A Two Titan Tale

Do you like towering engines of destruction?  Do you like incredible feats of resin building, modeling, and painting?  Are you amazed and in awe when you see a "miniature" that towers above the battlefield in the 20" plus range?  Then look no more:

Two Titans

Happy to say that not only do I just know this guy, he's a buddy of mine.  Definitely check out his blog, follow it while you're at it.  Even if you're not a huge 40K fan, my buddy Jon has got some great posts about the building aspect of our hobby, and he's no slouch with the brush.

Paint Desk, Fixed

Time to get this thing back in action!

September First: Mountain Challenge

It's no secret I've seemingly forsaken the blog, 'old faithful' here, for quicker pastures; Instagram.  In the circular pattern that is life (and minis), Chris from Miniature Woes on Instagram has started a minis painting / blog posting / lead reducing challenge.  Dave from Spider Web of History is in on it (I met Dave on IG and have gotten to game with him in person since then), and of course Spacejacker has found his groove and is in as well.

The official 'rules' can be found here by Chris.  For me, I need to paint for sure, but my last blog post here was two months ago?  That's just ridiculous, so in addition to painting figures I am going to focus on getting blog posts in the queue again.

The points for me; don't buy any figs...paint what's in house, paint period, get a blog post up weekly, in October do some zombie/horror themed projects.  Boom, that's it.  As always, thanks for sticking around and enjoy!

Sci-Fi Trooper Bases

This has been in the 'draft' file for, oh, over a month!  I never wrote it up, bah, there you have it.

All right, those sci-fi troopers have had a few more coats of paint as you can see, and I usually save the bases 'til the end, they're just about done.

I went with Citadel Foundation Calthan Brown, put it on heavy, and then used the edges of their coats to drybrush off the excess from the brush.  Also, I didn't bother going back and touching up boots, so they'll have an overall weathered feel to them.  I then went back with a lighter brown, did the requisite drybrush over both the basecoat as well as their coat edges.

You can see I've got rifles, helmets, masks, armor...pretty much everything else already wrapped up.  I still need to finish the two, non-helmet commander heads, then we'll call it wraps on these guys.  This is where I say, 'Enjoy!' and thanks for sticking around!

More Sci-Fi Trooper Progress

It seems a lot of my posts have "It's been a while..." in the introduction, well whoa be to me to break tradition.  Continuing to plod along with these Wargames Factory troopers.  They're actually a lot closer than the above pic might indicate.  It's a race to keep the blog updated and the bench moving forward.  Above you can see I've got the coats done, layering up dark blues with a little stark lighter blue contrast for highlights.

All those little GW bits went to great effect on these models, which would've been a bit plain looking without them.  I kept the palette simple since I had eighteen individual kits to paint up, so I alternated between the same green and brown.  

The gas masks and lenses were begging for a bright, almost glowing green, so I obliged.  The masks themselves were a ruddy olive drab, with a green wash.  The lenses were a bit more labor intensive as I worked up three shades of green to bright, leaving it a bit 'sloppy' around the edges for an ever-so-slight object source lighting effect.

Finally, what's a trooper without his gun?  I painted their primary weapons good ole M41A Pulse Rifle green, threw in a wash, then did a little highlighting.  Again, eighteen rifles meant keeping it quick and easy.  The ventilated shroud I went with a similar bright green as I did the mask lenses.  I tried something else, but ended up not liking it whatsoever and had to repaint the barrels from scratch.  Meh, live and learn, I really like how they ended up so it worked in the end.  Next up...bases!

Sci-Fi Troopers WIP

New year, new goals. Here's a small platoon of troopers I've got brewing. Wargames Factory forms the basis of these guys, they're not slated for anything specific, just painting up a small force to get back in the saddle. I wanted to do some Pig Iron head swaps, but didn't have any on hand and didn't want any more delays, so here we go. I like the idea of a battle robot thrown in there too, nothing fancy, but a frame for general combat duty. The humans are your basic footsloggers, so I'm calling him a slog-bot, cobbled together using a Mechwarrior body as the basis. 

