Joan of Arc core set terrain and some accidental Night Goblins

 One of the things that really got me hooked on the Joan of Arc (JoA) Kickstarter from Mythic Games was the amazing visuals they created with the terrain elements of the game.  My 15mm terrain collection is a bit dated and I thought, if the game was awful, I'd still be able to use a lot of the components in other 15mm games.  Fortunately the game is actually pretty good... maybe even very good... maybe even awesome! 

 The core set comes with a church, a large farmhouse, two small farmhouses, a ruined church, a well, 5 low walls and 7 defensive stake lines, 5 bushes, 4 rocks, 10 trees, and a small shrine.

I've managed to knock out: Church, houses, walls, trees, bushes, stakes, and rocks. 

 All of this was painted directly onto the plastic models without trimming, cleaning, or primer. I wanted to paint these fast and leverage the pre-colored plastic where possible.

Paint adhesion was excellent and I think they'll hold up well to use.  They were sealead with Krylon Satin Clear Coat but I'll probably zap them with a final light coat of Dead Flat.

 To get the variegated roof tiles I used three basic colors and rolled some dice to decide where they went!  A fun little exercise that turned in a good result.

The trees were pre-colored green and brown So they got some highlights and some Secret Weapon Washes.  I wanted to mix some green highlights and blew my color theory check and made a large batch of a totally wrong green....

... which resulted in a frantic look round for something to use it on... I located a box of "Battle for Skull Pass" which I think is something like 5th edition Warhammer Fantasy Battles and set to painting up the horde of Night Goblins it contained.  The sculpts are actually very entertaining and really marked the beginning of GW's shift in hard plastics from were awful to very good.  Now, of course hard plastics are amazing and the sculpting takes full advantage of the material's properties to give us things very dynamic posing and flying/levitating models.






Not being able to let the pile sit I finished up the spear, bow, and character models from the set all the while thinking about Night Goblins as the poster children for keeping serious religion and greenskins separated.  The Night Goblins have created a society that does not need orcs! They are successful in their own right and field armies that are a potent, and all too successful, adversary to the powerful Dwarf Kingdoms. 

Back to the brushes!

Joan of Arc terrain WiP

 For my first go at painting since the big move I decided to work on the Joan of Arc Board game.

This is a game that could only exist because of the great golden age of board-gaming that was brought about by the confluence of Kickstarter and the explosion of 3D miniature design and printing.  Its a very ambitious project that combines elements of RPGs/Tabletop Miniature  Wargames/Dungeon-crawlers.  Its already in a 1.5 Kickstarter to re-balance and expand the tabletop elements... I'm a bit obsessed.

 With the proliferation of board-games containing high quality "Designed for painters" components its no surprise that a few have ended up on my painting desk. Previously I've tackled the Dark Souls: The Board Game core set and The Order of Vampire Hunters Core set. Still in my queue are Fallout(The Board Game),  Chronicle X, Gloom Haven, and the inevitable... and seemingly endless, Kingdom Death: Monster.

 One of the things that interests me with these games, in addition to the really great sculpts, is the very well defined scope of each project.  Traditionally tabletop wargames and RPGs are essentially open ended endeavors so the sense of closure is pretty cool with the board games.

Many of the games like Joan of Arc (JoA) have made use of colored material and I've attempted to leverage that color base here basically shading, highlighting, and weathering using the existing color as a base. 

 Paint adhesion can be an issue but on hard plastics (as these are) its not a big problem and it occurred to me, somewhat belatedly, that I could spray with a clear primer... after all I've done it before... notably when mistaking the clear primer as a clear-coat sealer...  Let me tell ya its not the same! ... but it does let the original color show strongly and would work well for this sort of thing

JoA comes with a nice selection of 15mm buildings and the minis are very nice too... one of the fabulous things about 15mm is the ease of achieving the visual effect of mass troops, huddled villages, and massive monsters.  JoA does all of these superbly!

To the left you'll notice a pair of Japanese houses.  These are repairs that I snuck into the task list.  They are resin and were originally painted in the '70s in a sort of pygmy true 25mm scale. I've forgotten the manufacturer but they have the feel of the JR style about them.

While mixing up a green color I missed my mark in a big way so... base-coated the skin of a GW Ork and Goblin army from the Battle at Skull Pass... This chariot has a copyright date of 1993 on it so ... I guess its about time it got tinkered with!

Next time should have the JoA core set scenery wrapped up along with the surprise Night Gobbos and maybe some Forward Base underway.

Until then.

Arthenya VI the Archpapess and Bruegleburg a day at the fair

 Arthenya VI the Archpapess is another great model from Raging Heroes.  I have a couple of iterations of her because I want to use her in some dioramas as well as a plying piece.  This is the playing piece version.

She is escorted by some cherubs to protect her and hold some of her ceremonial gear. 

