Birthday Loot

I suffered through another annual reminder of my ever advancing age recently, which is particularly strange in these strange times.  At least my parents and sister could come to the backyard to help celebrate.

And I got some pretty sweet stuff.

Hit the Beach is a pretty amazing starter for FOW, since in addition to the starter set exclusive Germans and US infantry, it also has regular kit versions of pak 40s, panzer IVs, and a ton of M4 tanks.  All priced for $5 more than just a platoon of five M4 tanks would cost.  I was thinking about building a US medium tank company, and I would only need one more copy of Hit the Beach and a couple $9 sprues from Battlefront... might have to happen.  In any case, a few of the American options are going to be prepared soon for Chain of Command... and then probably painted very slowly over the next year.

The Warcry Gloomspite Gits box is a typical of current GW offering, where they take some older kits and bang them together in a box with extra materials for less than buying one of the kits on its own.  In this case the squig hoppers, which I wanted, come with three "sneaky snufflers", which I do not care about (but might be conversion fodder) as well as all the cards and boards needed to make up a Warcry... for exactly the same price as the squig hoppers alone.

Not sure why my mother thought that I wanted the Ultramarines banner, but at least the kid is excited!  I predict it will be hung in his room pretty soon, and is sure to feature in the myriad of Zoom calls he will be on in the fall.

In addition to the gifts from others, I happened to have an eBay score arrive at the same time.

In this case four platoons of FoW figures for a very low price.  Three German platoons, and one Italian (and the guy threw in a 12cm mortar platoon too, which with a range of 6km is hardly useful for skirmishing, except perhaps as a objective target).

Looks like lots of painting little men is in my future.

or is it?

Night Goblins - Nearing completion

Before you start a new project, you should finish you old project... is advice that I clearly never follow, as a glance around my blog, or house, or office would clearly tell you. 

However, I am nearly done with these night goblins, and while I was getting them ready for various basing work, I took a few hasty pictures.

The lighting is not great at night, but I think you can make out what is needed here. 

First up is a picture of all the goblins I painted in this round, which include 30 spear goblins, six fanatics (all old metal so they scale better), and four converted "heroes".  I started these in January, so not the fastest painting progress, although in terms of time spent it was not so bad. 

Here is my converted battle standard bearer and the figure it was built on. The standard is comprised of three different parts, and the left arm comes from a beastman (with some sculpted robes)

All of my figures have come from the old WHFB 7th edition starter box called "the Battle at Skull Pass" or some such, and as with all GW starter boxes, the included figures are relatively cheap on Ebay for a few years after release.  Consequently, I was able to buy a bunch of the figures (which is where the various regiments come from), and had a ton of heroes for conversion.  The center guy in this picture is the big boss from the box, and I converted two more of that same figure in to the guy on the left and the right. 

Since I had a surplus body from the battle standard bearer, I converted him to a boss with a great weapon.  Pretty minimal sculpting was needed, which I always appreciate. (As I recall the original regiments were much smaller than the 30-40 size I am building them as, so I have a lot of spare command figures)

Last, we have three generations of regimental champions, with the oldest on the left, 2013 edition in the middle, and newest on the right.  I think there are about 11-12 years between them. 

Since I took these pictures I managed to flock the bases for all these fellows, as well as another, older regiment of spear goblins that I painted a while back.  I was intending to also do the static grass, but looking at 70 of their little faces the energy left me, and they got put back into a box while I played Civ V.  Not exactly an ideal result, but they are so close now... just the static grass and matte coating and they will be finished. In the future I have another 40 spear goblins, 40 or so archers, the rest of the night goblin wolf riders to convert, a few more trolls, and a spear thrower... sounds pretty daunting when you think about it.

Next should be 15mm Germans, but you never know.

Night Goblin Conversions

I managed to do a little sculpting last week to move these Night Goblins along.  I am trying to strike while the iron is hot, so to speak, before I inevitably drift into thinking about other projects.

Converted Boss, Banner Boss, Shaman, and another Boss

Since I took this picture I finished prepping a 30 member regiment of spear gobbos, and now I am just waiting for a warmer weekend afternoon to get to priming.

Of course, given the time of year I may be waiting a while (and I spent the last one doing work on the house).

