New Year 2025

Happy New Year!

A couple of quick updates.

First off, my goal for a vampiric Deadcember was a pretty big flop. But I did get this lovely couple and their pet bat painted.

Second, I've decided to get back to organizing pages of painted miniatures. I started this years ago. The links are at the top, with figures organized into categories. But a lot of the photos are old and piecemeal. The Dragon page was done recently, and the Half-Orc page is mostly newer photos. And the Five Parsecs faction page has been my big project for the past year and a half. But I'd like to work on revising some of the others with better photos & organization, and creating pages for some of the unrepresented factions (wood elves, trolls, etc.) 

I started today with a small one: the Shroomfolk!

Deadcember 2024 - The Plan

My plan for Deadcember 2024 is to paint these (mostly) old vampires. And the one dreg, because vampires need a minion. I also have a couple of newer "accessory" figures to go with them (not pictured,) a bat and a dire wolf.

No Flesh November, Spooky Stragglers, and Travel

First up, some stragglers from my spooky painting spree in October.

Following up on both Spooky Season and my previous update regarding Warhammer -1313 skirmishes, I decided to paint some sKELTitons. Essentially just old Citadel plastic skeletons with metal Gallic shields. Since every month at the end of the year needs a named theme I've dubbed it No Flesh November. ;)

Aside from doing a little painting, I've been doing a lot of work. But that has also involved some travel which gave me a chance to take up a few side quests including a weekend in southern New Mexico. I started off in Amarillo, TX...

...and made a quick morning stop at the Cadillac Ranch where my painting skills were no match for the intense wind blowing across the field...

...I had planned on having lunch at the Midpoint of Route 66, but the cafe was closed, so I settled on standing in the middle of the road at the Midpoint before heading off to get some work done and then flying to El Paso. 

After a day of working there, I popped up to NM Saturday morning, racing around to national and other sites before returning to El Paso for a flight home. In the course of my continuing Adventures I...

...visited the "world's largest pistachio" at a tourist stop near Alamogordo, and bought a bag of piscahios to help sustain me through the next two days 😁...

...stood on a 5,000 year old lava flow at Malpais Valley of Fires...

...viewed petroglyphs, some dating back 1,600 years ago, on the Three Rivers Petroglyph Trail...

...returned to gypsum/selenite desert at White Sands. Unfortunately the back country camp sites are closed. My plan was to sleep on the dunes and see the Milky Way, but it was also very cloudy as well. So I hiked part of the Alkali Flat Trail until the sun started to set, got a hotel room and set off again the next morning...

...and the morning drive took me through Lincoln National Forest in the Sacramento Mountains. There were actual trees in the forest a little further in. And snow! Eventually the land leveled out to the high plains before I arrived at...

...Carlsbad Caverns where I spent a few hours below ground and my image/understanding of "caves" will never be the same...

...on my way back to TX, I briefly stopped at the Guadeloupe Mountains visitor center. I walked the first few hundred feet of the nearby trail just to say I hiked in one more park over the weekend 😉 , but I didn't have the time or preparations to actually hike the mountain! Maybe a return trip someday?

The week prior to my Southwest Adventure I had another, shorter trip to the center of the US. Literally.

...but first a stop at the World's Largest Ball of Twine in Cawker City, KC. Exciting as that was, the road was calling...

...and it brought me to the geographic center of the contiguous US.

Pretty busy November and I'm grateful that I got to see some interesting sites along the way! Now I will try to return to more direct miniatures & gaming content, and catch up on some Five Parsecs campaign reports. But I have a feeling that my Adventures will influence the miniatures & gaming. I'm already planning a Grav-Attack Ranch terrain project, and have been thinking a lot about caverns, deserts, petroglyphs. I wouldn't be surprised if more new terrain pops up on this blog in the next few months.

