Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone! For those of you with different holidays may yours also be wonderful. 

AJ

28mm Medieval Archers for Saga

This is a unit of twelve medieval archers for my Saga armies. They are Old Glory figures. I think these might be useful in just about any of the crusades era Saga armies as 'scouts', or in most as levy archers. I chose as many of the figures as I could from those I had with fur armor to hopefully also make these appropriate for use with my Eastern Princes army. Honestly they're so generic I think they'll even work in the Viking Saga universe. 

I painted these on stream in three sessions. One of the good things about recording all your painting is that you get accurate time information about your painting. These figures took 7 hours and 35 minutes to paint, not including cleaning, priming and basing. Call it 8 1/2 hours total, bag to tabletop. I'm quite happy with the quality considering I'm into the unit for 45 minutes per figure! I'm not 100% sure what's up next on the painting table. After all of the holiday parties and family activities I'll sit down and see what strikes my fancy.  Until then, I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas, or other winter solstice holiday.

Painting 28mm Medieval Archers on Stream on Twitch.tv

I've upgraded my setup for streaming on my Twitch.tv stream recently. All of the figures posted to my blog in the past couple of weeks were painted on stream. Those of you who looked at my preview videos posted earlier may want to take a quick peek at this preview clip which shows the current video and audio quality of the stream as well as a sample of the type of content you are likely to see on stream.

Hope to see you sometime in stream.

28mm Oxen for Saga Objectives

Two Reaper oxen, painted up for use as more livestock objectives for Saga. I did some experimenting on using glazing techniques when painting these. I think they were highly successful on the blend on the horns and mostly successful darkening the lower legs, but in other places my technique definitely needs refining.This was a good project to practice new techniques on, being only two figures and not part of an actual army. Adding two 28mm figures to my annual painting totals.

The last photo below is of a pair of oxen used at Colonial Williamsburg. I tried to model these after those actual oxen assuming that a living history community like Colonial Williamsburg would be attempting to use a breed that was available during the colonial period. While this isn't the medieval period, it is 'close enough' for use in AWI, Napoleonic and ACW games. For earlier periods we'll just have to use some faith. As with all of my recently completed projects, these were painted live on my Twitch.tv stream.

Two X-Wing Miniatures Modified Ships

Luke from the Gold Squadron Paintcast and I are working out the details of doing a joint stream some time next year. In preparation for this I thought it would be good for me to finish up a couple of my X-Wing Miniatures game modified ships on my Twitch stream. I did this mostly to work out the details of setting up the camera when painting these models as it is different than when I paint 28mm miniatures.

The first of the models is a modified M3-A Interceptor. I am thinking of using this as the ship for Sunny Bounder if and when I field him in a squadron. The inspiration for this is of course the Fang Fighter. I always thought the M3-A looked like it was flying backwards. Now it looks proper. The wings were cut off and reversed, with the underside made the top because it looked more interesting that way. I added a small tail fin as well and some details from plastic rod. Base light grey and blue were laid down with an airbrush, with the balance painted by hand. I'm pretty excited as to how this one came out.

The final picture below shows my modified M3-A next to a stock one.

The Jumpmaster is supposed to be a cargo ship. The cut-out in the hull always bothered me. My thought with this modification, is an enterprising smuggler rigged up a permanent hold for higher value or dangerous cargo. It has been fitted with an additional cannon. In the rear are doors to load and unload. I painted this to match the stock color scheme as much as possible. There may be a bit more weathering needed, but for now it's as done as it's going to get. The added portion was scratch built from plastic card and leftover bits from my bits box.

28mm French Napoleonic Marshals - Finished!

After posting several WIP posts about these, here they are, finished. The eight figures make up four brigadier general stands and two corps command stands. There are six Old Glory figures and two Perry. Now that they're mixed on the bases, you're hard pressed to tell the difference. I think Old Glory sometimes gets criticized unfairly by some wargamers. Sure, there are some exceptions, but in general I feel they're a high quality and very high value figure line.

I'm counting these as sixteen figures for my annual painting totals. Like all mounted figures I count the rider and horse separate. I feel this is justified since I paint them separate and mounted figures are twice as much work as foot.

More Saga Crusades Spearmen and Napoleonic French Artillery

Quick update today. These are some odds and ends finally based up. There are eight Old Glory heavy spear men for my Crusades Saga army and two French Napoleonic foot guns. For the latter, the gunners were part of the haul I bought from my friend Ed, but the Guns were painted on my Twitch stream. The guns I got from Ed had four gunners per gun, but my basing system only allows for two gunners per gun, so I needed to paint up two more guns. The guns are Old Glory French 6 lb. guns.  The shields on the spear men are from Little Big Man Studios. Total count for figures painted: 10.

WIP French Marshals - Part 2

Here's a second update on the 28mm French Marshals that I've been painting live on my Twitch.TV stream. I've added some background music to my stream so I won't be posting the replay videos on YouTube any more due to copyright reasons. You can however, still see replays of my recent streams on my replay page. There is a short highlight of last night's stream in my Twitch highlights folder for you to look at to see if this interests you.

The painting on these is now done. I'd like to give a shout out to my friend Ed M from Ed M's Wargame Meanderings Blog for giving me some constructive feedback on my last WIP shots when I asked him for some. Ed clued me in that the Marshal's hat crests should be black or white feathers, most commonly white, instead of the gold that I had painted them. They're now corrected thanks to Ed. I'll be setting these aside for now until I can finish up the horses.

I'm very excited about the quality of the paint job on these. There are multiple layers of intentional highlights. Painting on stream has helped me pay more attention to the finer details and motivated me to 'up my game' a bit more on these and I think it shows.  As of now I'm 50/50 if I'm going to brush paint the horses or try some airbrushing on them.

Big French Napoleonic Re-Basing Project

Having recently posted about my large Austrian re-basing project, this is another effort to increase my collection to a size large enough to host some Electronic Brigadier Napoleonic play test games. These are 28mm French Napoleonic figures my friend Ed of Ed M's Wargame Meanderings blog generously sold me. The figures are from Ed's extras collection that he was looking to part with.

The figures needed a bit of touch up here and there and each unit either had to have a figure converted to a standard bearer or in one case the standard bearer had to be repaired. Then they were based, flocked and after drying the bases decorated with foliage clusters and grass tufts. All of this was done live on my stream, shown in a couple of earlier posts here and here. The figures are all beautifully painted, so the touch ups were only to repair wear and tear.

 


There are a total of 37 stands re-based. Also, since the Austrian re-basing post included a German WWII anti aircraft gun, I thought I'd toss in a bonus WWII vehicle, a British Mk I Daimler armored car. This was bought from Ebay. It was priced, including shipping. for less than the cost of the un-painted model, and was base colored, but a bit light on detail. I didn't need another one, but at the price I couldn't resist! I gave it some edge highlighting and a dusting of European Dust MIG pigment powder.

WIP - 28mm French Marshals

I made some progress on these 28mm French Marshals yesterday while streaming on Twitch.tv. This is a pack of Old Glory "French Marshals 1", and two Perry "Mounted Infantry Colonels". The figures are surprisingly compatible. Unless you look for the saddles, which Perry cast on the horse and Old Glory cast on the rider, you really can't spot a big difference in figure size or quality.

The first pass was mainly to work on the faces and block in the hats and coats. Future work will highlight the coats and start working on the details. I still want to do a little more work on the faces, and I have to dry-brush some grey onto the black-haired figures. Still I'm happy with the progress and look so far.

As usual, below you can see a YouTube video of the stream I panted these on.