Slow Painting

I've been a bit busy lately, distracted with other things and what little painting I've done recently has been mostly for other people.

But I did manage to squeek in another small unit of Spanish caetrati. I've started on a few other small projects. Hopefully I will wrap up one or more of them in the near future!


(I just noticed I never finished the throwing spears on these figures! I'll have to go back and touch them up a bit...)


Still waiting impatiently for WAB2 to show up here.

Changes

Maybe it's a nearing-mid-life-crisis. Maybe just stress. Maybe a few other things.

I'm giving some serious thought to going back to painting on commission and other artistic pursuits full time. One of those "others" would be toy soldier related, as I'd like to take a stab at sculpting (for myself) for a bit and see if I can get good enough to make a serious go of it. I've got a few other ideas I'd like to pursue as well. Maybe I'm just daydreaming...

Painting Color Tool

I think I posted a couple of online color tools previously, but I don't seem to have them easilly tagged in the blog. I just found a new (to me) one so thought I would share it, along with the two previous tools. (And add a new "Color Tools" tag.)


http://www.colorblender.com/

http://kuler.adobe.com/

http://colorschemedesigner.com/


((edit))

While I am at it, if you'd like a good image/photo editor but don't want the cost associated with professional tools like Photoshop, I recommend Paint.Net:

http://www.getpaint.net/

"GIMP" is another alternative. I haven't looked at it in years, but I thought that Paint.net's interface was much easier to learn and use (for beginners and those experienced with other software alike.)

Southpark Tournament - April '10 - Game 2

Southpark Tournament - April '10 - Game 2


I forgot to take starting pics of the game, so here's a bit of an in progress shot. I also forgot to indicate that Karl Frank and Lucy (his dragon) are in the midst of the enemy in this pic.



My opponent was the ringer Warriors of Chaos army, which had massacred its Dark Elf opponent in the first round.

He a Nurgle Lord in a unit of knights, a Khorne hero on a juggie in another unit of knights, a Tzeench disk riding annoyance, and a Slannesh caddy in a chariot. In addition there were a couple untis of marauders, a unit of dragon ogres, and a couple units of hounds as screens.


Right out of the gate I had horrible luck with my cannons and did nothing the first two turns. That allowed all of his fast troops to take out two of the cannons and jump all over my line.

I moved many of my troops up, some as bait to try to draw in some charge material for the STanks. Unfortunately, he set everything up on one side of the table, most of which went down after I had deployed my entire army. So I did have to spend a few turns "redeploying" and sending one STank on a bit of the "scenic route" to combat.








My militia charged the dragon ogres but failed to break them. ;) Here you can see everything in the distance converging on one of the Steam Tanks.

You will also notice a distinct lack of Karl Franz. After completely missing (again!) the Nurgle Lord for two turns his dragon finally finished the lord off. However, I still managed to lose combat due to numbers and banners. Needing a 9 or less to stick around, Karl rolled 11 and ran... but nor very fast. Only about 6" on three dice. So he got run down by the pursuing knights.

The marauder cavalry dance around a bit and annoy my knights in the foreground for the moment.




With Karl gone, the rest of my forces are swept away and it all comes down to the two tanks. The second one joining in the combat with the first. The first is destroyed, but in the process the chaos knights and dragon ogres are taken out. Somehow I managed to not wound the Khorne lord. By the end of the game it was him and some of the marauders beating on the tank, but not enough to destroy it by the end of the game.



My opponent was thrilled to have scored 10 hits with S3 marauders and horses in the last round of combat. The tank had only three wounds left. Sadly, my dice were also OK (well, only at this point) and it made all its armour saves.


So round two resulted in a minor loss for the Empire. The chaos player was just shy of getting a solid victory. Thank god I managed to take down at least a couple of high value units/characters.

Southpark Tournament - April '10 - Game 1

Southpark Tournament - April '10 - Game 1


This weekend I went to a small 3-round WFB tournament at the sister-store to my local FLGS.

