Some recent 1/72 scale painting

I would suppose that there is not a wargamer out there who ever gets as much painting done as they hope to.  Most of the summer was occupied by other activities this year, and the fall is getting off to a slow start as well.  I was responsible for running an emergency response exercise for the office last month, which was taking up most of my crerative energy, but, when it finally came time to run it, I ended up with a long weekend in Tooele, Utah, with not much to do except to settle in with my portable painting kit.  I finished up 22 figures in a weekend, including this little dragon which I bought from the local game store while I was there. (The dragon also came with the large skull, which I painted up figuring that I could find a use for a giant/ogre skull for something.)  I have been trying to fill out my planned orders of battle for the five countries involved in my Northlands solo campaign, so I particularly wanted to get some orcs done.  I also had a group of cows (a very small herd, I suppose) that I wanted to add as a baggage element.  Beyond that, I was willing to go with whatever inspired me.

 

I wasn’t sure what to do with the cows.  My wife suggested that I look at “belted cows”. I hadn’t heard of this as a color pattern, and there aren’t any that I have noticed locally.

However, it looked like it would be very easy to paint, so, belted cows they are.  Since they are usually going to be deploed into a fantasy setting, I don’t need to worry about when the breed was developed or any of the rest of that “realism” stuff.

In addition to the bases, I finished up 7 individuals.  The orcs are destined for the Rangers of Shadow Deep campaign I am playing co-op with Chris Palmer, and the rest are an ecelectic assortment of Strelets, Caesar and Dark Alliance figures.  The 8th figure, at the far right, was finished before the trip but finally based up with the rest when I got home.  

As mentioned, at one point I took a break from the painting to walk down the street to the game store, Game Haven, where I picked up the Wizkids dragon and a couple of bottles of paint.  There was a Joann’s fabric and craft store next door, so I ducked in there to see if I could find something that would work for scenery.  I had the sudden notion that I might play a skirmish game with all of the freshly painted figures. 

I came out with a camoflage bandanna, a plastic plant, and some tan cardstock, and whipped up this. 

My son Norman looked over the available troops and suggested that the rational scenario was humans and orcs squabbling over cattle … until the dragon arrives.  I think that would have worked out, except that time and energy ran out before I could implement it.  Nevertheless, it does seem that it should be possible to have some sort of starter game on the table fairly quickly, should one need or wish to.

After getting home and getting the basing done, it took a couple of weeks to get back to the painting table.  I started in on some Dark Alliance orcish warg riders, but set them aside briefly to allow a heavy wash to dry.  Before I knew it, I was finishing up two “big guys” who had be in progress for a while.  The big eared one is a troll (or “bunyip” in the Dean family) from the sadly out-of-production Caesar Adventurers set, and the other is a Dark Alliance cyclops.  The Airfix Robin Hood figure is just there to give an idea of the scale.

With both sons due to be back in the area, family conversation has turned to DBA/Hordes of the Things armies, so I decided to try to make some progress on an ancient Nubian army (DBA I/3 if that helps) to add to the family Bronze Age collection.

I managed to finish up two warband stands and a skirmisher, so I have two skirmishers and nine bow stands (including a general) to go.  

A Test of Army Painter Speed Paints with 1/72 Caesar Elves

 I’m usually a little behind the latest trends, so I finally picked up a few Army Painter Speed Paints for a trial.

I picked up five colors from Critical Hit Games in Abingdon, Maryland.  I was actually expecting to do a test of some skeletons, so that’s why the pallid bone, and I’m honestly not sure why I chose red.  The brown and the green, I thought, would be a fair test for some “traditional” wood elves.

Since I would like to get an elvish army on the table as part of my plan for the Portable Fantasy Campaign, I pulled out a dozen 1/72 scale Caesar Elves earlier this week and washed them up as usual.  Yesterday after work I primed them with a Reaper brush on white primer, in keeping with the general instruction to use these over white.  I pulled out a cheap brush from a Dollar Tree craft section, which was unmarked, but about the size of a typical #2 round brush, since I didn’t want to risk any unforeseen side effects with a more expensive brush. I also pulled out an oatmeal container lid to use as a palette. I then queued up the latest episode of the Yarkshire Gamers Reet Big Wargames Podcast (which is appropriate because the host always asks guests what they think about contrast/speed paints), and started brushing.

