Thinking Outside the Box

Even though I've been playing a lot of Star Trek: Attack Wing in the past few weeks, I have also been painting. With Fallcon fast approaching and me slated to be running a tournament / demos for Dreadball , I wanted to get another team finished up. To my disappointment, I wasn't able to conjure up the energy to get them completely done. After almost a week of required rest following Fallcon (required because I caught a brutal cold during the event), I finally mustered up the fortitude to finish another season 1 team: The Royal Eternian Rams ! When I played in my first league early this year (January thru March) I decided to play with this team so that the Forge Fathers would be represented. We had one player drop out and I took up the slack by also playing a human team as well. ( The Avion Warriors have already been showcased on my blog, you can read about them here .) Like most of the other players in that league, none of us had fully painted teams. A few were primed i...

Yup, more zombies. I painted most of this set at the same time as the RAFM zombies box I posted earlier. The only additional figures here were the zombie judge and zombie mistress, which I'll talk about at the end of the article. As I mentioned in my review of this set , the contents consist of two sprues of Mantic zombies with some custom metal bits mixed in, plus original sculpts for the zombie mistress and zombie judge in metal. I've already discussed the construction of the figures and components in that post. Overall the figures turned out very well and were quite a lot of fun to paint. I do have another JDMG Zombie Horde set but when I build my next batch of zombies I think I'll add in some parts from my box of Wargames Factory male zombies too. There are plenty of parts to go around, and mixing them all together should provide me with some really unique figures. Since all the metal torsos in the set were the same I didn't want to use them for ever...

I was really pleased with my first use of the Plate Mail Army Painter  primer spray when I used it on my Forge Fathers team, the Royal Eternian Rams , for DreadBall . I ordered it knowing that it would also be a great time saver for the first batch of stuff I had in mind for my  Stargate  project.  I am very happy at how well it covers and how smooth it looks after application. I don't have a lot of use for coloured primer due to playing mainly skirmish games, but it is very good primer and I'll likely be switching to it even for black, white and grey. Shortly after I received the official Stargate figures I cleaned up and based all the Jaffa figures and prepped one of the two gates I bought. There are three 8-man squads of Jaffa, two heavy cannons with operators, and a First-Prime to ensure their loyalty and obedience. I'm still uncertain of the best way to construct and base the cannons, as they're two part models. I would like them to be separate from...

Sitting around on a quiet Sunday evening is one of the few times of the week that I actually have to myself. Often I'll just sit and watch some TV and try to decompress a bit before Monday morning responsibility thunders back into view. Last Sunday I didn't even watch what was on the TV, I merely listened while I put together some more models from my ever-growing mountain of lead and plastic! The Zombie Horde  pack is, to my knowledge, the only Judge Dredd set that comes with plastic components. Interestingly enough, the plastic parts in this kit are zombie sprues by Mantic Games . The pack contains a zombie mistress, a zombie judge, a sprue of metal heads and two sprues of metal shoulder/elbow/knee pads, a few pouches, six identical metal torsos, eight bases and two sprues of Mantic zombies. I received this pack as part of my Council of Judges  pledge on Kickstarter from before Christmas, so they arrived without retail packaging. That said, I'm uncertain if this is ex...

Holy crap, I can't believe that it's the year 2013. What the hell happened to time? I remember being a kid and watching movies like Transformers  and thinking "2005, that's so far away!" Maybe I'm just getting old(er) and starting to wondering what I've been doing with my life. Regardless, 2012 was mostly good, with some unpleasantness occasionally thrown in to mess it up. Not unlike most everyone else's I'd imagine. Overall I can't complain too loudly. It's a New Year full of promise, just like every new day should be. I won't be doing a full recap of the year, because well...that'll probably be boring for me and you. All the hobby stuff I did last year is available right here on the blog, so you can go through it at your leisure. I'd rather fill you in on all the stuff that's happened over my winter break! We'll just skip the parts about the exorbitant traffic ticket I got from less-than-honorable traffic cop, and ...

For the last few weeks I've been trying to decrease the number of items on my painting table, without a lot of success. That's probably because I keep adding more stuff to the backlog than I actually clear off! I've got several pieces of scenery and markers, a 'hero' model for SuperSystem which will also serve in my Nazi Death Cult for Kulten , plus the Lycaon and Vampire starter boxes for Empire of the Dead sitting up there. There are also a ton of primed figures-in-waiting up on top of the fridge (to keep them out of reach from both the cat and curious little-people fingers). Sunday turned out to be a lazy sleep-in-then-stay-home day, which was pretty nice as they don't seem to happen terribly often. I did a few things around the house that required doing, watched some TV and then continued work on a few things from the miniature projects to-do list. As you may have seen in my previous post I also received a large batch of stuff for a  Stargate  ...

I finally finished the two figures on my painting table. They'd both been sitting at near-complete for over a week and I just never got a chance to sit down and finished them off. The first figure is a converted Heroclix Wendigo that I'm going to be using as an alternate form for my figure Snowbird . As far as conversions go this was an easy one. Swap from the clix base over to a 40mm round base, which I added some sand and rocks to. The paint work on the Wendigo was quite good to begin with. I used a quick wash of the Army Painter Strong Tone  and followed that up with a dry brushed coat of pure white. I would have preferred a grey wash with a slightly blue tint, but honestly...I'm not sure how to make one. I didn't want to be up all night experimenting with mixing something up, so I went the easy route. I've got SuperSystem statistic sheets made up for both figures and am looking forward to trying her abilities out in a game. I've already tried usin...

I finished up a few more figures. The first one is a Heroclix conversion that I'll be using for games of SuperSystem : Snowbird. Obviously I re-based the figure onto a custom 30mm round base. The rest of the work was simple. I used an Asurmen Blue wash on all of the white and blue parts of her uniform and cape. Afterwards I applied a Gryphonne Sepia wash to her hair and face, and then finally painted a few view thin coats of white over her body suit to give her a nice smooth finish. The figure I'm planning to use for her alternate form is in progress. I'm hoping to have it finished tomorrow. My next completed piece is one of the figures from the villains starter box for Pulp City : the Gentleman. The paint on this figure was pretty simple. I used blue, red, black, metal and flesh from my Army Painter  starter box. I used a light citadel grey for the suit. Once I had my base coat applied I covered the whole figure in Strong Tone ink...and was promptly ...

I little while back I stumbled onto a post on LAF ; a user there was looking to get rid of his entire collection of Pulp City models for a very good price. I'd had Pulp City on my radar for a while, and eagerly jumped on the offer. We quickly struck a deal and I impatiently awaited the arrival of a huge box of new toys. A big thanks to Nate for hooking me up with all the awesome stuff below. The character cards and some assembled figures are that were also in the box are not shown. I went through all the boxes and sorted out the cards, which were already sleeved. After going through this massive pile I realized with some disappointment that there were almost a dozen figures missing. However, Nate did a double-check and found them hiding away in a closet. They've been sent in the mail and I'm trying to be patient while I await their arrival as well. Once they get here I think there are less than 10 figures from the entire Pulp City line that I'm missing; some of ...