SAGAing my way out of painter´s block.

It´s been a long time since my last update - mostly because I was in a painting slump caused by too much work. A 3 week vacation solved that problem and I dove head first into the Dark Ages, getting on the SAGA bandwagon with my Normans :)

I pretty much had all the figures I needed, most of which were already painted, which is helpful in getting out of a painter´s block (having to do some 30-40 miniatures from scratch would probably have been too daunting a prospect).

All I had to do was rebase my Basic Impetvs Norman Army, which was based with multiple miniatures per base. I will later procure some movement trays so that I can still use the miniatures to play in Basic Impetvs, which is a simple & fun game.

All figures tallied I could field 6 points of SAGA with only some minor purchases.

My initial band will be:
1x William the Conqueror/Bastard - mounted Warlord, 1 point
3x Mounted Knights Hearthguard (will probably be fielded as 2x6 knights) - 3 points
1x Sargents (Foot Warriors) - 1 point
1x Crossbowmen (Foot Warriors w/ Crossbow) - 1 point

All this miniatures I do have - I still have 6x bowmen waiting for another 1/2 dozen to complete a levy unit, but they can still be fielded as a 4 man bow armed hearthguard taking advantage of some of William´s special rules, so it does give some options (I could field the mounted Knights as 8+4 and free up 1 point to slot these bowmen in as is).

I also procured a slightly anachronistic Perry Thatched house (actually for the 1300s onwards, but it works fine for a bit earlier, at least to my eye).

So here are some shots of the Normans so far:

My mounted Warlord, taking advantage of the maximum allowed base size to be accompanied by a musician, a pious crucifix bearing knight and a banner bearer (banner done as if a piece of bayeux-like tapestry was used).

Some mounted Knights - the core of any Norman band.

A general view of the work so far. The 4 knights to the left of the command base are what´s left on the paint queue.

A closeup shot of some foot Knights with the crossbowmen in the foreground.

A shot of the bowmen, standing behind the foot Knights.

Some more foot knights.

The Perry house, complete with wattle fence and pigs.

More on this project very soon.

FoW German Scouts

It has been a while since the last update, mainly because I've been playing more than painting.

With the release of Battlefront's V3 Ruleset for Flames of War, I have been playing the game a lot. I'm having lots of fun with the new version - probably the most I've had with the game since V1 :)

Well, that inspired me to do some hours on ww2 15mm, a nice change from the 28mm historics I've dedicated myself to in the last couple of months.

Always a challenge "scaling down" from 28mm to 15mm where painting is concerned - I always find myself spending way too much time on details no one will see on the gaming table on the first projects until I get to the 15mm "mindset" - hold the miniature at arms length, if it's ok, moe on to the next one.

That said, I got all my WW2 15mm out of the display cabinets to be checked for battle damage or a spot of repaint and organised some miniatures from the lead pile into platoons for painting.

As a curiosity - this is what 120+ AFVs and soft skins look like on my gaming table, ready for inspection:

The unit currently in progress is a German Motorised Scout platoon. It is composed of a command element and 3x squads. They can ride either motorcycles with sidecar or kubelwagens (both count as Jeeps in the rules, so it's really up to players taste). in my case the command will ride a kubelwagen (with lots of stowage and a always handy panzerfaust) and all the squads will be motorcycles with sidecars.

Finished up the command kubelwagen today:

Will post up the motorcycles as I finish them (currently assembled, based & primed).

Cheers,
Pedro

Duel #2 - Roguetrader theme

Another duel between me and Meninobesta. Theme was Roguetrader-like single miniature, front and back shots.

Meninobesta came in with a 1990 Eldar Swooping Hawk, in a nice subdued color scheme:

And I went for the classical "beaky" marine in White Scars garb:

As in the previous one, loser after poll closes gets to set the conditions for the next one.

Another 2011 batch re-photgraphed

Some random miniatures from several 2011 (some older) projects.

