The return of The Desk, and painting schedule!

It's back! and almost ready to resume painting in the New Year, just need to sort the paints and brushes etc out and add another painting lamp as I always use two together. This Desk has been around a bit, my late Mother in Law bought it for me from a Cancer Research shop when we lived in Dymchurch on the Kent coast about 14 years ago and it's travelled all the way to Spain and then back again to Rochester and now to Twydall (pronounced Twiddle!), still in Kent, where I have lived most of my adult life. It's not full size but I have become so comfortable painting at it that I can't imagine painting any other way. It sits in front of the window with plenty of natural light with our little Christmas window display above it, everything feels just right and ready to resume after the stress of the past couple of months. We are off for a family Christmas for a couple of days tomorrow.

By God Sir, this desk has seen some action!

I have been thinking and planning my painting schedule for the next couple of months ahead as I have a fair bit in hand and I have fallen slightly behind. The plan is roughly as follows:

January. 

150 x 18mm AB Napoleonics for Bill in Australia who has been very patient. These are early French wearing bicornes and I had just got 25 figures into the commission before I had to stop to get ready for the move. Bill sent a nice painted sample and I have been able to match it quite well.

20mm Plains Indians, x 60 mounted for Mark. I have a real method now for painting these so look forward to getting back to them. 

2mm Irregular Miniatures for Geoff, who has also been very patient :)

February.

15mm Peter Pig ECW's batches for both Graham and John R. Then 4 more ECW Regiments of Foot (Warlord Epic P&S) for Noel. These will be followed by the first of the 7th US Cavalry for Mark, maybe 40 mounted figures, this will break up the Plains Indians a bit and marl has requested that I use Peter Gilders Pony Wars collection as a reference so I certainly will.

This seems a reasonable plan to me and into March I'm sure Old John will have more for me!

I'm not planning  anything for myself at this stage, the 3mm Ancients will be seeing some action over the festive season, but I'm sure that something will take my fancy in the New Year.

All the very best to you all and have a good Christmas.

Lee.

 

Seasons Greetings!

 It's that time of the year again after 13 years of blogging so I want to wish everyone Seasons Greetings. 

We are spending a few days at The King Charles Hotel in Kent while we wait to move into our new home. Charles I that is, and a very large painting of him in 3/4 armour riding a magnificent horse adorns the reception area.

I intend to be back painting again in the New Year for my existing customers/friends because I get a lot of pleasure from it, especially as I'm not really painting much for myself beyond the 3mm armies. 

I do intend to work on my YouTube channel by producing painting tutorials and learning how to place photos etc within the videos as it is clearly growing in popularity and I am repeatedly asked for them.

I have to say a special thank you to Mark, Old John, Graham, John R, Noel and Geoff for the ongoing support for my humble brushwork and to all those who still check the blog and those who leave comments. 

Finally, a couple of photos of one of the more unusual commissions of the year for (of course) Old John this wonderful Miniature Figurines Swedish Drum Carriage that was a joy to paint!

Cheers all,

Lee.

3mm stone temple DBA camp!

Scratch built 'temple by sacred river' DBA camp!  Just a bit of fun of course but it does the job and completes 3mm army number 9 Classical Indian.

Disruption to normal service!

There will be some disruption to blog posts and painting schedule for a few weeks as we are moving on 14th December due to circumstances beyond our control. I won't go into any further details here, I know that a few of my blogging friends are aware of the situation and have been very supportive, and I will email any customers of my painting service who are not informed with further details. Please rest assured that I fully intend to keep painting as soon as we are settled again. 

I have turned off comments for this post and will leave you for now with some more of Old John's lovely Miniature Figurines Winged Hussars which I'm sure brings John's total of these iconic cavalry to close to 200!

Cheers,

Lee.

Vintage figures anyone? - latest video on the channel.

A short video on the above subject and the description includes a link to the Miniature Figurines production process. Please give it a like if you enjoy it, cheers.

Scratch built 3mm Greek (ish) temple and more for Old John.

 I have been looking about for something suitable for a DBA camp for my 3mm Greeks but found nothing in the scale so decided to build my own temple! It is less than 20mm tall, based around two old dice with then built up with cut down MDF and card. It occupied much of Sunday and involved a fair bit of cursing, superglued fingers and crawling about on the carpet for bits of cut down cocktail sticks that went flying, at one point the entire structure was stuck to fingers and had to be very carefully prized off to avoid damaging it and having to write off several hours work :( Having managed to glue tiny columns to the front and rear of the structure I cold tell something was not right! It looked too Roman and required columns on all four sides. My wife told me not to do it, it looked fine she said but no, it needed more columns. I took a break played around filing and cutting more cocktail sticks and then carefully added them along both sides using tweezers. Everything then got a thin coat of tile  grout before painting.

OK, it's not perfect, but after the time spent it was going on the base and that was that. The hope was that some Hoplites gathered around it would help to draw the eye and with the addition of a few Cyprus trees called it a day. Here it is in all it's glory and it is now magnetised and sitting in it's box alongside the Greek army.

As said previously I'm now slowing down on the commission painting front but still painting for Old John, Mark, Graham and JohnR plus Geoff's 2mm tiddlers! These are more 1/72nd scale Streltsi and 20mm MInarion figures for Old John, the latter being Bourbon Infantry attired in rather fetching Purple coats and breeches with red cuffs and stockings.

Back to 60 more mounted Indian warriors next for Mark, being the November batch. There remains a lot more in the box for John including another 17 (I think) metal Winged Hussars and John tells me that he already has 176 of them painted in his collection!

The Portable Ancient Wargame.