The box has got x18 troopers in so I've made a small platoon of two nine-man squads. Each squad can be further broken down into three three-man fire teams. There's a squad leader and a special weapon trooper per squad. These figures are a fantastic value for the money, but do leave a fair margin to be desired, especially in the weapon department. To that end I opted for a couple of GW weapon bits to supply a flamethrower and a plasma rifle. 

Spicing them up just a tad in the kit department are some more GW bits. I put a pouch, knife, canteen, or the like on all of their belts just to flesh them out a little further. Slows down the painting a bit, but the finished payoff is well worth it. 

I like this project, it'll be its own little army, maybe not hugely ambitious but when it's done it'll be a compact, efficient, and cohesive force. Now the bane of a lot of armies is the lack of vehicles. Whereas the troopers I've got might not be all that ambitious, I do plan on adding a pair of Pig Iron IFVs, one for each squad. I also plan on doing a light combat/recon aerial drone, and a recon jeep that it launches from. So there's where I'll be pushing myself a bit, again, I'm looking at the overall gameplan and eager to get the brushes dusted off!  Until next time, enjoy!

Resistance is Futile

I couldn't resist the title (see what I did there...twice even!)  This stack of figure sprues has been haunting me like the hive-minded Borg on the desk since The Gonk gifted them to me.  Of course they came wiht the disclaimer that I had to paint them, I had to.

These are historical Dark Age figs suitable (most likely) for Saga but there's a myriad of other fantastic rules sets out there calling out to these guys.  It's a good mix of armored and unarmored dudes and a good number overall to boot.

Well, time to make the doughnuts.

Hordes Anyone? Round Two

So for those who have been around for a while the title may sound familiar. Three and a half years ago I posted the exact same thing.

Qalpha said it best recently, we use blogs as a medium to measure "in the now" a hobby that actually takes years and years to cultivate, this Hordes venture is a perfect case in point.

So, as the fortunes and fates of gaming would have it, I have thrown in my lot with the one Hordes faction I never dabbled in but the one faction I always had an eye on; the Trollbloods.

The Trollbloods represent a loose alliance between a variety of formerly scattered and disparate tribal communities. They were forced to band together to survive in the face of humanity’s quickly escalating wars. Trollkin tribes, called kriels, have deep roots in western Immoren, where they have built homes in several wilderness regions the human nations had deemed of little interest. Trollkin are not strangers to human cities, as a number of these robust and hardy people work and live alongside mankind, but the majority remain in the wild, wary of humanity after a long history of frequent struggles, broken promises, and mutual bloodshed.

In a very weird trade gone awry I ended up with the horde of Trollbloods you see above for pretty much free. I was going to trade some Imperial Guard for them, but at the last minute the other party pulled out of their 40k itch. Graciously they still sent their end of the deal anyway. And there was a bag of homemade cookies in the box to boot! Who is such a stand up guy, Eli at I See Lead People of course. I'm going to send him something cool in return as it is, but I don't want to ruin the surprise here.

Anyway. We're playing Hordes/Warmachine again. We had a huge six-player intro-night last Wednesday, and everyone is on board.  It seems I can say it's official.  I'll have a "forces of" post soon with at least those who attended most recently. Those who didn't, well they have tons of stuff too so it's just a matter of learning the new rules and getting down to rolling on the tabletop.

My fledgling warband/collection so far:

• Borka Kegslayer*
• Grissel Bloodsong*
• Madrak Ironside
• x2 Troll Impalers
• Troll Axer
• Dire Troll Mauler
• Pyre Troll
• Krielstone Bearer and Scribes

I added the first two warlocks* to the mix via the Miniature Market, and must say their speed and service were incredibly fast with good prices to boot. There are some other items I'd like to add, and as I said over three years ago, I'm more of a form over function kind of guy.  I like to make my army choices based on how cool something looks not it's statline. Now since the first time I mused on this topic the Trollbloods have receiveda metric ton of new and characterful models, all very exciting stuff.  So keep your eyes peeled; mini-warbands coming up followed by a writeup of our big intro-night, and more.  Until then, enjoy!

Friday Rucht Hour: Let's Mod up a Kraken

So, as you know, I've recently bought Privateer Press's Kraken. (See my unboxing and assembly posts for more info.)  Well, it's time to mod her up. If I'm going to drop that much money on a figure and it's of appreciable size, you better bet that I'm going to have fun with it.