The model is resin and the details are very sharp making her a bit easier to paint than you might imagine.  Fuscha craft ink, Reaper Bone triad, Gory Red triad, and solid white, Secret Weapon washes (Storm Cloud, Armor, and Flesh) Secret weapon Engine metal, Vallejo mediums, GW Necron Compund and Shining Gold.

 Bruegleburg: A day at the Fair was a kickstarter by Lead Adventurers that featured a lot of colorful townsfolk for festive settings.  There were some options to add a more military flair to it but I was really drawn to the Slice of Life feel of the whole thing.

Here are a pair of looters in the colors of my Stirland Fantasy army. 

 This batch of models has more military or local officials in it than I've done so far so there is the recurring theme of the local livery in green and yellow on most of these.

 Country Nobles sporting their colors for the fair.

Greens were worked up from Vallejo Emerald, Secret Weapon Washes and Verdigris weathering, and Reaper solid White.

These are metal models and are sculpted traditionally so they sit really well with the older style citadel models that I used to build most of my Sylvanian army.  The scale is well suited to that era as well.


Yellows are Reaper Yellow triad.










I've based this batch on 25mm rounds for use with some of the newer skirmish games but I've also done a lot of the previous models on 20mm squares to better fit with my existing terrain sets.  I'm a bit torn on this but even old reliable Tabletop World is moving to a larger Heroic scale and the 25mm really does support these big metal models better...
A wandering mercenary and his henchman.  Since he's not a local and is a veteran of the Chaos Wars he is in red.










These two are still WiPs but I'm out of time to finish them until I locate them again after the big move.  I'll do some patterning on his red coat which will reduce the Santa effect a but and the shield devices are just roughed in at present... more to come on these two.







That wraps it up until after the move.  See you again in Late August or Early September!

Sci-Fi Lamp Posts

 Clearing the desk of odds and ends between rounds of packing!

 Here are a set of six sci-fi lamp posts from Antenocitis Workshop.  These folks make some really outstanding stuff so take a look if you would and see what they have on offer.

I got these from a 'Designed for Infinity' kickstarter called "Undertown - The seedier side of the 'sphere" which I am anxious to really dig into.  I've only built some peripheral stuff like signs, trash bins, cargo pallets and a street food vendor... things like that ... but there is so much more!

Arriving as unpainted (gray) resin and supplied with tinted  clear acrylic bits they painted up very fast.  Antenocitis has a really high quality resin that feels a bit more like plastic and has none of the brittleness usually associated with things resin. It has good detail and arrives very clean and holds paint well.

I did these fast... moving house ya know!... so a quick spray with a paint/primer combo in French Vanilla, lining with Storm Cloud (Secret Weapon) touch ups and highlights with Splintered Bone (Reaper)... glue on the acrylic bits... done!

In future they may get weathered and/or signs etc... but good to go for now.

Shown with some Void Elves (Raging Heroes) for scale.

Hopefully I'll get a few more posts up before the pack out but ya never know!

Ork Mortars from Bitspudlo

 A while back I went looking to fill a gap in my Ork Lobbas.  I have three of the Forgeworld models magnetized to swap out between field carriages and the weapon mounts of the Gargantuan Squiggoth and I wanted another three in case I decided to use the Squiggoth and the field artillery... or just didn't feel like digging out the Squiggoth to swipe the guns for a game... anyway... I was surprised to be unable to locate them on either the Forgeworld or GW sites.

 I play a lot of legacy models and play in different editions of the game so I went looking for a replacement model and, after some sticker shock on Ebay, discovered Hexy Shop.  They carry a variety of third party conversion bits and a few complete models.  I located the Lobba replacement with a company out of Poland called Bitspudlo.  At $13.23 a pop I thought I'd give them a go.

The resin is good quality cleanly cast with sharp detail, a dry, and very paintable, surface but is a little on the brittle side and there were a few bubbles in the road wheels.  No major flaws and they fit the theme of the GW Orks with glyphs and a cobbled together appearance.

I painted them up in a state of very poor repair using the Secret Weapon rust line augmented with the GW Technicals; Ryza Rust, Tyhphus Corrosion, and Necron Compound.

All my basing supplies are packed so I'll have to base these on the other side of the house move. 







Packing up the house is going quickly now and my Ork models are all stowed so I grabbed, an about to be packed, Tinkerbell from the Twisted Game to use for scale. 

We're out house hunting so no updates for a couple of weeks... and then... I might... maybe... get one more out before everything is too packed up to continue working.

Cheers!

Raging Heroes Holy Blades All-Stars

Raging Heroes has had a few regular releases that expand on the TGG Kickstarter offerings.  Its very nice to see them working outside the massive Kickstarter format.

The Holy Blades All-Stars are a group of female Paladins that I'll use for warbands in Vanguard, Mordheim, and Frostgrave.  I'll also get a lot of mileage out of them in some RPGs, especially High Fantasy in the vein of Dragon Age.

 The Models were pretty clean and the resin has crisp detail and is just flexible enough to make handling them easy.

