“A roll of the die” (week 11)

Okay well before I start I promised  “Blax The Kleric” a picture of all four of my “Fantastical Foursome” together as a team, so here it is…

Right now onto the serious business (yea right!), this has been a busy week “Wargames” wise as not only have I been painting up the items turned up by my random painting generator (that sounds so much more impressive than two sheets of paper a penny and a D30 die!), but I’ve also been putting together an order to Irregular Miniatures (yes the cats managed to stay healthy this time!) and I’ve also sent away the items that I want to have cast up by our caster, so the excitement is really starting to build as I wait for all my new toys to arrive in the post (look I don’t get out much OK!). But that aside for now, Saturdays roll was on Galahad’s (Tails) sheet and consisted of numbers….

Box 7 (3x 25mm fantasy townsfolk (of my choice))

Box 28 (4 plastic space fighters of my choice)

So out came the draw of townsfolk again and this time I picked the town crier, a night watchman and the town hunchback. As usual they were based up on 20mm square cardboard bases and “tetrion” blended away their metal bases before they were treated to a coat of black undercoat.

Then on the town crier I decided to do a dark red tunic with hat to match over a cream baggy sleeved shirt and yellow “hose”. Brown leather bits and bobs, golden trumpet and cream scroll (with black “squiggles” on the inside to represent writing, I’m not good enough to do real writing!) finished him off. The night watchman I gave a dark blue tunic (well he is a sort of policeman after all) and grey trousers, more brown leather on his boots, belt, shoulder covering and hat and dark gold on his lantern with the small leaded glass panels first done in citrus orange and then dots of lemon yellow, once “Quickshaded” this worked well as a glowing, lit lantern. As he was supposed to be an old retired soldier dark grey, light grey and white were used on his whiskers. Finally my generic hunchback (a sort of “quasi” Quasimodo (sorry)), was pretty simple to paint, a khaki, dry-brushed with a khaki/cream mix jumper over grey trousers and brown boots and belt and some light and dark flesh and he too was complete. The only point of interest on him is that he has a loop of keys hanging from his belt (done in gold, I should say), the key’s to the bell tower perhaps? All the above were then given the usual coat of Quickshade and their bases were painted earth brown dry-brushed grass green and dark meadow green flocked. Three more down not that many left now.

As for the space fighters I bought these rather nice little models from Doug at EM-4 miniatures at the same time as I bought the plastic ”Troopers” and “Gangers” figures so I guess it’s about time I threw a bit of paint at some of them (though I did of course have to wait till there number came up!). I had bought four boxes as every one of the twelve ships in each box is different and as I wanted to make up small “squadrons” of four, well you do the math. I had a look at all the ships deciding on which would be the lucky four, in the end I went for a set of the more “Alien” looking craft so an alien paint scheme was the order of the day. But before I could go any further I needed to make a temporary base on which to paint them, I decided to keep the flying stands clear so needed something on which to undercoat them black and matt varnish them on later. A strip of wood was utilised for this with four flying stand “shafts” mounted into it, this gave me a base to hold while painting up the little blighters. Now as for painting I decided to go for the old classic alien ship colour of purple this was lightly dry-brushed with lilac, then I added lime green highlights which in turn were themselves highlighted with a “day-glow” green, I then added more highlights in gold as I thought silver would be to “human” looking, finally I added the cockpit cover in turquoise with a lighter highlight of reflected light and then they were ready to be “quickshaded”, I wasn’t sure whether to do this or give them a “black wash” like I do with my smaller scale spacecraft instead but in the end I thought I’d go with the “Army Painter” option and I’m pretty happy with the result.

All of the above were then given their customary covering of matt varnish and the fighters were then glued to their clear flying stands. I feel that the matt varnish has “clouded” a little to much on the fighters for some reason, but not to badly, oh well only forty four more to go!!

Till next time, Cheers Roger.