I'm back!

Unlocks door, turns on lights, looks around...

Well, it's been a long time since I've been here. Which is a shame, as the last post, way back in September, was the first I actually promoted to some forums and thus the most views I ever got on the blog... Life got in the way, mostly an extremely busy time at work, which ended with your narrator getting laid off once the bulk of the work was done. C'est la vie.

Anyway, I find myself with lots of free time on my hands all of a sudden, so it's time to start posting again. When I was last here, I was working on my self-imposed challenge to paint 300 figures from the lead pile before the Reaper Bones Kickstarter loot arrives. I've fallen way behind, due to the same craziness that kept me from blogging, but here's what I did accomplish... 

I don't know where the orc came from, but it's a figure I've owned since the mid-eighties or earlier. The sorceress is from Reaper.

Reaper Bones dwarf and ogre – I figured it would be a good idea to paint some Bones figures before all the loot arrives, and the process wasn't any different from what I do with metal or plastic figures. I cut off the dwarf's chunky integral base and glued him to a US nickel, while the ogre is on a 40mm Citadel base.

More orcs – from left to right we have Grandpa, Aunt Peg, Gramma, and Cousin Louie... Various manufacturers.

The goblin on the left is from Der Kriegspielers/Custom Cast, from 1975 or so, and the other three are my own sculpts in an attempt to mimic the style.

Women warriors! I'm not sure about the blonde on the left, but the other three are Ral Partha from 1988-1990. I think this shot illustrates why I like mixing my own flesh tones – instead of all of these figures having identical skin tones, there's a realistic variation.

The fellow on the left is from Mega Miniatures, I think the knight in the center is Grenadier, and the blue wizard is from RAFM. I'm not thrilled with the paint job on the wizard, but I don't find the sculpt very inspiring either, so it's not worth repainting him.

The SF gal is from Mega Miniatures, the demon and zombie are eighties Grenadier.

Custom Cast hobbits from the 1970s. These guys will join the six I posted last year as a small (12 figures) warband in a “Defend the Shire” scenario I'm thinking about.

Finally, Ral Partha's superb Galactic Grenadiers 15mm figures. I've got the rest of the figures from the set painted as well, but haven't taken photos yet. So that's 37 figures (The set came with 38, but one of the grenadiers has gone missing), plus the 28 detailed in this post. I've also got four Reaper kobolds painted that I'll be posting once I finish up their bases and take photos.

I'll likely post more details about some of these figures in the future, but for now they're just getting added to the challenge total. Total: 90 figures painted, 210 to go...

I doubt I'm going to make it to 300 figures before the Reaper stuff gets here, but I'm still going to give it a shot. I have some small units of various figures that I'm going to try speed-painting assembly-line style to bring the number of completed models up.

First completed figures of the challenge, and a look at the Trollforged goblins

Here's my full unit of goblins from Trollforged, not quite completed yet, but the painting is done. They still need their bases detailed, and the standard bearer needs a standard attached to the pole he's toting around. They also haven't gotten their final matte varnish yet, but I had a little free time to take some pictures and write a post, so here they are, almost done.

The four command figures are conversions. The Trollforged plastic/resin/whatever-it-is material is easy to cut and takes well to superglue, making conversions a snap. The standard bearer is my favorite of the bunch - the terrified look on his face is perfect for a goblin going into battle, in the front line of his unit, with nothing but a big flag to defend himself with... I snipped off the halberd and drilled into his hand, then inserted a standard made from wire, putty, and a skull that's been kicking around in my bits box for  at least twenty years. I think it was originally attached to an undead centaur. Also, I cut off the horns on the sides of his helmet and repositioned one of them on top of his head.

The leader got a sword made from a bit of a large packing staple, with some putty for the hilt. He also got the leftover helmet horn from the standard bearer. The champion is probably my least favorite of the four converted models. I tried repositioning his arms a few different ways, originally intending to give him two weapons, but nothing really looked good and I finally just glued part of an old GW plastic skaven arm and weapon to him. Not the greatest, but it'll have to do.

