2010/2011

Right-o, I think it’s time for an end of year review and a broad plan for 2011. The review is pretty simple: Lots prepped, not much painted!

So I hereby declare that for me, 2011 will be the “Year of Painting and Terrain”. What does that mean? Well, I’ve scratched out a few themes and resolutions.

(1) No more cleaning of figures until the backlog is cleared, with a few exceptions:

• Assembling, mounting, and priming figures already cleaned in 2010 is ok (need to get them on the painting table)
• Figures needed to complete a project (e.g. Vietnam), SYW India skirmish, air can be cleaned etc.
• Terrain is fair game, as it’s the other half of the year’s theme.

(2) Purchasing will be scaled back, I did my piece for the world economy in 2010; in particular, no NEW projects! Well, ok, two new projects may be allowed – 3mm ACW Terrible Sharp Sword, now that it’s released, and 6mm Hammer’s Slammers, IF they ever get released by Old Crow. Otherwise it will be:

• Terrain purchases will include a space mat, an aerial mat (overland, already have naval), some 10/15mm pieces, 2mm Irregular, and 3mm from Simply 6 (via Picoarmor).
• 2mm purchases for SYW India, my two fantasy projects (Kull, Imaro), Star Wars, and Land Ironclads.
• Star Wars capital ships from Studio Bergstrom (falling under the “completing a project” exception).
• Some more Pulp Figures, particularly if I manage to make the Hot Lead convention in March and PF is there with a booth.
• If Brigade (US version) has any sales, I’ll pick up some ERB Martian figures and VSF skirmish stuff.
• If Brigade (UK version) has their summer sale again, I’ll pick up some Aeronef and Land Ironclads stuff – I hope you all admire the way I didn’t spend any money during their Xmas sale.
• Splintered Light Miniatures have a few sales during the year, and I expect they’ll have some cool new Splintered Lands mini’s I’ll need, plus I have some of their 15mm stuff in the pending pile.
• In January I expect to put in an order to round up WWII over the Pacific, there are 6 mini-starter packs that will do me, plus some spares for China. And some modern odds and ends. And I found I need another pack of D.XXI’s for the Finns. But THAT’S it.
• At some point I’d like to place a small order with H&R for 1/300 WWI a/c, I have some gaps in my lineup, and they’re the only ones with a reasonable collection of interesting Interwar a/c.
  

Hmmm, so that looks like two rules and about 20 exceptions, but at least it’s a plan!

I’ve spent the last few days working on re-jigging my hobby area layout, and added 7 new shelving units to the house – 1 fancy bookcase, 1 utility shelf, 3 pairs of big wall shelves, 2 pairs of little wall shelves. Some of it’s to deal with my book overload, but I also want to get work station #2 back to being a work station, right now it’s a storage area for in-progress terrain. I also waste a lot of time trying to remember where stuff went, because it’s a pain to access much of my collection. This should put things out in the open, in a less jury-rigged fashion. Now hopefully I don’t move come spring…

Hope everyone’s had a good Christmas, and is heading towards a good new year.

CJR

Fighter Fleets on Bare Metal Parade

As mentioned, here are some of my fighters, all Studio Bergstrom, after cleaning and mounting. The 1" fighters are on magnets, the fleet scale ones are directly onto pins. The Battlestar Galactica ones are all done, the Star Wars ones are still in progress, besides having a lot more types, the 1" TIE variants and B-Wings require assembly.
The fleet scale alone:
Some plant bases for planetary skirmish gaming, many are Woodlands Scenics DIY's, the rest are various dollar store and pet store plants:

Yay, Happy Birthday to TwoThreeSixMM

I was just checking in for any comments when I realized that it was December 20th of last year that I made my first blog post. Time sure has flown, looking over my month-by-month breakdown for 2010, it was easy to tell when the slow and busy times at work were.

I should have a few more posts this month, later today I'll post a bare-metal shot of my space fighter fleets, and maybe some interplanetary terrain I'm rushing together to try to get in some Star Wars/5150 gaming over the holidays. I finally found a glue that works on aquarium plants!