First of all - if you didn't know before - here's a look at the model:

                 

Now, I started by wanting to put a figure into one of the Kraken's claws. But the question was, how? If you just stick a random mini into the claws of the Kraken, it's not going to look good. The figure will be posed for something else and look stiff while being held aloft. No worries, I thought. I have some figures of dead and dying warriors from another mod I did earlier. There was one problem. Even those figures didn't look quite right and most of them were completely flat on one side, because they were supposed to be lying on the ground. Look below to see what I mean...

So, I proceeded to dig around in my bins for bits and other minis. I remembered that I had an old bag o' zombies. I had always intended on them being grunts for another game, but a zombie would work nicely for my purposes.

Because the zombies were made of soft plastic, I just used the ol' boiling water trick. I bent a zombie in half, to make it look like it was being pinched in the middle. Then I put a rubber band around it, to keep it bent. I put the zombie in boiling water, took it out, let it cool, and voila! A figure bent over as if it were clasped in the middle. Quick work with a drimmel took off the zombie's plastic base. The whole process was about 15 minutes, tops. 

Here, you can see the zombie in the claws of the Kraken. I'll paint the zombie to look more like a human on the final product. 

Next up, salad dressing! The Kraken is supposed to be this menace which rises from the sea so I crafted seaweed from green stuff and draped it all over the model. To make the seaweed, I just made long, thin strings of green stuff and flattened it out carefully. Because green stuff has a taffy-like consistency, I stretched out the strands as far as I could to make them thin. It also helped make the ends of the seaweed taper off. Because most seaweed is twisted, I just twisted the strands around before applying it to the figure. Then, I tamped it all down to give it the appearance of something wet and clingy.

Behold! The modification is 90% done! Now, all I have to do is to add some barnacles to the figure and I'll be ready to re-base and paint! 

Less Than Four Percent

That's about all I've put into this place lately, less than four percent.  It's a darn shame really, I love my blog, I love my readers, and obviously I love all the things I do here.  So what's been going on?

This ain't no apology post, life gets in the way of hobbies, that's just the way of it.  Yes, I just used "ain't" too, I don't know why, it just felt right.  I have often seen blogs I follow post an apology that they've been away, or neglected their blogs, hey, it happens.  Without the real life stuff, the hobby stuff ceases to be.

I guess I've been tired more than anything.  I've moved from being a stay-at-home dad to re-entering the workforce so I find myself falling asleep on the couch with Supernatural on in the background somewhere around the 10pm range.

Boardgaming has supplanted a lot of the other gaming in my domain as well.  It's easy to setup, easy to cleanup, and provides a lot of fun in one evening that's accessible by everyone at the table.  I do miss the roleplaying though, however it's hard to get, err, rolling.  I do miss the miniature gaming too, and with a couple of games of Infinity under our belts I am hopeful that is going to rise.

There's also been a crazy (and sudden) interest in both Warmachine and Hordes, so I suspect a lot of content will start focusing (no pun intended) on those two games.  People have bought armies and started painting them and those who didn't buy anything have tons of stuff laying around from our first foray years and years ago.

I myself have thrown my lot in with the Trollbloods, starting over from scratch after selling off everything I had some time ago.  You'll see more of them for sure.

As for the title of this post, my statline so bluntly tells I've painted a mere 3.76% of the minis I've bought this year.  To be fair the Chuhuac 15mm figs and the Reaper Kickstarter have both inflated this number considerably.  This feels about like the effort I've been putting forth though.  All I can do is go up from here on in.  On a personal note I've just accepted a new job, this time getting me back in the classroom a closer reality than where I am now, and with a twist of synchronous irony, the hefty pay increase (37.73%) is strangely close digits-wise to my current painting percentage (3.78%), give or take a decimal point of course.

I'm going to give another nod to my friends, both Miller and Rucht for posting their guest spots Monday Night Miller and Friday Rucht Hour respectively.  They're not just guest spots, they're co-authors.  Without their fresh input things would be downright desolate around here.  My Thor's Day Hero posts are here as well, but remember I wrote all of those months ago.  So where does that put us?  I don't know.  I'm still here, hopefully you are too.  Here's to the future.

