The Painting Table - July 2022

This month's favourite brush work

Let's start with the good news. I have reduced the size of the lead pile. Partly this is because I haven't been anywhere to be able to add to it's contents for a while. The bad news is that after taking inventory of the unpainted/unbased figures the lead pile is bigger than I thought. Partly that is due to my counting figures larger than 6mm for the first time; of which there are more than a few lurking in the hidden depths of the pile (as detailed in my last post)! In total it turns out that as of the start of July I had 1,899 castings in the pile of shame. It isn't as bad as it sounds as some of the count are 3mm vehicles and Heroics and Ros 1/300 World War Two infantry which are not much bigger than the 3mm infantry. It's not as high a figure as I first estimated as I expected to hit 2,000! Although I just realised I haven't included 2mm buildings as I squeeze these into gaps in my painting as light relief and that I have a handful of 2mm ECW castings needing painting. Blimey this lead pile is a tricky beast, just as you think you have it tamed it springs a surprise on you. If a wargamer can't die while they still own unpainted lead, I think I'm good for a while.

July's output (minus three 3mm Scout cars)

The painting table itself is as crowded as ever. As soon as I finish something I seem to add something else!  Disciplined I'm not.  Movement out from the table has been a single 28mm Cowboy (see below), some 3mm 1980's cold war vehicles, some 6mm Hunnic Horse archers, Dacian horse and Justinian Byzantine light infantry and some 3mm buildings.  Joining the conveyor belt at the other end are 20 more 6mm Hunnic horse archers, 24 6mm Byzantine foot, around 20 3mm 1980's cold war vehicles and (gulp) a further two dozen 28mm wild west shootists. Still I'm ahead by 65 castings so far.  Not a huge dent in the pile but it's a start.

The paint desk chaos continues

My favourite completed painting job this month is actually a 28mm Wargames Foundry figure of Buffalo Bill Cody, as shown at the top of the page.  I know its a betrayal of the 6mm ethos but it is a lovely casting sculpted by Mark Copplestone and it looks a lot like my friend Lance (who coincidentally was working for WF around the time it was sculpted).  I have all my unpainted 28mm western figures in the painting queue now,  so I promise not to stray from the path of small scale righteousness again...until next time!  Those 28mm's are mostly Dixon figures but there are a couple of Wargames Foundry castings in the queue plus at least one I can't identify.  Things are moving forwards although I do seem to have resurrected an old project.  I will be using an old favourite set of rules if I do play some games.  Anyone for some good old fashioned, late1860's, Texas mayhem using ...

Vintage 1977 shoot out rules 

Apparently the rules have been updated and can be found as a Kindle edition as part of John Curry's 'History of Wargaming' project.  Or you can buy a second hand copy of the above version for a mere £42.32!

Lurking in the lead pile

This post started out as an aside in this month's painting table post, but it took on a life of it's own so I split it out  and decided to post it ahead of the next painting table update.

I previously mentioned that I would be taking a full inventory of my toys and this is now under way.  I started with the contents of the lead pile as reducing that was a target for this year, well its a target every year TBH.  Details will be in the next post but lets just say that there is a lot of lead in the pile and that some of it has been lurking there for a very long time indeed.  Oldest finds are a single Airfix US marine and a Hinchcliffe Viking berserker.  Both are at least 45 years old and the marine could be a decade older!  He is the last Airfix survivor from my first game experience using Charles Grant's World War Two set 'Battle'.  The Viking would have seen action under WRG second or third edition Ancients so both are true veterans.

Hinchciffe Medieval artillery.  Probably from the late 1970's

The inventory has been more complete this time and I included figures larger than 6mm for the first time.  I deliberately ignored them in the past as I wasn't intending doing anything with them and to be honest I probably still won't with one or two honourable exceptions.  So in the 20mm - 28mm section of the pile are some interesting finds.  A set of Gangster and G-Men style figures in 20mm (or possibly true 25mm) that I must have bought in the 1980's for some type of skirmish RPG game that never happened. A handful of Spanish Civil War figures from Empress Miniatures in 28mm, stunning sculpts but not a project I will be taking forward or at least not in that scale.  There is also a Hinchcliffe artillery set (pictured above) which is rather nice in a spindly sort of way.  Most interesting find in the pile were three 25mm Judge Dread miniatures.  There are also some 25mm Western shootout figures and a few unpainted Traveller RPG SF figures.  Both of these I will keep and may take forward as projects.  and lastly there are several bags of 25mm Dark Age figures (AKA The Bags of Shame) from a mixture of manufacturers which I haven't gotten around to counting yet, well there is only so much shame a chap can take in a single day!

Gangster types (but not a Granny to be seen) I have no idea who made these

The Judge Dread figures sadly not including the Great Man

One intriguing aspect of looking back on purchases from decades past is that the history of scale creep is laid out for all to see.  From 25mm measured to the top of the head, through measurement moving to the eye line and the upwards creep which led to 28mm figures.  It's all there to see when a collection of several decades is laid out.