 General Georges Mouton, Count of Lobau (from Perry):

A couple of Perry japanese (this are the greatest sculpts I ever painted):

French Napoleonic command stand to use in a MaW adaptation to 28mm, again from Perry - a mix of plastics and metals:

Conan, for CROM (highly recommended simple skirmish ruleset). A em4 miniature, originally from Grenadier (I think...)

 

A Kushite companion for Conan, also bought at em4:

Today I finished the Rogue Trader Duel mini, but will only post it after the voting is ongoing (that will be Monday).

Reiksguard for retro-fantasy Painting duel

All my photography woes cured by a 6500K daylight bulb :)

And here is the result: a Reiksguard painted for the 1st Setti.tv Forum miniature duel (the theme of which was "Retro Fantasy Duel"):

Marauder Reiksguard

Tomorrow I'll take a photo of the other half of the duel - an early 90s Marauder Lich.

The 2nd duel is already under way, themed "retro-40K AKA Roguetrader" (a single miniature this time around). I lost the first challenge to Meninobesta's excellent Otherworld Pig faced Orc, let's see If I can claw one victory back and claim a draw :)

Photo setup tests and some more past miniatures.

I tried some of the advice I got regarding lighting but, more importantly, I got my old Fuji S304 SLR fixed.

This post will start pretty boring as I post the exact same 3 miniatures from the last one, to document the possible improvement. I´ll try to avoid being totally tedious by showing some other 2011 completed work.

The same 3 miniatures, different camera and some fancy baking-paper-covering-desklamps work.

A bit better when I compare them with the real thing in terms of color accuracy, but still some detail is lost (washed out) and the pictures are not crisp. More on that latter.

So while I was at it, I snapped some photos of some other minis from 2011 projects:

Another retro Necromancer, from Marauder (base still plain MDF):

Conan for CROM skirmish games, from a barbarian sold by em4 (originally from the Grenadier range of barbarians, as far as I can remember):

 A FoW Gebirgsjager Objective marker:

Perry Miniatures General Lobau, for a Men at War 28mm adaptation (also, for Songs of Drums and Shakos skirmish)

 A battalion command base done with a mix of plastic and metal Perries, also for MaW;

 A couple of battalion bases (6 make up a battalion), again, for MaW. These particular ones are Voltigueurs. Again, Perry plastics:

 A WIP test figure (a Battlefront T28) for 3-tone camo I´m working on for a project I really have to get into, a Finnish Midwar Tank Company for an upcoming Portuguese big tournament (the GTS). From what I´ve researched, I´m pretty happy with the camo tones and now I must tackle the rest of the tanks.

I spent all evening fidgeting with various photo settings.

Conclusion - to improve anything of significant, I´ll have to either get a better camera or a lightbox. I´ll go for the cheaper of the two and try and get myslef a lightbox as soon as I can.

And that will be it - I won´t bother anyone anymore with test posts of the same old miniatures again and again as I try and perfect the photo setup, as this is far from interesting to anyone but me (and only slightly at that). I´ll just keep using the best possible setup at my disposal and "get on with IT!" - IT being that this is a miniature hobby blog, not a slight-baby-steps-towards-being-able-to-take-a-decent-photo-of-a-miniature-blog.

First and foremost on the workbench are the Finns I mentioned above and a 2nd Miniature Duel, with a theme to be decided (already have, really) by me, so expect that to feature throughout the next posts.

Cheers,
Torradas

Some 2011 miniatures - part 1

I'll be filling some backlog of miniatures onto the blog as time permits, also as a way of testing some different photo setups, until I'm comfortable with the way they turn out.

For the photos in this post I tested using a blue gradient background, and my cheap Fuji compact set with macro on a tripod and with flash forced off.

First up, a Battlefront 15mm German half-track:

Now, a GW old-style skeleton horseman (for a CROM Fantasy Warband):

And a Tentacle Faced Wizard from Reaper:

Didn't turn out too bad, still not quite happy with focus and lighting.

EDIT: Just got a hot tip from Meninobesta and the next setup will feature a diffused lighting focus through the use of some baking paper.