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.