CJR

Pulp Monster Robot

While doing my Xmas shopping for my nephew (only 2 months old, too young to introduce to miniatures...yet), I found in the clearance section a T-700 toy from the last Terminator movie. After hemming and hawing, I decided it would make a good giant Nazi robot for pulp gaming. Here it is, with and without its gun, with the Shadow (from Pulp Figures) for scale:

If not the Nazis, here's another classic story it could fit into: The Spider: Robot Titans of Gotham

More from Shapeways

It's hard to tell if I should place the blame on Shapeways, for giving me a one-day 10% off coupon a few weeks ago, or Steelonsand for his recent blog posts about his Battlestar Galactica project. Anyway, now that I've switched to sci-fi mode and have two tables covered with spacehips - fleet scale and fighter scale - I'll post some stuff in revenge.

While searching for new items from the Shapeways/Star Ranger crowd of companies, I found a new shop doing not-Trek stuff:These are the basic Heavy Cruisers of legend, and are pretty sweetly detailed. The "alien heavy cruiser" has already had its basecoat applied, I find it helps somewhat with the slightly roughness of the White/Strong/Flexible material (which is still way cheaper than the other materials). Coincidently, Klingon Armada and Romulan Armada (licenced Starmada variants in the Starfleet Battles Universe) just made their way to the E23 Warehouse for digital ordering, so now I have a game to go with them, although I'll be tweaking the ship stats to bring them more in line with the TV series. The Armadas are set in the General War (SFU)/post-movie (TV) era, and I'd like to scale them back.

And then for my super-VSF project, using Iron Stars, I picked up Objects May Appear's Gothic Space Fortress. It's an expensive bugger, but the discount helped, and it's awesome. I think the Germans are getting it, but I'll see.
And then for Land Ironclads, also part of the VSF-unity, I picked up (from left to right) some self-propelled superguns (going to the French), a monster ironclad, going to the Turks, and well, the gingerbread house from hell. I'm going to make it the largest possible ironclad in the game, all tricked out with options, but of course it'll be stationary, so maybe some sort of battlefield HQ.
So all this madness, and the fact I'm spending so much time prepping and so little painting, has made me consider establishing a theme for 2011 around painting and terrain, and that's it. Only a few essential purchases (mainly terrain), and no more prepping until I've cleared the backlog that's currently prepped, for a year. More on this in a future post, as I establish my rules.

Jealousy Will Get You Nowhere

There's been a lot of blog posts and tutorials etc. about using CD's as bases for terrain and scenics, and I've been trying to collect CD's where and when possible, including making the sad decision that some of my computer games from the early 1990's were never going to get played again. However, even after that cull, I still had less than 20 CD's to get to work on.

But problem solved! During a re-carpeting at work, someone mentioned that during the clean-up to get his office cleared, he'd thrown out a couple of hundred CD's of an old annual report. I immediately raided the garbage, and am now set up for terrain bases for life! Life, I tell you!And I think the storage towers can be used as a scenic in their own right, with a bit of work.

Mars and Spears

So at least this time Mars and spears could have some relationship, but in this instance they actually don't, other than being what I spent a chunk of the weekend on.

On the Mars front, I scored big this weekend at a local used book store. I had most of Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars series already, but was missing 4 novels in the middle of the series. I went to the store on a hunt for a few items, and asked the clerk on hand if I could go through the "Burroughs crate" - some prolific authors get their own box rather than go on the shelves. Going through the crate there were the usual bazillion Tarzan novels, which I read as a kid and still have a bunch of, and some Pellucidar stories I was missing, which was a minor score, and some one-offs that look cool. But no Mars novels and no Venus novels (I was short the first and the last of that series).

However, as I was going to pay, the store owner came back and was there to ring me up, when he saw I'd been through the Burroughs crate, he said he had a new box of Burroughs that he hadn't even inventoried or priced yet, and was I interested? After the polite version of a "hell yeah", I got my mitts on the new arrivals, and found ALL 4 of the Mars novels I was missing, and the last of the Venus series (The Wizard of Venus).

