3 little Marauder Goblins by Trish Carden

Over on the Oldhammer Facebook page, Trish Carden from Marauder Miniatures fame has been posting the original green sculpts of many of her models. To celebrate her work and contribution, JB has suggested we all paint up some of her miniatures from back in the day, under the hashtag, #makeatrish.

 I already have a unit of those Marauder Goblins (only missing one for the entire collection of sculpts) and saw this as a perfect opportunity to paint a few of them up for this celebration. It's always nice to have an additional reason to paint up some of my collection.

These are 3 of my favourite sculpts from the series and I chose 3 because I wanted to make sure I got them completed in time and anything more than that would have led me down the path of tedious batch painting. (I'll leave that for a future painting session).

So here they are, showing a bit of courage  in numbers...

 They were painted in one evening and based in another. Pretty quick to work on as there was only a limited palette and once the skin and metal are done, there's very little left to paint!

 This is a classic pose with raised weapon and shield, but I like how he's hiding behind his shield and how his chainmail hood pretty much covers his eyes. Of course it's great that he's armed with an old hammer.

 This one has a less obvious pose, a goblin with an additional weapon! Brave not to be hiding behind a shield!. He's also got a sly intelligence to his face which I think is typical of a Goblin.

 Finally my favourite of the three. He's got a great dynamic pose with the sword resting on the shield ready to attack and he has the most evil looking face of the three with those pointy ears and nose. A little snarl in the right side of his mouth is perfect.

So if you weren't aware of Trish's sculpting you are now and of course there's many other classic Marauder and GW sculpts that she's created for us to paint. I have about another 20 odd to go from this range! 

Lasercut MDF buildings and Salute

Earlier this month I took my first trip to Salute, having seen and heard many a great thing about the event in London. I could only visit for the afternoon, so time was short but I managed to see lots of amazing set-ups, boards, games and stalls, even if I did not have time to actually game. 

I have plenty of models to paint, so even though I was very tempted to buy some Mierce monsters or some Hasslefree adventurers or some of the other amazing (and unknown to me) company's models, I decided that I wanted to try out some of the lasercut scenery. I eventually settled upon the below, both at about £15 each from different stands; unfortunately I have forgotten the names of the brands now. Below is a three storied Tudor manor house; each layer comes apart:

As you can see, I have made a few moderations. Even though the kits are wonderful in terms of how easy they are to construct and how good they look as scale buildings, they do understandably, lack any texture. This is most obvious in the roof and and the brickwork. So I reverted to the tried and tested cereal packet cardboard shingles for the roof and decided to carve into the mortar between stones as seen below. This technique did not take as long as expected because the laser cutter had created an outline that had enough depth that meant that I could dig out a layer with my scalpel for the stone work to remain raised.

Below is a watermill model, where I just did not add the watermill to the side. I've made the same moderations as above to improve the texture of the building. I'll probably add some sand/pva for some mossy areas too.

On reflection, these mdf lasercut models are very easy to work with and relatively cheap too. They are certainly quicker to put together than any of the scratchbuilt/foamcard models that I have previously made. I think they will sit well alongside each other and I intend to continue investing time and money into both. Scratchbuilding will lend itself well to some of the more unique ideas for buildings that I have.

I also had time to enter the 'Eavier Metal speed painting competition. We were given a Mantic model, some paint (in bottles and already out on a palette, some brushes, water and 20minutes to paint. It was intense! Being out of my comfort zone (not having my own equipment) an audience (I had one woman leaning over my shoulder as I painted!) and a time limit was sweat inducing and I had to make some very quick decisions about colour schemes based upon the colours that were available. I jumped into the skin tones first, going for multiple washes and tried to paint other areas as they dried. My hand was not as steady as I was used too and I really struggled when it came to doing some quick highlights and details. The time flew by and I just about managed to finish and was lucky enough to be chosen by the judges as a winner for my group! I won a lovely Eavier Metal mug for my efforts!

Salute was great, next time I will make sure I have time to get some games of new games in and maybe meet up with a few people I know.

Painting of the buildings is underway and I will post updates on those next.

Bandai Y-Wing 1:72

I'm having building work done on my house which means that I've had to lose my hobby space. I wasn't in the best run of form anyway, so this has really hampered my productivity. To get out of the dust zone, my kids and I went to my parents for the weekend and as is customary, I had a rummage around my old bedroom in the hope of finding a few nuggets of nostalgia and hopefully old models! Well I found one! A boxed Bandai Y-Wing (1:72) that I received for Christmas a few years ago. Joy. With my parents taking the kids out for the day, I set to work on constructing the tiny, detailed model.

Having worked on some quite difficult Airfix models with my son (small fiddly bits that need lots of gluing and don't fit particularly well) I was amazed that I did not need any glue to make successfully build this and the level of detail and quality was pretty astounding. I would definitely recommend these kits to any serious model-maker.

I wish I had the larger scale version to fit in with my Star Wars Imperial Assault minis, but I can imagine creating a diorama where this hangs in the sky, it's smaller scale lost in the perspective of distance.

Once the kit was built the yellows were painted on (rather than use the rubbish decals) and then the weathering which was done very quickly. Without applying a primer, I washed a dirty brown, very dilute oil paint mixture over the entire model and when dry applied a further range of acrylic washes over this including blacks for the burnt effect near the engines and browns over some of the pipes. A few of the details, including the pilot, droid and lights were then picked out with acrylic paint.

Overall it was a very enjoyable day making and painting this. Back home, I've established a temporary site for my hobby exploits, so (fingers crossed) expect a few more posts in the near future of a variety of different projects.