Just stop listening to me.

Recently I mentioned that I was looking at trying to figure out why I dropped my 28mm projects (other than money and space consumption being the issue). I have, in the last few days, been spending time looking over all of my old 28mm figures and I think I have it all figured out. For the 6mm range of figures there is no push or drive to increase the detail or quality of the figures as I paint them. I say this because I do not want to strain my eyes and I feel that the point of 6mm miniatures is being able to throw 5000 to 10000( or more) figures on the table and not even bat an eye. There is also that cost benefit as the price per figure for 6mm is very very small. It is also a way to tackle projects that I would never even be able to dream of affording or storing, such as the Eagles of Heresy project( masses of Titans and tanks is not something people can easily handle).

On the other hand, I look at 28mm figures and see the opportunity to add in lots of detail and to improve my painting skill. The Sons of the Emperor project ( still waiting for Kabuki to release the next figure that I am looking for) has kind of been a test bench for improving my painting skills. These results can be seen in the Lord of the Rings diorama that I made for my Dad last year. This has led to a revival of my Roman Legions and has such led to a revival of my 28mm Napoleonics.

Now this is not an all in revival, but it is a revival. I still plan on working quite heavily on the Romans and in the back ground begin the process of updating the paint job on my Napoleonics AND I am going to be redoing the bases for my Napoleonics. Thankfully in that respect I have been basing my miniatures with wood glue and all it takes to remove the figures from their bases is a few minutes of submersion of the base in water. With this new plan in mind I have gone through my 28mm Napoleonics, organized the storage of those figures, assessed what I have painted, what I have waiting to be painted, what I have yet to assemble, and what I need to close up some gaps in Battalions. This has led to some test paint jobs and to some test of the clean up process that will be taking place in the near future.

Big difference in paint job.

I will probably tackle the re-basing and repainting in a Battalion by Battalion process as I do not want to get in over my head. For the basing, I have been wanting to improve my basing technique for a while and I have purchased a lot of supplies to that extent. So look for lots of random stuff in the future.

The Fellowship of the Ring

At the beginning of last year I began a little side project to create for my Dad a little diorama. My Dad is a big fan of the Fellowship of the Ring movie and of the first Hobbit movie. I would have liked to paint all of the 13 dwarves, Bilbo, and Gandalf since the Hobbit movie had just come out at the time. However getting hold of some good figures of all of the characters from Games Workshop would have been really pricey and probably  would have taken more time than I had to do the project. As such I chose to go with the Finecast Fellowship of the Ring set. I also ended up purchasing the terrain set that GW provides for their Lord of the Rings line.

Each one of these figures is a resin miniature and were thankfully designed in such a way that each figure was one piece. This was a really nice feature as sometimes dealing with multi-part metal or resin miniatures is a royal pain. I will also give GW a lot of credit on the formula that is used for the resin in their miniatures. This resin has a really good blend of stiffness and flexibility, although I did push this to the max at one point and caused myself a bit of consternation.

In painting these figures this was the first time I had ever worked in the realm of the Lord of the Rings universe. I have been a HUGE long time fan of the universe as it is laid out in the books and I think that visually Peter Jackson and GW have done an excellent job of bringing Tolkien's vision into the real world. My praise for Peter Jackson stops there. I would go on a rant/tangent about what I think has been horribly screwed up and has made subsequent additions to the theatrical franchise a total and utter money seeking farce. But that is a post for anther day. Back on topic starting right now.  Since this was my first time painting these particular characters I spent a bit of time looking for pictures of the cast in their garb as they are represented by the miniatures. I even spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get certain looks from the paints I had on hand. The experiences I have gained from my other projects really came to the for in this project. I am by no means a pro competition grade painter. I am also not a 3 year old with hand paints either. Hear are the results.

Legolas

Aragorn

Boromir

Gimli

Gandalf

Pippin

Merry

Frodo

Sam

I still have some work to do. I have never done elves before and trying to get their fair and non-human look down right is a bit tricky. I also still need to work on the eyes of my miniatures. These ones are a far cry from the anime style bug eyes I had when I first started. But sometimes they come off wrong.

The display case was purchased from Squadron.com and is basically a converted vehicle display case. I did a little bit of terrain stuff, but I wanted to keep it fairly simple as the whole purpose of this was to show case the Fellowship. Not go crazy with the terrain. I also decided to do something rather radical for me at least. I went ahead and combined two different flock types to get what I consider to be a better color grass. Also the entire base is painted. I did not do any highlighting or dry brushing as the color of the terrain material that I used was grey and I did not go super heavy with the brown paint. I think the result gave me a decent look.

