Category Archives: Side projects

Happy Commencement of New Arbitrary Terran Orbital Cycle

04 Monday Jan 2021

Posted by in Dragon Rampant, Side projects

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Greeting Terrans, and if you are reading this, congratulations on getting to 2021 with your sanity intact. What a year eh? I’m a firm believer that pushing one’s comfort zone is good for your growth & wellbeing, but last year really did stress that outlook to a whole new level. It seems that every single assumed ‘truth’ that I understood about myself and my life in 2019 was deeply flawed… Things I thought were unconditional had conditions. Stuff I believed could never happen happened. Things that I took for granted were taken away, or were very nearly lost. The shock of these events was disorientating and deeply unpleasant, but I’ve certainly learned a lot & grown along the way. Here is a summary of my key takeaways:

  • People (and by extension, societies) are not always rational – get over it
  • A life is precious to those it affects, otherwise it is an abstract – get over it
  • Even the most secure workplace can be forced to make cuts – get over it
  • Fair-weather friends are just that – get over it
  • Some people can’t disagree without being disagreeable – get over it
  • I am not the Covid police – get over it
  • Never miss an opportunity to show someone you love that you love them
  • I wouldn’t want to swap my issues for anyone else’s issues
  • Get rid of shit that doesn’t enhance your life (and don’t replace it with other shit)
  • Don’t make your happiness & self-worth contingent on anyone or anything
  • Staying fit is hard… Being unfit is also hard… chose your hard!
  • Take a moment to be grateful for what you have every single day

I have cleared up my life & ditched a whole bunch of crap I didn’t need, both literal and metaphorical. I have refocused my energies into areas that deserve my attention and efforts, and I have pulled back from those areas that don’t. I feel a little older & maybe a bit more cynical, but I’m a hell of a lot wiser in terms of understanding those things that are most important to me. I honestly think that one day I’ll look back on 2020 as a defining year that led to some positive personal outcomes despite the trials and tribulations along the way.

Anyway, I know you came here to see painted minis rather than listen to my bollocks, (ok, not literally – that would be weird), so let’s get to it. During my mass-clear-out I found a whole load of minis that came with two kickstarters from Monolith Games, (Mythic Battles: Pantheon and Conan) and Rising Sun from CMON. I went through a phase of backing shit like this, but with no idea how I was going to paint all the stuff, learn the game, play, etc…  Pretty wasteful really, and definitely not in keeping with my drive to clear out crap.

I decided that the games per se didn’t do it for me & so I got rid of all the associated guff, but I thought that the minis were ideal for having some Father/Son time with my youngest during Christmas lockdown – if he fancied it. We had a chat, and he was pretty positive about it, so he helped me to sort the minis by type & selected those he most wanted to paint. A short time later & we had cranked out Ares, a trio of Argonauts, five Hoplites and Leonidas – I helped by painting in parallel with him to speed the process up, but not by doing it all for him. Here’s what we ended up with:

Nice!!

As we were painting, we naturally got to talking about having a game with them, so I got out my copy of Dragon Rampant & worked out a list for his Ancient Greeks, and another using my Greek-themed Dark Elves. DR is a cracking little rule set, very easy to pick up & understand, and is totally agnostic when it comes to minis… Perfect for a simple throw-down with a youngling! We played a couple of games over the weekend, winning one each for a very satisfactory outcome:

So, in a roundabout way, 2020 has led me up to this. Having a good clear-out unearthed these minis, and lockdown gave me ample opportunity to spend quality time with my youngest. This surplus of time meant that the slow art of painting and gaming managed to get a look-in against the many & various forms of electronic entertainment – no mean feat these days!

Most of all, 2020 taught me to be grateful for that quality time with him, and I am looking forward to more of the same – he’s already plotting what units he needs to add to make his first army even more formidable 😊

Anyway, that’s all for now. Keep buggering on ya buggers & I’ll catch you next time.

Populating Spero Secundus part 2

16 Thursday Jul 2020

Posted by in Side projects

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Greetings Terrans, and sorry it has taken such a long time to get this done – life got very busy recently, and I had a bit of painter’s block as well, but we’re all on track this week, so welcome to the second post where I share my efforts to populate my made-up Imperial world Spero Secundus! This time, we are venturing deep into the sump of Hive Terminus… Now, a bit of background for you – Terminus is an interesting place in my made-up Imperial world… Originally, it was one of three hive cities on Spero Secundus’ single continent, it was nuked by Hive Sevelli a century or more ago, marking the close of a nasty civil war. Terminus was reduced to a 100 mile wide pile of irradiated rubble surrounded by miles of radioactive desert where the sand had been fused into glass. However, beneath the surface of the rubble, several domes remained intact, and they became the desperate battleground of the survivors of the nuclear storm… Basically, it’s a super-fun sandbox for me as a GM, and my party had a blast hunting Sump-Spiders and fighting off hordes of cannibal rad-mutants… it is these rad-mutants that are the subject of this post.

