Compagnie Franches de la Marine

This is a WIP for my Compagnie Franches de la Marine for Muskets & Tomahawks. I picked some up at the Tactica fair here last weekend. I think I have enough for a 300pt game now. I just need to get painting. I am not investing too much effort into these as to get them to look good would take a lot of effort as white isn't the easiest to paint. The models are also not great. The standard historical standard which is poor. I am hoping that they will at least look good en-masse.

Ancient Dwarf Lord

It has been a busy week. Work has been overwhelming and I not only haven't been able to paint but I haven't been able to blog. However the dwarven urge has not left me and I pulled out one of my old unpainted models. This one definitely qualifies for Oldhammer as it is from 1991. It is really interesting to compare this model with the new characters. While this model is fine the new ones are really great. They are better detailed and more dynamic. Just look at Old Fogey's recent character. It not only sports a great paint job but the model is brilliant.

Wayne England's Dwarves

I think one of the main reasons I started collecting Dwarves was due to Wayne England's army previewed in White Dwarf 135 and 148. I could be wrong on the numbers but they are in the general area. The links will direct you to copies of the articles in question. I have had fairly strong memories of the article and when I seriously started collecting my Dwarves in about 1997 I even went as far to emulate the blue and white colour scheme. With the release of the new army book and the fact that all the Warhammer media are chatting about Dwarves at the moment I took out a few of the models I have in my large collection to look. There always has been a dwarf on my painting desk. It is never the same dwarf but I have never stopped painting the army. Infact I really have two armies. One in the blue and white scheme and one in a red and green scheme.I have been trying, over the last few months or maybe years, to decide if I have given up with Warhammer Fantasy or if I will continue playing. The Dwarves are my army and if I let this release go by, as I suspect I will, then I think I really have given up. Well by saying given up I refer to the playing rather than the painting. That would be sad as I really have had a lot of fun with good friends playing Warhammer over the years. I guess maybe as I am not in such good contact with these friends anymore that Warhammer has become the casualty of my move to Germany.I can't even say it is because the game is not good. It has never been good but that also never stopped me from enjoying playing it.

Today despite being sick I decided to paint something. That lone Dwarf on my desk was the target of my paintbrush. I snapped a quick photo with my phone of the gunner. It was a one hour paintjob and to be honest it came out pretty good. The model is a one piece affair though the detail is excellent. Once I had finished him I rummaged through my bits box and came up with another five to sit on my desk. I am very tempted to pull out a load of Dwarves and start painting them. I know I have huge amounts stockpiled somewhere. There are definitely about twenty more Bugman's Rangers somewhere and some of Colin Dixon's Miners too.

Listening to all the chats about Dwarves over the last few days returned an idea to me that might be an interesting exercise. I had intended to make a number of army lists that was the same in terms of content but came from each edition of Warhammer. I think it would be quite rewarding to start with Wayne Englands army and do that same list as it appeared in White Dwarf for each edition. I am really interested to see how it would work. Who knows maybe it can provide the spark to ignite my interest in the Dwarves again?

Canadian Militia

I have nailed my colours to the mast and they are white. Here are the first of my Canadian Militia for Muskets & Tomahawks. The models were a christmas gift from a friend. With all models I get that are gifts I try to paint them as soon as possible. There is little point in giving someone a gift if they don't or won't do anything with it. I have four more to go and they are at least base coated. I am going to go with a militia force at the start as I like the scenarios they usually play. I will have a smattering of various other models though and this depends on what is available at Tactica at the end of the month. I will probably pick up some stuff from Warlord games but I am eager to find some other interesting models I can use.

Tale of Malifaux Bloggers - Month One

So it begins.

