Eleven Hearthguard-AHPCX # 10

 

Still plugging away at the painting. One of my goals during the challenge was to complete a Lords of the Wild warband using elves from my LOTR collection for SAGA AoM. Next up are 2 Hearthguard units. These were half painted by my son many years ago, they were airbrushed with Tamiya flat black and re-painted and based to match the the current war band. I thought about stripping the metal casts but decided against it, so they are a little less defined than the plastic sculpts which just had been previously primed. I am happy enough with them. I have 11 more figures to go but I somehow another think that this will not get done for the Challenge.

 

 

 

Sainte-Mère-Église: AHPCX #9

 

This model has been an albatross around my neck throughout the AHPCX, without exaggeration there is probably over 300 hours of print time here with multiple failed pieces. This is a model from 3d-print-terrain, there are 14 pieces to print, the longest one clocking out at 38 hours alone. I had multiple problems throughout with both adhesion and extrusion problems. Anyway, I suspect most of you shall have no idea what I am talking about, so I shall stop. The fence come from the same set and I found the headstones on Thingiverse.

I needed a church, as I sold my massive Italeri hard plastic one, this is much nicer and of course Sainte-Mère-Èglise is one of the classic WWII Normandy set pieces. I based it on two old placemats and added a small cemetery as you can see.

 

 

 

I will treat it as 3 separate units in respect to bombardment for CoC, the two large roofs come off, and the centre tower comes off. Difficult to say whether the ground floor windows can be used as firing positions but there are 3 doors, one large and certainly the tower would be an excellent firing position. Funny how I think of terrain in game terms!

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Some Terrain for Epic: AHPCX #8

Myself and Iannick are planning to have our first 30k Epic game in three weeks, I have never played before and I do not think that Iannick has played Epic Armageddon since he was a young lad.  We are planning to use 2000 +/- 100 point forces and are playing the NetEA rules with the Horus Heresy lists. I am playing the Blood Angels and Iannick the Emperor's Children. I believe the plan is to play on a 4x4 terrain with no spaceship's, but everything else goes. I have my list together but keeping it a secret in order to confound Iannick. as we had no terrain, I have been keeping the CR10S busy. I already have a desert mat and some hills (from Rommel) as well as some 6 mm roads and rivers which will do, I really can not imagine the 30k world being a lush, verdant one, but of course I really have no idea as I know nothing about this world! I am looking forward to getting my force on the table though and the rules themselves do not look too complicated.

A Warhound for scale, I am hoping it is right

Ruined buildings, some objective markers and game tokens, all done on the 3D printer.

Regimental HQ in bottom left. I will make an orbital blast marker later but only needed this one for our upcoming game.

Bit of a challenge to match colouring with mat but pretty good I believe.

Detail of markers and and objectives.

Wish us luck in our game.

African Kingdoms for Congo: AHPCX #7

 

One of the last piles of 28mm lead, I have are the figures I bought for the game Congo, which I have yet to play. I painted up the Explorers box in a previous AHPC, but still had the African Kingdoms box. I have a very small lead pile and to be honest all I think is left is some Perry Samurai figures.

Certainly I have some plastic and resin figures lying around from some games like Mansions of Madness, some Games Workshop figures and a few Carnival figures. Hopefully I will get to play the game soon.

King and Wardrums

Askaris

 

Married Warriors

 

Young Warriors

Scouts

 

Princess and Hostage

 

Hostage

 

Bearers

 

Fanatical Warriors

Witchdoctor

Warhorn

Prince

 

War Leader

Nice to get them done.

Train Tracks: AHPCX #6

I need some train tracks for several Chain of Command games that are coming up and it has been something missing from my collection for awhile. I could have gone with 3D prints, as I have several STL files which look quite nice but it does take a lot of time to print something like this.

I was going to buy some real HO track but found some very cheap plastic tracks on Amazon and I got some rail bed from a Train Terrain company. The whole thing was less then $30 and I probably have another 8-12' of track materials still left but what I needed was a something to cross a 6' terrain table.

 

 

 

It was a bit more work than I thought it might be. The track was a little too wide for the bed but I plan to improve that when it is set up with clumping foliage. I used PVA to glue the track to the bed which is some sort of foam and then sprinkled the ballast on the wet bed, it was not really the best method but with some repairs I moved on. Once dry, I airbrushed the whole thing with black, followed by a green brown followed by a light brown. I then drybrushed the whole thing with a light sand colour. I then washed the rails with black followed by a drybrush of a dark metal. I then used a brown ink from Scale Colour to paint the wood, which really worked quite well. I finished off the tracks with a rust wash.

Shieldmaidens for SAGA: AHPCX #5

 

These figures have been on my desk for over a year, I paint "to need" now and I have not played the Viking faction in SAGA for a while so I had no need. But of course this is why the challenge exists....to clear the lead, although in this case we should say resin.

These figures are from Brother Vinni, who really has a superb line of Dark Age figures, his Viking line is largely based on the characters from the TV show The Vikings, but that is OK as they are beautifully athromorphic casts.

I painted up a Shieldmaiden unit from a fantasy line a couple of years ago, they were nice but these are much nicer, so I will suppose the old figures will go on TMP (it really is not much use for anything else).

These were primed white and painted last week in Montreal where I only had, I believe, 12 colours! I did touch them up a bit when I got back to the US and where I also finished the basing. I mostly used glazes here with minimal uses of washes to finish off the recesses. I am improving but still a long way to go. I am pretty happy with the figures aside from the faces which are a little weak.