Before the 1.5 hours podcast was over, I had paint on everything, with figures and sand on bases.  I did touch up some belts and metallics with conventional paints within that time block.  The Speed Paint seems to do a reasonable job of staying where you put it, so you can probably paint trousers first and a tunic after, if that made sense.  The one point that I should have considered before starting (but did not) is that the lighter colors do not cover darker colors.  Add that to the paint staying put once applied and it is clear that the correct order of application is “lightest to darkest” rather than “innermost to outermost” or “bottom to top”.  So I should have started will all “pallid bone”, then done the flesh tone, then the brown, red and green in any order that made sense.  That would have required me to consider the whole paint scheme first rather than starting (as I did) with the cloaks (because I knew what color I wanted them to be).  

I had not necessarily intended to paint figures entirely with Speed Paints.  If I had thought about this in advance, I would have bought one more neutral-ish brown or light green or something “elvish”.  Once I got started, though, I ended up “leaning in” to the speed aspect. As it was, half the figures got green tunics and brown cloaks (with the other half the opposite), half of the figures got pallid bone trousers and the other half got red, and the brown cloaks got red quivers while the green cloaks got hardened leather quivers.

I had a certain amount of touching up to do.  I usually paint over black primer so that a missed bit looks like a shadow, so I was not surprised to find that white primer with speed paints works about the same way as white primer with conventional paints.  I ended up tapping any white bits in out of the way places with the hardened leather, as being the most inconspicuous.

Once finished, I broke the figures off the craft sticks I use to handle them with (4 to a stick) and glued them to the movement stands with the usual Walthers Goo.  As soon as they had set enough to handle the base I added the usual mix of white glue and Nova Scotia traction sand to disguise the integral bases.  Since my white glue is fairly wet at that point, and since this was a speed test, I used a dropper bottle of water to wet the sand before it finished setting so that capillary action would pull enough glue to the surface to get some flock to stick.  In the interest of speed I did not add any additional small scatter (rocks, tufts, etc.) to the bases.

I then left them to dry overnight, and sprayed them with the usual Krylon Low Odor Matte Varnish I customarily use.  This does not appear to have had any adverse effects.

If you tap on the pictures, I have uploaded larger versions of them as usual, so that you may draw your own conclusions about whether this worked.  Keeping in mind that the whole purpose is to put tabletop quality units together quickly, it is to be expected that they are not optimized for close-up viewing.

Just for my own amusement, if I were trying to optimize 1/72 scale figures for closeup viewing, they would end up looking something like this sorceress and her guards I painted earlier this year (pre-basing…).

I decided to set them up next to some of the elves I did five or six years ago using my usual techniques.  Now, I will not that I did not really like the way these figures came out vis-a-vis how I had envisioned them.  They were done as regular speed paints, and I see that I skipped eyes and other fine detail not visible at table viewing distances.

And here is one stand of each with my elvish commander stand, which was painted as though each figure was intended to be viewed as an individual.

So, what’s the overall verdict?  I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Speed Paints seem to work as advertised, and, with a little more practice for the peculiarities of the paint, would allow you to throw some basic units on the table pretty quickly.  It’s probably worth getting a few more colors, and, just for fun, trying them out with some 25/28mm figures as well.

 

The Battle of Newkeep

There was a brief discussion this past week over on the Reaper Forums about solo games.  This reminded me that I had left a battle pending in the Northlands campaign.  Since the last Northlands related game I played was a skirmish game back in June, that probably means that it has been pending since some time in July or August.

So, I decided to set it up.  I had been avoiding it because it looked like a blow-out; one kingdom’s army had advanced into another’s territory, and, due to bad intelligence (as provided by occasional die rolls to assist in decision making along the way), was attempting to attack without realizing that they were outnumbered about 2:3.  But, having been reminded, I thought that I would like to resolve it, so as to clear the way for something more interesting down the line.  

