Analogue Hobbies December Update

It's Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge time!

I'll be doing monthly updates on this blog to keep overheads down.

Group shot

Curtgeld

FoW objective

Necromancer for Mordheim

Zombies also for Mordheim

Greyscale samurai

1 of 3 ghouls

Vermillion Mk1

1 of 6 vehicles for ACW2 project

COVID Cupdate 5

Quick post, another Lurking Panther, this time painted as a mutant mountain lion.

Goofiness notwithstanding, I'm actually quite happy with this one.

COVID cupdate 4

In all honesty, there were updates ready for last week, but due to a number of factors I didn't manage to get a blog post up.

Slugs!

So convincingly gross they icked out the the COVID cup whatsapp group! More nasties for fantasy and post apocalyptic adventurers.

Mortar!

This is my entry for the Rare bonus round. Now I can already hear what you're thinking. Sebastian, how is a metal Catachan Imperial Guard mortar from the early to mid nineties count as rare? There must by thousands of these bastards around. Oldhammer doesn't necessarily mean rare! And you'd be right. But this figure is perhaps the rarest figure of all. Each wargamer will only have one of these, and that is the first figure they ever had, and this is mine, the one that started it all, gifted to me on a birthday and - probably not starting but - crystalising the start of a life long love of wargaming.

In retrospect, I should have taken a picture of the "before" model, before I stripped it of all its glossy, thickly applied citadel paint glory and repainted in a more "realistic" style, but here we are.

This is because, this is also a Dynasty model!

***

As if the prominent winged skulls on the mortar and the flak jacket pauldrons weren't enough, the extremely large caliber of this mortar instantly marks it out as a 2N6 ultra-heavy infantry mortar, produced and used exclusively by the forces of "General" Zattomir, one of the pre-eminent warlords during the middle-Warlord era

The 2N6 traded range, portability and supportability for an extremely impactful kinetic effect, able to ruin emplacements and troop concentrations and was produced to pacify the Moscow metropolitan area and urban areas inn Eastern Europe, and in the run up to Zattomirs abandoned invasion of coastal China (abandoned due to his alignment with Gao).

In the swirling, chaotic fights that took place with Solarin motorised raiders on the central steps, however, it proved to be utterly worthless, and large stocks were captured (and converted into more generically useful materiel.

A number of examples still exist; 1 in the Imperial Arms Museum in Dhaka, 1 in the Martian Mons Collection (not currently on display) and at least 4 in the hands of private collectors.

COVID cup update 3

Nothing to report last week due to massive amounts of laziness probably, but hey, two entries this week!

First up, for the "scout" bonus round of our challenge group is a Lurking Panther from the Darwin's World post-apocalyptic campaign setting.

From the Terrors of the Twisted Earth:

"Descended from the mountain lions and puma of the old American wilderness, the lurking panther has had to evolve certain features to compete with the more dangerous predators of the Twisted Earth. The lurking panther’s long spindly neck allows it to observe its prey’s movements by placing the head high above, often among a tree’s branches or poking through thick underbrush or sand; in addition, its eyes sit on the end of pliable stalks, which further allow it to conceal its body behind cover and still observe unseen."
 
I'm aware that it looks more than a bit goofy but it's from the period in time when I was determined to have minis for all my RPG monsters, before the (Pathfinder) pawns bug bit, but I was damned if I wasn't going to complete such a simple paint job.

Second up there's the first of my dual-role miniature for a new project.

This is an a Iron Lords sniper from the (newly revived!) Anvil Miniatures range. I am rather fond of their definitely not Space Marines honest guv!" aesthetic, and as soon as I got into my local Kill Team scene I jumped at the excuse chance to buy some. Unfortunately, they had closed that production line and I had to supplement this last miniature with their no less excellent Afterlife line.

He will be pulling double duty as a soldier in the Dynasty setting - a long running sci-fi politics RPG run by a friend of mine. Think West Wing meets Babylon 5 (or The Thick of It meets Red Dwarf if you're feeling uncharitable).

