Bits and pieces from Salute

 

I was relatively restrained at Salute this year, but that doesn't mean I got nothing. There were bits and pieces in the goodie bag, as usual, and I bought a couple of choice pieces.

The goodie bag had the show miniature and a set of Mantic Abyssal Dwarfs. I didn't have any particular plans for these, so they've both been eBayed.

There were also some magnetic things from Warmag, which I am tempted to try out the next time I do a big Games Workshop project, as their plastics better suit magnetising than KR Multicase foam.

And finally, amid the various advertising leaflets, the goodie bag also included quick start rules for Space Gits.

Actual purchases! I grabbed two Beastmen from Red Dragon Miniatures. I mostly grabbed this for the goat beastman who'll make a great Breggle bandit for Dolmenwood. But I also love the boar headed chap, even if I'm not quite sure what I'll use him for yet.

I got this "Bound Soul" from Four Score Gaming. I'd seen it at Chillcon and had been tempted, but decided to go for it this time. I believe the sculpt is produced by "Illusionary Constructs". It'll get added to my assorted "awful fantasy RPG encounter" pile once painted.

Anvil Industry had this cool 3D printed vampire like creature that I loved and was able to pick up. It was a bit of an impulse buy, but should be a fun paint.

Finally, I picked up this art print from Greyhawk Miniatures. I just loved the cosy vibe of this mouse wizard, so picked it up to add some art to my room.

One quick purchase of a picture frame online, and he now graces the top of my shelves, making them look five hundred percent more delightful.

Getting into the painting headspace

I managed to get back to some painting and got some things finished! First up, I got these Anvil Industry Female Zombies done. They're not currently available, but I picked them up when they first came out. I then messed up the paint job on them and put them away for ages because I hated them.

A quick bit of finishing up base coating, some washes and dry brushing and they're table ready and good to go!

I also painted up this Frostgrave Hyena. It was a quick paint job and I tried out some new basing things which I will talk about separately in their own post.

Salute: Cool Companies

First thing I noticed was that TT Combat has a new Infinity range of scenery. They were doing a fantastic full table scenery deal on the day prior to the full release, but I am trying to go mostly pre-painted these days and already have most of a table. The new flat definitely can't fit a second table worth of terrain!

Bad Squiddo had a bunch of new releases - some jesters, a new orc berserker, and a bunch of ATS, their new scenery line, a retail release for some of their post apocalyptic figures and a bunch of other small bits and bobs. A whole ton of this is now available either for sale or pre-order on their site, so if you missed Salute, you can still go and pick it up now.

Anvil Industry had a few of their new Commissars available, along with a bunch of "miscast bags" where you could get a ton of random product for a knock down price as a few bits of it were miscast. They're doing a lot of cool stuff these days and are well worth a look.

I mentioned the game Briskars by French company TGCM in a previous post, and I managed to take a whole bunch of photos of their figures.

You apparently need only four or five models to play (I suspect it's a little more than that, but not by much). And there's a wide range of stuff.

As far as I understand it, there's no real factions as such so you don't have to take the models from the same faction if you don't want to. Not sure how much of a big deal this is if you don't. I'll look into it when I get a little time.

There's a massive range of different animals and figures in the range. I'm hoping that means those of my friends who are interested will all find different figures of interest.

That said, we may have some problems. I utterly love these penguins (they're what tipped me over into buying the book).

Fortunately, the amazing dodo models are used for objectives and stuff, so it doesn't matter if we all end up with dodos.

No models bought yet, but I suspect it's really only a matter of time. I want to see a squid sword fight a panda...

Daughters of the Burning Rose - Anvil Industry Kickstarter

As I mentioned in last week's Salute post, Anvil Industry are currently running a Kickstarter for their "Daughters of the Burning Rose" miniatures.

So firstly, having seen the miniatures in person, I can definitely recommend them. They are wonderfully detailed, well cast, and have a nice consistent theme across the range.

Obviously, one of the most common uses for heavily armoured sci fi warrior women will be as Sisters of Battle in Warhammer 40,000. Many people will have seen the announcement by Games Workshop that they'll be releasing Sisters in 2019, with an open development process. So why buy these now?

Well, if you only play in your local Games Workshop, then no, you won't be able to get to use them there. But otherwise? You'll still be able to use both these and the new Games Workshop plastics. These aren't a direct rip off - there's clear tips of the hat, sure, but they are their own thing and I don't feel bad about buying them. They're also sensibly proportioned and armoured, with no over-sexualised nonsense that I've seen so far.

In short - these are the sort of figures that there's been a bit of a shortage of up until now, and it should be encouraged. If you can spare even a token amount for a single figure or squad, I'd recommend throwing it into the pot now to show that there is a market for this sort of thing and it's worth doing.

To finish, this magnificent figure - it's a "10 up" figure that Anvil basically put together because they could. Pretty awesome, right?

Disclaimer: I am friends with the owners of Anvil Industry. However, I've not received any free product from them and this isn't a paid advertisement. I'm promoting something I think there should be more of in this hobby, because I think it's awesome and you'll like it to.

Pottering about doing a little hobby

I've spent the week pottering about doing some bits and pieces of hobby. A couple of my Infinity figures have picked up some dings. Mostly, it's the loss of the brass etch fire arc markers, particularly when they were the first ones I ever put on.

I also took the opportunity to assemble all those zombies I ordered from Anvil. I made sure everything got thoroughly washed and laid out to dry. I've even bought myself a new bowl to do this in so I don't get (rightfully) told off for using baking bowls for cleaning resin.

