Neo-Tiki Motel and Office V.2 from Antenociti's Workshop

 Continuing the foray into MDF scenery I wrapped up the Neo-Tiki Motel and Office from Antenociti's Workshop "Made for Infinity" line.

This is the culmination of three kits... the Neo-Tiki Motel, The Neo-Tiki Motel Office, and the Neo-Tiki Upgrade Pack which provides interior details for both the Office and the Motel.

This is a wonderfully detailed model and the upgrade pack does not disappoint with each room having individual graphics and a very clever 3D illusion of rooms and areas beyond the walls.

 "STAIRS!!!! WHY DOES IT HAVE TO BE STAIRS?!?!?!"
CL4P-TR4P's histrionics aside the twin stairs were the trickiest bit to assemble but, after struggling with the first one I hit my stride and the second was a breeze... whew!

The small signs on the roof are attached magnetically and can be re positioned as desired while the Aircon units also serve as handles to take the roof off.

 The sleeping alcoves and bathrooms use a small space to create a big feel and help keep the rooms' playable areas clear for use.

The doors are operational although a little tight in my build.  I'mma chalk that up to learning curve and pay closer attention in future builds.

 Adverts and Computer Terminals... weather reports... news casts... They really do top notch photo elements.

The HUGE sign is attached to the office which is also fully detailed with a customer service area that includes a "Press Your Hand Here To Pay" terminal and sliding doors. 

 The Large sign has a lot of acrylic elements, some of which glow convincingly under the game-room lights.

This is a completely pre-painted MDF project that took a couple of days to assemble.  Its going to be part of my Undertown and will get some weathering and graffiti once I have several parts assembled. 

Its possible to smudge a bit on these white surfaces so keeping your fingers clean is a big deal... the MDF is laser cut and covered in a protective paper that often has some soot on it... which transfers instantly to fingers and tools.

CL4P-TR4P is caught here making a pass at the very attractive Tiki motif Acrylic room doors... that resolutely cheerful and inappropriate model is the GGW3000 Dancebot from Armorcast.

Back to the desk!

Antenocitis Workshop Asian Wall Set v2, Neo-Tiki Motel Office WiP, and the Accidental Dwarf Army

 Antenocitis Workshop has a couple of new prepainted MDF releases in their Made for Infinity line. 

They are well designed and are sized to be LoS obstructions even for 40K. These will be great with the Asian Restaurants or the Neo-Tiki Motel that Antenocitis also have on offer.  The wood color is actually laser charred and not paint... which makes this kit have a strong odor of burnt wood even before opening the box.  This dissipates eventually and I hit them with some Dead Flat sealer so they can be handled more casually.

 Our trusty Burna Boy is checking out the rental office of the Neo-Tiki Motel. This is a small building with a GIANT sign that services the Neo-Tiki Motel.  This is a WiP and the Neo-Tiki Motel have detailed interiors sold as a separate upgrade pack that contains both interior sets.

  The Asian Wall Set v2 makes 11 wall section and one (working) gate.

The Prepainted MDF has a covering that is a single color with details laser cut in so its not completely or 'finely' painted but it does make a great surface for adding in those extra details if you like without it looking so much like painted MDF.

 It is recommended to varnish or seal the prepainted MDF to reduce smudging from handling.  I had not though of that and wish I'd seen the recommendation before working on Hab 3 from the Forward Base line.  Once the clear acrylic components are installed sealing becomes more tricky! Its a learning process.  My current plan is to seal the interior upgrade pack before removing the components from the MDF sheet and then do any extra detailing after that... resealing if required.  The reason being that the clear acrylic doors and windows really need to be installed before the model is assembled.  Otherwise there is a significant risk of damaging the MDF.




While we're talking about Hab 3 I'm making some progress on the resin bits.  I'm interested to see what the difference is between the old resin accessorized offerings and the new "all MDF" versions.











Lastly a couple of pictures of the Accidental Dwarf Army that is on the painting desk because I has a paint mix error that resulted in me digging out The Battle for Skull Pass box set and... since I was doing the goblins to eat up the erroneous paint mix I , of course, had to do the dwarves because they were there!










These will initially get some use as Imperial Dwarves in Kings of War but will certainly find their way back onto the table in my Oldhammer games.

These guys are a uniformed army while my Freeholds will be built from Atlantis Miniatures Dwarfs and then there is the giant pile of Mantic Dwarfs to grapple with...





Back to the desk!

Forward Base Hab 3 WiP

 Getting started on the actual MDF buildings of  the Forward Base range Antenociti's Workshop.

These are "Made for Infinity" products and, while I've not played Infinity yet... hopefully I'll get some games in the near future... I've wanted some non-ruined buildings for my SF battlefields.

Forward Base fits that bill well.  Its a collection of prefab modules that would constitute the core of any exploration mission and would evolve into the basis of early planetary settlements.

Other lines like "Under Town" build on this foundation while retaining the feel of modular construction and a function over form theme.




My kits are from the Kickstarter and they have since been redesigned to eliminate the resin components in favor of printed and painted details.  The resin interior panels of the original set could be swapped round and customized extensively during construction and even, to a lesser extent afterwards.  I suspect in practice its just easier to settle on a configuration while building and glue it all in... at least that will be my approach.



Hab 3 is a small dormitory unit and was a good place to start while learning the ins and outs of building these models.  You can see several assassins here for scale and to show the very fun and numerous acrylic windows.  These are tinted a nice blue and probably look awesome with some LEDs to illuminate them.

I'm thinking about adding backing paper to the signs as they are cut through and the letters are reversed on the back anyway and they might be easier to see and give a more SF finish... plus it would make them solid LoS obstructions instead of portable windows

The kit has card "End Caps" to extend the printed textures into the tab areas that are usually left blank.  I found that a Reaper "Nut Brown" is a pretty good match to the laser burn brown that these edges have.  These are the weathered version of the kit. There is a pristine version but I have not seen it.

The MDF comes with a pre-colored surface which can be used as a base color for painting or as a prepared surface for a complete repaint.  the idea is to provide a painting surface that will not look like painted wood when completed.
 The safety barriers are a transparent green and intended to look like holographic barriers with corporate logos, cautions, or even advertisements on programmable surfaces.  The structures of the base have mounting lugs so these barriers can be added and removed from the roofs as desired.

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The white primed bits are the resin bits for Hab 3.  They include walls with lockers, a bunk, vid screens, trash recepticles, and more. Interior scatter has a table, two chairs, and a personal locker. The interior scatter will probably be reduced during most games in favor of space for models to move about.  Exterior resin includes vent covers and air handling equipment. The tan primed bits are shipping crate barricades/piles.

Back to the painting desk.

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!