Continued to be quarantined due to the plague panic, I manage to get a lot of hobby work accomplished. In addition to finishing up the editing of the 17th Century supplement for Feudal Patrol and get most of the editing done on the Meso-American supplement, I managed to get a lot of figures painted. As with most weekends, the week was spent on figure prep and base coats, and then I did the detail work while listening to movies streaming off my media server. This weekend, I listened to a bunch of the Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland musicals and a half dozen Hopalong Cassiday movies while painting. I also got my weekends mixed up and thought Sunday was Mother’s Day, so picked up IHOP family feast breakfast to go.
The “main event” for this weekend was to complete a platoon of British paratroopers from WWII. I had completed the first half with figures I had collected here and there over the past year, but I was missing a few more riflemen, PIAT teams, Bren gunners. I ordered Crusader figures from Badger for most of what I needed, but Badger also carries Artisan, so I was able to get their paratrooper PIAT teams, since Crusader doesn’t seem to make them.
When the smoke cleared, I had a reinforced platoon, including three PIAT teams, a Vicker’s machine-gun, and mortar, and a 6lb anti-tank gun. These are now ready for action!
Having completed my main objective for the weekend, I then started pulling some odds and ends out of the painting box and knocking them out.
A couple weeks ago I posted some pictures of the OWS smugglers and highwaymen that I painted. When I ordered my missing British paratroopers, I ordered five of the smugglers I was missing. I painted these in all red bandanas with the idea of making them an easily identified unit during a game.
I picked up this pack of looting Vikings at Cold Wars. I don’t remember the manufacturer. They were fun to paint.
I had a dozen or so Reaper Bones figures in the painting project box, that I have been delaying painting. I don’t like working with the original Bones material, and I think the features are mushy. One of these figures I have in metal too, the one carrying the tray, and that figure is so much nicer than the Bones one. I keep four 4L Really Useful Boxes of figures that are filed, based, and primed, and I decided to paint a few of these Bones figures to make room in one of the project boxes. Here you can see four of them. I really like the woman with the rolling pin. The figure second from the right is of unknown origin. I painted her to be my wife’s character in our D&D campaign.
Chris gave me this figure. It is Reaper Bones but in the new Bones Black material. While the details remain mush compared to a metal figure, the black material is WAY better than the old white material. This figure was fun to paint.
Over the years, I have painted a handful of figures that I just wanted to paint and am not sure they will ever make it onto the table. I usually just place them on a shelf in my painting room, where they gather dust. I came up with the idea of getting some baseball display boxes from Hobby Lobby (on line) and putting some figures in them for display. I will probably do a couple more, but here are the four I did early Sunday morning while everyone else was still asleep.
Months ago I purchased a Delorian from Back to the Future for an 80’s movie and TV game I plan to run in the future. It came in a plastic display box. I painted the surface gray and placed the Imperial Assault figures from Rebels on it fighting Darth Wader (Darth Vader as a duck). These are affixed with putty, so I could take them back out and use them to game.
Last, but not least, I bought into the Sally 4th Whiteout Kickstarter a few months ago. I ended up with 12 figures, a gyrocopter, and a snow mobile. Here are the first four that I finished. The others I’ll finish this week. These will be for a pulp game based on Ice Station Zebra. That game is deep in the queue for convention games, but I wanted to get them painted for when the muse strikes me.
It was a pretty productive weekend. This coming weekend, I should finish the Whiteout figures and the Bones figures. Next in the queue are some Pulp Figures iconic movie monsters and a group of Gypsy musicians. Then I hope to knock out several battalions of 10mm Napoleonic Prussian infantry and cavalry that have been filed, primed, and glues to sticks for a couple of years.
