Return from Crisis II

Apart from the paper, I also brought home some wargaming terrain: I had been looking out for a game mat that I could use for both Frostgrave and Sci Fi (of course I had originally started out for two). I ended up buying a 4'x4' mat from Kraken. I was swayed by the guy from Kraken showing a WH 40K battle report video which used this mat and it looked dead on.

Last year I bought quite a lot of styrofoam stuff to build large stone buildings for Frostgrave. But as I've got two left hands, I have never actually dared building anything without adult supervision. So this year I decided to just buy a bunch of ready made ruins which I can quickly assemble and actually use.

Finally, I also got some Footsore miniatures to round off my Anglo-Saxon army for Hastings. That's part of the annual project from the Dutch Miniature Wargames facebook group, this year themed for the high and late Middle Ages. More about that later.

Ooh! And the guinea pigs!

Bats, Rats and More Rats

Spray painting and simple designs have actually got me going! After some tests in the last month, this week I set in motion an old project.

I had bought quite a few sets of Warhammer swarms in a sale. So I've got 25 each of bats, rats, spiders and goblins. Oh yes, and six bases with metal rat swarms. So on a sunny morning I applied the can.

Spray painting was easy, but I decided to try two different sets of rats: some with a light (bone white) base coat, and the rest brown.

I then started off on five bats, to see what effect might be achieved with drybrushing. I actually did some reseach on bats and that's why they look so cuddly.

These are the metal rat swarms. I just love those pink tails! More on the big rats later.

The biggest pleasure is of course that I got it all done in a few hours. All this goes really well with a Skaven army, but is also really handy in stand alone dungeoneering. There's still a bunch of spiders lurking in the box but that will be a bit harder to spray paint due to their model.

The Shadow Host

Today I had the urge to finish a bunch of miniatures that I had in my cross hairs for some time. It´s a set of great looking warriors of the cursed kingdom under the southern mountains from the War of the Ring range by Games Workshop. They're plastics and wonderfully sculpted with great dynamism.

The Shadow Host

I knew they should be relatively easy to do. A couple of months I got them out and glued them together and on slotta bases. Then nothing happened for a long time.

Even when I bought a can of  black spray paint for the base coat, a Saturday ago, I actually didn´t expect much to happen. However, the next Tuesday I actually got those guys out and subjected them to a black storm.

And today I wanted to see how I could achieve the desired effect, so I started on a few minis to try out the dry brushing followed by a green wash and then a another dry brush for highlights. They had to look ghostly.

I was so pleased, I finished them all of in two further short sessions. And I'm pretty pleased with the result, although it still needs a layer (or two) of varnish and some basing. This was of course the easiest of the easiest of paint jobs, so nothing to be proud of. If only all painting could be that simple.