Hobbit progress

Skin done

I have completed all the skin and am going through the clothing. I'm painting identical poses all at the same time to reduce overly similar colour schemes. I'm restricting myself to a muted, earthy palette of mostly greens, creams and browns.

I decided not to do the dip for this project, so as to match the eight hobbits I painted a couple of years ago. These should give an idea of the look I'm going for, as I was really happy with how they came out.

In other news, things are coming up Barks as I acquired a cheap copy of 'The Scouring of the Shire', and an OOP Lobelia Sackville-Baggins miniature. Rumours are circulating of a GW 'Hobbit' box set to be released next month- no doubt fiendishly expensive but hopefully containing some nice terrain and minis.

I've made no progress on the hobbit holes, unfortunately. I may only have time to patch up the one hole I've almost completed.

Concerning hobbits I've painted

As part of my Hobbit Month, here are my previously painted hobbits.

First up we have the plastic 'Mines of Moria' hobbits. My clear favourite sculpt is Sam and his frying pan, with his backpack strewn with strings of sausages. I feel I've got his hair too blonde. Frodo looks like a drag queen with lipstick, and his eyes are too dark- I now leave them dark brown rather than black. His face lacks definition as well. Pippin and Merry are OK, but somewhat chalky. Looks like I gave them a final light drybrush?

These are my metal hobbits. The cloaks should be a variety of colours as they are pre-Lothlorien, but I painted them as elven cloaks in a grey-green shade.

Somewhere I acquired Merry and Pippin in armour, and I really like these guys. I considered building up a Gondor army just to go with Pippin so I'd have a use for him...

When I got Sam and Frodo in Mordor, I was really happy to paint them looking a little forlorn and weather-beaten. They've got a healthier complexion than their Moria selves, though! I thought about leaving the bases bare, but finally decided to add a few bits of grass to match my game boards (I had the same dilemma with Sauron, Isildur and Elendil).

More recently, I picked up Sam and Frodo in orc armour. Fun to paint, and if I field my orcs I'll be sure to stick them in there so that my opponent hesitates before killing them!

Finally, here's Frodo with the ring on. Or is it my Predator?

Hobbit skin and faces

I prefer to paint from the 'inside out', ie the deepest, hardest-to-get-to bits first, and the superficial easy bits last. Skin is often a deeper layer (hands are the exception) and in this project I'm doing it first. Besides, it's a drudge and I'd like to get it out of the way. Furthermore, when the skin and face are finished, it guides you as to how the rest of the figure will come together.

(I also try to paint messy bits before neat bits, so basing and drybrushing gets done early.)

My belief is that a face is the focal point of a miniature- get it right, and the rest of the figure works. The converse also applies. I don't paint eyes very often- you see eyes on people less than you think you do. More often, it is merely a shadow. Besides, getting eyes wrong ruins a face, and thus, following my logic above, ruins a miniature. Also, painting eyes- hard.

Anyway, I've gone through different styles and ways of painting skin and faces over the years, and this is what I'm currently using for my hobbits:

1. All paints are Derivan MiNiS (which I believe are now OOP) over a GW Chaos Black spray. Lighthorse Brown to all the skin, covering the eyes but leaving the mouth black.
2. Most raised areas except around the cheeks, sides of nose, between fingers (and toes!) in Tobruk Brown.
3. Eyebrows, nose, chin, cheekbones, knuckles etc. Flesh.
4. Watered-down Dark Chestnut to give shading to the eyes. Voila!

By stages as described above

Faded labels! Colours as described above

Cars, ships, and unspeakable nightmares

Had a great evening's gaming- DC introduced me to 'Uncharted Seas', where his Bone Griffons and their zombie whales just beat my fleet of Dragon Lords. We got a lot of rules wrong, but I'll happily play with DC's well-painted ships again- and I saw the 'Dreadfleet' components- lovely ships, measuring sticks, and islands- not to mention the high quality sea mat!

Not much later there were three ships left in total...

Then Shannon joined us for 'Mansions of Madness' (see my painted figures here)- Professor Harvey Walters and private eye Joe Diamond investigate my sinister cult. They fought off hordes of cultists, only to discover the horrible truth that the cultists were raising a terrible monster. In a race against time, they failed to prevent the creature being summoned and tried to fight it- Joe Diamond went down, but Professor Walters used an arcane spell to destroy the beast and win the game- but at the same time went insane! Totally Lovecraft!

Game over as the monster falls and the professor loses his mind...

Finally, the three of us played a game of 'Formula De'- I'll be keeping an eye out for this myself as it was a great fun game. DC won that game as well- three wins for him tonight, the dice gods were smiling...

It's hobbit month!

November is 'Hobbit month' on the One Ring, and I'm going to try and put a big dent into my unpainted lead pile. Well, a big hobbit-sized dent.

I picked up a batch of GW hobbits at a bring-and-buy a few years back, and they've been sitting around taunting me since then. I've got sixteen militia, four shirriffs, twelve archers, a hornblower, Paladin Took, Bullroarer Took (foot and mounted), Fatty Bolger, and Farmer Maggot. Thirty-eight figures.

I'm conflicted about painting my old slow way, or experimenting further with the dip. I still don't feel confident in getting consistent results, but I'll need to paint at an unattainable speed otherwise. The first few days of this project are likely to be prep days- I hate prepping figures.

I also made a hobbit hole a while back which needs patching up, and two more holes I previously started but never finished. Hopefully I can complete them as well.

Space Pals

I had way too much fun painting these 'Space Pals' from Highlander. I think the 'Space Pals and Nemesis' set was renamed 'Bounty Hunter, Sasquatch, and Smuggler', and the other set is 'Kendo Masters and Student'. (edit: should that be master and students?) These guys painted up nice and quick- an advantage of 15mm.

This was my first attempt at OSL, and I'm reasonably happy. I was inspired by dis- check out his great blog! The droid is from GZG's Workbots pack, with the top shaved down.

Coincidentally, this week I also received a set of X-Wing ships for the game which is the new hotness- this pic via BoardGameGeek is too good not to share:

 Pew pew!

Apache vs Hokum!

I'm desperately trying to get through my pile of unpainted purchases from this year so that I end up in the black on my ledger of painted vs unpainted. I'm down to 43 to go now.

Here's what I finished off today, inspired to get some funky support for my Russians: a Ka-50 Hokum A.

I found some red stars from a 20-year-old 1/72 Mig-29 kit- they're a little big on the tail. Because they're so old, they cracked and split during application.

I couldn't be bothered to panel-line the underside or scratchbuild the front undercarriage. You can see here the excellent, if bulky, magnetic telescoping rod from CorSec Engineering. (Their new version is less bulky).

This helicopter was the Revell Easykit. It's snap together and pre-painted, so I glued and painted it. Perfectly, it is 1:100.

Prepainted components

It's projects like this that make me think of getting an airbrush, but then I think I can do without it, but wouldn't it be easier with one, but I don't need it to get tabletop-ready results, etc...

As a bonus, I thought this would be a good opportunity to put up pics of my 1:100 Apache Longbow, also a Revell Easykit. I have a pre-painting picture here:

I didn't put any markings on- that way it can be US, UK, Dutch, etc.

Together at last...