When mulling over what to use as rad-mutants, my thoughts inevitably went to the Nurgle range (pox-walkers and so on), but I really didn’t want to go buy any new models… besides, the pox-walkers are pretty well defined as what they are, and I didn’t think them generic enough. I also thought about the old Zombie kit, but that kit really is a bit of a stinker (pun intended) and is long overdue an overhaul… Then I remembered that I had an old ‘Escape from Goblin Town’ set from The Hobbit range. I figured that the malformed little shits in that box would be perfect for generic rad-mutants, and looking through the box confirmed my suspicions. The sculpts are a little weird – they are all single pose one piece affairs, with odd bits of poor definition here and there… I suspect this is a by-product of the production approach that GW used for this rabble… they are ridiculously inexpensive, and you really do get an awful lot for your money… even now, 36 of these fellas can be bought for a mere £30!!

I also had the Goblin King’s Captain and Lieutenant to paint and add to the mob, plus I decided to paint the King himself, though more as a painting exercise than with any gaming application in mind. All in all, this gave me 39 models to paint, so not a trivial task. I did toy with the idea of 40k-ifying them, but decided against in in the end… I kinda like that they are generic enough as they are, and wouldn’t want to root them too firmly in any particular genre or system. I also briefly considered converting out the duplicates, but I didn’t bother in the end… I didn’t think the juice would be worth the squeeze, and I just couldn’t be arsed! (I did use some technical paints to add some texture here and there, but hardly what I would call a conversion). Anyway, here they are in all their glory:

 

They all got the same basic treatment with the paint brush – a white zenithal spray over black undercoat followed by either a purple or crimson wash all over. The flesh was highlighted up with Rakarth Flesh and then a white glaze, while the wood & leather was picked out in Snakebite Leather contrast paint. Boils and pustules got a yellow wash, and the metal work & bone was picked out in my usual way. Finally, I picked out the eyes & teeth, and added some blue or green wash here & there (like a spot of blue shade under the eyes for example), and used a dab more crimson wash for particularly sore bits… The Goblin King had much more attention paid to him, and was really a very nice exercise in blending nasty looking flesh tones:

 

Here are a few different genre shots to show how versatile they are:

 

Anyhow, that’s all for now – I’ll be continuing with the drive to populate Spero Secundus next time with a visit to Hive Verento!

 

 

 

Populating Spero Secundus part 1

22 Monday Jun 2020

Posted by in OldHammer, Side projects

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Greetings Terrans, I hope you are all safe and well during this age of strife. Sorry about the delay getting this post out – it has been a rough couple of weeks, and I actually thought I posted this a fortnight ago! Still, better late than never, and as I promised on my last post, I have been working on more mooks to populate my made-up Imperial Hive World – Spero Secundus. I have had vague plans to do this for a number of years, but since running an online RPG set there, I have been far more motivated to actually get it done. As such, these are all old projects that have been resurrected in this lockdown world we find ourselves in.

First up, the full group of survivors from the shattered rad-wastes of Hive Terminus (including the six test pieces from a few weeks back):

Again, these are de-badged Tallarns with a bit of Greenstuff added to give most them full face coverings & goggles or visors. The only one that is really noteworthy is the chap with the turban – a Tallarn who gave his head to a project a few years ago, and got one back from one of Wargames Foundry ‘Time Warped Wizards’. A few bits and bobs were used to give him a psyker vibe – he makes for a good shamanistic leader or tribal elder I think.

Next up, the Malocchio household guard (again, including previous test models and the nobles of House Malocchio from 2015!!):

Not much to say about these guys – same paint job as before, and no conversions to talk about, but man, I really do like these guys 😊

 

And a final little set up showing a wee skirmish (because who can resist setting up little vignettes like this when you have your toy soldiers handy):

 

And that’s about it folks! Not a hugely exciting post I suppose, but rattling through these minis at speed has an enjoyment factor of its own… All in all, I don’t think I spent more than 20 hours on this lot, so to have 2 decent skirmish level forces finished to a reasonable standard in such a short time is a nice achievement. Next time, we’ll be delving deep into the irradiated & mutant-filled sump of Hive Terminus…   Stay safe out there!

Something old, something new…

26 Tuesday May 2020

Posted by in Daemon Ink, OldHammer, Side projects

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nothing borrowed, and fuck all blue!