The Anvil stuff goes together super easily. Most of the joins don't need any pinning at all, but there's a few points where I get a bit nervy and decide to do a little re-inforcement.

I was also using Anvil's Hypercity base toppers. They're pretty darned awesome, but do sometimes leave a little of the base showing, so I used my favouritest thing in the world - the Vallejo red basing paste - to add a little texture there.

It seemed like no time at all before all five women zombies were assembled ready for undercoating.

I took advantage of the clear weather to get other undercoating done as well - a bunch of Infinity figures also got a quick Corax White undercoat spray as well.

You'll notice one zombie is missing here - sadly I managed to break one before undercoating, and ended up having to pin several components together to fix my ham fistedness. The glue on her is still drying, but she should be ready for undercoating by tomorrow - though I'm betting the weather is going to be terrible for weeks now...

Product Review: Anvil Industry Female Zombies

Having had excellent fun the other week painting zombies for Anvil Industry, I decided to pre-order the female zombies I'd been grumpy about not being ready for the speed painting night.

This is a mini-review of sorts, so as a disclaimer - I paid for these miniatures with my own money, but I am friends with the lovely people who run Anvil Industry, as well as a fan.

My original plan was to paint these on Sunday, but a reschedule meant that my plans for my day off on Friday got moved to the Sunday, and they hadn't arrived on the Friday for me to paint... (This paragraph specially for everyone who says that they miss my painting excuses!)

The detail on the new sculpts is excellent, and well up to Anvil's usual standard. There's a mix of military and civilian women zombies to give some variation. As you can see from the photo, bodies, arms and heads are separate so if you want an all female zombie horde, you should be able to get a reasonable amount of variation before you start seeing duplicates.

Because I pre-ordered, they also threw in a free Rock Zombie. He's pretty darned cool, and definitely a character of sorts.

Part 2 of this mini review will follow once I've assembled and painted them! So, erm, don't hold your breath? We don't need any more zombies...

Zombie Night at Anvil

Last Thursday night, I went down to Anvil Industry for Zombie Night. It was the night before Friday the 13th, and Anvil were planning on releasing their new zombie regiments the following day. Sadly, the female zombies, were still in the mould at the time I arrived, so I didn't get to paint those.

Between us, we were aiming to get fifty zombies painted in an evening, and play a game with them. In the end, we "only" managed to get 46 done, but we were close!

With it having been so long since I was last painting, it took me a little while to get back into the swing of things. I also made a few mistakes, like leaving a spot of white on this one's arm!

Still, it was nice to play around with different painting techniques and colours, if in a rather hurried way. For the first four, I base coated, then did a light bone drybrush over the entire model for highlights, before adding ink washes for detailing.

Of the first four, I'm especially proud of the effect I managed on the visor on this one, although the coat and goggles on the first one I showed are also pretty darned excellent.

For my second batch of three, I tried something different again - doing a light Nuln Oil wash over the entire model before brushing on the colours. I quite liked this technique and I'd like to experiment with it a bit more in the future.

This zombie was all fashionable with his white shoes and yellow jacket before he got bitten.

The spot where the blue has bled into the yellow is incredibly annoying, but I was working really quickly and often not waiting for paints to dry...

And here's the final zombie of the seven I painted in the evening. I then handed them over to someone else to mass paint the bases and get them on to the game.

The zombie hordes assemble...

One of the other painters had managed to get ten military zombies done in the same time I'd done seven!

We then added the horde to one of Anvil's lovely demo boards, where they were also showing off their police car that they'd wired to have flashing lights.

As the game started, heroes rallied around the police car to try and hold off the zombie horde before they could escape.

And here we leave our brave zombies, watching as the murderous "survivors" flee in the distance, slaughtering any innocent undead they come across...

Playing with paint

So, with a Chaos Villager to do for a painting challenge on the Oldhammer Forum, and the deadline looming, I dug out the assembled and undercoated model to do something with it. I pinned it to the miniature holder I'd picked up from Hobbyzone, because I wanted to do the base separately anyway (I had no wish of trying to paint the lower half of the model with the anvil in the way).

 I was a bit stuck for ideas, so decided to play around with a few things. I went with Darkstar's Tarnished Steel. I was a little disappointed so moved on to other bits, in particular, basing the leather with XV-88, as I couldn't find my beloved Steel Legion Drab. Like, seriously, I can't find it and it's really bugging me.

I then tried a bit of a wash with a P3 Chestnut Ink I originally got to experiment with water effects and hadn't used since. It ended up with a really nice rich colour, but with too much of a gloss finish for what I was trying to do - there are totally leathers that would suit that, but I wanted this to be a more dull flat colour, so I'll need to bring that back again.

I then put a Nuln Oil Gloss wash over the leg plates, and some sort of dark wizardry occurred. They suddenly looked amazing. I need to tidy up the bits where I got brown ink on them now, because otherwise they're pretty much perfect.

The anvil had been based with the Forge World Iron Hands Steel paint, though it seems to froth up into bubbles whenever I shake it. I don't think that's meant to happen.

OK, I'm back from mailing Forge World to ask them if that's meant to happen. I drybrushed the anvil with the Tarnished Steel, then did a Nuln Oil Gloss wash. Still want to play with it more, but liking it so far.

The metal bit of the base, I did the same as the anvil. I'm wanting to play around with colours a bit more, so I'm planning on really playing around with the cobblestones once the matte Nuln Oil wash is dry on that.

Oh, if you want this miniature, you can totally get it from Anvil Industry.