 

I decided to roll at random for one of the 30 scenarios in Neil Thomas’s One Hour Wargames book, and got scenario 7, “Flank Attack”.  Not only that, but the dice decreed that the larger force was the ambusher.  I thought, “well, that’ll be that”, but then noticed one little peculiarity in the line up.  The smaller force (the King of Darmis and his army) had a Magician unit, and the larger force (the King of Verdance and his army) was led by a Hero (i.e. the King, in this case).  This being a full scale battle, the rules to be used were Hordes of the Things, and a Hero is particularly vulnerable to a Magician.  Hmmm…could be more balanced than it initially appeared, I thought.  I rolled a die to see whether the Verdancers were aware of the presence of the Magician, and they were not, so I set the King up to be boldly leading the flanking force.

The Darmish army is on the two hills at the bottom of the picture, facing down the road, and the Verdancers are on the hills by the tower and the edge by the woods, prepared to roll the Darmish up from the left flank.  To make this short, the battle lasted two turns (so two moves by each side).  The attackers rolled up the hill immediately destroying the unit on the left end, and pushing back the remainder.  This brought the King (Hero) within range of the the Magician (Cassara, the Blue Sorceress), and her side got enough activation points each of the two turns to move 1 unit and make one magical attack.  The second try succeeded, and, having lost 4 army points (in the form of the Hero/General) to 2 army points (one stand of bows), this amounted to “more and the commander” and the battle was over. Had the Verdance attack killed a second foot soldier unit on their second turn, it would have been 4 and 4 (i.e. not “more”) and the loss of the general would have been serious but not immediately fatal.  

 

This made a good solo game; if someone else had come over to play this, I would have felt bad about giving them either side, knowing from experience that it was going to be a pretty random thing as to whether the magic attack would succeed.

Since the actual game only took a few minutes, I decided that I would write it up in proper style.  Now it’s back to the map and notebook play, to finish out the campaign year’s record keeping, and figure out the next map moves.  With the capture of the King of Verdance, I suddenly have a need to know more about his family and possible factions within the kingdom.  

I also note that the campaign year included only two pitched battles, with the other one being the Battle of the Crossroads, which was fought all the way back in May 2019.  Both of these battles were ended when Cassara the Blue Sorceress took out the opposing general.  Perhaps the Blue Order will be looking for some increase in its standing within the Kingdom of Darmis as well?  I have considered the question of whether I might use this campaign map for a roleplaying game as well as a wargames campaign, and it is starting to look like adventure hooks just write themselves …

I am hoping that the second campaign year will move along a little more quickly than the first.  

Last Stand of 2021

As I mentioned before, I took a couple of hobby projects with me at Christmas, but ended up working on the maps rather than painting any miniatures.  December had already been a good month for miniatures, in the grand scheme of things.  However, after recovering from the trip, I wanted to get something done before the end of the year.  My desk was clean, so I decided I would use the travel paint kit to keep my choices down to a reasonable level, and inspire some creativity by accepting limitations.  I had one Strelets (006, Henry V’s Army) axeman in my travel miniatures box with a few colors on him, so I started off on the morning of the 31st by finishing him up.  After painting the last sorceress, I did a bit of quick ear surgery to turn a Caesar elf into a human, and that figure was also primed and ready to go, so finished up quickly.  

Hordes of the Things (and Dragon Rampant) are both very open-ended about what a stand might consist of.  I’ve done a couple of stands with two foot figures on them, and they look just a little thin to my eye, so I decided I would go for a third figure.  The archer is also from the Strelets set 006.  I had to stick him to a painting handle, prime him, let the primer dry, then paint.  In between I took a nap and played some online board games.  Before supper, all three figures got a layer of brush on varnish.  I pushed the basing a bit, handling things while still wet where I would ordinarily let things dry between steps.  