Conveniently enough, I've been prepping some 28mm "not" John Carter of Mars figures, mainly from Parroom Station, but also new arrivals from Tinman Miniatures. Here's a sampling of Parroom's White Ape, Banth, and John Carter, and Tinman's Woola.You can see in the background some of the other stuff I've been prepping - apes on motorcycles, not-Space Marines, pulp figures, and 18C India for skirmishing...

Which brings me to the spears. I have Freikorp's 15mm History of India range on the go for that skirmish project, and the generic spearmen need spears. After some reading on TMP, I tried to make my own with some brass wire (I had florist wire on hand as backup) and I was surprisingly successful, they actually look like spears!As always, the pictures can be clicked to bring up larger versions.

2 and 3mm Scenics (WiP)

The last few weeks have been spent basing some 2mm Star Wars and 18th century India figures (possible the the widest gaps in interest one can imagine), but on the painting table my poor Vietnam project has been pushed to the side, literally, for some scenic pieces from Irregular (2mm) and Simply 6 (3mm). These are still being finished, but here's an early peek at them.

Since the manor on the right is actually intended as a plantation house for my Vietnam project, I guess the little guys can't complain too much.The one on the left is for some TBD European project.

And I also have some 3mm ruins from Simply 6 for city-fighting in Vietnam, still working on how to achieve depth to the rubble. There are four in total, these two are to be "concrete", the other two will be the typical white buildings that seem to be common in pictures of Tet (or at least the Osprey version).
The Star Wars project gets its first piece with an ion cannon base for the Battle of Hoth:
And for good measure, a missile base for a temperate world...
On to 18th century India, for which I'm using both of Irregular's "mid-east" pieces as a town and village respectively...
I plan on getting two more of these and doing them in more of a Northwest Frontier paint scheme. These two are for more tropical India.

I also have a cathedral and castle from Irregular underway. The red base around the cathedral is an attempt to show red cobblestones, hopefully drybrushing and a wash help pull out the details. Interestingly, while searching online for photos of a cathedral to base a paint scheme on, I found which cathedral this seems to be based on - that of Cologne.
And finally, here's a couple shots of a fantasy castle, in near-2mm scale, that came from some knick-knack store a long time ago. I think I remember what town I bought it in, but I'm not really sure of what store. This was way before I took up miniatures again, and before I even knew of 2mm as a scale, I just picked it up as a trinket, along with some little dragon figurines. Realizing it could serve a better purpose as a scenic bit, I stuck it to a base and am giving it a go. The hills and grass need some work, as do the boulders in the stream, otherwise I think it looks pretty good. And has given me a whole new appreciation for knick-knack stores...need to do some hunting for some of its brethren!

Well, in a fit of something, possibly stupidity

I started another blog: Mahindya 1750 for my 18th century Imagi-nations set in a fictional Indian sub-continent.

The introductory post there pretty much explains everything. I set it up separately so it would have a clear lineage, rather than the clutter that is here. I may have to do this with some other projects too, eventually - Kull comes to mind.

I also made it separate to give it a different look and feel. I was actually trying for more of a newspaper look, but maybe I'll save that for more contemporary projects, AK-47 Africa or Back of Beyond stuff. The look now does have a sort of old-world feel, me thinks anyway.

3mm Works in Progress (and some targets)

Well some of the pictures are crappy, but here are some painting projects that have been going on lately. Most are 3mm Vietnam, but a couple of bases are targets for 1/600 air gaming - 1/2400 truck convoys. One for the desert, one for Europe. The trucks still need to be painted obviously.

