Men In Boxes

Recently found boxes of old Warhammer fantasy figures and figured they could be made into a HOTT army. Making the army and painting the figures will be a welcome break after a very hectic month of work. Mosty would need a bit of repainting but nothing straight from scratch. Going will be slow though since I haven't started filming at work yet. The past month has been a whirlwind of concept designs, storyboards, animatics and campaign pitches. I'm making it a point though to devote at least an hour a night to making a matched pair of armies together with a tank I'm building at the same time. My Middle Earth Orcs are on hold since they're already in the painting stage and my very much reduced free time wont leave much for painting them en masse. I do hope to finish them soon together with the other stuff that's been put on stasis.

I'm still knee deep in work, both inside and outside the office. I've also taken up a side career selling oil and acrylic paintings made by various Filipino artists. All these have left me virtually no time for miniature wargaming. My gaming table is currently loaded with a miscellany of stuff I have to sort and place in storage, mainly household stuff my wife and I want to keep. Summer in Manila is quite hot with some days being 36 degrees in the shade. Earlier this month, I moved my hobby workbench to the garage, the more to maximize the summer breeze but I havent finished sorting the paint bottles, equipment, hobby stuff and other ephemera. Maybe mid May will see me picking up the dice again. In the meantime, here're a couple of more World of warcraft minis I picked up for less than a dollar each.  I'm not sure what creatures they are but the 3rd from the left looks like a water elemental.

Slitherblade Tidehunter is another figure from the World of Warcraft miniatures game. The figure consists of a naga-like creasture preparing to strike with a trident. The sculpting is crisp and the details good enough but the spear/trident thingie is all bent and wobbly. Maybe I'll clip it off and attach a kris or some similarly exotic Asian-looking sword. Detail is quite good, this being a hefty miniature but the scales on the mini's skin surface seem a bit too juvenile in design. It's just basically a cross hatch job. It would have looked better if the sculptor payed more attention to the shape and arrangement of the scales rather than the quick cross hatch. The paint job seems decent enough with the majority of the body block-painted with no highlighting and blending -- just as expected from a CMG figure. But unlike the previous CMGs from games like Mageknight, this figure seems to have been carefully painted -- no splotches nor stray brushwor...

I picked up another assortment of loose World of Warcraft miniatures for use in our AD&D Battlesystem game. These could be the nucleus of either a Tauren or beastman army. Since I got these secondhand at the 4th TAGCOM ( a Philippine toy and hobby convention), each figure came at around $1 each. I only went thru the monster figures and passed over the elves, dwarves and humans since they towered over most of my 28mm figures. Click the pictures below for bigger views. The figures are well sculpted in terms of detail and the painting is way above the style I've seen commonly used in prepainted minis -- yes, I'm referring to the barely tolerable paintjobs on Mageknight, Starwars ( have you seen the Han Solo in Stormtrooper armor? UGLY!) Heroclix and D&D minis. And what is it with huge weapons and shields?  The guy's already a freakin' minotaur with huge muscles and horns! And he needs a boss-heavy shield?!!! Not in my fantasy world he won't. I...

 I couldnt resist. I've been working on my dirt cheap sci fi tanks and I snapped a couple of pix over the weekend. Then a slow day at the office pushing pixels led to my fooling around with the files and VOILA! The tanks aren't finished yet  -- detailing and decals and weathering to go -- but I opened one file to play around with in photoshop while I waited for my storyboard materials. Another one followed the first. Then another one. So here're the results of a lazy morning at the office. The pictures are clickable and opens my photobucket gallery. Let me know what you think:)

I finally chose a camo pattern for the sci fi tanks, or at least for one version. These babies will be joining the Terran Commonwealth. The camo is made of three colors: desert yellow, tan and red brown. After cleanup, the tanks were sprayed desert yellow all around. A set of putty masks were placed and the lighter tan was sprayed on. FInally, Red brown was brushed on the edges where the two colors met, but only on one side. When the paint was dry, a wash of earth brown was applied to spread on the sunken parts of the models. For some reason, the inks beaded a bit, even after a modest dose of acrylic smoothers. I just wiped off the beads and plan to reapply some desert yellow and tan with the brush when the washes dry.   Sorry for the blurry pic but this eye-level picture shows the color order from the fron to the back. More to come soon:)

I found some more variations of the dirt cheap tanks I bought before. The smaller tanks cost less than 50 cents each with the bigger one going for less than a dollar. This time, I bought a bunch, including more of the previous types I wrote about. One of the newer tanks is quite large and features a single but thick barrel while the smaller model had dual barrels plus rockets on the sides. The hulls of these tanks are visibly different than the previous ones seen here and could be fielded with different armies. I've begun scrounging parts from my other models for spare tracks, jerry cans, bags, crates, etc to festoon the tanks as well as spare parts from the equipment of the models I plan to use the tanks with. I'm sure that each model would need some putty because the plastic's a bit brittle. The bigger tank has very nice raised detail and looks heavy. I'm planning to use it for my futuristic Roman legions while the smaller one will be assigned to my...