2012 Update

This seems like a good time to review how my resolutions are holding up after 3.5 months. For painting, I've gotten as far as: "1) Continue practicing on 25mm figures.
2) Finish the 6mm stuff that's been on my painting table half-started for a stupidly long time (I think I have a friend who'll paint the rest of my 6mm WWII stuff on commission for me)."

The 6mm stuff includes both polishing off what I got commissioned, and the tanks that have been sitting on my table for ages, doing nothing more than serving as a backdrop for pictures of what I was actually painting.

The 25mm figures still lag, partly because of the desire to catch up on the 6mm, partly because it's a real pain doing character figures with different paint schemes all the time. This doesn't bode well for some of my 28mm projects like VSF and pulp skirmishing...

On the other (non-painting) tables, things are a bit better - a lot's been done - but I'm now conceding I'm a month behind. Here's what was planned through April:

"Jan. - Cardboard terrain
Feb. - WWII plane prepping
Mar. - Base texturing (for all the stuff I based in 2010)
Apr. - VN terrain, including hills"

I'm still working on basing, the Vietnam terrain hasn't come out of storage. Part of the reason for the delay was I was working on both modern and WWII plane prepping - I had a lot of moderns come in from Shapeways - and partly because I rushed through cleaning and prepping 6mm microarmour so I could get them off to be painted.

I've also been distracted trying to prep up my Star Trek and Star Wars ships, including priming with gesso. Plus (lots o' excuses today) March is a crazy month for work and play, and I was away for all or parts of five straight weekends, home for one (Mar 31/April 1) then away last weekend again.

So I'll spend April working on bases, then get onto the Vietnam terrain in May (also a crazy month for work).

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.

There's no basing like sno' basing

I guess it's kind of appropriate that I had a warrior from Thule in my last post on 28mm Thurian Age figures, as I've been working on painting the bases for my initial 2mm Thulian forces. I have a complete unit of reindeer-pulled chariots, a polar bear chariot leader unit, and partial units of polar bear chariots and mammoth howdahs.

Since Thule is the one real northern nation in the Thulian Age, and their mounts all have a basis in the snow and tundra, I decided to do up their bases differently than the others, trying to capture a wintery environment.

So I spent January and February looking out on the landscape as I drove or trained around. These are some pictures of what I've come up with, the bases have gone through a bit of a process of doing and re-doing things that didn't quite work. I'll give my "mostly final" method down below.




So to do these bases, my method was:

1. Mount figures on base.
2. Glue some spots on the base and add sand (my usual basing method).
3. Where the base was still bare, add polyfill (spackle, what-have-you) for the snow drifts.
4. Prime.
5. Paint the sand areas a medium brown ('Mississippi mud' for me), representing dead, low ground cover.
6. Paint the snow drifts (polyfill/spackle) an off-white (I used a 'winter white'); this will take a couple of coats if you prime in anything other than white.
7. Dot and sponge white over the brown, representing vestiges of snow. If you have any flat areas (bare base, basically) in the sand areas, paint this white too.
8. If you put in wheel tracks, run white along the track (when the wheels beat down the dead vegetation, they expose the snow underneath).
9. Dot and sponge with a different brown ('spice brown' is my default dirt colour) anything you want to be muddy.
10. Drybrush a dull yellow (I use 'antique white actually) the brown sand areas, representing taller dead vegetation (long grasses, corn, shrubs), which stays yellow during the winter.
11. If any of your dotted and sponged white sand areas look like they could be improved, drybrush either your medium brown or dull yellow over them, representing the dead vegegation sticking out of the snow. This can be tricky, because I found that either the brown colour was now not dark enough (being on top of a white base) or I was painting the snow, rather than the sand bumps. Try somewhere, and see what your results are before going in whole hog.

Other than fantasy, or maybe some Viking uses, the only time I really see this basing method being useful is for 2 or 3mm WWI or WWII East Front stuff. Or the Winter and Continuation Wars of the USSR vs. Finland.

Now I just need to paint the blasted figures on the bases!

The Story So Far, Part I - Aircraft

One of my abiding interests has always been aircraft, and much of my family spent WWII in the air or otherwise involved in the air war. One grandfather worked at de Haviland Canada, the other was a bomber navigator. Two of my one grandfather's brothers were air crewmen on bombers in the RCAF, a brother of one grandmother was also in the RCAF (communications, I believe). Another close relative was a flight instructor in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.