Final result. I think it I did a rather good job. Will I do this again in the future? Yes. This was a lot of fun to do. I have begun to find a lot of enjoyment in doing one off miniatures, as in spending a lot of time with a single miniature or a group of them as seen in my Sons of the Emperor project(Update on that soon). Not going full bore nuts like some of the competition people do. But being able to put more than a couple of hours into each figure and trying out different paint schemes. The added bonus is that since this was a gift I do not feel like I have purchased miniatures for no purpose other than to satisfy my vanity. There are a ton of miniatures out there that I would like to paint. But finding reasons to validate purchasing miniatures that will not be part of one of my bigger projects is difficult. Will there lots of updates on them? No. This was done as a gift for my Dad and as he watches my Blog I have no intention in giving away information on surprise gifts. Will there be more of these coming along each year. Due to other projects, that thing called college, and that thing called life I believe that I will only be doing one of these a year. I already have a head full of ideas on what to do next. It is just a matter of money and time at this point. Also some of the projects take a little bit of thinking to figure out how to do it right.

Worst feeling ever

So I have come to the conclusion that the worst feeling a hobbyist can ever have is as follows. I am currently at work wanting to paint some miniatures. IF that was not bad enough, the miniatures that I want to paint are 77 miles away at my parents house. Smooth move. Real smooth. Chances of going to my parents house between now and March.... wait for it..... wait for it...... ZERO PERCENT!  This would happen just when I got back to my apartment.

More French Cavalry

Quick update as promised for my 6mm Napoleonics. I am now down to only two more units of French Cavalry to paint (squeals of utter delight ringing in my head at the moment). These are two regiments of Hussars. The 1st and 4th Regiments of Hussars. They form part of the French I Cavalry Corps.

1st Hussars

4th Hussars

After these next two Regiments of Chassuers are painted up I will be moving on to a small amount of French Artillery and limbers. This of course includes any continued work on my Epic 40k miniatures.

Slogging on

It has been a while since I did a post and I apologize for that. The lack of posts has not been due to a lack of work, it is more due to a choice really. That choice being that I can either post a lot of tiny little blurbs on what I am doing or just do a single big post on all that has been happening. And with my school schedule the latter becomes easier.

Sooooo what have I been doing. Despite what the following pictures show, I have been doing a lot. I'll start with terrain. As I noted in a previous post I had decided to go back a redo a lot of the pathetic excuses that I had for terrain and so far so good. I have successfully made a lot of (still want more) wooden zig-zag fences as well as starting  to get under way with producing stone walls. I improved my hedges and even did a test tree stand which I will produce more of when I am done making fences and stone walls. I still have a way to go on getting all the fences done though as I need to spray paint all of them, but I lack the facilities to do that at my apartment sadly. So when I go home in July for a week I will be doing a lot of preparatory work to enable me to continue working on the terrain and miniatures.

A look at what I have been doing.

Next up is a 6mm Napoleonic update. I just finished three more regiments of Dragoons and used two of the regiments to finish off another French Cavalry Division. I realize now that I made one tiny little (more like really big) mistake in the way I ordered all of my 6mm Napoleonic figures. I bought a tone of French Cavalry. I mean a tone of it. I will have 43 French Cavalry regiments by the time I am done painting just what I own currently. What is even more ironic is that I have gotten really good at painting French Dragoons as they make up the majority of the French Cavalry arm( I have painted 15 regiments of the 30 I have info on). But the end is in sight.... kind of. All that is left is 1 regiment of Lancers, 2 regiments of Hussars, and 2 regiments of Chasseurs.

The French 7th Cav Division.

The 6th Dragoons.

The 16th Dragoons.

The 2nd Dragoons.

After I finish all of these French Cavalry regiments I will be onto more French Artillery and finally (almost a year after I had planned to start them) onto the Russians.

Lastly I am really excited as I get closer to finally making an order for 6mm American Civil War Miniatures. I plan on doing this some time next month and it will be a kind of kick starter on this project. I plan of focusing on the Eastern theater of the war and will be starting with armies based on the Gettysburg Order of Battle. The first major units I will be building will be the I Corps under John Reynolds and two of A.P. Hill's three divisions, plus John Buford's two Cavalry brigades that were at Gettysburg( His third one was else where). As you can see this will be a Gettysburg day one starter and from there I will develop the armies so that I can do anything before Gettysburg and after Gettysburg. With this new project there are going to be some changes from the Napoleonic 6mm project as I want to make this project distinct as there are a lot of difference between the two periods in terms of army organization. I'll talk more about that later. So stay tuned for more updates.