Stargrave plastics

I must have been about eleven when I experienced my first multi part plastic kit from GW. I went to a friend's house after school, he was one of those kids that had every hobby indulged by his parents and he never kept at one for more than about five minutes. He had a box of Space Orks, there must of been enough parts to make at least 30 in that box. They had giant mohawks, shoulder missile launchers and the monster of all close combat weapons a power claw that looked pretty mean. That day we had great fun making all the combinations we could from those sprues, I remember my friend asking me to help him make them because he had got bored after about three of them. I have always since had a love of the putting together stage, clipping out parts, choosing which bits go together, swapping out other parts from the spare bitz box. (When I last moved house I condensed my bits box down to one 64 litre tub. Yep, condensed!) Don't get me wrong, I like painting, but the building is always my favourite bit. I think I would probably even offer to build for other people if they didn't want to do it themselves. The only issue is the toxic stench of poly cement, if someone could invent a more friendly product I think Mrs Lead would be happier.

So readers will know I had a giant pile of plastic sprues from the Stargrave Nickstarter just begging to be built. I have had to ration myself and not build the entire lot in one go, I would probably happily build the lot and fill my painting tray with them and then not paint them (bear in mind the same tray still has unpainted on it fully built plastic Zulu's and British.) Instead I would build around ten, then paint them before building more, much less intimidating. Combined with a box of Great Escape Games cowboys and the add on sprues from the kickstarter of cultists and gnolls I had great fun kitbashing.

First attempt was adding Stargrave guns to the Frostgrave cultists, simple paint job, done.

Next up Stargrave bodies with heads from the cowboys sprue on the left and Frostgrave barbarian on the right.

Then some made entirely of Stargrave bits.

These are mostly Stargrave parts, although I felt the medic needed a smaller gun from the cowboy sprue and the chap on the right has the body and legs of a cowboy.

I'm particularly proud of the chap on the left here. His backpack has as many pouches as I could squeeze on it plus a tiny missile launcher from my bits box. The chap on the right has a head from the cowboys sprue (in case you couldn't guess that.)

These two are both using gnoll heads but the one on the right has a gnoll body as well. For the chap on the left because the gnoll head connects from the rear normally I had to fuly construct the back of his head with green stuff. This inspired me to paint him with a green mohawk as well. The backpack on the right has an extra compartment on it made from green stuff and paperclip wire, just to make it not look like all the other backpacks. (Paperclips never survive long around my hobby desk.)

These two are from the cowboy sprue. I wanted to at least make a couple of them up for my Western town, although even the head on the left is an alternative. It is actually from the Warlord games Zulu British sprue that came free with Wargames Illustrated one month. 

Mainly here I wanted to paint something to not have the regular black boots that all models seem to have in my collection. Now I have a good wash from Coat D'arms I never fear painting white anymore.

Finally I had ordered some "Bounty Hunter" heads from Diehard Miniatures. I was under strict instructions from my youngest to paint them in different recognisable colour schemes. I'm thinking I'm gonna have to get myself another set of them to make it up to a squad of ten. Maybe try and use green stuff to give one a fur collar and arm her with a hammer and tongs. Plus I should really make an attempt at a graffiti style design on one set of armour.

My favourite currently is this one, complete with green stuff cloak over one shoulder which I have completely failed to get in the photo, guns and holsters taken from the cowboy sprue.

You can see I haven't fully flocked the base. It dawned on me that all my models lately I have been religiously putting down a textured layer of brown on the base and then covering it in flock and tufts. Noone will see that lovely textured base then, so for this one I decided to keep the flock minimal to see if I liked the style. I think it still works. I'm still refusing to stop giving bases a solid green trim around the edge. Deal with it.

 As a bonus dear reader for getting to the end, here is an image of those damned adorable Space Orks, enjoy the reminiscing. Now I wonder how hard it would be to find an untouched box of them now?

Orctober and other random paints

Yep, its an Orc, there you go, that's Orctober covered. It's a 3D print from the same range as the Kobolds in a previous post. I mainly did it to try out the contrast paint I bought from GW to see what all the fuss is about. I've gotta say, it took a couple of coats to get any kind of green coverage that I was happy with and it still looks quite pale. Yes, you do get a shading and highlighted look, but I don't think it is any quicker. Maybe next time I'll try painting it over a colour rather than white. 

Moving on I've been jumping about projects lately, just enjoying grabbing things from the lead pile and experimenting. In a random box I found some tyranids I had rescued from a car boot sale. Every now and then you find that golden find. Somebodies child has expressed an interest in wargaming and so the parents have forked out a good chunk of change on a trip to GW and bought them a whole army, some paints and glue. A half-hearted has been made by the kid to put them together and start painting, but it's nobodies fault, the kid doesn't know what they are doing and the parents have no experience either. It all gets thrown in a box until one day in a clearout it ends up at the carboot. 

Half the fun is trying put it all back together again, stripping paint, scraping off glue, putting parts together again. Yes there are some models beyond help that end up in the bits box. Random unidentified bits of lead go in a pile to be passed on to the father in law for melting down and turning into Victorian 40mm casts. Nothing gets wasted. Except maybe the box it all comes in which is covered in horrific paintings of kittens that freak Mrs Lead out so much she refuses to allow it to stay in the house. (Seriously they weren't cute, they were just weird, with intense staring blue eyes.)

So yes, I decided to go real old school bright colour and go for a neon pink look.

Next up is a cute little adventuring mouse that a friend 3D printed for me as part of a bundle of models to say thank you for painting his viking commission. I remember as a kid watching the animated movie Secret of Nimh based on the book Mrs Frisby and the Rats of Nimh, this model would make a great Mrs Frisby. Although the tuft I have added to the base has ended up making her look like a squirrel.

Finally, to keep on the anthropomorphic theme, I have Squeepiosa the Guinea Pig from Bad Squiddo games. It's just a fun looking model so I decided to give it a go and it did not disappoint. Sometimes when you paint something, the paint just does as it is told and this was one of those occasions. For some reason the Coat D'arms red paint had just the right consistency that all I had to do was give it the gentlest of drybrushing with a GW white on top and it actually looks almost like a real watermelon.

Gaming wise it's still been a bit sparse. My youngest has been dipping his toe in the wargaming world with the first couple of issues of the bit part magazine from Games Workshop so we have been playing some random games of a version of Warhammer 40K that I can remember from the top of my head, I would say probably somewhere between version 3 and 4. No points values and pretty much equal numbers of models on the table, so his Space Marines have been slightly superior to my cultist guard. It was just fun to roll some dice.  I've been trying to teach him that it is just fun to play and winning isn't really the objective and I think we are getting somewhere with that.

I'm positively itching to get out to a wargame show, in fact seeing all the photos and videos from Partizan last weekend  definitely whet my appetite. I'm already thinking about which tube route to take across London to the Excel next month.