Having said that, aircraft and their role in war are fascinating in and of themselves, from WWI up to the modern day (although unmanned aircraft aren't too jiggy). As much as they may look like unflyable crates today, those first aircraft were the F-22's of their time, the most sophisticated machines man could make.

So, where does that leave me in miniature? I love the 1/600 aircraft of Tumbling Dice and Oddzial Osmy (though I can't spell that without looking it up!), and I've gone in that direction for WWII and beyond. My two current periods are (1) late WWII to Korea, mainly for a hypothetical WWIII in 1945, and (2) helicopters supporting land battles. So in the latter case the 1/600 helicopters will be used with the 6mm (1/300) land forces; the scale difference shouldn't be noticeable since the action on the ground is the main thing.

For WWI I went with 1/300, mainly because there is much, much more available, and the smaller WWI aircraft would probably be mentally unstabling to paint. So far I have a few C-in-C aircraft in hand and painted, as well as two Goblintooth aircraft that came with my copy of Hostile Aircraft. My main source will be Navwar/Heroic and Ros, although they've just changed ownership so I'll wait till that settles down. I'll fill things in with C-in-C, Irregular, and Skytrex.

My first adventures in WWI were C-in-C Hanriots, done in Italian livery:


They weren't too bad to do, once I got over putting them together (more superglue ended up on me than the planes). These are on my standard aircraft bases, which I'll discuss below. I've decided the C-in-C planes will be kept on these bases, rather than stored on nails, as I don't like handling and moving them with my clumsy fingers.

Main lesson learned: It's going to take time and touch-ups.

Bonus lesson: I primed everything before I attached the upper wings and this was a mistake; the two parts fit together when raw metal, didn't fit when the coat of paint was added to both halves. I had to file them down after priming till they fit (yes, I almost cried). So next time I'll either have to complete before priming (which could make getting the underside of the upper wings a right torment to prime) or cover up the fitted bits so they stay raw metal.

I've since finished painting a Halberstadt CL.4 (C-in-C) and the Goblintooth Dr.1 and Camel. Kind of a standard scheme for the Camel, went for the obvious with the Dr.1, and pulled off an ok lozenge scheme on the Halberstadt. The undersides have their different colours too, I'll try to remember to take a picture when I have it out next. These guys have been Future'd, and are awaiting a decal day.




For my 1/600 stuff, I pulled the helicopters out of the first kits I had - Korean War USN and USAF - to experiment on, since I was a painting newbie to pretty much everything. These Sikorsky S-55's were thus my guinea pigs, but I think they turned out ok (more worthy than my photography skills show, anyway). They still need for me to pick up some main rotors, otherwise they're done.



Next were some OO UH-60's, done in a variety of colour schemes: standard brown, camo, special forces grey and desert sand. Currently I'm in an "I hate canopies" funk, so haven't gotten further on them. My basic canopy technique is to paint the fuselage, paint the canopy, touch up the fuselage (remember to get in between the canopy panels the first time, idiot!), touch up the canopy, possibly repeat. I haven't gone for fancy canopy efforts yet (adding flashes of white, for example), but may experiment with these puppies.



So I picked up this basing technique from someone on the 1/600 miniature aircraft Yahoo group (I think - may have been a different group, but either way this isn't my idea). All the aircraft get a tiny rare earth magnet (from Dom's decals) applied, then the base consists of a 1" wooden disk with 3-6 staples glued upright, sort of like [. They then get primed, painted, and sealed. The aircraft then spend their time in the "hangar" perched on nail heads, and are added to the bases for gaming.

I started with standard green on brown or two-brown schemes, but the batch below (first picture) was my second bunch, and I tried out different colours, usually when I still had some paint left in my palette from another project.

All told the bases cost about 20-25 cents apiece, plus about the same for the magnet.


Some were primed blue and left that way, for high altitude encounters. Maybe version 2 will have clouds or contrails added.

For action over water I used Polyfil to sculpt some waves, primed blue (as above), gave them a heavy dose of Future, drybushed whitecaps, then sealed with Future (for the wet look).


For action in the depths of space (Silent Death rules), I just primed some black, dotted white for stars, added a couple of comets (right hand column, second from bottom) and nebulae (bottom left), and sealed. The way over-exposed Y-Wing in the second picture is from Studio Bergstrom, and is awaiting its paint job.

Next up in the Story So Far, 2mm fantasy action with Kull of Atlantis and Imaro.