Nevertheless, what with staying up late to welcome the New Year and all, I was able to allow enough time for everything to dry and to put on the final spray varnish coat before I went to bed.  So, it went into my painting log as a 2021 accomplishment. So, there you have it, another Hordes Magician stand, bringing me to a total of 164 things (figures, buildings, and other scenery pieces) finished for the year.  This is the fourth year in a row with between 150 and 200 figures painted.  What that says about future projects is for another day…
 

More 1/72 Fantasy Campaign Figures

 With the week off from work, I was able to make some progress on painting.  I have been wanting to get some orcs done for my 5-country fantasy campaign, and started with a Hordes of the Things “Blade” stand:

These figures are all Caesar orcs, a mix of Set 1 and Set 2.

I also had some archers primed and ready to paint:

The final orc army will include the larger Caesar orcs as the “blades”, the smaller Dark Alliance orcs as the “warbands”, and Caesar goblins as “hordes”.  The warlords of the orcs are apparently pragmatic, and group together for field service anyone who shows up at the muster with a bow, so there are three Caesar orcs, a Caesar goblin, and 3 Dark Alliance orcs on the stand.

Having accomplished what I set out to do, and inspired by a recent stand painted by my son Norman, I decided to paint a HotT “Magician” stand with three figures from the Caesar Adventurers box as a reward.

Unfortunately, the fantasy vacation is over, and it’s back to the reality of work tomorrow.  My original plan for the project involved about 100 stands, and I’m at ~57 of those now.  As with any gaming project, the plan has had a tendency to expand, but may be revised back down a little as the completion approaches.  A few more orc stands would be desirable before getting on with the second year of the solo campaign, and the month isn’t over yet.

September Overview — Zorn and 1/72 Fantasy/Medievals

 

September turned out to be a busy month in several ways, and I thought that I would blog about some of it as it was happening.  That, of course, did not turn out to be the case.  

I’ll start off with a disucssion of painting.  Included above is everything I painted for the month.  There are three 8-figure stands of 1/72 scale medieval city militia, from Strelets and Ultima Ratio, a single 1/72 scale Strelets axeman done as a fantasy individual, 3 Ral Partha orc leaders or champions from the 2015 (already?) Iron Wind Chaos Wars revival Kickstarter, a new Reaper science fiction drone for my Stargrave crew, and a couple of small pieces of scatter terrain. That’s 31 figures/pieces in a 30 day month, a rate I haven’t hit since the Before Times. I will do what I can with October, but matching that seems unlikely.

We had Barrage 24 on September 24th/25th.  I was involved in five games, and had eight total for the month, so that was good too.  One of the Barrage highlights was an opportunity to play in a game run by local GM Matt Kirkhart, who has been building his own miniatures out of bits of stuff from the craft store for many years.  This year’s scenario was a recreation of the climactic battle from the 1982 Conan movie, run as a 4-player co-op game.

We managed to save the captive princess and Conan survived, though it looked like he wasn’t going to be as effective a fighter as his companions for a while…

It was going to get its own blog post, but in the interest of getting the information out there at all, I wanted to mention that I have run across several references to the Zorn palette recently.  Anders Zorn was a Swedish painter of the late 19th/early 20th century famous for doing many of his painting with four colors of oil paints, a bright white, a bright red, an ochre yellow, and a bluish black.  With some advice my son gleaned from Internet painting discussions somewhere, I emulated this with four Reaper hobby paints:

The only blue you get is a faded denim/slate blue from mixing white and black; green is an olive from the yellow and the black, and caucasian skin tones are red and yellow with just a dash of black.

You end up with a somewhat subdued color range which seems to me to work well with medieval sorts of fantasy figures.  In the group shot that opens this post, the two stands of spearmen at the left rear were all done in Zorn colors.  It was a fun and relaxing little exercise, and a Zorn color selection is going in my travel paint kit next trip.