Greetings Terrans, how goes it? I’ve got a bit of a mixed bag to share with you today – a bit of speed painted cannon-fodder, and a couple of intricate minis. First up, the speedy stuff.

I’ve mentioned the rpg/virtual tabletop/inq28/Frostgrave mashup thingy that I’m running with some of my hobby homies – well, a lot of the campaign ideas have been kicking around in my skull for a good few years. It is set on a world called Spero Secundus, and originally, it was going to be a sequence of linked tabletop battles with the outcome of one game influencing the next. Over the years I’ve collected some miniatures with this in mind, and playing through the campaign in virtual has given me the urge to dig them out and get some paint on them!

First up, we have some Rad Waste types – the backstory for these guys is that they are the survivors of Hive Terminus – the hive got nuked about a century ago, and so these guys are the ancestors of the survivors. They exist in the ruins of the hive, or in the surrounding wastes. The minis are Tallarn from GW, but I’ve removed any imperial iconography, and added face shrouds and goggles where practical… In my head they are a cross between Frank Herbert’s Fremen, and folks on Tatooine:

They were painted with mostly washes & contrast paints, and are deliberately drab and plain looking. I wanted them to be quick and easy to replicate, and I think I did a good job there, with the test model being completed in 32 minutes! I did add some bone & flame iconography here and there, with half an idea of having them as serfs to my Legion of the Danmed, but first and foremost, they are Rad Wasters from Spero Secundus.

 

Next up we have some guards for House Malocchio – the ruling house of Hive Sevelli, and governing family for the whole planet. I have already painted members of Hose Malocchio, and so the heraldic colours were already established – this made the design for the guard uniform pretty straight forward. I used GW Mordians for some proper officious pomposity:

Again, I wanted these to be quick and easy to paint, so all the main colours are blocked in with washes, and ‘regular’ paints are just used to tidy up at the end and add the odd quick highlight here and there. The Lt. model got a bit more attention with a spot of gold here and there.

 

So that’s it for the speedy stuff, now for the more intricate work. This next mini is my first ever Inquisitor – a character type that I have successfully avoided over the years! He has been created in response to a new invitational called ‘Daemon Ink’ that Mark @ Heresyofus is getting up and running. Set in a corrupted library world, the setting is dark, mysterious and very Inq28, so I wanted my warband to reflect that vibe to the best of my ability. Mark mentioned that Green is very much the thematic colour for Daemon Ink, so I plan to adopt it widely in my warband – starting with the leader:

He is based on the Deathwatch watch master figure from a few years ago. The character I have in mind is definitely on the radical end of the Inquisitorial spectrum (or ‘pragmatic’ as I prefer to call it), hence the Eldar weaponry. He also had a head swap for an AdMech helm – I really like the crusader vibe this gives him! I also jazzed up his backpack a bit, partly to bring in those candles to give him a more scholarly vibe, but also to change up the silhouette & take him away from the original figure.

Paint-wise, I used gold a lot on this guy – it seemed appropriate for someone of his rank and grandiosity. Most of the gold on the armour got a cool purple wash, but the odd detail & the eldar bits had a slightly warmer sepia wash to make them stand out a bit. The rest of the armour is a very deep green, (a pot of Black Templar contrast paint with a good splodge of Winsor & Newton green ink) – it looks almost black, but the edge highlights bring out the green again I think. The odd recessed area of the armour has been carefully picked out in pure black Indian ink from Winsor & Newton – this has a slight reflective quality which gives a lacquered effect that I really like (it isn’t robust enough for a raised area, but can survive in a recess).

The robe is painted with a different set of greens, so it is tonally different to the armour without moving away from the theme, and I repeated the same trick for the wreath decoration on the armour and the gems. I pushed the concept to the max for the crystalline blade – I’ve never painted one of these before, but I think I did ok, and it was that was a cool thing to research and practice. Finally, a splash of red and some neutral bone completes the palette.

I’m not ready to share the fluff for this guy, but rest assured, he will be suitably well storied 😊

 

Next we have this rather exotic member of his warband:

She is a conversion I did a few years ago, but never had the courage to paint – she’s a really complicated figure, and is intimidating as hell! She is based on the Mistweaver Saih from Warhammer Quest, but spliced with the Harlequin Shadowseer mini… yeah… two really detailed and tricky minis 😊

In terms of painting, I kept with the green and gold theme, but looked at the colour wheel to do some more fun stuff. I ended up with a Green/pink & yellow/purple thing going on, which works nicely I think – it’s tight, but allows for splashes of colour across the mini. I brought in a few more colour combos on the masks, but these are small enough to not confuse the overall scheme. I am particularly pleased with the smoke effect, given that it’s the first time I’ve tried to paint it.