Friday Rucht Hour: Assembling the Kraken

Well, here she is!

What I've done with the model is to prop one of its legs up so that it appears to be stepping up on a rock outcropping. On the rocks, I'm going to use the same dead and dying figures that I got from a historicals site that I used for my Wraith Engine. The Kraken eats bodies (the rules say that it collects corpse tokens), so the dead men are supposed to suggest this garish ability.

It's not shown here, but eventually, the Kraken will eventually have a dangling a figure from one of its claws. Speaking of its claws, that's probably my favorite feature of the model. It's arms are really, really long and stretch off of its base in a real menacing way.

It's reaching out for you! 

Here's an upclose shot of the dead figures on the rock. They aren't glued to it, yet. 

Here's a rear shot. Note all of the steam valves! 

One of the remarkable things about the model is the Kraken's long arms.

Did Someone Say Space Raptors?

His dream was velociraptors with guns.  His vehicle was Loud Ninja Games.  His fuel; Kickstarter.

I can't say Eli of "I See Lead People" fame anymore, from this point on it's Eli of Loud Ninja Games, or more to the point just Loud Ninja Games, period.

Let's face it, chances are if you game in sci-fi 15mm on the tabletop and follow this blog, you've already seen this announcement.  Maybe you're not a 15mm gamer per se, but our circles have overlapped anyway, so you already know.  But did you know that I've recently become part of the team over at Loud Ninja Games?

Yup, me, bet you didn't know that!  Now you have two reasons to plop down for some Chuhuac action.  Need a third reason?  Well those raptors you see drawn here are by none other than Minions of the Monday Night Miller Master, Chris.  In the initial planning stages in getting the raptors from idea to paper (and then eventually to sculpt) Chris and Eli worked closely together getting every last detail to be as exact and thorough as possible.

I've talked more than I intended.  I was going to just post the link and yell, "Go!" but when have I ever exercised brevity?  The sweet spot is definitely the $50 dollar mark, and that's what I opted for.  You get an entire company of space raptors, plus you get all of the cool stretch goals as they become available such as assault raptors, APCs, attack bikes, even 28mm Chuhuac!

Sunday Rucht Hour: Unboxing the Kraken

So, recently, I saved up some money for Privateer Press's Kraken model. It's one of their Colossals line, which features massive models for use on the battlefield. Their Hordes line features the Gargantuans, which are their massive warbeasts.

Since Cryx is my main faction, I saved up for this one. I'm showing you guys an unboxing. When I get it assembled, I'll show you guys that as well. And then, of course, the final product once it's paint. As a 100 dollar purchase, I'm taking my time with this one.

 There's the box! 

 All pieces laid out

This is a neat feature they've started to include with all of their warjack models - wreck markers. When a warjack is slagged on the field, it becomes rough terrain. 50% of the time, we have to scramble to proxy in a wreck marker. Finally, they've included one in the kit. It's made from thick cardboard, too. Nice!  

The resin appears to be high quality. 

The model itself, as you can see, is both resin and metal. The resin mold for the Kraken appears to be much better than the resin mold was for the Wraith Engine, which I also assembled. The Wraith Engine resin mold had a bubble in it and was bent so that I had to dip it into boiling water to make it fit. I have had not such problems with the resin this time. I did need to clean up the model with an pen knife, but that's par for the course for any model.

That's all for now - I'll post more of this baby when I get it put together.

Infinity Reinforcements

Not much to this one, as the title states I recently received some reinforcements for Infinity. My buddy Jeff recently headed out to GenCon, had a blast of course, and in addition to getting himself the Pan-O Military Orders box he snagged me a free copy of the starter rules...much better than the printout I've been using!


One of the back pages of the starter rules had a sheet of counters. Unlike the color printer ones last time, these were printed on the nice, glossy-slick paper that the whole rulebook is printed on. Like last time however, with barely any effort, I cut them out and glued them down to spare slottabases effectively doubling my overall counter count and giving me some badly needed thermo-optic camo markers.


Finally comes the real meat and potatoes to the reinforcements segment; more models for my Combined Army. Nothing too outside of the box, not knowing the game well enough I could've pondered troop choices 'til the cows came home. I just went with what the main site suggested to add to flesh out the starter box to a full three hundred points. I figured just adding three models got me to 'regular' sized games? Sign me up. It also helped that two of the three suggested figs were already on my 'must have because they look too cool' list.