This has been a quick alternative project for my ancient armies, a small flexible set up for Bob Cordery's Ancient rules published in his book Developing The Portable Wargame. I started with 12 laser cut tiles of 3mm MDF, 150mm x 150mm and marked them up in 50mm square grid. I drilled out the central grid square which is all I need to identify the grid clearly after painting. Everything got a thin coat of Vallejo Earth Texture and was then painted using Vallejo Flat Green thinned slightly with water. Roads and rivers were added from tile grout then painted, I wanted to avoid using flocks etc for this project. finally (for now) I dabbed a flat green/yellow mix all over to add a little brightness but may need to go a little further later. Must say for a fast and furious stand alone project I'm rather pleased and it cost so little, the tiles coming in at just £1.45 per tile and with paint etc no more than £2.00 per tile.

The game can be played on a 9x9 grid (or even 8x8) but I prefer this 12x9 battlefield. I may well add further tiles to allow more flexibility in the layout. The roads are more for effect than anything so can be ignored or utilised. 

My 3mm Celts had a run out on the grid to see they look when deployed.

Warlord Epic Pike & Shot - how I paint them!

I wasn't too keen on them initially but when regular customer Noel asked me to paint them as a follow up to his ACW's I wanted to see what cold be done with them! My method is speed painting with lots of pre dry brushing before picking out the detail. I have this down to around 3 hours per 4 sprues by this method which seems about right, as always I could of course go further with detail and highlights etc but Noel is very happy with the results ( I also base them using the Vallejo Earth texture  which is so quick and easy to apply). One tip here is on basing those tricky frontal individual pikeman.

 

The US 7th cavalry have arrived - new sculpts!

A couple of days ago the advance guard of the 7th US cavalry arrived (troops A,B and C) in the form of 60 mounted figures specially commissioned by Mark from Andrew Stadden (son of Charles Stadden who requires no introduction here). The horses are by Qualiticast. I have to say that on opening the box my first impression was simply one of awe at the animation and period feel of these 20mm sculpts, but also how traditional they are with fine engraved detail and faces full of character. Mark pointed out to me that he commissioned the sculpts from Andrew as he is one of the few these days who still works in metal, no green stuff etc and this shows in the figures. I have no doubt that they will be pure joy to paint when I get to them next year - I still have around 280 mounted Indians to paint yet - and may even sneak in a couple of test paints. Troops D,E and F will follow in due course (who remembers the old US TV series 'F Troop'? 

They arrived with some basic painting instructions but basically Mark wishes me to use the old Peter Gilder 7th cavalry from his Pony Wars collection as a reference for colours etc, the link to which I posted a few posts ago here. A nice touch is that all bases are labelled using names of those who fought at Little Big Horn where possible with some fictional characters. 

Meantime I have started to enjoy my DBA in a box and had a Classical Indian v Macedonian game the other morning which resulted in a resounding Macedonian victory. Clearly the Indians are going to take some time and play to find  the best way of deploying them, my idea had been to place the light bowmen out in front with elephants at rear in order to soften up the phalanx before trampling them with the big beasts  but the phalanx simply smashed them aside! The range of bows is 200paces and the move distance of the phalanx is also 200 paces so you are only going to get off one shot before the heavy infantry are on top of you. Elephant v Phalanx is interesting, can go either way resulting in broken formations, base v base fighting, but the double ranked pikes certainly packs a punch.

One issue came up, moving the phalanx on the flocked board required careful handling to avoid bending the pikes, I have a light hand but it occurred to me that a surface where the bases could be pushed/slid forward would be better and I am wondering how/if there is a means of 'fixing' the surface without damaging it? Spray varnish possibly? Any thoughts would be most welcome, thank you. Laying thin plastic transparent sheet over has been suggested and I thought that rather clever but I really need to keep the project portable in the small box.

Back to more Indians and Wargame in a box!

I'm back painting the October batch of another 60 mounted Plains Indians for Mark and thoroughly enjoying myself. I'm tending to paint in batches of 8 keeping the horse tones similar each batch but varied overall. For this second batch I wanted to keep the ponies fairly light on the whole to begin with including several greys. I must say that when removing the first 40 yesterday from the wine caps for storage it made me think about how spectacular the 400 + mounted warriors are going to look when Mark eventually gets to deploy them on his table next year! So this will be so far 128 mounted and 100 foot, the November batch will be another 60 mounted. 

Photos look a bit overlit and please bear in mind these are 20mm Qualiticast figures. Satin varnish applied. I especially like the crashing horses. White horse eyes have been dotted out to reduce the human like appearance.

I'm now completing the last of my 3mm ancient DBA armies, the Marian Romans by painting 8 bases of heavy infantry along with a base of Auxiliaries, they will share the cavalry and skirmishers from the earlier Polybian Romans.

As you can see I now have everything stored in a lovely sparkly box thanks to my wife, I had to do the whole 'shut your eyes and hold out your hands' thing before being presented with it, never was a man so excited about a storage box! It's just about perfect and holds the 4 wooden cigar boxes containing 8 fully magnetised armies, the folding board plus terrain etc. With this about done I'm planning to make a series of 150mm x 150mm interchangeable terrain tiles marked out in 50mm square grid so I can use the armies to learn The Portable Ancient wargame alongside. I'm going to keep these one dimensional with terrain features simply painted on using textured paint only, a 9 x9 square grid to begin with. Thanks to Bob for the free PDF of the rules and I'm keen to see what I can do with project.

Marian Romans so far, the ships in the background had been gathering dust on the shelve so I think it's abut time I got them rigged.

And finally for now, I present (drum roll please), 'Ancient wargame in a box', in the words of the late Paul Daniels 'It's Magic'.

Can anyone suggest a source for 150mm x 150mm tiles please? I'm thinking 3mm MDF possibly but other ideas welcome? Cheers.