To cut a long story short, my current characters dad came to power by consolidating the survivors of a post-apocalyptic high tech earth and somehow made the jump to God Space Emperor.

The period that I am calling the Warlord Era wasn't examined or simulated in any depth, beyond the outline our GM graciously gave me to kick start this project so I'm going to be working on my 28mm sci-fi minis with this setting in mind. There may be games.

***

Powered Battle Armour was used by all faction in the Warlord Era, but most extensively by Solarin and his lieutenants towards the end of the war after they had captured significant portions of the Earth's remaining industrial capacity.

The armour pictured here is a relatively advanced model of local produced armour, especially as the Warlord factions had little access to nanotubes from which to make the much more flexible combat suits used by the Juntas marines. Marks are hard to put on this era of suit production, as many secondary systems were a cottage industry and un-standardised compared to the main task of producing the main suit structure and systems. This is illustrated on this particular suit by the exposed filtration tube on the front left of suit.

This non-standard application may have been to do with where the suit was operating. Although we do not know where this photo was taken, the use of the urban camo cloak suggests an urban environment (Solarin forces rarely repainted powered battle armour as they had to be redeployed quickly). Additionally it seems strange that PBA units would be issued with sniper weapons given their relative utility as close assault troops. This all suggests that this particular unit was operating in an area hostile to unarmoured troops, perhaps an area of high CBRN contamination, uncontained industrial pollutants or even an area still heavily infected with JS1E1. There are at least 2 documented occasions where Solarin set up long endurance missions with PBA forces in infected environments, essentially operating freely along enemy lines while having a safe, uncontested area to retreat into.

COVID cup update 2

Alright, more painting done!

Not as much as I was expecting again, but I think being introduced to multiplayer Hearts of Iron 4 might be bad for my productivity...

The latest British Flames of War book has allowed each platoon to take 2 PIATs, so I made a few more, and converted the now obsolete infantry spotters to PIATs as well.

Also 2 regular rifle teams to convert a newly obsolete Airlanding Assault Platoon into a regular Airlanding Platoon.
 

Giant leaches! Inspired by this scene, and once destined for Darwin's World or Pathfinder before I caught the Pawns bug.
 

The bear, again, destined for RPGs before I fell hard for Pawns.

COVID cup update 1

Updates!

Only three Chieftains, but a lot of prep work in the pipe.

AHPC Roundup - not dead, not infected!

First up, not dead!

Second up, just completed the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge for the second time, and have had an ongoing, unadulterated excuse to clear as much of the lead pile as possible, in the form of Covid-19.

AHPC X output - once again a bonus points heavy strategy prevailed

It looks like the Bristol wargaming scene is taking some inspiration from the Challenge - no points, no rewards however - and is planning to share it's endevours via WhatsApp - to keep admin low. I will be reporting my progress on this blog every Sunday.

So to the various bots that regularly trawl this blog for content, and the maybe one follower who checks in for nostalgia's sake, hello again, goodbye for now, and stay safe out there!

Thing a Week 32

My first stab at the unambiguously post-apocalyptic for the AHPC, with this guy.

He's a scavenger, he has a rusty pipe, an a la mode scavenged wardrobe and he is ugly as shit.

I painted him with colours that just happened to be on my palette while painting other items. Other than the neon orange, a recent acquisition from Model Box. I decided to give him a modern climbers rope and somehow it managed to throw the entire scheme off. Not that that's a huge problem, he's a post-apocalyptic scavenger, not a hipster.

So my mother says I'm hard to buy presents for. It shouldn't be that difficult, I give her access to my amazon wish list, and a request not to buy novelty key-chains or tat.

Come play with us human...

With that in mind, here's a tatty, novelty key-chain that she got me for Christmas. I decided to re-purpose it as a miniature, perhaps an animatronic mascot at a long abandoned theme park, or even just a piece of art.

It lights up it's eyes and makes a tinny meowing noise when you press the button on it's head. Just what you want going off in your pocket all the time. This is where our planets precious finite resources are going people...

Come play with us... forever...

Thing a Week 31

Anyway, here's a giant scorpion.