I had another 10 LVTP-5's to get into action, so after basing I painted the bases green for jungle on 3, giving me 8 on that terrain. The other 7 I'm putting on the beach, so after messing around with various colour permutations, I just settled on Americana's "Sand" as the colour. It looks better in real life than this picture shows:
All the rest are US forces. These are just a sample - FAC base (4 guys), half-squad (5 guys), medic station, and MG team. Uniforms, flesh, and guns are done on all. I remembered I wanted to add flak vests on a couple of guys way after the fact, so today I gave a couple of guys on FAC teams and one gunner's assistant their vests. The guy on the far right of the FAC has one. Most references showed the vests as beige, so I went with that. On the MG team you'll see a hint of gold, representing brass cartridges; later Dullcoate should tone down the shininess.

My big "decision" was to go with black (leather) boots on the guys who's boots you can see - just the MG teams and medics and their patients. The beige jungle boot would be more representative, but after trying it, I realized that at this scale it just made them look rather ridicuously barefooted. I think the black contrasts nicely with the rest. This particular medic station has a couple of patients with bleeding wounds, one in the lower leg, one in the gut. I wasn't planning on doing it this soon in the process, but I needed to cover up a mistake while doing the boots, and deep red did the job nicely. Most patients will have bandages with or without blood.







Although painting has been slow, it's been a productive month for me - lots has been cleaned and based, including some new terrain pieces from Irregular and Simply 6. I also have been scoping out SYW and ECW projects in 2mm, and should have the SYW (in India) started by next weekend.

Trenton and Trenton again (1776 version)

Last week the club I've been playing with in Toronto (current name is "The Napoleonic Brigade - Toronto") had its big annual weekend of games in 6mm. This year was the Battle of Trenton, played thrice on Saturday and twice on Sunday (some test games earlier made it 7 games total). The third game Saturday followed a quick end to the second game, after the Hessian commander's boldness didn't pay off).

I was only there Sunday, playing in both games. To make the game fair to the outnumbered and surrounded Hessians, there was a 3 hour time limit on each game. The first game got to a late start, which made my job easier as I was the Hessian commander (Rall). I traded space for time and we slowly got pushed further into the middle, doing more damage than we took, and when the clock struck we were ahead. As we had to wait for lunch to finish cooking, we played a few more turns and the Hessians also got cooked as their perimeter collapsed.

In game 2 I was one of the American commanders (Greene), looking after two forces coming in from the north west (to the right of the American battery on the hill). The Hessian strategy in this game was to try to escape to the east, using their free set up of a half battalion of skirmishers to harass one American unit from the rear, holding the door open while the rest tried to scamper out. The skirmishers did a good job the whole game, and one wing of Hessian infantry ultimately escaped (with guns).

However, once the Hessians in Trenton itself got turned around to mosey on out, my forces got across the river and threatened them from the rear, so they had to turn around yet again, and this allowed additional converging forces from the northeast and south to hit them from all directions, and everything in the centre was destroyed.

All in all, a good time was had by all. Playing the Hessians was challenging, but fun. I seem to have a talent for delaying actions...

Here's the table set-up before the gaming began. The Hessians occupy the centre area, under fire from American guns on the hill, and basically threatened on all four sides.



More pictures from another attendee (Andy) are available here:
Game 1 and here: Game 2

Funky Colour Schemes

This link was posted on The Miniatures Page today, it's a forum for plastic aircraft modellers I guess. This particular 46-page thread is about what-if paint schemes the members have come up with, either photos of models or illustrations, mainly for modern planes.

The link is to the last page, but it's worth the time to go through more or all of the site.

Some schemes are just modest variations of what's out there today, others are of special one-offs (final flight planes etc.), but some are right out there.

Which means they're great to "borrow" for some of my other plans - sci-fi sure, but mainly Victorian Sci-Fi, and Aeronef in particular. Maybe Iron Stars spaceships, but I picture them as pretty serious; maybe Land Ironclads too, but ground vehicles get pretty beat up in the course of a day.

But a tiger-skin painted zeppelin? Or hot green with hot blue with more serious blues and greens? Definitely worth trying out! I'd already come up with some national schemes while doodling around, now I'll see about integrating with some of my favourites from this site.

Mimi Redux

More shots of the Screamin' Mimi, showing her business end.

