July, the month of painting

So, at the half -way mark, I'm looking good to hit the year's painting mark. I'm aiming to have 732 painted models, or two for every day, by the end of the year. Having been unemployed for two and a half months has helped this total, and I'm 4.64% ahead of where I should be and I've now painted 400 models.

Which meant, that as June came to a close, I've had to do some basing, quite a lot of basing actually, as this photo shows.

Though you may not be able to see them, there is a good mix of models in there, from the Napoleonic 79th Cameron Highlanders to Iron Man, to High Elf Archers. Having hit 400 models, it's time to turn my attention to that American War. In previous posts I've talked about playing games and the rather large amount of models I've purchased this year, roughly 100, plus the 36 I already had, well it's time to get painting.

So, with a hundred plus models, one commander and 4 cannons to go. I feel a challenge needed. For the month of July, I'm aiming to paint at least one base of models a day. A base for me means four models. So by the end of July, I could have a 100 plus models painted.

 As I'm painting Confederates, which are a mixture of Grey, brown, grey, butterscotch, and more grey, this should be  an easily achievable target. In the past, I've painted a Scottish force for the English Civil war, and so I have a lot of grey paint. 

In the photo above you can see a box with five units, undercoated, waiting to be painted. There are five units worth built, and I have parts for another three, if not four, waiting to be built. 

So stay tuned, I hope to post updates daily, but we shall see. See you tomorrow. 

That American War

So, it’s been a while, and I’m sorry for that. I’ve been busy with work, and painting, the total is increasing towards having 4000 painted models. I need to do more basing, but that will happen, at some point. 

Recently. We’ve been gaming in the American War. Jim has had a number of models for this period, and last year we had a game, that had been several years in the making, and I’ve had a box of Perry’s plastics which were brought upon their release several years ago. 

Then a month, or so, ago, Warlord released Glory Hallelujah and things changed. A few purchases of Perry Battle in a Box later, and we all had models and rules to use them. My models are still on the sprue, waiting for some space to appear on the workstation. Once it appears, the Confederate forces will be marching from my painting table to the battletop. 

We’ve had two games so far, and each was and enjoyable affair. The one thing that Glory Hallelujah does is provide a new selection of special rules, to help give the flavour of the period. So for both games John S and I were Union, while Jim and Terry were Confederate. 

Both games happened very similarly and so I won’t be producing a battle report (that and I’ve not got any notes) with both sides approaching until they were in musket range, and then opening fire, till one or the other broke. 

However, playing in this period was refreshing. One of the special rules introduced was to make it harder to charge. Apparently, and this is a period that I’ve not done a lot of research into, that American War didn’t really feature a lot of combat, the two sides would blast away at each other until one side fled. 

With this in mind, at no point did I ever feel like charging, as I was quite happy to sit back and fire away. There are other special rules, which we’ve started to use and I look forward to getting more done. 

We also had a quick game of Napoleonics, where we were joined by Lorenzo from Warlord Games. It turns out he can really roll dice, and the French nearly won. It was a good job, John S and I, allowed them to go first, so they broke first :)

In model news, I’ve just taken delivery of a bunch of German Grenadiers to get ready for the D-Day landings we’ve started talking about wargaming. A nice 20% off from warlord helped out. I’m also purchased a few beastmen. I saw on Facebook that Paul Sawyer is redoing his Tale of Four Gamer warbands, and a few eBay purchases later I have a Beast Lord, a Shaman, and Minotaur Lord. I have lots of plans, and not enough money.

I’ve also just finished painting up my Black Widow model, that I purchased from Salute, an easy model to paint, and a good job as well. I’ve also recently painted up Commander Vimes, and that model, was, even more, fun to paint. 

I've also found a new blog about skirmish games, mainly the DC and Marvel games from Knight Models, which I've put in the side bar. Go check it out. 

Right, back to the painting table (well to World of Warcraft at least)