There are lots of ideas on my mind right now.  Norman has been working on Bronze Age DBA armies, so I am trying to get some Nubians painted.  Adding several 1/72 stands has me thinking about rounding out the planned armies for my Portable Fantasy Campaign, especially with the prospect of running something with 1/72 figures at Huzzah next year, and the Ral Partha orcs were intended to fill out a nicely themed one manufacturer orc army to give Nic Wright’s Fantastic Battles rules a try.  The Stargrave campaign is settle down as we learn the peculiarities of the rules and of our crews’ particular abilities.  I was in a co-op Rangers of Shadowdeep game at Barrage, and I’d like to get the pieces together to start playing the introductory scenarios.  So there’s lots to do, and I’ll try to be better about posting some of it…

 

1/72 Scale medievals for Fantasy and Ultimate Dungeon Terrain

 I might have mentioned that I am trying to relax a little about the painting, and just do whatever the Muses inspire me to do, confident that I always have plenty of things that have already been painted that I could be playing.

I spent most of my hobby time the week after my previous post finishing up the Ultimate Dungeon Terrain board.  One side is paved in stone:

The other side is painted green and flocked for outdoor encounters:

There is a Dungeons & Dragons (5e) game tonight, so perhaps we will have a chance to try it out, even if the scenery assortment available needs some expansion.

I painted a WizKids “bounty board” for potential use with this.

I wanted to try using extremely fine line permanent markers to create the notices. Expecting that they might not be “permanent” to the propellant in the spray varnish cans, I decided to protect them with a layer of  brush-on varnish, and was a little disappointed to find that the varnish was causing the ink to run a bit.  I finsihed it up by dabbing it on carefully, but the notices still look like they have been running a bit in the rain.

I finally finished a troop of eight mercenaries for the Portable Fantasy Campaign.  They are mostly Italeri Knights with a couple of supplementary figures thrown in.  When I started, I thought that the livery (sable, three bezants) would be simple to paint, but it turned out that putting down that many clean circles (or almost clean circles) was harder than I expected, and they kept getting set aside.  I finally completed them by the expedient method of painting one figure at a time to the finish.

Inspired by that success, I decided that I would paint some more stands for this project.  My order of battle says that I want a few spear stands, so I dug out a box of Strelets Medieval City Levy. This is a mixed box created from two of their earlier sets, one primarily spear armed, and one with a variety of mostly two-handed melee weapons,

Naturally, I couldn’t leave well enough alone and just take the spearmen, but selected a group of other weapons as well.

 

I also picked a group of 8 figures, with mixed polearms, pavises, and crossbows, from the Ultima Ratio Italian Militia set.  I posed them on a standard 60mm by 40mm base before getting started, to make sure that they would fit, and so that I would have an idea of how I wanted them to look when I finally finish them.

I had a slight skating mishap (toe pick!) last week, so using my lunch breaks at work for painting this week, rather than some sort of exercise, seemed like a good idea.

I finished three across two days, one Ultima Ratio militiaman (on the left), and two of the Strelets city levies.  They are shown here with a standard Reaper figure for size comparison.  As usually, I put a coat of thinned acrylic varnish on with a brush, to protect them while waiting for the rest of their stands to be finished.

Thoughts on the 1/72 scale ancients/fantasy/medieval project

 I have been fully vaccinated since mid-May, and the two and a half months since then have been pretty good for gaming.  HAWKs meetings have started up, my son has been up for a visit with his DBA armies, the monthly skirmish campaign has arrived, and I’ve gotten in a couple of solo and remote games as a bonus, a total of 12 games in 10 weeks.  A HAWKs sub-group also started a D&D 5th edition game this weekend, and therein hangs a tale.

5th edition allows the players fairly complete control over character creation, so the gamemaster asked what I was thinking about playing.  I said I thought that I’d like to try a bard, and, knowing the group likes to use miniatures, I thought about painting something new.  Despite the arrival this week of my Bones 5 Kickstarter package (originally ordered back in the fall of 2019), I didn’t have a figure from Reaper that I particularly liked. As one of my son’s said, I was basically looking for a male in doublet and hose with a lute. So I thought I’d have a look at Stonehaven Miniatures, a company whose miniatures I have backed on Kickstarter in large numbers, but of which few have been painted. I found just what I was looking for, and, better yet, found that I had backed that Kickstarter and threrefore had it around the house somewhere.  

