I mainly paint GW models and even then I mainly paint Chaos especially Nurgle but I also have painted a lot of Greenskins, this is the category for everything else.
I only finished two teams. I have been really trying to get a job and just not been in a painting mood I guess. I haven’t touched the Khorne Bezerkers in a month or two. I hope to get back to painting soon. In the mean time here are some closeups of the models I did complete including my somewhat infamous naked chicks:
I’ve been busy. One of the things I’ve been working on is running an Astro Smash, a Red Shirt Smash to be precise at the 2011 Trumpeters Salute Gaming Convention. The convention is still going or just ended. Me and my back had had enough after two days. I spent most of the morning and part of the afternoon in bed catching up on sleep and hoping my back would stop hurting. I should really take more drugs…
Anyway, despite planning ahead I still had to photograph 100 pieces of paper and finish my prize ship and create asteroids the day or two before. I barely made it. The paint was still wet on the asteroids and they’ll need yet more black paint and some dry brushing to be truly done. I also should make 4 or 5 more, maybe even a full 10 more as that is how many little styrofoam balls come in a bag. I’d wanted to use lava rock, but didn’t expel much energy looking for them. I just used balls which I melted with some liquid plastic glue I’ve had for ages.
This was probably toxic and a bit dangerous, so open a window and move anything important like your prize ship well away from your work service.
Friday night at Trumpeters Salute was a bit weird as it seemed like more games were being run than there were players. And even after I managed to get 4 players they kept wondering off to talk to people and look at stuff. They seemed surprised my game moved so fast and their turn was literally up in a minute. Then to top it all off they wanted me to run it again on Sunday.
No way, I knew my back and life would need readjusting. Plus I had to almost beg to get my first two players. Next year I’ll do it bigger and better and likely on Sunday. Astro Smash and Silent Death are really beginner friendly and there were a lot more people there on Saturday and more kids. Kids like to blow stuff up quickly, they don’t care about historical accuracy. Astro Smash has zero historical accuracy and even sacrifices some physics and such for fun.
Fun over physics especially in outer space.
In the end someone I knew won the prize ship and quite enjoyed the game, so I may run Silent Death if not an Astro Smash at some future Trumpeters Game Night. It really is a good game even right out of the box, it just never had the big corporate gaming clout behind it, it never was a company’s number one game, and now it is basically really hard to find, but all the books and miniatures are in print and can be bought online at Iron Crown Enterprises, err I mean Ral Partha, err I mean Iron Wind Metals, err even they don’t know who owns and supports this game anymore…
The prize ship is a Glaive, official prize ships are no longer in production and I didn’t feel like giving any of mine away. So I painted up a Glaive. I thought it would look cool in flaming red from black right up to near white and really glossy like a hotrod or chopper. In the end I went for just the lava effect. It was a bit rushed but 20+ coats of thin paint, plus washes and glazes went into the effect. Then I just painted some brass, about 5 blues on the cockpit and then 3 or 4 purples on the thrusters…
I’m at the #EastVanLove Tweetup but before that starts I’ll update ye old blog. The second week of the Lead Painters League is on now, something like 68 new teams of miniatures for you to peruse and vote for. I lost week one badly, but I think I could have done a better job photographing my entry and perhaps gone with one less highlight would have been more natural. I’m used to painting unnatural subject manager, not naked chicks.
I also drew a very good opponent, this week my entry is simpler and my opponent is not as esteemed so perhaps I can win. My OOP Khorne Bezerkers are not going well. I left town to visit a sick friend in the hospital and then just didn’t paint much. I painted some the last two days but I don’t think I’ll make it, oh well Week 4 can be Bezerker week.
In addition I have my first product un-recommendation. Previously while studying for my CFA and just suffering from insomnia I spent a lot of time reading Tabletop Gaming News and other sites and bought a lot of stuff, particularly from small independent companies. I bought a lot of resin terrain which I did wash and have slowly, very slowly been painting as part of my trench table. I also bought a lot of boutique miniatures, including a bunch of cowboys, some WW1 Canadians, some Picts/Celts. I hope to paint most of it eventually, maybe even some of it for the Lead Painters League. The other thing I bought a lot of was resin bases.