Canopies Complete, World Continues Spinning

I finally got the last touching up done on my first large batch of helicopters for Vietnam. These have been kicking around in previous posts for a while, but I'm now down to a coat of Future, decals, sealing, and rotors.

Other stuff has been going on in the meanwhile, some of it's below, but a ton has just been prepping mini's for the usual billion other projects going on. Some mounting got started last week, including 28mm sci-fi, more 25mm fantasy, and some 2mm Star Wars.

So with only that brief intro, here's some pics (as always, click on the pic for a bigger version):

The big shot of everything.

Huey Hogs, Frogs, and Snakes, with some OH-13's on the side. Two 13's are for Vietnam, the two medevac ones are for any Korean gaming I do. I still have 4 more of the things primed, I'm holding them back for AK-47 or some other odd side-project.

The other half - more Hogs and Frogs (back), OH-6 and 58 (back at either end), Slicks and CH-46's (middle two rows), more Snakes, including a pair in the Widowmaker paint scheme.

An even slower moving painting project finally got done too. These HH-60's have been sitting around for 18 months, part of a test painting project before I realized I was actually ok at painting these small things. Two are done for the navy, the rest for special forces.

And those of you with good eyesight might have picked out something odd at the back of those helicopter pictures above. As mentioned/promised previously, here's my secret painting project for Vietnam - 80's TV favourites.

The trio.

You have to figure the A-Team got their van's paint scheme from somewhere, so here's a OH-58 done up for clandestine missions. Obviously Murdoch is flying this, so I guess I need another secret project for the rest of the team...

And of course TJ was a pilot in Vietnam before making it to Hawaii, so here's the first Island Hopper...

Last, and most obscurely, Screamin' Mimi from the less remembered Riptide. I haven't watched the show since its original run, but I liked it, and always remembered the Mimi. The red scribble is actually "Screamin' Mimi" in script, but yes, I cheated, it's just a scribble.

My US infantry bases have also been progressing, flesh and uniforms are done, details and weapons are next. Here are a few work-in-progress pics:





I've also been testing my painting skill at the larger scales, using some old (literally - some of these have been kicking around for 25-28 years) figures from D&D days. I have more of these in line, including some that I and my brothers tried painting, and gave up painting, back in the day, and others that have a bit of sentimental value to me, as they represented my favourite RPG characters - Rolstun Goldaxe and the Swerlin/Verlin/Twerlin lineage of disposable magic-users.

Anyway, here are some pics of my first tests, the mummy I winged, the foot knight in red was done using the army painting guide from the D&D Battlesystem book, the elf archer from the advanced techniques guide in the same book, and the foot knight in green was done using a TooFatLardies mass painting technique from one of their specials.

I Steam, You Steam, We All Steam For Elephants

So over on his Steelonsand Blog, Steelonsand has been working on a project to create the airship of Jules Verne's Robur. It's a pretty cool project and has gotten me looking for the books (Robur the Conqueror, Master of the World). Until I did some research I'd forgotten I'd seen the movie with Vincent Price, which was a mishmash of the two books.

I've also been on a Edgar Rice Burroughs kick, specifically around the Mars/Barsoom and Venus books, a result of a month or so of puttering around on VSF stuff.

So last weekend I decided to hit a used bookstore near me that I knew had a Burroughs' crate in the back, mainly hoping to find the first book in each of the Mars and Venus series, I have a bunch of the rest but haven't started either series since I couldn't start at the beginning..

So I did score Princes of Mars, and some Tarzans (the lost city type ones), but I hit a nice motherlode of Verne as well. Michael Strogoff, Up the Niger Bend, and Master of the World (so I'm still stuck looking for the beginning of a series!). Also there were two books, Demon of Cawnpore and Tigers & Traitors, which more in-depth reading of the back blurbs revealed to be the two parts of one novel, The Steam House.

This is a long-winded way of getting to the point: I now have a book about a steam elephant! Not just a steam elephant though, I was planning on doing some of those as Contraptions for Land Ironclads anyways, in fact someone on the Wessex Games VSF mailing list has already statted some up.

