Wild West Exodus - Outlaws

I wanna be a Cowboy...  Oh my, lets jump on the path of another distraction and a new project.  Derek, from Throne of Angels, suggested we pick something to paint and play at Adepticon this year.  After kicking some ideas over to him, the list came down to either Wild West Exodus or Relic Knights.  Having some stuff already, from the original Kickstarter, I advocated Wild West Exodus.  We agreed to target 750 pts for a small starter force that would be doable (for me) and depending on time we could either increase the size or also throw Relic Knights in at a small point level.  Note, since "agreeing" to 750 pts it would seem to have grown to full blown 1500 pt game...

I advocated for WWX mostly because I already had some models and that should mean not having to buy much, if anything.  Using the Outlaw models I already had also allowed to me to actually do something with a kickstarter (other than put it on the shelf) for the first time!  Since then I have been, albeit unsuccessfully, resisting the urge to buy more and new stuff but let's not dwell on that now.

Outlaws assembled.

The picture above consists of the Outlaws I got from the original Kickstarter.  The multi-part plastic models (hired hands) are tedious.  Each one of them was at least 5 pieces, sometimes more.  The resin models were much easier to deal with, although the alternate Jesse James was not such a great casting.

Slapping some paint on the hired hands.

I went with a strange, for me at least, approach to painting these guys.  Something I had never tried before.  I primed a black base coat, then did a heavy dry brush of grey followed by a light dry brush of white.  Then the colors you see above were applied as washes, trying to take advantage of the highlighting.  I think it worked to some degree, and I managed to get to this point very quickly (I think I was at about 20 mins/figure here).  The next few steps however bogged down  as it required more precision work.  Esp, since I did not use a good/proper order of operations (like the classical "inside-out" approach) to get to this point.

The metallics and light leather blocked in.

Now I've hit the home stretch.  Not terribly happy with the light leather and it "ate" the pre-highlighting (paint was to thick and my previous work being to sloppy), so I had to re-highlight.  At this point, I was hoping the washes would knock things down to where I wanted and also help clean things up.

Post-washes.

Maybe a matter of opinion, but I think the washes panned out the way I hoped.  I considered hitting the light leather with 1-2 more washes to tone them done some more but ultimately decided not to.  Now all that is left is to highlight the armor some and knock the bases out.  I kind of backed myself into a corner at this point though.  The typical darker color for the basing did not seem like such a good idea since the models themselves are kind of dark.  After a few iterations I ended up at this:

Click for a better view, Blogger is butchering the thumbnails.

I not completely happy with this, as I find the bases distracting and in general just find my eyes drawn downward.  But since they are just hired hands (grunts), I called them done.  Maybe down the line I will figure something out and get these fixed up.

Colors used:

• These colors were interchanged on various figures & places:
• Dark Browns:  RMS Blackened Brown
• Blues:  RMS Twilight Blue
• Greys:  RMS Cloudy Grey
• Light Brown (Holsters/Belts/Boots):
• Leather Brown (Base), 2:1 Bronzed Hightlight:Leather Brown (Highlights)
• Bandannas:  RMS Clotted Red
• Rifle/Pistol/Knife:  AP Gun Metal
• Rifle/Pistol/Knife Stocks:  RMS Walnut Brown
• Skin:  RMS Bronzed Highlight
• Cracked Earth:  RMS Tanned Leather
• All - 2-3 applications of thinned AP Strong Tone

Bolt Action - Even More Americans

Still catching up on finished projects.  Here is more Bolt Action Americans.  I'm not sure what I was thinking when I bought these guys, other than "cool, Americans can field 3 MMG teams!"  But, in retrospect I'm not sure I will ever use/field them.  But 9 figures painted is still something to share. 

Might go back and add some static grass to the left one to make it more interesting.

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...

August Recap

I really should have written this before the NOVA Open, everything is a bit fuzzy now.  Anyway, fairly decent month of gaming for August.  As part of running the Konflikt 47 league, I managed to play two games at the monthly point level of 500 pts.  I also showed a new player Bolt Action with a small 500 pt game.

The rest of the month was pretty much consumed with painting.  From recent posts, you can see I knocked out a Firefly Jump Infantry squad for Konflikt 47, 2 new cars for Gaslands and a few Guild Ball Mason models.  I technically achieved my goals of having Guild Ball and Konflikt painted up for the NOVA Open, but with very limited selections for both.  Still, a win is a win.

Moving on to the NOVA Open, I'll go ahead and include that in this post while it is fresh in my mind.  Returning to the NOVA Open after a multi-year absence was pretty good.  It was really good to see many familiar faces and spend time with some great people.