This was a little different than most tournaments and local games, as it allowed special characters and enforced no composition requirements or scoring. The result seemed to be more decisive games and the irrelevance of most normal rank & file type troops.

I took Karl Franz on the Imperial Dragon (who I've named "Lucy",) two scroll caddies, two steam tanks, three cannons, three units of five knights, and a unit of ten militia.

My first game was against another Empire army. While that may seem a bit vanilla, we both have themed armies (when we're not playing cheese-fest no-comp tournaments, it would seem), mine as the independent city-state of Marienburg, and his as an Estallian army!



I set up on the right. From the furthest flank to the closest I had... Karl Franz, knights, cannon, STank, militia, cannon and two mages in the woods, knights, STank, knights, and a cannon on the hill in the corner.

My opponent had, from furthest flank to closest... Captain on Pegasus with Sword of Fate (nominated KF as the target), inner circle knights with grand master (general) and behind them a unit of handgunners with a HLR, cannon and mage/caddy in the woods, STank, handgunner detachment, unit of swordsmen, cannon in the woods, STank, and some knights with a warrior priest.




My opponent went first and right out of the gate he disabled both of my STanks with cannon shots. The one on my left (foreground) took 6 points of damage, the other took 3 (I think) or 4. So I was left hoping my cannons did the same.

On my turn it didn't happen. I rolled very short for the cannon in the foreground and missed the STank on my left completely. The STank in the center took a few points of damage, but was still rolling. The luck with my cannons, however, paid off on my right flank, where I shot the Pegasus out from under the captain with the Sword of Dead Franz. Good thing, since I advanced pretty aggressively to threaten the IC knights and Grand Master. In fact, everything other than my scrap metal STanks and cannons advanced.




The IC knights turned to face the inevitable charge from Frank & Lucy. The dragon obliged & charged, with some knights coming up to (hopefully) intercept the walking Captain before he could reach Frank. My militia ran towards the central STank, and my central knights sped past the block of swordsmen, weathered a hail of bullets and charged the handgunners. On my left I probably should have played a bit of cat & mouse, but figured that "He Who Risks Nothing Is Lost" or "No Guts No Glory" would be my motto for the afternoon, and charged the unit of knights who admittedly outclassed me due to numbers, command, and Priest.



So the results where that my knights did get chased off and run down. However, in the center my other unit of knights ran down the handgunnners. Karl missed with all of his attacks at the Grand Master and the dragon barely manaced to kill a few knights. I lost combat but (thankfully) didn't run away.





So my knights on the right did intercept the Captain of Karl's Doom (and ran him down.) After surviving another volley of cannon fire, my right STank risked a few steam points in order to hide behind the woods. I killed my opponent's STank on the opposite side, but contined to miss the one on the right flank, which started to hit high-gear & head towards Frank & Lucy who continued to miss all of their fn0rking attacks and lost combat again. The enemy knights and WP swept past my left flanks and started moving across the backfield...


Finally Frank & Lucy score some hits (last minute!) and chase off the IC knights, pursue, run them down and head into the swordsmen (missed a turn or two in the pics!) The knights in my backfield charge and finish off my crippled STank before heading back to the center of the battlefield. The enemy cannon crew in teh central woods panicked at some point. I don't remember if that was from the broken combat or from terror. In any case, my militia continued to spend the game dodging cannon balls, dragons, steam tanks and all manner of madness and quickly followed up the panicked crew! With a few lucky cannon shots I managed to finally hit and destroy the STank that had eluded me for the first half of the game.



So this was the last bit of mopping up. Frank & Lucy finished the WP and last knight (who charged me) and then ducked out of the cannon's line of sight. The final victory of the battle was the militia defeating the rallied cannon crew.

End result massacre for the Marienburgers over the Estalians!

What may not come across in the report above is that I really felt like I was losing for the first three turns of the game. It was only when I finally broke the IC knights and took down that first STank in the bottom half of turn three that things turned around for me. So it was a pretty up & down game.

A few highlight pics....




