'Baba Yaga' - John Wick @ 1:05:48

When I saw that Spectre Miniatures had issued a limited edition figure of John Wick I knew I had to snap one up. While I've not been especially enamoured with the overall trilogy (silly assassin meta and increasing bloat), I really enjoyed the first movie's brutal simplicity.

While I was cleaning up the figure, getting it ready for priming, I was trying to recall what Wick's shirt colour was when this scene was shot. I knew he wore a white collared shirt in the earlier bar scenes, but I though he may have changed to all-black later in the film. 

1:05:48

So, for a bit of fun, I decided to spin up Netflix and watch the movie again to see if I could both sort out the shirt colour and also spot the moment where the pose originates. Sure enough, at 1:05:48 he's seen swapping his assault rifle for a pistol wearing his iconic black suit.

For painting him I used thin layers of dark grey over a black base. It should have been easy, but it was actually fiddly as heck.

One more whine: trying to photograph black on black is pure evil. I must have blazed through a hundred shots to get something workable. Thank goodness for digital cameras!

On a related note, a few people have asked what process I use for working on clear acrylic bases. Well, you can definitely use normal superglue to mount a figure, just be sparing with the glue and keep the finished work away from any moisture while it's curing as it will frost the acrylic base. A more fire-and-forget approach is to use this GS E600 glue as it doesn't frost and gives good adhesion. I don't know what it's made of (I suspect ground unicorn horns and distilled pixie tears), but it works. I picked my tube up from GreenStuff World.

Thanks for dropping in!

Pak 40 Anti Tank Gun

I was casting about my hobby room trying to figure out what to work on next, when Nick came to the rescue by tweeting me, asking what was going on with my 20mm WWII Italian Theatre project. The quick response was 'well, nothing actually', but it did make me think and prompted me to uncover a few half-completed projects I had been working on; one of them being this German Pak 40 that has been sitting on my desk for the past year or so.

This is fitting as I had done up a trio of Canadian Shermans from the Three Rivers Tank Regiment a while ago and thought that they needed some opponents to give them a bit of pause. 

This is a plastic kit from PSC. They do a very nice job on the gun, with lots of nice extra bits, but I found the figures to be a bit soft in detail. No matter, as we all know, everything looks better with a lick of paint, right? 

I had some extra MDF wall bits left over from Byron's excellent Italian buildings he designed for me and so decided to have the gun nestled in a wrecked structure, waiting in ambush. This will provide a nice anti-tank option for German players in our ongoing Italian theatre games.

Next Up: An Action Hero!

Loo Roll HazMat Team

I'm still undecided if this post is in very poor taste or ingeniously apropos... No matter, I'll put my head down, brass it out and hope for the best. I present to you a quartet of  special forces operators in badly clashing hazmat gear. 

To my way of thinking, in a perfect world, these would be the guys we'd call in to 'have a chat' with the loo roll hoarders and those tw@ts who refuse to take 20 seconds to wash their hands.

Some may think those backpack canisters hold oxygen, but I think they are just clever toilet paper holders...

These are Ebob sculpts offered through Hasslefree Miniatures. Great minis to paint, with lots of foldy relief and neat details to have fun with. I thought I'd save time using yellow contrast paint, but it all just ended up with me layering them similar to my normal method. This being said, I still enjoy the funky colours you can achieve with these paints, depending on how you mix them and on how you prepare the surface (i.e. use of various shades of grays and whites as an underlay to skew the colour saturation).

I was originally planning to put them on clear bases like my other modern skirmish stuff, but I thought that I had run out of stocks, so I muddled along without them. As it turns out I had scads of them in another drawer (facepalm), but being lazy I just dashed ahead as is. Sigh. I think they look okay.

Thanks for dropping in for a peek!

Curt

The Analogue Hobbies Quarantine Challenge

Hi All!

A few weeks ago, when the world was realising that the Covid-19 outbreak was escalating to be a VERY serious thing, we were just beginning to wrap-up the 10th Annual Painting Challenge. With more and more people going into isolation, keeping safe and taking care of those around them I thought it might be helpful to provide a space for people to keep in touch, post their hobby projects and to simply unwind. So here I present 'The Analogue Hobbies Quarantine Challenge'.

