“Ship Ahoy!”

Well back to the grindstone this week, and another load of boats for my “Dystopian Wars” Prussian fleet, the plan is to get some of the other projects I’ve started this year (and last year if I’m honest) that have been languishing about in “half finished” states for far too long… well finished! (Or at least a bit nearer to completion), before I launch into yet another project. This next one being “Zom’tober” that will hopefully be followed closely by “Frostgrave Mo’vember”. Now whether I will stick to all the good intentions I currently have, remains to be seen, but I do plan to have a little side project running parallel to the more mundane stuff, but I’ll go into that a bit more towards the end of this post.

Right anyway, this week’s boats come from the “Prussian Empire support flotilla” that I picked up at Salute earlier this year and comprise six “Wachter” class escorts, these rather nice little 45mm long vessels were firstly given the obligatory spray coat of matt black after a quick “clean up” of the casting marks and bottom edge flash. Then they were touched up by hand to make sure the black was fully coating them. Next a good dry-brushing of chainmail was had by them all before the wooden decks were painted in using chocolate brown that was then highlighted with leather brown. The hulls were then painted dark grey (you probably know this paintjob better than me by now!) before they had the diagonal strips lightly brushed on with (you guessed it) light grey and black, the dots on the hulls were then added using my coffee colour, and then after a bit of a tidy up (the light grey had gone a little far up the sides of the vessels) I added the funnel tops and the odd detail in with bronze. A slap about with some mid-tone “Quickshade” and a spray coat of matt varnish finished them off. This just leaves three stands of planes (two of which need movement trays), and my two big waterline versions of the “Metzger” robots, and I’ve completed all the Dystopian stuff I have. At some point I will probably add a few more mid-sized ships to my fleet, but I don’t even want think about that at the moment!

So now onto my little side project, as I’ve already mentioned we plan have a bit of a “Frostgrave” feel to Mo’vember this year, this means painting up some figures for a warband (or at least to go towards a warband), for this new Wizard based game. So me being me, and never doing things the easy way, I’ve decided rather than just buy some new figures for my band I’d convert some of the stuff I already own and then possibly buy a pack of plastic “Vikings” to pad out the ranks a bit (alright, who called me tight! You’re not wrong but honestly!). Now as I want to spend Mo’vember painting and not sculpting I really want my warband together and ready for paint by the start of that month, this means I need them fully sculpted by the end of October (or September really). So after a look through what I had about, I found these three suspects for conversion as a start. In the middle we have a “Bob Olley” Dwarf wizard, now lovely as Bobs stuff is a 28mm “dwarf” he aint’ however as a slightly short 28mm human wizard I should be able to get away with. I like his staff but other than that I think he is a little to overly “adorned” with skulls and spikes, but this should be easy to rectify with a little “greenstuff”. The “Cavegirl” is by Mark Copplestone, and will require a little more work to turn her into his apprentice, but hey’ if it was easy we’d all be doing it (and if we were all tight right! Watch it!!). And finally the Caveman also by Mark, will become my barbarian, not a lot of work there except that he’s a little underdressed for the snowy climbs of “Frostgrave”, so I shall be slipping him into my “winter collection” of barbarian apparel. Hopefully I should have “hacked” away the unwanted bits and the first of the “greenstuff” should be on by next week’s post.

So till then, cheers Roger.