Bit of a round up

I realised it had been a little while since my last Facebook post, which probably means I'm long overdue a blog post, so here's a little round up of what I've been painting 'recently'.

First up is a set of villains painted for Crooked Dice. All Ernst Veingart digital sculpts and very well done they are. Ernst seems to have a pretty good idea how a digital image will turn out once printed and moulded and cast. Anyway, I'm sure people might notice who these are meant to be but if not then just turn the TV on on any given bank holiday and you'll likely spot one of them in a Bond film.

I also got one of those odds and sods jobs as I call them out of the way. Many of the jobs I do for people are small sets of models but occasionally I get single figures. This model is a Wizards of the Coast Boba Fett (from Star Wars of course!) and as such is one of those bendy plastic monstrosities. I think the owner had wanted to get the Knight Models Boba Fett but that was difficult to find so he made do with this one. I was kind of expecting the model to be a bit crap what with it being bendy plastic and a pre-paint, and certainly the paint job it came in didn't do it any favours. Clean up is usually a pain in the arse with these model but it ended up being pretty painless apart from a bit of mould line I couldn't shift from the detail of one foot. A blast of black spray paint quickly covered the horrors of the pre-paint and revealed a model that wasn't bad at all! Of course it had a few of the usual issues that bendy plastics display but nothing that made me want to put pencils up my nose and headbutt the desk.

For a change, rather than painting all the chipping on the armour in metals I just used white and I think it came out pretty well. The shoulder insignia proved to be a tricky bugger to get right and I scrapped my first attempt. Second time though it came out pretty much spot on, considering the small size. I actually ended up really enjoying painting this model, which surprised me a little as I was fully prepared for it to be an absolute ball ache.

Finally I'm currently working on a set of battle nun types by Warband Miniatures. Just a quick pic here. These are mostly done but a couple need the metals finishing and the rest need another coat of varnish.

Digital sculpts and cast in resin, which I don't think is the best material for them given they're rather delicate. I had a number of breakages during additional clean up (they were sent 'cleaned' and assembled) but most problems were to do with removing the original bases which were horrible things. Plenty of cracked feet needing glue and putty, plus none of them could be pinned so I had to just glue them to my bases and hope for the best. My superglue is pretty solid though and nothing I've glued has fallen off (had to re-attach a few bits that fell off from the original assembly). Other than that had an ankle snap whilst brushing some undercoat on, a foot sheared through when my finger tapped the back of the model during painting, and a hammer broke. I gather from Warband's FB page that they've had some issues with getting these cast and I can see why. I think a move to metal would really be a good choice if possible.

I've got more of these to paint and then I might have a Guildball team to do next and all the other stuff that's backed up in my schedule. Nothing new for my own collection sadly although plenty I'd like to do. I've not forgotten my colonial marines! Right, time to continue my afternoon of thrash metal and whisky!