There are a few supply issues it would seem in getting models not only to Europe but to Germany and so I am a little worried I won't be getting my first month models anytime soon. The game store has been informed at least and so I hope that once they are in I will get a message to tell me to come and pick them up. I am starting with the crew box of course. I choose McMourning simply because he is one of the original three Ressurectionist masters and I have the other two already. I think that is as good a reason as any. I also don't fancy the Ten Thunders dual faction Masters and Tara isn't available either. The choice was probably made for me. I was quite tempted by Tara but I am struggling to see with what I can build the original box contents. At the moment there are very few things that thematically fit with her, that I can see at least.

Month One

McMourning Crew box: $45 Rafkin: $10

Monthly total: $55

The crew box represents the biggest expenditure of the month. I had to go with what was available and suitable for the remainder of my budget. Rafkin was and I snapped him up. I haven't heard any chatter about him at all and that makes me wonder if he has been relegated to mediocrity. I guess in a crew that is already dealing a lot of poison why do you need more models that do the same. I suspect he is good in support of a less focused crew. He can then amplfy their poison abilities a little more. Still he fits in theme and so I am happy to have picked him up. I very much think I will be sick of painting white by the end of these six months. Especially if I pick up some regular Frenchies for my Muskets and Tomahawks army.

I have $10 left to bring forward to next month. That should hopefully allow me to pick up a few models extra and doesn't pack too much into this month. I am aiming to have everything painted within the time frames set for purchase so it shall be interesting to see if I can manage that. My first game with McMourning is on this Wednesday. I will play on Vassal as usual and I am looking forward to it.

Seamus - the Mad Hatter, the Joker and Jack the Ripper

I am still struggling with my camera. I guess I can't expect any better at this point. The photo is fairly poor but at least is conveys the colours for Seamus and his lady. As the model is essentially composed of two people I wanted to contrast them fairly strongly. I went with a rich skin tone for Seamus as he is at least alive. For his undead hooker I went with a really washed out pallid tone. I began her skin with Elf Flesh (GW) and highlighted with white. I started the skin on Seamus with Dwarf Flesh (GW) and highlighted with Bleached Bone (VJ). That kept his skin in a nice warm range. I highlighted everything on the hooker with white. The pink didn't come up to a light tone as quickly as I hoped it would and it is still fairly rosy. Her hair was bleached bone to start off with and I just highlighted with white. To contrast I kept the roots of the hair black, its a cheap dye job after all. I think this worked out fairly well but next time I would go for a dark brown I think. I want to start working a little more with the tone of the colours I am using and models like this are a great place to start. I do have the McMourning crew to paint soon and they feature a lot of whites being essentially morgue assistants or undead constructs. These will be annoying as hell to photograph but should be fun to paint at least.

Tale of Malifaux Bloggers - Month Zero

I was listening to a recent podcast about Malifaux called Malifools. They mentioned that they were organising a Tale of Four Gamers style project where people would buy and paint a decent sized set of Malifaux models over the next six months. If you don't know the famous Tale of Four Gamers it is an old and excellent series in White Dwarf where four gamers were given a monthly budget and with that they had to eventually collect and paint a new army. I heartily jumped in and I believe Owen, my regular Vassal opponent from Farfarawy.org, is going to take part also. I will be collecting a McMourning crew for this, so far I am the only one to have selected him. I was picking up the crew box anyway so it was quite serendipitous. The first post is on the 17th of this month and hopefully the local store has the models in by then.

Wargames Building Pt. 4

I am making really slow progress on this building due to not really having all the material I need. Today I picked up some thinner balsa and I was able to get the tiles done on the veranda roof. I measured them all out at 1cm intervals but due to the difficulty of keeping them all aligned there is a good bit of variability in them which is fine. I glued a sheet of paper down and I added the tiles on top of this. I also added the first section of the removable roof. To make any more progress I need to get this building based. I will go on the hunt tomorrow for some plasticard. Hopefully I can find some that's at a decent price.