Noble Estallian knights make a charge against an immobilized Marienburger steam tank. The panicked engineer turns around to meet the unexpected destruction of his precious machine.




Brave Estallian swordsmen were some of the only infantry in sight. But were they brave enough to face...



Frank and Lucy? No. After witnessing the death of their general, they failed to withstand the terror of the dragon and fled... but fled too slowly and became dragon snack food.

Wiz Again

Another classic GW mage. (And another repaint.)

Wiz & WAB

I repainted one of my oldschool wizards for my Marienburg army.

The big news seems to be that WHW has announced they will have WAB2 at Salute. I'm glad to hear that it's finally (hopefully) hitting the market, and the price isn't as bad as the other Forgeworld books. I'm disappointed that it's only available direct, though. I like to support my local game store, and I was hoping to get some interest in the game there.

More Empire WIP

Some more work-in-progress shots of my current project. More of the Marienburg "Armoured Company."

The stock Steam Tank still needs to have the blue on the hull smoothed out a bit. Then I'm going to try painting a nautical "mural" on each side. Or maybe "mural" is the wrong term. But "nose art" doesn't sound exactly right either.

The War Wagon aka non-Steam Tank is almost done. I plan on putting a second crewman in there. He's got a blunderbus, representing the "steam gun" on the stock steam tank.





Here's a pic of the "tank" bits removed from the War Wagon. My plan is to have three removable insterts for it. This one, one for use as a War Altar, and a third for use as an old-school War Wagon, or something resembling it.




Yes I had a few problems with the lighting. Click on the pics to enlarge, as always.

Burgundians vs. Scots

Sunday evening I dusted off my Burgundians & headed down to my friend Rich's for some WAB medievals. Initially I thought I was going to be facing Low Countries, but it turned out to be an invasion of Scotland... the (in)famous "Battle of Twinsborough." All the same to me, really. (Well, not really.) One is a bunch of pike armed rabble supported by a bunch of guns, the other is a bunch of pike armed rabble supported by some even more unruly sword wielding rabble. ;)


Since I recently painted up some more gendarmes, I added them in, substituting them for their dismounted equivalents from one of my last used lists.

In the photo below, Burgundians are on the left. From foreground (Burgundian right flank) to background we had... Coustilliers followed by Household Gendarmes, skirmishing Archers behind a low stone wall, a block of formed Ordonnance Archers, Ordonnance Pike, and a second block of Archers. Beyond the central blocks was a unit of Crossbowmen with pavise. In the (ruined) farm were some skirmishing Handgunners, and on the far side of the farm were some Gendarmes.

The Scots, on the right, had three screening units of skirmishing Archers across the bulk of their line, then from foreground (Scots left flank) to background the main body of troops consisted of two warbands of Highlanders, two Pike Schiltrons, another Highland warband, one more Schiltron, and some camp followers. Behind the ruined farm were some Border Horse and one more group of skirmishing Archers.





The Burgundian left was a disaster. The gendarmes easily chased off the border horse, but were ambushed by lowly archers and destroyed. The handgunners shot off several rounds before losing combat to the camp followers who came into the ruins to fight them.

On the Burgundian right, things were a little different. The coustilliers chased off the skirmishers, and broke through the the rear of the Scots line. However, one of the bands of highlanders had panicked due to heavy casualties from bowfire, and had fortunately rallied in a position to keep the coustilliers from taking advantage of their breakthrough.

In the center the Scots rushed forward through a storm of arrows and hit the Burgundian line -- but not hard enough. The Burgundians held long enough to allow the crossbowmen on the left and more importantly, the household gendarmes on the right to swing in on the flanks. The Scots resisted panic from the initial charge itself, but the casualties from the Gendarmes were great enough to crush the first schiltron in front of them and send almost the entire center fleeing.

The victory was just crushing enough to save face for the embarrassing defeat against the underhanded commoners on the left flank.

APR WIP

I'm working on a pile of things at once. Not all of it mine.

But here's a peek at one of them...