Not all resin bases are created equally. I like Epicast and Dragonforge plus I also like the stuff outta Poland. One company I tried was Resinforge. Their bases arrived in a pale yellow color, not ideal. I prefer darker colored resin. They also seemed thinner than regular GW bases. I finally got around to using one and paint would not stick to it. I rinsed it with water. I tried GW spray primer, craft paint, GW Chaos Black. I gobbed it on. But it would just erase, kinda bead off, like a felt pen on a blank CD… It only did it on part of the base. It was annoying. Once applied paint also wiped off easily. So I got out the file and filed off the edge which was the biggest problem. Still didn’t help. I ended up gobbing on more black.
We’ll see if it takes.
In the mean time I got all my Resinforge bases and dunked them in a jar filled with dish soap. Hopefully this solves the problems, but I have my doubts after repeatedly sanding off resin only to have paint not stick to the resin underneath. So in conclusion, I’m not recommending Resinforge bases. You should be able to just grab them from a package and glue a mini to them. A little sanding or scraping is OK, but you shouldn’t have to dunk them and leave them soak overnight. You also shouldn’t have to keep repainting your base black…
The naked chicks are done and officially entered in the Lead Painters League. I thought of one or two more highlights I meant to do. Another layer of red on some of the lips, a highlight of silver on the shackles… I already spent too much time on models I don’t really have a use for other than to get bonus points for in an online painting competition.
Still no pics publicly available or even privately. But I took a shot of the wet palette. I blended up some custom skin tones. Actually all the skin tones were custom, I have the Californian Blond, the Native American, the Mocha Skinned Lass, the Red Head and the Asian. I used all manner of thinned washes too. Hopefully they score alright.
I dug out my Silent Death models, the spaceships in the title. Many were broken off their bases, some were even bent. It’s been years since I used them. I even bought some new ones off of Metal Express but I can’t find them. I know they got mailed to my current address, so unlike some other models I know I own but am not sure where they are, these models are definitely in my apartment somewhere. I’ll probably paint up a squadron of five for the Lead Painters League, but I don’t plan to spend as much time on them.
What I really need the spaceships for is to run an Astro Smash at this year’s Trumpeters Salute. My demo game is April 1st on Friday evening that my event will be run, so if you want to play a fun little space dogfight came, come on down. You have to pay admission at the door, but they did rent an entire community center or at least three rooms in it, so there are other options and models to buy and gawk at.
Here is a pick of everyone I’ve ever painted and still have in my possession, plus two that I won already painted from the Ottawa Red Shirts.
Once you start painting naked chicks you’re a true “artiste“.
So I decided to enter the Lead Painters’ League, season five. One of the hardest to win Internet painting competitions. I’m not even sure there is a prize. Just bragging rights is enough. So anyway the powers that be over at Lead Adventure made one of the bonus rounds, “non-combantants”. In fact Week One is non-combatants. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. Despite my collection of unpainted figs, they are all ostensibly for one army or another.
Then I remembered some guy from the 40K mailing list threw in with a trade some naked chicks. What is more non-combative than naked chicks?
So I dig through my little baggies of lead for the one with the bonus figures. Whoever it was through in a bunch of small scale models. Scale doesn’t matter in the Lead Painter League so the smaller the better, these models were certainly smaller than the usual models I paint. I’m not sure the scale, 20mm maybe, maybe 25mm. I’m also making no comment on the anatomically correctness of the naked chicks.
After lining up the contents it appears there are some torturers and even some secumbuses and amazons, but also a bunch of chained naked chicks. This post is going to do wonders for my keyword referrals. I picked a team of five naked chicks in chains and after briefly considering basing them on square bases, went back to round.
My basing techniques and my resin base collections are all based on battlefields or at least sci-fi or fantasy settings. This harem of naked chicks isn’t going to be standing in a burnt out building or an open field so I had to dig out my old green stuff and sculpt a token cobblestone base. My greenstuff is so old and hard to work with, time to buy some more.
I think I got these models in 1996, sure enough on the bottoms of the bases is the words “Dennis Mize 95 Ral Partha”. So I’m saying these figs were sculpted or at least caste in 1995 by Ral Partha. I’m sure the diehards over at the Lead Adventure Forum will know more about them.
The Green Stuff is curing now and I’m enjoying a beer. I may get around to assembling another week’s entry. This time some space ships form the Silent Death range. They too are small and hopefully easy to paint. We’ll see if I have any flesh painting skills…
Due to the rules of the contest I can’t show any WIP or finished pictures until after they are used in the contest. I think the contest runs ten weeks starting in March. I’m not sure I’ll even try to paint ten teams, but for the next couple months I’ll try to paint models in groups of five.
Musk's Miniatures 
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