Demo army progress

I'm moving on quite nicely.  All the armor bits are done on these fellows, except for the final detailing but that doesn't count because it's done at the end.  Trust me, that makes sense in my world.

We got the light box thing sorted out.  Now I'm just learning the best way to use it.  So these are a little more clear.

Chain mail and all armor pieces are done.  It's a little hard to see but there's a faction symbol on the top of his right shoulder that's also done in the silver so it stands out.

I'm reconsidering my color scheme for the fabric parts now that I'm really seeing how the silver and gold look together.  My original plan may be too wishy-washy to really go with the contrast.  I'm going to ponder this for a few days.  Or until I decide to paint them some more.

There's really not that much left to do.  I say that now.  When I actually paint I'll find all kinds of things yet to be done.  Of course.

The full progress of the paint job is in the collection below.

Demo - Crusaders

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Working on a demo army

I want to start running demos, events and just plain games using the Reaper Warlord system.  So I need demo armies to keep the ham-fisted gamers away from my personal armies and to have readily available balanced demo forces.  As an official Reaper demo person I get points for running events.  I can then spend those points to get stuff.  Like figures for demo armies.

I may have already noted this but I'm not known for going back to read old posts.

My demo armies each have two troops - one with a sergeant and troops, one with a monster.  So that's a total of 10 figures to paint for each demo army.  Not too bad, that's doable.

I'm starting with Crusaders since that's not one of my personal armies and I didn't have the color scheme set for the ones I did get.  So, start with the oddballs.

I've been taking pictures of each step of the painting process, mostly to keep me going and also to show off and hopefully inspire others to paint stuff.  It takes more time on my part since I have to stop to take pictures after each step but that's not too bad.

I'm not doing the typical 'base coat, dry brush, call it done' painting.  I've tried it and I just don't like it.  So I'm doing a basic tabletop paint job on them.

Without further ado, the pictures.

Warrior 01b

This dude has the brown paint on his legs.  Everything was painted dark brown.  The chain mail, the leg armor and the boots.

Warrior 02a

It's a little hard to see but his chain mail now has silver on it.  I so need a better light setup for quick pictures.

Warrior 03c

A bit more shiny.  The leg armor has been painted gold.  There will be tiny hotspots of bright silver on that when I'm done with everything else but for now it's good.

Everything left that is chain mail, armor or attached leather (like gloves) is that same dark brown.  I need to buy another bottle of that.  This gives me a nice warm brown undercoat to everything.  That same dark brown base coat sucked all the light out of the picture.  And I'm not savvy enough in Photoshop to make it lighter.  Hopefully by the time I get to the finished figures my new low-class light box will be color corrected out of the yellow band and I can take better, more accurate, pictures.

That's as far as I go right now.   There's four of these types of figures that are all getting painted at once.  I'm trying to find the time to get at least one step done per night if I can.  Hopefully this weekend I'll get them all the way to the fabric parts.

A note on the gold armor.  The only reason for this is that one of my other demo armies is dudes in plate armor.  So to make sure they stand apart on the table this faction gets gold armor.  That will make it easier to identify who is whom.

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Finished a couple of minis

One of the most tedious tasks is painting armies.  There's just so many figures and so many are the same it seems like an impossible task.  So I thought it would be interesting to see if people were interested in trying an exchange.  In this one it would work more like a round-robin so that everyone painted minis for one person, then the next person sent out their minis, and so on.  Eventually you'll end up with about a dozen painted minis, as would everyone in the exchange. (Math = 4 people each sending 4 minis.  While that might look like it adds up to 16 and not 12 remember the recipient isn't counted.  12.  Nyah.)

So the first set goes out and it happens to be minis I can't stand and just can't figure out how to paint.  I finally slogged through them and actually finished up the one different one today.  Considering I also started it today I think that's pretty darn spiffy.

The one on the top is the type of figure that I had a hard time figuring out what was what to paint.

The one on the bottom was quick, easy and fun for some reason.  I can see a couple of tiny touchups needed on him in the pictures but since they're all waiting on varnish that's a quick thing.

The entire collection is down below if you want to browse.  The pictures weren't done with 'good light' so they're a bit dark in places.