One last item, I've updated the format of the blog to allow larger photos to be displayed. This is a bit overdue, as the blog was originally designed for older display resolution. I guess I've been at this for a while! There's still some issues to work out, but that's for another day.

Five Things From A Place

Real Life is still a bit hectic, but another quick update!

First, I finished the five mercenaries I had been working on. Along with the two I previously painted as tests for color scheme, I now have enough to make a solid faction for Five Parsecs. I do have a bunch more of these figures (from Satyr Art Studio/Drew Williams) and will definitely get back to painting the rest of them. But first I want to keep getting a larger variety of small 5P factions done. 

I also finally painted this figure that I've had for ages. I think it's from Ramshackle. There was a horrible mould line (mould slip?) along the back that I had made a couple of attempts at sanding/filing off a various times over the past ten years or so. Probably longer. I finally just took a fresh blade to it and carved it out of all the folds of cloth. I thought they deserved a colorful hat and a splash of blood on one of the "scissor hands" to give it a pop of color.

Walking through Target last week I noticed some clearance items and scooped up a few for my sci-fi gaming....

Buzz Lightyear toys for cheap! The drop pods are very.... Grimdarkhammer. Even the robots that came with them can probably be put to use as security bots or something like that. The spaceships are a little on the small side, but I'm thinking about painting them with solid canopies and calling them pilotless drones. Reflecting real life, I've read a few articles about AI piloted fighters recently, and remotely controlled drones have been in use for a while, so this doesn't seem like a stretch for the grim dark future of stuff.

Two other impulse purchases.... My new brush holder. I feel like I need a legion of these...

I just received these limited edition figures from founder of the A Forest of Kings Facebook group. If you're interested in Native American, Messoarmerican, and/or pre-Columbian gaming and miniatures you should check it out (and get a couple of sweet figures). 

I discovered the group because of my interest in doing "new world" style fantasy skirmish game. I've not made much progress, but the idea was something like Mordheim but with oldschool froggy Slann, new-world undead, some Marienburg explorers, Sea Elves, and maybe others like Pestilens Skaven.

Back to the source.... Check out the group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/273828859831681/

Back to Five Parsecs and sci-fi gaming, I've finally made some progress on my "Five Bananas From Home" project. I also rolled up the first battle and (painted or not) I hope to FINALLY play my first game this long holiday weekend. I would prefer to get outside, but it's supposed to rain the whole three-day weekend here. 

Speaking of bad weather timing, there is a local joke that every time there is a celestial event, we will be entirely covered with clouds and/or storms. But we had a pretty decent full solar eclipse (see my previous entry) and last week we also witnessed northern aurora! This has actually happened a quite a few times in my life but -- as the joke goes -- every single time it's completely overcast. Until this year! My wife came home and texted me that we needed to come outside. Even with semi-urban light pollution, it was really visible. But we got in the car and braved the unusual traffic to get to a spot along the lake (Erie) to get a better view. Very cool to have two big celestial events visible in Ohio within a short span! First pic is from our house, the other two are from the lake (very near by)

And Just Like That... Three Months Go By!

 

Apparently it has been three months since my last update. There has been a bit going on lately. For one, I had some down time due to a thumb injury...

I have also done a bit of travelling (survived a tornado near Chicago, an earthquake near LA, and less dramatic visits to Palm Desert/Joshua Tree NP, and Miami) for work. On the topic of work, I have also made a significant career change and taken a new job. To be honest... I've also been a bit uninspired lately. I think my head has just been elsewhere with everything else going on. Really, I'm not terribly good at keeping up with this blog lately either.

But there has still been painting going on, though no real gaming.

I wasn't very successful with my "Five Months From Painted Factions" but I did make some more progress. I built and painted some mutants!

I also painted Ambassador Khan Cern. He has no patience for your shenanigans.

Following up on my previous Five Bananas entry, I purchased my crew. Just tonight I started putting a bit of paint on them. More to come on that soon. "Soon." Like maybe in a few months again?

