September Recap

Wow, the month of September has blown by and now I am staring at the family vacation to Disney World (staring tomorrow!).  Anyway, as (maybe) seen in my last blog post I finally finished up the mousling foot soldiers for Tail Feathers.  It is very nice to have them off my desk.  I followed that up by getting the birds cleaned up and primed, but nothing more since I realized that I really have no idea what birds look like (at least in enough detail to know how to paint them).  Luckily my wife reminded me she had an artist photo reference book for birds, so hopefully that will clue me in and I can knock them out after vacation.  Along with cleaning and priming those models, I have also done the same for several other things but they have been all over the place.  I have not been very focused.

Additionally, I dreamed up two other builds for games I don't play.  *sigh*  Out of all that stuff though, only one of them would require any purchases but I've been trying to behave until the Fallout Miniatures game pre-order goes live because that is going to hurt my wallet.

Anyway, one of the many scattered started projects included my British Infantry for K47.  I pulled 3 of them out of the batch of primed models to do test paint schemes on.  I think they are coming along fairly well and hopefully I can wrap them up when I am back from vacation.

About the only other thing I have to report for the month is that I got in a game of Frostgrave.  Definitely not my first choice, but it was the pretty much the only choice for the one game day I could attend.  Attending and playing it only reinforced my desire to not play the game.  I rather have stayed home and painted, not that my family would have let me.. 

Anyway, part of the reason for disinterest in Frostgrave was the situation:  It ended up being 4 teams of 2 players each.  So 8 people.  It was slowwwwww which was also compounded by 3 new players (new players are a welcome addition to the group, don't get me wrong).  It also didn't help that I was between 2 high level warbands with basically a starter warband.  So not really a fault of the game but that game also confirmed something I thought I did not like about the game:  I just find that it to be non-interactive.  Everyone just telekinesis treasure around, places practically permanent walls of fog and mud pools, cast beauty, etc...

Not that I think it is a bad game mechanically.  It's actually fairly decent in that regard, albeit a bit bland.  I think the problem really is certain spells and how each wizard has access (at varying difficulties) to take pretty much every one of those problematic spells.  So it just becomes a game of denials.  The repercussions of this have been that my enthusiasm for Ghost Archipelago has waned.  It is going to have traction around here though, so I will at least pick up the rules and give them a read through to see if I detect some the same issues.

Well, that is all for September.  Next stop, Disney World.  Wish me luck.  Wish my family more luck.  ;)

Tail Feathers - Mousling Foot Soliders

Well it has been a long time coming, but I finally finished another batch of Tail Feather figures.  The delays really had nothing to do with the figures themselves or the paint job, instead it was really about my focus or lack thereof.  I've gotten distracted several times when I was supposed to be working on these but I finally buckled down and knocked these guys out.  Now onto the birds and the riders.  Hopefully I find those a bit more interesting.

Not completely happy with them but I really do not want to spend any more time on them.  This batch of figures really gave me fits along the way.  For the light fur color, my initial color choice was completely off base from what I wanted.  On the green cloaks, I achieved a really nice blending from shadow to highlight with the airbrush but for some reason when I had to correct some issues using a brush I could never get a good color match.  This required me to apply several washes over the entire cloak to tone down the gradients but destroying a lot of the highlight work in the process.  Also for the life of me I just could not get a decent highlight onto the red cloaks or the bows.  I don't know.  Of course, I gave up kind of easily.  lol

Just gotta do the basing.  I have a good backlog of basing to do on some "almost" finished figures, so I think one upcoming weekend I am finally going to sit down and knock them all out.

Anyway, for my reference here are the paints I used.  All paints are Reaper Master Series unless otherwise specified.

Basecoat:

• Fur:
• Vallejo Panzer Aces Light Rubber
• Yellowed Bone
• Cloak:
• Templar Blue
• Olive Green
• Clotted Red
• Amor/Arrow Head:  AP Gunmetal
• Flesh:  Aged Bone + Carnage Red
• Tunic/Shirt:  Terran Khaki
• Leather:  Earth Brown
• Bow/Arrow Shafts:  Rich Leather
• Bow Straps/Feathers:  Aged Bone

Highlights:

• Fur:
• Vallejo Panzer Aces Light Rubber + Polished Bone
• Creamy Ivory
• Cloak:
• Ashen Blue
• Pale Olive
• Carnage REd
• Armor/Arrow Head:  AP Shinning Silver
• Tunic/Shirt:  Khaki Highlight
• Leather:  Leather Brown
• Bow/Arrow Shafts:  Polished Leather
• Bow Straps/Feathers:  Polished Bone

Shading:

• Fur:  1 pass of AP Strong Tone
• Cloak:
• Breonne Blue
• Muddy Olive
• Bloodstain Red
• Rest:  1 pass of AP Strong Tone, 2nd pass over select areas/spots

August Recap

I managed to get a few things done for the month of August.  As seen a couple of post back, I got my first models for Konflikt 47 finished up, which has allowed me to turn my attention back to Tail Feathers.  Well, at least in theory.  I just not very enthusiastic about painting those figures, so it has been really hard to double down and just knock them out.  Although, I did make a dent in what was left of the Mousling foot soldiers last week:  they are almost done.  Maybe I will find the birds more interesting and they wont drag out so long.  We'll see...  My daughter also sloshed some paint onto some miniatures with me one day, for about an hour, so that was fun.

I also read through the rules for Bushi No Yume, another samurai skirmish game, last month.  I haven't posted up a review of it yet, since I'm still trying to figure out how to approach the review (I know, that sounds weird.  You'll maybe understand my dilemma once I post it up).

Actual gaming wise, I missed the first regular meetup because my wife and daughter went out of town for the eclipse, leaving me with the baby.  For the second meetup, I got in a game of Mike's home brew game called Mini Mayhem.  I am not really recalling getting any board games in with my daughter or otherwise, so all in all a pretty slow month.

The annual Huntsville Plastic Model Society's show was also this past month and I swung by.  It was a quick walk through the area but some pretty neat stuff.  You can find some pictures in the last blog post.  The "news" out of Gencon also failed to generate much excitement for me.  Well, except for Star Wars Legion but that was about it.

August also ended with my missing another NOVA Open.  The family decision was made to go to Disney World (god help me) in October, which meant time/money/vacation wise, the NOVA Open was out of the question.  It looked like it was going to be pretty good show and it would have been great seeing old friends.  Hopefully I will get to see some of them at Adepticon and/or I can finally make it back to the NOVA Open in 2018.

Anyway, a few days late and time to move on to September.