Prime Time!

This past Sunday, I took advantage of the nice spring weather to prime up my Rogue Trader/30k Mashup army:

15 Rogue Trader plastic beakie marines!

These guys will follow the Heresy Era Death Guard paint scheme I worked on a while back.

Mordheim Dwarf

This is the first right proper dwarf I've painted up:

His hair is painted with orange and red using the original Citadel Paints from the Space Marines set (the orange is supposed to be the highlight color for Blood Angels!).  Rest of the paint is all Delta Ceramcoat.

Real Flagstone Slotta Bases

Bad news - my front walkway, made of flagstone, is disintegrating.  Each spring, the results of the prior winter show more damage, with broken bits scattered across my lawn.

Good news - I've got a huge, renewable supply of basing materials!

I've used broken flagstone bits on lots of mini bases, to excellent results (see here), if I may humbly say.  However, as my collection has trended towards older minis, the challenge of basing slotta tabs has prevented me from using the endless supply of detritus - until now!

It's not yard waste, its free basing material!

Lord of the Rings Miniatures - The Fellowship Returns

These old plastic hobbits aren't of very good quality, especially in comparison to the more detailed metal versions below.  I can see why so many hobbyists were metal snobs, though the sculpts companies are now doing in plastic is quite amazing.

After a nice spring break away from the hobby table, I returned home to my piles of unpainted minis calling for attention.

I have a long term goal of replicating a small piece of the battle of Helm's Deep.  I've built a rough approximation of the redoubt out of foam and bought the fellowship and a few bad guys.

More recently I procured a pile of Uruk Hai and, facing a long cycle of batch paintings, I realized I better paint up the more famous faces before I tired of painting within the lines.

After a few nights, here's where the first group of minis stand:

These two came pre-painted, but not well.  I probably should have stripped them, but have so many other projects, I just tried to touch them up as best as possible.  

This is a great sculpt, but it took three tries to get the face to resemble Gollum.  Still not happy, but done nonetheless.

My favorites of the bunch, these metal minis really captured the likeness of Elijah Woods and Sean Astin.  Very fun to paint up, despite their small stature.  

Merry and Pippen weren't at Helms Deep, but I may pretend otherwise, just so these two can get some action.

These two are plastic sculpts, though the poor detail is less noticeable on these larger minis, as opposed to the hobbits.

Metal on the left, plastic on the right.  

Metal Gandalf, looking quite grey.

We just finished watching the last Hobbit movie last night.  While I sort-of enjoyed the Hobbit series overall, the last one fell far short of the standard set by the series as a whole (though I did enjoy seeing the Laketown architecture, in all its Mordhiem-ish glory).

I'm hoping to rekindle some of the magic from the original LOTR films, of which the Two Towers was my favorite.  They were a remarkable achievement in filmmaking, and it's a shame to see their pop culture impact fading.

Cheap Flagstone Bases - step by step

I've recently been making good progress on my small Mordheim board, and I hope to post more on that soon.  In the meantime, I wanted to get some bases that matched up well with the flagstone texture on my board.  I'm getting sick of all my minis standing on bases coated in sand.  

Having looked at some of the great resin bases on the market, I found three problems.  First, the bases are expensive and I am cheap.  Second. they don't really match up well with the particular pattern on my board.  Third, I couldn't find any slotta base styles and I didn't want to cut off the mini tabs. 

So, I decided to home-brew my own bases with stuff I had on hand.  I used a spackle/glue mix on my Mordheim buildings to replicate stucco and I decided to do something similar on the bases.  Like home-brewing beer, results were mixed, so consider this a bit of an experiment.  I'll try to point out some of the mistakes I made, so you can avoid them!

Here's the "ingredients":