Terrain – Addicted to Lead

Meager progress for the week of April 19th.

After a couple weeks of good progress I slowed down on chipping away at the lead pile. I finished one single piece that had no paint on it when the week started from my own collection, and a fist full of figures that were half finished and sitting around for two years.

What I did do was almost complete a commission of Germans from a friend. I am a slow commission painter, which is why I only take commissions from friends. This one was a large German army with over 60 figures and half a dozen vehicles and had several pieces added mid commission, but it still took me about 6 months to finish. Clearly not the kind of speed to satisfy a customer I don’t know. I was down to 20 guys when the month started, and I’ve been banging out 6ish a week. The last NCOs are half done right now with just a MMG team left to build and paint and Chris will have a full force to march in front of my Americans.

Dollar Store Finds.

Our local Dollar Tree had a couple of toys that I grabbed probably too many of and turned into wargame stuff. I’ve been hunting for a couple more things to use for scratch building some spaceships I’ll probably never actually play with, but this whole lockdown is cramping my style.

I normally don’t have much luck at dollar stores or thrift stores. I see something posted online and go search 14 dollar stores and find nothing. But these two have been consistantly in stock around me and I was able to pick up about a dozen boats and six or eight of the tanks.

This week’s painting progress.

I’ve had a productive week, especially after not getting a whole lot done in February. I’ve done two platoons of Ground Zero Games 25mm figures, so I wanted a little palette cleanser, Some variety to break up the monotony.

I keep breaking out my livestock for viking raiding games, so I figured I’d actually get more than a couple cows painted up to join my sheep and pigs. The Warlord Games farm animals are 1:56th scale with good detail, but the seams are ridiculous! I tried using the Vallejo Plastic Putty but it just wasn’t enough to fill them. The Pegasus Hobbies cows are mostly one piece, but 1:48th and have some soft details. The scale differences add some variety and I’m not too concerned about the detail level of a cow…

New toy for photographing minis!

So I’m a professional photographer. I do mostly photojournalism and portraits. The newspaper industry is in the toilet and I’m retraining to get out, but that’s not the point of this blog… What I don’t do a lot of is product photography and until yesterday I didn’t have a very key tool for doing that, a light tent. I have everything else, flashes, strobes, hot lights, stands, tripods… Closets and cases full of stuff. I wanted to not only start this blog but also sell some stuff I’m never going to use again, so I bit the bullet and spent $20 on this.

I’m planning on selling the buildings/ruins I made here in a couple weeks after a large Bolt Action event I’m helping to run, so I figured they’d be my first subject!

These were all built to represent ruins (hard cover/obstacles) in Bolt Action for a very large multi-player game representing the battle in Achen. I donated a bunch to the club and don’t have the space to store these anymore.