This is a steam elephant pulling a caravan of "steam houses".

This is steam-nerd heaven to the nth degree. And I never knew. Now I need a proper land ironclad version, or two in miniature.

So while I just got into a few pages last night, the internet has proved useful, and I now have some initial musings to post.


This is the edition I have:
Kind of small, I'll try to get a scan or photo of my book, but it shows an elephant-like elephant pulling an Indian-esque palace on wheels. The howdah is circular and has a couple of old school bombards sticking out the side. I'm liking this direction.

But not this one:
This looks like Mecha Godzilla or Robo-Kong, a 1930's or 1950's Art Deco steam elephant. No sense of Victorian style. So I ain't doing this version.

I'm back on track with this, from Wikipedia:
Gives a bit more detail, still a round howdah, but no signs of cannon. The trunk with steam coming out is awesome, and I found a perfect 6mm model with Irregular's MP22 Successor Elephant (top picture in the link). The rein thingy will either get cut or turned into a steering cable.

I'm going with 6mm since I want it to look behemoth-like (in the book apparently the beast is called Behemoth), and bigger than the steam elephant contraptions I'll do with Irregular's 2mm elephants. A 6mm elephant should be about 11-12mm tall, or about 3-4 stories in 2mm scale.

This also helps, although I'm not sure what happened to the rest of the caravan...
Or why it's surrounded by elephants! Maybe they're in rut and got confused.

As a backup elephant I might get a couple of Irregular's African elephants with howdahs, and I'm thinking 6mm Hussite wagons may be a starting point for the rest of the caravan, with findings etc. as decoration. I have some coupons for next week to see what I can find. I may just end up scratch-building the caravans.

I don't think I'll mess around trying to make the howdah circular though, unless I find something that's an easy fit. I'll probably just file down the figures sticking out from the top, put on a minaret-style roof, file off one shield hanging from the side and turn the other one into a gun mantlet.

Lardcam

Well since painting and prepping are continuing on without anything sexy to photograph, I thought I'd post a link to some fun stuff that's come out from the Too Fat Lardies gang - their own Youtube channel.

In three parts they describe the basics of Sharp Practice (Napoleonic skirmish) and play a few turns showing off the system. Beware the sound sometimes goes in and out when they switch camera viewpoints, so keep the volume dial handy during episode one, but they're working on this for their next videos.

While I have Sharp Practice, a lack of mini's for that period are keeping me from trying it. However, I was able to pick up the game's basics pretty quickly from one viewing. It may have helped already being familiar with TFL games, but I think this video will help anyone interested in the rules.

In other news, the painting table is again dominated by helicopters and their bleedin' canopies. I finished the US flesh and uniforms, so per my plan then switched to the copters.

The green-tinged top windows turned out nicely, only a few touch ups needed, but I really buggered up on the gray. I'm using gray for windows on open doors and blue for everything else, and for some reason I concluded I wanted dolphin gray, as I'd used that before on my UH-60's. What I wasn't paying attention to was that I'd used dolphin grey for THE FUSELAGE of a couple of UH-60's, and a darker gray for the windscreens. Idiot, idiot, idiot. Eventually I realized the windscreens looked kinda white and repainted what I'd done, but still.

This is when you have to remind yourself "punch pillows, not walls."

On the prepping front, I've started on the Microworld fantasy mini's - really nice stuff, I'd recommend them (and for all you non-continentals, worldwide shipping is only $4 US!).

I've also been on a real VSF funk and have prepped some aeronef and land ironclads, as well as gotten to work on the setting again (it helps avoid painting canopies!). My VSF is set after Victoria (1938) but still has a real Victorian feel, with all the steampunk changes not much has changed other than the Queen's in the ground. I actually don't remember why I went that route initially but I'm good with it.

I also spent my August money on Brigade Models' summer sale, picking up more stuff for three of the four VSF angles - aeronef, land ironclads, and aether ships. Only the navies got neglected.