Army Exchange - Darkspawn

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Tiny little updates

I haven't accomplished squat this last week or so.

I've been working on the cardstock stuff and wanted to use up some of the incredible amount of foamcore I acquired.  So I decided to work on ground tiles.  Not familiar with ground tiles?  Let me explain.

Ground tiles are tiles of mounted cardstock that simulate the ground terrain of your current setup.  So you have rocky floor for caverns, grass and dirt for villages, etc.  They're not completely necessary if you're using a battle mat underneath them (the grid for movement, you see) but they really do make it look nice.  And yes, one option is to print the ground tiles with a grid.

The company suggests gluing these ground tiles onto a single sheet of foamcore to make a Masterboard.  Well, since I have so freakin' much foamcore I decided to go with tiles instead.  That way I can create my ground terrain however I darn well please.  This is more of an issue with the village stuff than the cavern or water stuff really.

They have a nifty extra step that allows you to use bow tie connectors under the ground tile.  That way the pieces don't slide around but you also don't see the connector.  The newer sets come with the template for this process.

I copied off a bunch of the template and decided to try spray adhesive for this, since I was gluing a large flat area and that's what spray adhesives are good for.

I'm calling that a mixed success.  I might not have sprayed enough on but the adhesion isn't as good as I would have liked.  I'll be doing some cleanup by gluing down corners, etc.  Luckily I had a 40% off coupon at the one store in the area that sells the type of glue I like.  Score!

So I'm slowly cutting these out.  The foamcore is white and while technically I could leave it white I'm going to paint the edges black just so they look better.  Another step in the process.  After these foamcore bases are complete then I can glue on the ground tiles and it will be all good.  Not only will these be more versatile in setup but it's much easier to store 7 inch by 7 inch tiles than a 2 foot by 3 foot sheet of Masterboard.

Otherwise I just need to finish up painting and basing a figure for someone, paint up one more figure for an exchange, and work on a plaster building or three.

Oh, I had the opportunity to score some free plaster but I passed it up.  A couple of reasons:

1. I've got the water:plaster ratio down cold for the type I currently use
2. I can buy fifty pounds of plaster for very little money
3. I'm not casting enough to justify having several hundred pounds of plaster sitting in the basement

OK.  That was three reasons.  I feel they're all valid reasons and I'm happy with the decision.  We're trying to reduce clutter and that wasn't the way to go.

One last thing.  I'm in a wedding in December so I was able to pick up the fabric to make my dress.  The bride is being quite sensible and just telling us a color so we can (technically) have dresses that we can wear again.  The color is 'dark red' and didya know just how many colors kind of but not really fall into that range?  Let me tell you - lots.  But I found a satin that will work.  I'm still not sure if I'm going to make it shiny side out or not.  What?  You didn't know you can use either side of a fabric?  I'm shocked!

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The way it always goes

I joined the demo team for Reaper Miniatures because I love their paints and minis and I've been upgraded to running the paint events at my local store.  Since I'm doing demos and events anyway I might as well earn points for them, right?

They also have a ruleset for a miniatures game that uses their miniature lines.  Not a shabby idea and I've liked the game the few times I've gotten to play it.

I do have figures for armies for myself but I really don't want to subject them to the hamfisted local gamers on a regular basis.  With the points I had banked up and some advice from experienced players/demo team members I settled on the basic composition of a demo army:

Sergeant
4 swordsmen
2 archers
2 spearmen

Monster

I was on the fence about the monster but was persuaded by "They look cool on the table and bring people over to see what's going on."  Good enough for me.

I created my rosters and then placed my order for three demo armies (three different factions).  Which arrived yesterday.  Yay packages!

I started to sort out the minis so I had all the different factions separated and when I sat down to paint I could grab-and-go.  But something was odd about the elf figures and what ones were in the package.  I checked my order and found out that somehow I only ordered archers.  No swordsmen, no spearmen.  Hrm.  That ain't gonna work.

Oh well, I'll fix it with my next order and use the extra archers as giveaway figures to people who show up and play the game.  Not a big deal at all and what the points are there to be used for.

Which leads me to the "The way it always goes" part of this post.