the mirror mask was a bit of an experiment as well… I was trying for a ‘ghost in the shell’ type effect with multiple layers of tinted gloss… The skull is quite hard to make out, and I wish I had smoothed out the whole face of the helm rather than leave those metal spikes in place, but hey ho, it’s not too bad, and I like a mini that rewards a closer look 😊

Here’s the two of them together – colours close enough to belong, but without being too uniform I hope…

 

In other news, there’s a new version of some Games Workshop game or other – personally, I’m finding it hard to find any fucks to give about it, but some of the minis look nice… I’ll leave it to better bloggers than me to comment in detail, but so far I’m not planning on getting involved… (that said, I am a sucker for a collector’s edition…)

Otherwise, that’s it from me for this week! I’ll be doing more Spero Secundus mooks over the week & weekend, maybe a Space Marine or some more Inquisitorial henchmen… we’ll see how it goes, but I’ll be back in a week or so. Stay safe 😊

Counter Culture

27 Monday Jan 2020

Posted by in Blood Bowl, Side projects

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Greetings Terrans, just a quickie from me today – I managed to get a quick game of Blood Bowl in last week, and so I bashed out a few counters to use instead of the standard ones. They weren’t quite finished for the game, but I’ve tidied them up this weekend & thought I would share.

For those not in the know, Blood Bowl games primarily track three things – Turn, Re-rolls and Score. Many coaches create their own snazzy counters to match their team, so I came up with these:

 

Simple things, but they are fun & are a sign of ‘doing it right’ in BB circles 😊

As for the game itself – turns out Wood Elves are bloody good… even when coached by a noob like me! I wanted to try as many positional players as I could, so I took 2 War Dancers and a Treeman, but I only had 1 re-roll for the team… A risky strategy, but the Corpse-Wood Wails comfortably ran out 2 – 0 winners against well coached a Human team. Come on the Wails!!!

Organised Chaos

17 Friday Aug 2018

Posted by in OldHammer, Side projects

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Greetings Terrans, I hope this finds you all well. It has been a hectic time in Leadballoony-land – the idea of running the Wolf Time campaign next year has got me motivated to paint some Greenskinz that I have been hoarding for far too long… I’ve been examining the campaign (in the Book of the Astronomican) to get an idea of the forces needed – and the answer is ‘bloody loads!!’ Quite a few can be re-used between games, but the effort of matching models to stat lines is quite the challenge… I’m determined (for now) to stick to late 80’s lead where possible, and to apply the WYSIWYG principle. I have the first raft of Orks based, primed and ready to take on holiday for a spot of al fresco painting, and I’m super excited about it because the bulk of this lot is made up of RTB02 Space Ork Raiders…  Thing is, the RTB02 boxed set was my first ever Warhammer purchase, and Thrugg Bullneck was my first ever ‘proper’ paint job, so I’m really going way back to my roots with this project, and boy, does it feel good! Here they are, ready to enter the carry-case dropship to painting Valhalla:

I’m going for a general militaristic desert theme for these guys – Wolf Time happens before the idea of Ork clanz Is firmly established, when Orks were really more like savage humans than anything else! As such, I primed them black, and then gave them a light zenithal coat of Zandri Dust – the perfect (and quick!) start to any desert scheme. The theme itself seems like a good fit for the minis – it isn’t particularly novel, but it works for the pre ‘red-era’  period of the Book of the Astronomican, and they’ll fit nicely with my Praetorians too… (Last Stand at Glazers Creek anyone? :-D )

It hasn’t all been preparation though – I also managed to paint a thing this week! He’s a chaos warrior from the Pantheon of Chaos range, and I absolutely love this mini. I keep having the urge to do a chaos warband one day, and he has been primed and ready for painting for quite some time, but I never seem to actually get around to doing anything with him! This week, I had some time to paint but didn’t want to start anything big – long story short, I picked him up and gave him a tickle with my hairy stick:

I have the vague recollection that this guy is supposed to represent Malal – a mysterious anti-Chaos chaos god from the pre-Slaves to Darkness era. I don’t know much of the lore personally, but Orlygg has put together a brilliant piece of research on the subject – you can find it here. From this research we can learn that Malal is all malicious and insecty, that he despises the other chaos gods, but that he isn’t a friend of the ‘good guys’ either, and that black & white skulls is his vibe… As such, I kept the palette restricted, but I did try out a thin wash of violet over silver to give a rather pleasing metallic purple on the armour. I have never tried this technique before, so I’m dedicating this to Azazel’s ‘Technical August’ challenge :-)

Anyhow, that’s all for now – I’ll be off the grid for a couple of weeks, but hopefully I’ll be back with a decidedly big green bang in September! Peace out dudes, and be excellent to each other  :-)