From KevH: 28mm Napoleonic Westphalian Infantry, 54mm Medievals & 15mm WWII German Prime Mover (397 points)

From Kev:

It has been a while since my last post and I have been painting.

I also have my Mrs painting at last, been showing her the ropes and she is helping me with my Siege project. She is currently painting the missile units, she is a bit slow, but getting there.

First up are some 28mm Westphalians (commission work). A battalion of 24 figures with command and a mounted General de Brigade. All 28mm Front Rank miniatures. I have two more of these and one light btn as part of the commission.

Next up is my first 54mm Medievals for "Siege" This is a castle game I have been working on for the last year. The rules are now complete and ready for play testing. I now know how many figures and type will be in each unit.

The castle was started a few months back and is a toy castle from Simba. This painted up quite nicely and with the added thickness of some styrene is starting to look the part. I have built it in modular sections with some breaches made for entry for the attackers. I have siege engines, ladders, boiling oil and all sorts of nasties for this and it should prove to be quite a bit of fun to play. It will accomodate 1 defender (holding the castle) and as many attackers as wants to play, great for a demo game.

All in the lovely 54mm scale. All These medievals are plastic 54mm Accurate miniatures. They are painted in a pretty basic block style. The reason being, my Mrs is painting some of them and these are the first thing she has ever painted. They are based in singles and will be handled a lot, so easier to touch up.

They are a really soft plastic, unlike the ECW I have been painting that is a quite hard plastic. A few are conversions as the poses are quite limited...

The seige rules will be available on my blog for anybody interested in a stupidly simple set of siege rules.

And finally, a 15mm Battlefront Miniatures German Famo Tractor. (Hopefully to stop me bogging, lol.) DAK paint job to go with my recent panzers. 

I picked this up at Hammerhead in Newark a couple of weeks back.

Horrid cast, and a real pig to fit together. The resin on the underside was still soft and stank vile. I painted over it and and the matt varnish seems to have sealed it ok. The BF Mins really need to sort out there quality control. At £8, its not cheap. Quick paint job though and its fits in with my tanks perfectly.

Super stuff Kev! It's nice that your wife is joining you in the hobby - its a great way to spend time together (I know of others who use it for precisely the opposite reason!).

I'll definitely be looking at your siege rules as I have an old Citadel castle (yes, the Old Skool high-density foam one) sitting in storage, waiting to be brought out again.

This eclectic batch of goodies will give Kev a staggering 397 points! This will allow him to close the gap and bring him within striking range of the top two Challengers. Well done!

From RobP: 28mm ACW Irish Brigade & Monks (273 points)

From Rob:

Here is my latest entry to the Painting Challenge.

I conclude the Irish Brigade with the 28th Massachussetts and the 116th Pennsylvania... These are all Foundry figs except the 28th standard bearers wich are  Steve Barber conversions... I was running out of command figs and do not want to double up so I had to come up with an alternative; nothing that a spare cossack arm cannot be used for....

The Foundry figs are among the best ACW I have seen; clean without mouldlines and full of character and paint up easily. I have used them before as they make the bulk of my  Confederate brigades. I know people tend to think they are over expensive but they currently have changed policy on shipping and offer a good deal on larger orders.. I am planning on  doing another Union brigade in a few months and will definitely use their figures.

Also some Brigade command and casualty markers; all Redoubt figures. The Redoubt Command sets are excellent and I have used them also within my Reb troops.  Being the Irish Brigade one would expect to see Meagher and Kirby instead of generic command figures. They will be up next included in the final batch I am currently finishing. 

Having kept my focus on this project I did however wander off sometimes and painted other bits and pieces in between.. Mostly little stuff that can be used to give our group's gaming table a more lively look.. This time I include some figures that can be used for Dark Ages or Peninsular, or even downed pilots if you are familiar with the ´Allo ´Allo series.... These men of the cloth are Qualitycast figures (where have they gone??) and have been fun to paint. I will enhance my procession overtime with more faithfull followers to litter our gaming table.. 