Up first would be the jetpack-equipped and heavily armed/armored Rasyat. The ultra sneaky crouched Noctifer was next; lots of stealth and decent firepower, not to mention a great sculpt put him on my must-have list. Rounding out the trio is the shape-shifting Speculo Killer, maybe not my third choice, but she (it?) works out points-wise and has some kind of neat (weird?) egg laying capability.

As with my last Infinity post, I snuck in Ray's Ariadna at the end. This time is no different as I am sneaking in one of Andy's troopers too. Jeff was on a snagging frenzy at GenCon and picked up this alternate sculpt variant of one of Pan-O's basic line troops, the Fusiliers. If you haven't seen Andy's Fusiliers so far you need to check them out here.

That's about all I have for now, until next time!

Last Call for Reaper: I Did My Part

A few hours ago I joined the other 14,000+ people and bought into Reaper's Bones Kickstarter at the "Vampire" level. Last count, not that I've bothered, was around 225 figs. From dungeon crawling spider to halfling, storm giant to griffon, and everything in between.


Since my last post they have added everything you see here in this post, no small haul whatsoever, and I have a hunch that maybe some more figs will make the final curtain call. Which is in seven hours mind you (10:30 am EST as I type).


The overwhelming responses to that post were nothing short of awesome, and I based a large part of my decision in the discussions therein. My wife also had a great point; all that other stuff I want (Eclipse, Super Dungeon Explore, etc.) aren't going anywhere, I can basically buy them anytime. This Reaper ship on the other hand is pulling anchor.


So a big thanks to everyone who answered the "what do y'all think?" call the other day. As I like to drone on and on about, it's this overall global gaming community that keeps the fires lit in the boiler room that is Mik's Minis!


All right, you've got seven hours to get in on this Moby Dickulous deal if you're so inclined. As it turns out, it really was too good to pass up on in my case. Until then, as always, enjoy!

Workbench WIP

I know, shocking, there's stuff on my desk that's in a state of...being painted! This part's probably not as shocking, but you may have guessed these Infinity models aren't anywhere remotely close to my Projects HUD that I have hyped so much in the past either. They're not done but as you can see, they're very close.

I'll get some proper pics up with a real camera soon, right after I paint the bases and go through the finishing touches stage. I am breaking my 'one post a day' rule seeing how Thor's Day Hero will be here in a few hours but this is kind of breaking news I guess. Also, if you haven't figured this one out either (but I know you have) as a group we are looking down the Infinity barrel, in fact consider it a done deal, so more on that soon as well. I do want a give a shout out to Jeff who sent me an email just last week, encouraging me to get those painting numbers up and to put the "minis" back into Mik's Minis. Hope this filler helps!

Garden Post-Apocalypse

These were the tomato beds!

The History Channel had a show, Life After People, that I loved. Well I've got my own little microcosm in the backyard, but mine is Garden After People. Twice in one week I reference my tennis injury, which happened in late summer.

Well I was crutches for a little while and this monstrous moon-boot after that. Needless to say making treks to the garden after that pretty much stopped and all of that post-growing season maintenance never took place. Hence this wreck.

My pepper beds now sport huge weeds and even a maple tree!

Obligatory dog pic in what were the Habañero plants

The upper beds

Sprouts gone wild

Whoa. Have you ever seen broccoli do this?

So my time very soon will be spent down in garden doing way more prep work than need be. Pulling weeds, turning the dirt, adding new dirt, and I'm thinking of adding a new bed too. I know what I won't be planting, and that's the mega-mutant squash! Seriously, that stuff took over and there was no letting up. Maybe that's why it's banned on the import list!

Recon Trooper

I think we're still waiting on the backlog of episodes to release on the Minions podcast before the 'big reveal' for the 'big project' gets more light shed on it, but the observant of you that have been following the Instagram feed over on the right will have noticed a lot of LEGO content. The big project isn't LEGO-related per se, but it all goes hand-in-hand. Anyway, I thought I would post up a teaser pic of one of the Recon Troopers. Enjoy!