Gloomspite Gitz

Happily for me (but not for my budget), the next Age of Sigmar army is "Gloomspite Gitz" which rounds  up the Night goblins, Forest Goblins, and trolls into one army and adds quite a few new figures.  Here are some that have caught my eye:

The bad goblin himself

Plastic Squig hoppers! 

Troll King

Goblin cave terrain

In addition to these there are also an alternate build for the squig hoppers (with lances!), squig herd, a box of various drugged out shamans, new (tall) stone trolls, plastic mangler squigs, and several more.

Looks like GW is keeping up the frenetic pace they have been on, which is great for new models, but terrible for those of us with limited time and budgets!

What about you, will you be adding any goblins in the new year?

Fantasy Figures

As seen in my last post (was it really two weeks ago?), some miniatures I have painted recently.

Usual excuses about photography with a cell phone, and lighting.  I may eventually get around to taking better pictures, but given my track record on that regard, I would not hold your breath.

The two enigmatic large bases need a bit more work before I show them off with their proper occupants.  I have enough figures to show off that I will break them up into a few posts.

First off fantasy.

Leading the charge is this Night goblin on a wolf, which I converted back in August after being inspired by Sebastian's work over at Eastern Empire. (Inspired should here read "nearly directly ripped off")

Next up are these Reaper peasants, although really only the one could be a peasant, while the others are clearly city dwellers.

These may need another application of matte spray

And finally we have a chaos standing stone made from the one grasped by the plastic giant. I carved away the excess material (a giant hand) and ended up with this stone.  Seems like it needs something else though... spent candles, and some blood maybe?

Tomorrow I have some various Inq28 figures to put up, and then we will have another wait until I actually get something painted. (I did assemble and prime a troupe of Harlequins, so there is material forthcoming eventually!)

Night Goblin Wolf Rider

In what is a pretty obvious direct (yet inferior) copy of Sebastian's work over at Eastern Empire, I converted this chaos hound to be slightly more wolfy and mounted a night goblin on his back.  This required cutting off the original legs at the waist, using gnobler legs on either side of the wolf, a bit of sculpting, and then result.

I have a few more of these planned, so that I can have a tiny unit for use in some eventual far future Warhammer game (or for various other skirmish/RP usage) 

Converted Spiders

Way back at the end of 2011, I was planning to run a D&D game using miniatures, and as one does, I collected a bunch of various monsters to terrorize the poor players with.  Spiders are a natural fit for this, and I bought a few of the spiders from the then current Warhammer box (Battle of Skull Pass), got out the sharp knife, and produced the following monsters on 50mm bases:

The last picture shows the range of motion possible if you cut the legs off after splitting them apart.  The only ones which are particularly hard to separate are the rear legs closest to the abdomen. Really the hardest part of this conversion is getting the spiders to stick to the bases... and apparently painting them, since this is how they have languished for four plus years. 

Night Goblins

As I mentioned yesterday and Friday, I finished painting a regiment of Night Goblins armed with spears.  The figures are from the Warhammer 7th Edition starter set, which had a healthy number of goblins in it, and which I supplemented with eBay.  As I mentioned on Friday, I painted these exclusively at work, and it took me around five hours, plus time to clean, base, and prep the figures at home.  Not too bad, other than being spread out over four years...

30 mean little buggers with pointy sticks

 For comparison purposes, here are some prior goblins.  The newer ones have much blacker cloaks, and are somewhat sharper.

Old, new, new, old, new, old

Here is a closeup of the two unit champions.  The new one on the left has a much sharper looking shield, since it has about 5 layers of highlights, as compared to just two or so on the older one.  The dags I attempted on the newer one's sword did not come out so well, less so with the sponge effect weathering (which itself is hard to see here)

As you can see, the figures still need a matte spray finish, as well as flock and static grass before they are 100% completed, but painting is done, and that is the part that always takes me the most time.

I really enjoy night goblins, which is good, since I have a bunch of fanatics, another regiment of spears, and one of archers as well to build up and paint. After that I have a couple of trolls to convert, and by time I actually get around to all of these, the 9th edition should be here, and hopefully it will have new rescaled plastic standard/forest goblins as well. (and plastic squigs?) So plenty to look forward to in the future.