For now, I have also returned to painting the mercenaries that I had started working on before my thumb injury.

On the fantasy side....

Satyr Art Studio zombies...

...and some old Ral Partha zombies.

The middle figure is my D&D character, if the family D&D campaign ever gets started. Nettie Coldwater, middle-aged empty nester forest gnome turned druid. This is the second time I have painted this figure from Reaper Miniatures. The one on the left is the "stock" figure, and Nettie was converted a bit to more accurately reflect my character. The dog on the right was painted previously but I was thinking that it would be interesting if she brought her dog along with her.

Random daemon. Daemonette. Had the figure, figured I would paint it for my mixed-daemon horde. 

D&D figure, Grick. 

Dwarf With No Name.

Giant flies/stirges.

Painted a couple of tiny bunny toys, inspired by the Black Rabbit of Inle.

Fungus infected ant swarm.

I was fortunate to live within the path of the recent total eclipse in the US. I could not get a good pic during the total eclipse, and really didn't want to spend that brief time messing around with my phone trying to take pics instead of fully enjoying the experience. But here's the closest thing -- I got a couple of decent pics of the approach to totality.

New Year New...?

2023 ended not with a bang, but a whimper. But over the last week of the old year and the first week or so of the new year, I did get a little painting time in. 

I did some more painting and basing of "unaligned chaos daemons." I've been thinking about that idea since I received the Drachenfels figure a few years ago. It/he has long since been painted, and I even (finally) finished the novel! Lately my mind has turned back to the idea of chaos as chaotic, like in old Moorcock novels & early fantasy gaming. Not a bunch of organized, uniform creatures.

This will be a slow, ongoing project. I'll just keep adding any odd figures that seem like they belong as I continue to work on other projects.

Since I started this entry a week or so ago, I've added some more. Most are actually for a potential D&D campaign, but I feel they will fit the chaos vibe. The undead gnoll things I just got because I thought they looked cool. :)

The ochre jelly is homemade from some wire and melted hot glue, similar to some I did previously with different paint. The flameskull is just a plastic skull with some crudely sculpted flames. I liked the floating skull thing I did the same with a Bones cow skull painted blue. The rest are soft plastic D&D figurses

I also finally painted a pair of figures to represent our current two dogs. I had one but had been searching for the other for over a year before painting. On the left is Moji-Tater, our Corgi-Sheltie mix. He's the youngest. In the center is Cookie, a shelter rescue dog who we think may be a mix of Boxer & Border Collie. On the right is Sasha aka "Muffin Butt", another shelter dog who passed away almost 10 years ago. She was a German Shepherd-Husky mix. Cookie was the tough one to find, but since I was recently looking at D&D figures I found a pack of three dogs, one was a pointer with a pretty close body & head shape, but I had to cut off the ears and re-sculpt them to fit the real thing.

I've also painted a few sci-fi figures of mixed quality & complexity. The first is an Eru-Kin and jagual figure from Knightmare Games. I will be using Eru-Kin for K'Erin in Five Parsecs From Home. You can almost rearrange the the letters to shift between teh two names. Maybe the apostrophe is for the "u"? This one will be a member of my crew. 

I also finished the space goblins/Malig from Alternative Army's Ion Age range, which will serve as pirates in Five Parsecs. I painted a test figure earlier in 2023, but never got any further until December. One more faction down, and another month of "Five Months From Painted Factions" under my belt!

Lastly, my slacker painting from this week. First is Orbus, a sentient sphere of what appears to be some sort of plasma like matter. No one knows for sure. Orbus is literally a pearlescent bead on a stick. I didn't even paint it. Just drill a hole, make a base, and glue it on the stick. Next to that is the second of the two D&D nothics that came in the pack. One is for D&D, the other I thought would make a good sci-fi alien or mutant. Super quick paint job, mostly just abase coat, wash, then a few details. I almost want a whole squad of them now.