Elves were the only faction with a defined color scheme right now.  I hadn't thought out color schemes for the two other factions, thinking I could do that while I painted up the elves.  (Note - I'm painting the demo armies in the same colors as my personal armies.)  Now all the figures I really can paint and complete are ones where I don't know what colors I want to use.

I went into a couple of online chats about this kind of thing and got ideas.  I looked at what other people used for those factions.  I know I don't want to use the colors that are used in the rule book as everyone seems to use them and it isn't required to use any particular color.  Plus, I don't have a personal army for one of the factions.  So that color scheme has to stand alone and not be similar to any of the other ones.

I'm hoping to spray some primer on some minis to use as test subjects for the color schemes.  Then I can have the dual satisfaction of seeing how the color scheme works and getting a mini painted.

By the way.  The faction I'm working on first is the Crusaders so it's a lot of guys in armor.  Armor is easy for fast painting.  They have the flowing skirt-things (tabards or some such) to soften them up a bit.  I'm looking at ivory as the main color for those, accented with a light green.  And then the armor being mostly gold/brass/bronze.  My original scheme had a brighter, warm green instead of the light green but when I looked at the figures it would have put the green and gold too close for comfort and made me think of the Green Bay Packers.  Not a totally bad thing but not what I wanted on my gaming table.  Plus the other faction that I did order correctly is Overlords which is more guys in armor.  They're getting silver armor (I have a personal army of those but haven't settled on a color scheme.  I'm thinking orange.  Maybe.) and I needed the other set of armored dudes to contrast on the table.  Otherwise it would have been rather confusing and monotonous.

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Back on track!

I'm as healthy as can be expected so now I'm back on track.

I'm doing some more casting as I found out something interesting.  I used to use a dental plaster called Merlin's Magic for my Hirst Arts work.  Great stuff.  But the cost was getting prohibitive and I had to have it shipped.  I've switched over to Hydrostone.  I can get that locally for a fraction of the price.

The interesting thing is that the two plasters don't take paint the same way.  The paint doesn't seem to soak into the Merlin's Magic like it does the Hydrostone.

While normally this wouldn't be an issue all the columns for the inner temple of the display base were made from Merlin's Magic castings.  The roof sections were made from Hydrostone.  Both of them will have the same color of faux marble painted on them.  And while doing the base coats I discovered that they don't look the same.

So now I'm recasting all the column pieces in Hydrostone so the marble will be consistent when I paint it.

At least I have four fully assembled columns for future use.

Also, for a design detail I'm gluing two curved sections together so they make a round opening.  That will make sense when I post pictures.  I'm putting in four sections so I need eight bricks.  Of course I only had seven.  It's going to be a long build.

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Inspiration high. Motiviation low.

I've got all my great ideas.  But actually doing something about them is tough.

But I did work on my design for the large display base I'm doing.  It's in two pieces - inner and outer.  I'm starting with the inner since it will have more detailed painting.  Yes, I'm faux painting again.

Since the pieces are assembled pieces there are join lines.  In the past I've just painted over them and lived with the result.  This time around I'm trying an idea of filling them in using caulk. 

I did some pre-assembly last night.  I consider pre-assembly things like making columns to length and working with sub-sections.  Essentially making the pieces that will make the larger pieces.

Tonight I filled the join lines.  One of the sub-sections will become a hemispherical roof and there are join lines all over the place.  I'm hoping the caulk will fill them enough so there are nothing but smooth sections where there should be smooth sections.  Considering I'm going to be faux painting those areas I'd like them to be smooth.

I also got smart enough to make a test piece that will be a small section of the intended whole.  That way I can see if my color ideas will work.  I think they will but without a test I can't be certain.  I caulked that thing too.

Tomorrow I hope to do more assembly.  The columns are at length but still need to be glued together on the long sides.  The roof is down to 8 sections from 16.  Tomorrow there will be 4.  Then I'll fill the join lines on everything again.  I'm working on the join lines as each sub-section is assembled because it's easier to get into all the little nooks and crannies when they're still separate.  It might take longer but I'm hoping the final result will be smoother and nicer.

Right now there's nothing that would warrant pictures.  It's just some partially assembled pieces.  And the caulk filling really doesn't show up well.  I don't expect the pictures to start until the main unit is dry-stacked and the test piece is painted.

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