Wargames Building pt. 3

After many hours of cutting and gluing here is the result. This part of the building is the easiest as there really isn't anything complicated to do. The windows aren't finished yet in the back. I have to let the glue dry a little more before I can get some wood in there for the frames. I haven't figured out how I am going to join the stone chimney which is fairly irregular to the rest of the structure without leaving a lot of gaps. I am hoping it won't prove too difficult. I also need to pick up some thinner wood as the thickness I am currently using isn't right for the tiles. I need a thickness of about .5mm and I have one of 1.5mm. Hopefully one of the cafes around here has some coffee stirrers that are the right size.

Lots of Trees

I have been busily building more trees. I really want to get a good few of these done as they look excellent, especially en masse. I have another fourteen to do here in Hamburg still and twelve I intend to bring back from Ireland next time I am home. Thirty six to forty eight of these spread around a board is probably a little too much but I am figuring that especially with Malifaux which uses a 3'x3' board the extras can serve as dressing along one side. I had considered building a small cliff face to go down one side and while I still might it would be annoying to store.

Wargames Building pt.2

I took a while to figure out what I would use to build the chimney section of the building. I finally settled with some air drying modelling clay. I usually don't like the stuff and for this type of building it really isn't that good. However as I had nothing else I just went with it. The problem is that it dries and shrinks. I couldn't really glue it before it dried and so it was likely to fall apart once I started doing anything with it. To over some this I added some reinforcing wire into the corners. I built the entire chimney in four sections and joined them together once everything was dry. Using the plan from the last post I could maintain the scale I wanted despite working in four sections at once.

Once each section was close to dry I painted the joins with a coloured watered down PVA glue. This gave enough support that once everything was 100% dry I could apply a stronger glue. I only had one or two problems where the bricks I had made weren't glued but I could get them back into place easily enough. Again once this was done I got busy filling the tiny gaps in. There were loads. The clay shrinks a lot and so I added in small stones to cover the holes left behind. As these were small the dried really quickly and so by the time I was finished the last face I could already glue the ones into the first face. I covered everything in a dark brown paint at this stage and also sprayed some black up through the centre so that the white of the clay was no longer showing. When these coats were dry I used a thick gloss varnish to hopefully prevent the inevitable chipping from coming up with the original white. I guess the building shouldn't recieve too much wear and tear. I don't play at home that often. However the removable roof will probably cause some wearing so the gloss varnish is a good way to try to stop that.

Here is the chimney finished. It looks a little more grey in the photos than in actuality. I went with a few colours for the base coat, mainly a very dark brown. I added some grey to this and then highlighted with some Bleached Bone (GW) additions. I washed it with a little green in places and then some dark brown to bring out a little of the texture. As you can see in the profile as I went on with the building the stones got smaller and thinner. It is definitely something I would do if I was to repeat the process. The larger squared stones don't look as good as the thinner ones. I tried to mix the sizes but I could definitely have done with using more of the smaller ones. I will eventually have to build a second building in the same size for Muskets & Tomahawks. The game demands them and the minimum number is two. I was half thinking of building it completely in stone but that would take too long. I might use this technique to do the lower floor in stone and then the top half in wood. Using small thin stones I think I could get it to look quite good. Now I have to start building the rest of the house.

Wargames Buildings pt.1

I have been building a few buildings recently and I thought I might show a step by step of exactly the process I use when building them. I don't tend to get too complicated with what I do. Mostly I rely on the lessons learned from an old White Dwarf article from issue 130. I don't know if many of you will remember that exact issue but it thought me the basics of constructing a building. Despite searching I can't find a picture of the cottage.

To begin with I usually construct a single wall of the building. Once I get to this point I realise that I need a plan and so I start sketching ideas. For this building I want it to be primarily used for Muskets & Tomahawks but I would like to be able to use it for other systems. I knew then that I would be going for a French Indian Wars style with a wooden veranda and stone chimney stack. This picture from 4ground buildings is an excellent example of what I want to build. They also have some interesting information on styles of building in this period so they were an invaluable resource when it came to doing this project. There must be a good book on the subject but I can't find it. Now that I know what I should be doing I can get busy cutting the balsa to make the rest of the walls.