The long and the short of scale creep - 5mm difference along the line

I do wonder if scale creep is just a reflection of our eyesight getting worse over the 42 year span represented in the picture above.  On the left is a 1980 Traveller figure which is true 25mm to eye line on the right is a Galloping Major figure which is 30mm to the eyeline.  To be fair to Lance at Galloping Major he doesn't claim these figures as 25mm they are advertised as 28mm and very nice they are too just a tad big for my table space.

The bags of shame (and friends)

 Maybe I should start a competition 'how many figures in the bags of shame' charge a fee to enter and the winner gets the contents of the bags plus the loose figures in the above shot!

Some of the newly catalogued unpainted stuff will need to go to new homes as it represents projects I will not return to or the loose ends of completed projects.  That will mainly be 25/28mm dark age/medieval figures.  Perhaps the Judge Dread trio to.  There are also eight Empress SCW 28mms needing a home.  There are also about the same number of Gangster and G-men 25mm figures although those may find a home with my Traveller SF RPG collection.  In some respects I'm accepting that these are things which will not be completed in my painting lifetime which is a sobering thought but I'm nearer to seventy than sixty now and need to be realistic.  So with that in mind, if any of the figures tickle your fancy feel free to make me an offer.

It's too hot, too hot I tell you!

Here at Chez Elenderil the inside temperature reached a sultry 30 degrees this evening.  It was indicating nearly 40 degrees on the outside thermometer and this is on the banks of the Humber mark you.  It looks like it will be even hotter tomorrow.  It was too hot to do much of anything painting or modelling wise so I wasted the day computer gaming instead.  Even Barney dog who loves the sun is prostrate at the moment.  On the other hand our guests like it as it's just like home.  They still think it's too hot but it's hot like at home hot, if you see what I mean.  Home sickness takes some strange forms I suppose.

Counting figures has been postponed until I can be sure nothing will melt (me included!).  TBH everything has been postponed except if absolutely vital.  I will be back in wargaming mode once the temperature drops to something civilised!  

Blog layout change

 Just a quick note to let you know that I have added a link to the all time top five posts on my blog.  Let me know if it is of use or just taking up space.  Thanking you.

Back in the 6mm groove.

For the last few weeks I have been working almost exclusively on the 2mm ACW project and prior to that on 3mm cold war stuff.  So I was not entirely surprised to find that I haven't painted any 6mm figures in months.  Looking back over blog posts suggests that it might have been over a year in fact!  Although there have been 6mm figures on the painting table I had just left them sitting there without actually doing any thing with them  However, as the 2mm ACW project has gone as far as it can until I buy more figures so it was time to do some 6mm painting again.  

The starting point was a no brainer; do something with the part painted back log.  I must admit to a wondering if the 6mm layoff would have impacted on my painting in a negative way.  The first figures in the queue were some Irregular Miniature Huns.  These paint up quite nicely but need more finesse in the brush work than more modern sculpts, the detail is there but it needs a bit more work to bring it out.  Once I started on them I realised why I had bypassed them.   I hadn't been fully happy with the initial work I'd done so I had put them to one side while I had a think about how to proceed!  But proceeding was required so proceed I have done.  I'm reasonably happy with the results and they have been mounted in a 10 man wedge formation on a 15mm DBA cavalry base (that's 30 x 40mm) because, well Huns often fought in wedges.

And here they are 'The Scourge of God'. Hun horsemen

I have had Huns as Foederati for my Late Imperial Romans since my 25mm days back in the '70's but I have never fielded a Hunnic army.  That is about to change as I'm looking at a DBA army based around the  attack by Atilla on the Western Empire as it will be a historic match up for my Roman troops.  Not a purely Hunnic army as there will need to be Franks, Burgundians, Alans and Goths in the mix too but it is close enough for jazz.  I checked the lead pile and found enough Hun light cavalry hiding in there for two more bases so that will keep me going for a while.

Keeping track of things

As you might have worked out I do like a spreadsheet.  My favourite for the purposes of this post is my figure control sheet.  This has values of my finished 6mm stuff for insurance purposes and an annual lead pile in and out page so I can see if I'm making progress in reducing the size of said lead pile.  Now the thing with a spreadsheet is they make you think you have things under control, while in reality if the data entered is out of date then control is the last thing you have.  Having looked at spreadsheet it appears I don't have control so over the next few days a bit of a 'stock count' will need to happen, (Boy but do I know how to have a good time!). 

What was interesting from the spreadsheet is how much value is tied up in my toy soldiers, not so much in the potential sale value (trust me that's never gonna happen while I draw breath) but in what it would cost in like for like replacement using a painting service.  For example one of my DBA bases of 6mm cavalry with 10 figures on a 2mm mdf base, painting and texturing the base would be around £15 (plus VAT if applicable) not counting postage costs.

It's not something I often think about but we do add quite a lot of value to our little lead warriors as we paint and base them, in fact I honestly couldn't afford to have someone else do it for me if I was starting from scratch.  Which begs the question how would you cope if you had to replace your collections?

