Bolt Action - More Americans

Not a lot to talk about here.  Just adding more American units to my Bolt Action.  The mortar team was painted per my previous infantry recipes.  I will capture how I did the Jeep later, with a group shot of the vehicles I've done.

Funny thing happened during this though.  I realized while I was airbrushing the Jeep I had completely forgotten to paint the actual mortar for the mortar team (I had the entire team finished, except for it).  So while I was cleaning out the airbrush, to prepare to quickly paint the mortar, I bent the crap out of the needle.  Luckily I had a spare, so I slide it in and was amazed by the difference.  It was such a night and day difference, I can't imagine how long I've been fighting the obviously (at least now it's obvious) bent needle.  Anyway, I then proceeded to very effortlessly do the best detail/precision painting I have ever done with my airbrush.  On sandbags.  *sigh*

Damn, those sandbags look good!  Note, this after a wash but before
the weathering pigments covered up most of these awesome sandbags!

More Guild Ball - Masons

Entering the home stretch for my Masons team.  Despite the delay in this post, I did actually get these done in time for the NOVA Open.  And then I decided not the play at the NOVA Open.  I thought this would be the last of them but I recently sourced Veteran Chisel and the dual faction Lucky model.  I need to still paint a ball, of all things.  And a bout of OCD will probably have me finally tackle the original Harmony model I don't like and finally make a goal marker.  Nonetheless, they have been a nice break from all the Bolt Action stuff lately.

Four new members.

This particular batch of models (with the exception of Granite) caused me a lot anxiety, leading me to hold off for a long time before painting them.  I was really worried with Hammer because I had never painted dark skin before and thought I would butcher it.  He turned out pretty good ok though, I think.  I also dreaded the mascots because I had no idea how to paint either one.  While I waited for an intermediate layer of varnish to dry on Granite and Hammer, I decided to throw caution to the wind and just grabbed paints and gave it a try.  I think it worked out well enough.

Here they are with the rest of the team that is completed so far.

Obviously looking at the picture above, I need to go back and repaint the base rims.  Again.  For some reason my black paint is just not taking a liking to those rims.  The mud basing is pretty simple and some point I think I will go back and add some vertical components to them (tufts, rocks, something) but I'm going to wait on that awhile.  I tried tufts with Brick and spent a considerable amount of time trying to undo the damage I caused.  

Anyway, for my records here how I painted them:

• Granite/Hammer - The same as my previous Mason models.  Hammer of course used the Reaper Dark Skin triad.
• Wrecker - Other than the shell, the rest as my previous Masons.
• Shell - RMS Stained Ivory (Shade), RMS Yellowed Bone (Base), RMS Creamy Ivory (Highlight).  Followed by 2-3 applications of thinned AP Strong Tone
• Marbles - No idea what I used on the branch.
• Fur - RMS Bone Shadow (Shade), RMS Aged Bone (Base), RMS Polished Bone (Highlight).  
• Skin - RMS Blackened Brown and I tried to feather/wet blend it into the fur colors.

September/October Recap

It's almost Thanksgiving and I still had not caught up with September & October recaps.  Mostly due to not having much activity gaming wise the past couple of months.  However, I have gotten some hobbying done and got several miniatures fully painted in the past 2 months.  Hopefully I will get these posted up soon.

For both September and October, I only managed to get in 2 games of Guild Ball.  Both of those games were in September, so sadly I have not tried Season 4, yet.  It looks pretty good for the Masons but only time will tell.  I had hoped that Season 4 would streamline some things and reduce some of the inter-dependencies, and in a lot of cases it did but not so much for the Masons.

Also, despite running an escalation league for Konflikt 47 I did not manage to get any games in for the past two months (at the 750pt or 1000pt increments).  As the organizer, I needed to bow out when there were an odd number of players which was the trend for those months.  We ended up wrapping the league up a couple of weeks early to avoid overlapping a couple of major events at the game store.  Since the league was not anything I would call a success, that was more than fine by me.  

Lots of exciting news, IMO, hit toward the end of the October (maybe some of this is technically November).  The minds behind Test of Honour announced a similar game coming out called Mortal Gods: Test of Courage.  Ancient Greeks!  The figures are looking fantastic and should be very similar ruleset to Test of Hounor.  The other exciting tidbit is there seems to be some changes on the horizon for Test of Honour, which the creators taking it back over (or something).  Here is hoping they will break the horrible sales model that the game has suffered under (IMO).  Also, good news for SAGA in that the Book of Battles recently released containing new/revised scenarios usable for all the variations of SAGA.  This was followed up with the announcement that the Age of Magic would be the next expansion, bringing "fantasy" to the SAGA system!  

Coupled with an Adepticon challenge for 2019 and a new Bolt Action league kicking off, looks like my painting queue is going to stay packed.  Very packed.  

Lastly, some personal disheartening hobby news:  My new accountant discovered an egregious error in the book keeping.  While I thought I had managed to stay amazingly on track budget wise, he unearthed the fact that 3-4 months of purchases from early in 2019 had not be logged.  With virtually no time to "repair" the damage before the end of the year, looks like I'm really going to bust my budget for the year.  Of course the devil on my shoulder is shouting "Well, if you are going to break that goal, break it goooooood.  Real good."

Anyway, more soon.  Hopefully...