Thursday was a pretty slow day for me.  I was registered to play in the Konflikt 47 tournament but multiple factors convinced me to bail on it.  I spent most of the day just wondering around and catching up with people.  For my taste and interest, the vendor hall did not offer much of a distraction and I ended the convention only spending $40 on the new Warlord US Infantry box (different sculpts that, hopefully, will help me get over the hump of not wanting to paint any more infantry units).  Mostly though, I just harassed my buddy John from the 40k Hobby blog.  This included Dave Taylor and I jumping into the photo shoot for John's amazing titan that was part of the charity auction.

Shamelessly stolen photo.

Friday I was scheduled for a Falconer's flight for Guild Ball, but again I let multiple factors convince me to bail on it.  Mostly because I am not sure I completely like Guild Ball and did not want to suffer through multiple rounds of it.  Instead, John's buddy Brian left a beautiful 4x4 terrain board in the dedicated hobby area that only had basic priming done to it.  He had hoped to have it completely finished by Sunday for a game, so John and I decided to surprise him while he was downstairs playing 30k.

On the left is basically what we started with, the right is
what we got done Friday in about 6 hours.

While we did have an airbrush to paint the crashed ship, our other
"tools" were pretty limited.

Aside from the ship and the scattered structures, this was
pretty much the definition of "finger" painting.

We rounded out Friday night with Brian buying us an awesome dinner for all of our work.  Later we managed to find a secluded corner of the hotel bar and were joined by several more awesome people.

Saturday saw the arrival of my wife and kids early that morning (their Friday night flight having been cancelled).  I met them at the nearby airport and helped them get the rental car loaded up and squared away, before being dropped back off at the hotel for my first event I would actually attend:  A seminar by Vince Venturella.  I've never taken a class with Vince but turns out he does a really nice job with his classes and, much like his "Hobby Cheating" series on YouTube, focused very precisely on the seminar topic of Battle Damage.  Having taken other vehicle based weathering classes this class was a very good compliment (for me) focusing on smaller scale damage (such as space marines).  Vince does a great job with his classes and I'm glad I took this one.

Saturday night was a Wrath of Kings narrative event I had signed up for.  It was 3 vs 3 player game, having the Hadross defending their home from a multi-faction invasion hell bent on stealing Hadross's latest genetic manipulation feat.  I played as one of the 3 Hadross players who successfully fended off werewolves, celestial animals, and mask wearing demon women.

Another shameless stolen photo.

It was a fun game on a beautiful board.  The scenario ended up being a little lopsided for the other team, even as we made adjustments on the fly to let them bring reinforcements back on.  Still though, I think everyone ended up having a good time.  Along with my 2 teammates, I walked away with WoK two player starter box.  The event reminded me of just how great of a game Wrath of Kings is,  to bad it appears CMON is letting it atrophy and die a slow death.  I wrapped up the evening talking with Todd, from the weekly hobby hangout, while he waited for his dinner and ate.

That pretty much wrapped up the NOVA Open for me.  While I did not fly back till late Monday afternoon, the conclusion of Saturday night had me back on family duty.  Sunday morning we met our close friends and their kids at the national zoo and had fun catching up.  That night, I just hung out with Alex while the girls went to the spa.

Anyway, that's it with August and with the NOVA Open behind me time to move on to:  more K47 stuff, more BA stuff, wrapping odds-n-ends up, and new projects.

Returning to Guild Ball - Masons

Continuing to resurrect old projects, I decided I needed to finish painting my Guild Ball Masons team since I've been playing it a bit lately.  Plus, I'm signed up for an event at the NOVA Open so I wanted to have them wrapped up for that.  Here is where I left off 2 years (oh my) ago:

I did finally do the basing on these guys.  Recently...

Wow, that was awhile ago.  And look, all boys...  Not sure that was a conscience decision or not.  One thing I do remember though is those models seemed to have taken me forever.  By contrast, these seemed to fly by at a pretty decent pace (for me):

They didn't really turn out the way I hoped.  Honour (middle) and Harmony (right) experienced some pretty bad texture on the facial skin (not really visible in these photos).  And I happened to save that part for last!  Anyway, I was not going to strip everything down just to try it again, so I pretty much just decided to accept it and didn't put in a lot more work after that.  Just want some respectable on the tabletop and at tabletop distances.  Speaking of which, I still don't feel like I'm pushing my contrast far enough.  *sigh*

These are same colors I used on that original batch, so for my reference they are:  Masons Basecoat, Shade, and Highlight.  The hair was done differently than the first batch, but I didn't take notes.  From memory though:

• Chisel (left):  Very dark dark blue base, highlighted first pass with Vallejo Panzer Aces Dark Rubber, second pass with Light Rubber.  Shadows with VMC Black.
• Honour (middle):  Pretty much RMS Blonde Triad
• Harmony (right):  Very similar to Brick from the first batch, although a stronger highlight was added with something...

While doing the basing and sealing for these, I actually knocked out Marbles but I'll post that up with next group:  Wrecker, Granite, Hammer.