Give him a hug!

Despite it being a fairly rushed job, I'm actually pretty happy with the way it turned out, especially with the way the Vallejo quote unquote matt varnish glossed it up a treat.

I basically had no idea what I was doing when I started out, but a few washes in and he started to look quite gribbly.

I based the paint job on a yellow-tailed scorpion; the UKs only resident scorpion, that, thanks to global warming, has been thriving! You're welcome fellow Brits!
 

With an unlucky scavenger, for scale

I drilled the claws, but not the legs; I suspect that I may live to regret this decision.

Thing a Week 30

For your delectation, a small child with a crowbar.

As painting continued, I realised he looked a little bit like Donald Trump... I decided this wasn't entirely inappropriate.

For scale, here are two repainted dogs. I really wasn't happy with two I did previously.

Turns out one of them was supposed to be a German shepherd...

Thing a Week 29

This guy is good for viewing over at the All That Remains blog!

Thing a Week 28

The French EW forces continue to take shape, here's my artillery group. All photos, no waiting.

Thing a Week 27

Turns out I'm better at identifying dog breeds than I thought.
This, I believe is an Irish Wolfhound.

It might be worth noting that some of these were sold to me as 30mm. I thought there wouldn't be much of difference but I was wrong. I had to clip bases back to the minimum to get these to fit on 25mm bases. Even so this one seemed rather oversized and *one google search later* bloody hell those things are big!

I'm well aware of the internet's penchant of paring particularly large animals with particularly small women, but even by those standards these dogs are massive. 

Speaking of massive dogs, the next breed is a Baskerville hound. That's a real thing right?

It was giant and ornery so it looked like it deserved to be a giant black predator hunting fictional detectives across the moors of Victorian England.

It's original colour scheme was so black that none of the highlighting showed up on the photo... or at distance for that matter... so I added some less subtle highlighting to compensate. I'm not entirely sure it's an improvement. Have I mentioned that I hate painting animals? Actually, any large smooth surface, flesh in particular.

I am, however, happy with the outcome on this wee guy.

I'm note sure what breed it is (but I'm sure you can enlighten me ad nauseum in the comments). It looks like some cross between a chihuahua and a miniature German Shepherd.

I've never tried blending, and I'm not sure if that's what I've done here, but I think I got the colours to blend really well.

Here's group shot of them all

Thing a Week 26

Hello everybody! With the holiday period now a sweet memory I have finally got round to some more painting: some rats!

These little fellas are going to be providing XP to level one adventurers in both post apocalyptic wastelands and tavern cellars. I've never really seen what threat rats pose to a humans* (other than via the medium of disease obvs) in fact, I think they're rather cute, but I get that they're a staple, and these guys can double up as dire rats or those brain rats from Planescape: Torment that gain access to more powerful spells the more of them there are.

Look at his widdle paws!

The figures aren't great, they have a prominent mold line bisecting some of them that gives some of them a weird "sideways Trump hair flick"** if viewed from one side.

He just wants to hug... your face off!

*But of course D&D is a system where - rules as written - the average housecat will, on average, win a fight with the average peasant...

**Insert your own political joke here

Thing a Week 25

Happy New Year all,

Here's my first paintjob for the year and first submission to the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge ever: Ben Affleck in a Batman costume. I'm not even joking, the packaging repeatedly stated that this figure was Batman (Ben Affleck)

Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge

So in a fit of wild optimism I signed up for the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge. I missed the boat last year but just about managed to catch one of the few open spots in time this year.

It may have been a slightly unwise choice as I'm also trying to complete my masters thesis by summer. I've signed up for what is effectively the lowest possible points option, but I'm already starting to feel stressed. On the other hand I really, really need to get stuck into the lead pile.

The challenge starts tomorrow and I'm not even done with the prep. In fact there are still bases for some of the models in the post.

Here's a sample of what we're working with

Also some gaming roundup

Our trial game of Necromunda (with zombies!) gets off to a good start as my gang are driven off on turn 2

TwiceLord Jadhak and co fight a sentient pinata from another dimension