- Curt

Maltese Militia, 1565

The 1565 siege of Malta is often seen as a contest purely between the Turkish Ottomans and the Knights of St. John. Nonetheless, the realities of the campaign were much more complex and interesting. 

The 40,000 man Ottoman host was not only composed of Turks, but also drew upon the many ethnicities from its sprawling empire. Greeks, Bulgarians, Algerians, Libyans, all along with a smattering of coastal corsairs and assorted religious fanatics were allied with the Turks laying siege to the island. This provides a veritable feast of character and colour for hobbyists to represent on the gaming table. 

Also surprising (well, to me anyway), was that of the 6,000 defenders, the Knights themselves only made up about 500 of their number. Another 2000 were composed of marooned Spanish sailors, along with various companies of 'Gentlemen Adventurers' from Italy, Spain and Greece. The largest contingent of defenders (at least half of the total number) was made up of the humble Maltese themselves. 

A small number of the Maltese would have been previously trained as militia, whereas the vast majority were simple island folk, rising in defense of their island. A few of them would have had the means to possess a studded shirt and a morion helmet, but a large proportion would have fought in their civilian dress, bare limbed, indifferently armed and reduced to mere rags by the end of the siege.

The histories indicate that the Maltese were often organized into large units with a Knight or soldier of fortune acting as their leader. Several accounts depict their local priests and women sharing the risks with them.

Gaming wise, one can find many suitable figures for the Knights and gentleman adventurers, but no one that I know of that has a range of figures which specifically depict the Maltese militia. Nonetheless, like the brave Maltese themselves, there are good proxies out there that can be pressed into service. The best figures that I've come across are the Portuguese Conquistador range from Eureka Miniatures. They are wonderfully sculpted and hit the highlights of what I think a Maltese fighter would look like: bare legged, lightly armed, scruffy and most importantly: scrappy.

Eureka Conquistadores

Common weapons amongst the Maltese would have been half pikes, short swords, long knives with maybe a smattering of firearms, bows and crossbows.

A couple other figures I pressed into service (a Foundry German barbarian (left) looked just fine for a slightly hirsute Maltese)

Undoubtedly the most powerful weapons in their arsenal would have been the incendiary devices which they created in an attempt to fend off the large masses of Ottoman infantry. 

One of these were the use of pimkins, basically earthenware jars filled with an incendiary concoction (some sources say Greek Fire) with a simple fabric fuse. A rudimentary grenadoe, these pimkins would be thrown into the Ottoman ranks in the hope that they would shatter and catch fire upon impact. 

Another weapon, quite ingenious in its brutal but effective design, was the use of reed hoops that were coated with an incendiary paste. The hoops would be lit and then, using long tongs, would be thrown, or rolled towards the Ottoman formations. This weapon was  particularly nasty as it would entangle the legs and long robes of the Ottomans during their advance, causing havoc in the ranks.

I made a rendition of the burning hoops by coating a circle of florist wire with texture gel and teasing it to look, well, sorta flame-like. I made a set of them laying flat on the ground and another set with them rolling along like demonic hula-hoops, which while neat looking is probably a bit fanciful. 

Finally,  the Maltese also employed what was called the 'Trump' (I know, really...). Not much detail is recorded regarding these weapons, but it is understood that they were hollow tubes filled with incendiary fluid mounted on half pikes. 

When lit, they would gout out flames for 2-3 meters, like a crude, short-burn flamethrower. Unreliable and incredibly dangerous to friend and foe alike (and so quite appropriately named), these would be used to block off weak points in the fortifications, or in point defence to help turn back Ottoman assaults. 

Flame effect made from a 3D print.

I also picked up a few wall sections from Vatican Enterprises to represent the walls of the various Maltese strongpoints. 

Though they are not a perfect match to the Hospitalier designs (which were more blunt and angular) I think they do a good job in conveying the overall sense of the fortifications of the island, and could be used for gaming other historical periods as well (Constantinople, Vienna, Badajoz, etc.).

I especially like the damaged sections as I think they will provide great set-dressing for a a wide assortment of breaching/sally scenarios.

So there you have the beginnings of my Maltese militia, along with a bit of terrain for them to defend.

Thanks for dropping by!

Curt