However, ransacking the basement did not produce the box of “Stonehaven 2020 Adventurers”. Considering that it might take an arbitrary amount of time to find a single miniature in the hoard, I ordered  a spare.  Naturally, the box appeared on the next delve into the basement. 😳. When you reach the point where you are ordering spares of things you know you have rather than search for them, you’ve probably gone too far…

All of the gaming has cut into painting and preparation time, so that has had me considering the question of whether it would be better to decouple painting and playing…that is, play with what’s already done, and paint what I feel like painting without worrying too much about when it might be on the table.

That line of thought suggests that I have four “favorite” projects.  These are the 40mm home cast Not Quite Seven Years War, which I mused about recently, the 40mm home cast 16th century project, most recently played last September, 

Most recent 40mm Rough Wooing game; time to get these guys out again

small/true/vintage 25mm fantasy, which contains the majority of my oldest surviving miniatures,

These lizard riders have been in my armies since ~1977

and the 1/72 scale project.  Whether this is one project or several is open to debate. As far back as ten years ago, my son proposed that we deploy all the existing or planned 1/72 forces on a single map, along the lines of Tony Bath’s classic Hyborian campaign.  With all of the work he has been doing on the Bronze Age lately, he produced a draft of what he’s called “Myboria, the Second Age”, with the medieval, classical, and chariot armies generally divided up geographically.  Elements of the original map remain, but there have been some shifts in what miniatures we are considering likely to appear.

Myboria, the Second Age

I am currently splitting my very limited painting attention between two different sub-projects in 1/72. I am trying to fill out the other two Northalnds armies (elves and orcs), as well as add a historical Nubian DBA army for the ongoing Bronze Age expansion.

My Northlands map was an adaptation of northwestern Myboria

So, why 1/72 scale plastics? 

There is a nostalgia element.  I actually have a few of my own original pre-1976 Airfix Robin Hood figures in among the single-based fantasy figures. When I started wargaming with historical seriously again in the mid-1980s, I was finding the newer 1/72s (ESCI, Italeri, etc.) in the hobby shops.  This constantly tempted me to have a side project in 1/72.

Vintage Robin Hood figures from Barrage 2019 flea market

However, as I see it, there are two more objective reasons why one might take up 1/72 as a gaming scale.  The first is the transportability.  The light weight of the figures, even when based (as I do) on wooden bases, makes them easy to carry to conventions.  The second is cost. Even with increases in the prices recently, the average box is still about $15, and you can usually put on some sort of reasonable game with 2-3 boxes per side.  Less objectively, I also like the fact that most of the figures are cast in one piece (occasionally two) so I don’t have to try to assemble them, that their proportions are generally less exaggerated than the typical run of wargaming-specific figures, and that, for me, they represent the lower limit of what I can comfortably paint well enough for my taste, so are at a good spot for the combination of taking less storage space and being fun to paint.  

The Portable Fantasy Game headed to Gencon in the Before Times

There are a few downsides.  Because they are sold to a mass market, there is a tendency for the producers to stick to the tried-and-true topics, World War II, American Civil War, Wars of Napoleon, Romans and enemies, and the Hundred Years War, for example, although those topics have covered in some remarkable depth. (Anyone need some WWII German bicycle troops?) However, I guess that most of us are probably interested in at least one of the “common” periods, and if you have a yearning to refight King Phillip’s War, you may have difficulties even in metal.  The Plastic Soldier Review, in case you might not be familiar with it, has an extremely thorough coverage of historical (but generall not fantasy) sets that are, or have been, available. That is another downside; sets come into production and then disappear again quite quickly sometimes, and the recent disruptions to global commerce have not helped.  I have been trained, therefore, to buy promptly when there is something that fits into an existing project, but also not to start a new project unless you can buy everything you need to start all at once. 

The wide array of sets that have been released does give me a nice microcosm effect for fantasy.  I’ve got wagons, civilians, and farm animals, so I can set a scene in a variety of contexts, which is handy when you might be supporting a role playing game as well as a battle game.

Fantasy civilians gather for the market day

So, there you have it, why this works out to be one of my favorites…now back to some playing or painting!

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