 The Models are very light weight and several of the more dynamically posed, the Standard Bearer in particular, were prone to falling over if the terrain was at all uneven, or the table was bumped, so I added a 1" (25mm) steel  washer to the base and now they are super stable.

 The flag staff of the Standard Bearer is holding up a huge, otherwise unsupported, banner and I'm afraid that it will eventually break during handling.  I'll probably try to replace it with a brass rod or similar if that comes to pass.

Painting wise the banner is not finished.  I'm going to add some patterning and images to it after we get on the other side of the big move.  So its mostly just concept at this point... playable but not really done!

 I experimented with a different way of doing armor and started with Tire Black (Secret Weapon) over the standard Khaki primer/white dry-brush foundation.

This was then dry-brushed with Engine Metal (Secret Weapon) and edge highlights were Necron Compound (Citadel) then lining with Tire Black thinned 50% with Glaze Medium (Vallejo).

 The rest of the color scheme is kind of traditional for warrior nuns and I viewed them as an Order of Paladins that specialized in fighting the Undead and so are equipped with a lot of tools for the consecration/reconsecration of burial grounds so that the Necromancers could be stripped of their access to the mortal remains that fuel their endless hordes.

 With that in mind there is a lot of gold on these models.  I tried to make the embroidered cloth of gold details have a different texture to the ecclesiastical tools that are meant to be metal.  To accomplish this the gold cloth is entirely non metallic while the tools etc... are done with regular metallic.

 The gold cloth is Iron Oxide dry-brushed with Sun Yellow (Reaper) while the metals are Brass Casings (Secret Weapon) washed with 50/50 Flesh Wash (Secret Weapon) and Glaze Medium then spot highlighted with Shining Gold (Citadel)

Whites are layered with the Reaper Bone Triad (Dirty Bone, Graveyard Bone, and Splintered Bone) and lined with diluted Soft Tone (Army Painter).

Lots more to do and the packing is accelerating!  I'm hoping to get some a few more Raging Heroes, Lead Adventurers, Hexy Shop, and RWBY figures done before the end... fingers crossed!

The Port House 3D Print

 I'm flinging paint at the model backlog in between bouts of pre-move prep so I have a half dozen projects in one stage or another of completion that I hope to finish before pack out.

This is The Port House from Rampage: The Lost Islands Kickstarter.  Rampage is very aggressive with releasing files and they often follow up the initial file release with some adjustments, improvement, or corrections soon after the initial offering. This is the 1.0 version of the Port House.  They have updated this, and several other models from the project, since I printed it and it seems that they have generally re-scaled the models for the more common Heroic scale.  That means that this model is a wee bit petite compared to my other buildings.  Its even a bit small compared to the Tabletop World buildings that are scaled for true 25mm.

 Since most of my games that use this style of build tend to be fantasy themed I'll imagine this as a mouseling, or gnome, building.  I'll have to do up some mouselings with timber floor bases!

Actually for gaming I probably should have moved to clear acrylic bases years ago... but I didn't... so now I'm not inclined to do so... maybe when I start a completely new army I'll give it a go but I'll otherwise keep trying to theme match the bases for the existing sets.

Gerystone and wood standard process.  I skipped out on plaster for this one and may go back and add it later... I had some print errors with this model and went with it being a bit run down.

 You can see the very wide back window area that looks like exposed wood... printer error... also some of the supports for the railing failed to survive the print and some outside wood supports and one face of each of the doors are a little fuzzy or deformed.  This was an early 'learn to print' model for me and I learned a lot.  Still, I think it'll be serviceable enough on the tabletop as part of the larger town so no need to let it go to waste!

For scale there are some Twisted minis, a couple of Lead Adventurer minis, and some Reaper Mouselings.  The other buildings that I'd like to compare it with have been packed so I'll have to do that on the other side.

 I've done a lot of the Greystone Village buildings and I'm trying some new things.  Since this building has a tile roof, instead of a wood shingle roof, I went with a variegated red tile.  It was fun to play with the color mix to get a more natural looking roof.  The rest of the Lost island buildings tend to have this tile roof so it'll be a nice addition to the wood shingle schemes I've already done.

The Greystone has been a theme here for a long time but I think the next step will be to add some variations to the stones.  I'll probably do that with the next several residences but stick with the more monochrome grey for working buildings like shops, forges, warehouses etc.. 

I've also skipped on putting magnets in this building as the magnets seem to have found themselves packed up already.  It holds together very well as is and each level is in two parts that are offset from the level below.  I'll likely put magnets in the bottom level at least just to encourage it to stay together through vigorous rotations but it seemed to spin and slide and stick together as it is so no rush on it... one more thing to remember on the other side.

 The roof tile started as an Amethyst (Secret Weapon) wash over the black base followed with a Gory Red (Reaper) Dry-brush then patch dry-brush areas... some with Phoenix Red (Reaper) and other areas with Scrofulous Brown (Vallejo). 

The printer error is also visible from the outside rear of the model as a elongated window but I just painted it to resemble wood slats and moved on.  I think it adds some character to the model!

Pack Pack
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