This batch will more then double my current score and puts me right on track of an average of 250 pts a month to achieve my challenge...

Beautiful work Rob! Your Irish Brigade looks marvelous and the command stand is brilliant, but I am eager to see Meagher and Kirby in your next submission. Those monks are very nice as well - I'd like to source some of these to go with my existing Foundry Dark Age monks...

This entry will give Rob a very respectable 273 points. Bravo, well done!

From ScottB: 28mm Goblins from 'The Hobbit' (180 points)

From Scott:

I burned a bit of the midnight oil last night and finished off the 36 goblins I have been working on, off and on, since the beginning of the challenge.

The quality of the plastic sculpts was very good, and the amount of mould line to scrape away was minimal. As for painting them up I was in a slight dilemma as to what colour to paint them. They were not going to be classic 'green' as the majority of the Moria goblins are.

In the movie they come across as having a yellowish hue, yet a lot of stock pictures show them with a pale grey skin colour. I can only assume the lighting effect in the movie from the flaming torch-lit caverns of GoblinTown would have cast a yellow colour to their actual pale grey skin.

So I went with the pale grey base tone.

After this they had shading washes and heavy drybrushing to set the flesh tones. The loin cloths and equipment were painted up, and finally the disgusting spotty lumps and bumps were given red and purple washes and the yellow spot heads added, just ripe for popping! An adolescent kid would have a field day on these buggers! ;-)

Finally facial features were added, including eyes and teeth/mouths.

I have to confess to the eyes not being the best - normally I do the eyes at the mid point of the models, but with so many washes and dry brushing going on they would probably have got messed up, so I left them to the end. Typically by which point my fine detail brush had given up the ghost! So with nothing good to hand to dot the pupils I resorted to trimming a cocktail stick to a sharp point and used that! Not the most accurate way of doing things and some of the eyes went a little off centre, but in the end I think it actually added to the character of the mis-shaped limbs and general ungainly poses. Bases were PVA sand textured and painted and drybrushed.

So I am rather happy with the way they turned out. Suitably loathsome!

So now I need to finish off the Goblin King, his throne, 2 Goblin Captains and the scribe. Then the 13 dwarves, Bilbo and Gandalf who are all undercoated... And there is still an LOTR Groblog Goblin King (that's 2 goblins kings on my table at the same time!) and a Victorian EotD police inspector to finish off!

Hopefully I'll get these done before the deadline!

Wow, you've done a superb job on these, Scott. I really like the blue/grey skin tone and I love the disgusting buboes - they really are quite zit-tastic! Painting eyes with sharpened cocktail sticks?!! Awesome. This 'technique' reminds me of my first efforts at 14 with fabric pins and testors oil paints - though my results were, ahem, rather less successful than yours!

This mob of acned goblins will give Scott 180 points. Well done!

From JohnM: 28mm Dwarves from 'The Hobbit' (60 points)

From John:

The minute I saw these figures last weekend in the GW store in Montreal, I knew that I had to have them. They are just really cool. Painting them was great because I could see immediately how I wanted to paint them. No googling away this time. 

Here we have 12 dynamic poses of heavily armoured dwarves. It took a bit of time assembling them, but all in all they went together easily. 

They were primed white, I know this sounds strange, but the car primer I use, has really a great bite. They were then airbrushed with the old GW Boltgun Metal. I then heavily washed them with a really oldie Citadel Tin Blitz. A very new paint Citadel Dry Necron Compound was brushed on. 

The beards and the clothing was then painted and AP Dark Tone was sparingly applied. I then touched up only the beards and the clothes with AP brush on Antishine, leaving a lot of the metal shiny. I really like how they came out. 

I will leave the Hobbit now and get back to some Napoleonics.

Lovely work John. I really like how you did their armour - you're getting very good with the airbrush (something I've never had the patience for). I'll have to try out some of the Necron compound as it seems to give a very nice effect.

These dozen dwarves will give John 60 points. Good stuff!