Lazing on a Sunny Afternoon

It has been really rather warm here today.  Far to warm to consider doing much of anything in the garden other than a bit of basic maintenance.   On the other hand, it was dry and not too windy so I was able to test the effect of spraying Humbrol matt acrylic varnish  on the printed sheets I use for my 2mm infantry wrap arounds.  The good news is that there was no colour bleed from the ink jet printing.  As a result I was able to spray the entire last couple of month's 2mm infantry output.  I now no longer have quite as much fear of an unexpected drink spill turning my troops uniforms into a rainbow of runny colours, plus it will help seal the basing materials.  The metal figures can have a coat of brush on varnish in due course but the home made stuff is now totally completed.

On the Ukrainian guest front things continue in much the same vein as before, with long stays in the downstairs bathroom (currently entering the second hour) and cooking of things that appear to consist almost entirely of sunflower oil, water and coriander which has been shown a picture of vegetables and told that somewhere meat does really exist.  As a positive after much crying of 'Nyet, Nyet' telephones are no longer de rigour at table.  Rules on food hygiene are still the subject of debate, we feel that once a meal has started trying to climb out of the fridge on it's own that it is probably past it's best, our guest's solution is not to put it in the fridge in the first place.  At present there is a pan of 'soup' and some sort of Frikadellen stew sitting on the top of the cooker.  These are unserved, uneaten foods which have been sat out in the heat for around four or five hours.  Now I have a flexible approach to food storage but even I will be making my excuses when these are offered up as a repast.   It's the waste which I find hard to come to terms with.  It's not as if they have a lot of money to spare, and buying food just to throw it away seems so counter intuitive.

Thank God for the boon of Covid which allows me to stay out of the way.

Fun with cardboard - a low tech storage boost for 2mm figures

As you will have gathered I'm a fan of the Really Useful Box as a storage solution. My go to boxes are the four and nine litre capacity ones as they take two or four hobby trays respectively. The hobby trays each have fifteen spaces measuring just over 60mm by 60 mm and 30mm deep. For two millimetre figures it's that last dimension which is problematic. Well not really problematic, more overly generous. I simply don't use the entire depth of the tray to maximum benefit. For the 2mm Altar of Freedom project two nine litre boxes don't quite give me enough storage space and a lot of the space available is wasted. This vexed me as I needed more storage while at the same time I had unusable storage capacity staring me in the face!  The question was what to do about it.  As always I turned to a do it yourself solution.  I considered a few options, I dismissed cutting trays down to allow extra trays per box as too costly and probably impossible to do neatly and turned to my old stand by ...cardboard.

The thing about my homemade 2mm figures is that even with a 2mm MDF base and standards mounted on top of the matchsticks the average height of an infantry base is well under 1cm, nearer to 6mm in fact.  So there is space to double up in each compartment in a tray.  What I didn't want to do was damage the flags of the lower layer by standing a second base directly on them so I came up with a cunning plan.

The aforementioned cunning plan in the flesh

A quick bit of basic mathematics told me how many more compartments I would need to free up.  This was assuming that I could only stack infantry, artillery and cavalry bases two deep (Generals and HQ's have oversized flag poles and won't stack).  Then it was out with the scissors and Stanley knife and straight edge.  Trebian at Wargaming for Grown Ups will be proud of me I'm doing proper grown up craft stuff with sharp tools and still have all my own fingers!  The idea was to create a 60 x 60mm surface supported all round on 15mm 'legs'  (these would sit around the MDF bases of the first layer of troops)  a small hole in the centre of the 60 x 60 surface allows the mezzanine floor I'd created to be easily removed to get at the lower tier of troops.  The first one was carefully measured and test fitted before being used as a template for the rest (that's high tech talk for 'you draw around it and then cut more of the same shape out').  Four score lines later and a bit of gentle bending and hey presto.

The master copy for use as a template

The final rough shape

These work exactly as wanted and have given me a low tech, low cost storage extension solution, which pleases me immensely, especially the low cost part.  

The final item in use ...Simples!

In other news I am still testing positive for the 'Rona but the viral load must be dropping off as the line is much thinner on today's test.  Hopefully I will be clear tomorrow and can rejoin polite society (if they will have me).

The Covid Blues (with apologies to Rory Gallagher)

" ...I woke up this morning and I got 'em too!"  To misquote the esteemed Mr Gallagher's Bullfrog Blues.  

Although to be accurate I tested positive on Saturday just nicely in time to scupper my plans for a trip to the Joy of Six show  just down the Motorway at Sheffield on the Sunday.  Bugger!  I was looking forward to that as well.

The good news is that I don't seem to have it too badly as it's about the same as a light dose of Flu or a very nasty cold (so far at least).  That's what being three vaccinations to the good and avoiding chances to be infected for two and half years has achieved.  I'm currently very sneezy but otherwise not too uncomfortable.