Anyway, hopefully some helicopter pics soon!

Martian Rocket Test Launch

Last week I gave one of my new Shapeways arrivals a paint job to see how things turned out, volunteering the Martians' rocket (actually an Earth R-Rocket from Pat and Walt's Spaceship Emporium) as it was going to be a pretty simple colour scheme, and would let me test out some of my silver paint.

I applied the paint straight to the WSF (White, Strong, Flexible) surface, which is the default (and cheapest) material the Shapeways products come in. As mentioned in my previous post, it is a rougher surface than metal or resin, but should look ok from standard tabletop distances.

So here's a close-up of the result (prior to sealing):

And another:
I used two different silver paints, and one metallic gunmetal paint (darker rear portion). One silver was used for the body, wings, and nacelles, the other (cheaper) for the middle portion and nacelle fins. From close up things seem a bit "sparkly", rather than a polished metal, partly because I was using craft metallic acryllics, but also because of the bumpiness of the surface.

And then a long distance shot to see what the result is from a gaming distance:
I think things look ok from this distance. I have bought some better metallic paint to try on my next volunteer.

My main lesson was I'm going to prime these, not to help with the surface but to minimize bleeding at the edges, as the material (and all the Shapeways materials, according to reports) absorbs a lot and it is hard to get hard edges on the first or second coats. So letting the primer do the bleeding will save frustration later. At least that's my theory...

Other updates...the current batch of helicopters are done except for the bleeping canopies (and decals). The next batch of helicopters and ground support planes have been prepped and primed - 39 more! F-4B's, Dragonflies, Broncos, Mohawks, Chinooks, Choctaws, UH-1B's (inc. medivac), T-28's, and probably more that I've forgotten. The Chinooks and Choctaws are the bulk of them. Some will be done as the South Vietnamese Air Force, others Marines or US Army as appropriate.

In the meanwhile, I'm taking a break from the canopies ("issue avoidance") for a couple of days to get started on the US ground forces. Last night I finished painting the bases (dirt, fallen trees, shrubs) so I'll begin with faces and hands. My research turned up about a 9:1 ratio of white troops to African-American troops, so roughly 1 soldier per squad will be black. I'll vary it from 0 to 3 to keep things interesting. Then I'll get helmets and uniforms done, then return to the canopies (and get some UH-60 canopies finished that have been in purgatory for a year), then back to the infantry. There, I've said it publicly, so I have to do it.

I also based a bunch of civilian vehicles for 3mm, once I get some sand applied to a second round of LVTP-5's, I'll prime them this weekend if the humidity stays down. My other big prepping project has been a ton of WWI aircraft. So far a bunch have been cleaned, but need to be assembled and mounted.

Then to top things off, this month's splurge was on some 6mm fantasy troops from Microworld Games. I know, I know, what happened to my 2mm fantasy projects? While they're still good, and I'm continuing them, but for more traditional fantasy, where 6mm can do the job too, I've decided to go for the larger scale. I've never been a fan of Games Workshop's practices and sometimes too-gothic tendencies, but their fantasy setting is way cool and in particular the Gotrek and Felix novels are enjoyable (I've read 4 as of about 2a.m. today).

So I ordered some of Microworld's really nice Undead and Orc troops (check out the mammoth skeleton!), enough to get started on some armies. Another thing moving me in this direction is that my rules of choice (Advanced Legendary Battles) seems to have been designed as an alternative to GW, and the army lists are pretty WHFB-esque. So for a change I don't have to mess around with things.

I also picked up one pack of their dino-riding sci-fi line, the raptor-riders. I haven't figured out what to do with them, but they're so damn nice. Ideas for them include a 6mm sci-fi faction (Hammers' Slammers is due out in 6mm so it could fit in there), weird WWII, or VSF/Land Ironclads. Even though they're 6mm, I think if you bronzed up the weapons pods, they might work at 2mm (except of course the pack I ordered, which has riders that would obviously look out of scale...sometimes I don't think things through).