The musician got a pretty extensive conversion. Part of his right arm was cut off and repositioned, the arm below the elbow was sculpted from putty, as was the horn. Finally, his face got some putty as well, to make him look like he's giving a good blow on that horn.

The paint job is very basic - blocked in colors followed by a magic wash. I was going for decent tabletop quality, not display pieces, and besides twenty finished figures is a good start on my self-imposed painting challenge (More on that below).

And now, my thoughts on the Trollforged figures, having painted and converted them. The sculpts are fantastic, more Jim Henson than GW-style goblins, which in my book is a good thing. They ooze character, and at a buck a figure everybody should have a unit or two of these guys in their fantasy armies. 

The not-so-good-stuff: The material used is not nearly as strong as Trollforged's YouTube video implies. I had one broken weapon when they arrived, and two more broke off when washing the figures to remove any mold release residue. Another one broke at the ankles when I tried to remove him from his base - Several of the figures sat oddly in their bases the first time around, and had to have bits removed from their tabs or feet to stand properly in the base. Fortunately, these are all easy fixes.

With most resin castings there will be some bubbles and other issues, and these guys are no exception. Some of them were missing fingertips and such, and while that too is a fairly easy fix with some putty, I figured the hell with it and counted on paint to hide the casting flaws.

Even with the casting issues, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend these figures. In fact, I think I might need another ten for this unit - "The Goblins of the Red Shoes" - and maybe another ten to convert and otherwise fiddle with. They'd be great for a dungeon encounter, and converting them would be an interesting project...

So now we come to my painting challenge. I've committed to paint 300 figures before the Reaper Bones Kickstarter loot arrives next March, which might not seem like much of a challenge to some painters, but it's a pretty daunting task for me. Here's the first, painted before I got stuck into the Goblins of the Red Shoes.

He's a Grenadier magic user circa 1982, stripped of his decades-old paint job and re-done in much the same colors. Again, the base is not finished, for two reasons. One, I'm giving myself some leeway on basing for the challenge. I know, I know, it's not done unless the base is done, but I'm also not sure where I want to go with basing my figures these days. I'm growing increasingly dissatisfied with the ubiquitous slotta-base, and I'm looking into and thinking about various alternatives. I prefer a base that sits closer to the ground, like the pennies I based my hobbits on from a few posts back, and one that can be detailed on the edges as well as the top, helping the model blend into the table a little better. Finally, I'm thinking of splitting my figures into two groups, those used for wargames and those used for RPGs. Most of my fantasy RPGs are old-fashioned dungeon crawls, so I want to base those figures appropriately with stone or rock floor details, while the wargames figures will have dirt, grass, etc.

The challenge so far: 21 figures painted, 279 to go...

First figures of the challenge

As I mentioned in the last post, I've set myself a challenge to drastically reduce the number of unpainted figures in the house before the Reaper Bones Kickstarter loot gets here in March. Here are the first figures I pulled out of the pile of old lead - a Grenadier wizard from 1982, and two late eighties / early nineties Ral Partha female fighters.

A Reaper vampiress, with the bit of scenery and demon bat familiar she came with. These are fairly recent, 2006 maybe, but I neglected to look at the bottom of the base for a date before blue-tacking them to bottle caps, and now I can't be bothered to take them off and check.

Finally, an early eighties Grenadier demon and a fairly rotten plastic orc from Zvezda. The orc is part of a cheap box set I bought a few years ago, figuring they couldn't be all that bad, but I have to admit they're pretty dire. This guy is only the third I've put together, and the second fell apart almost immediately, so he's the only one assembled and unpainted.

This is the chieftain of the set - He actually painted up pretty well, but no paint job can truly save a sculpt this bad...

And a back view - the crappy iPhone pic doesn't show the shading very well; the paint job is much nicer in real life. I normally don't paint orcs green, but the Zvezda models are obviously going for the GW look, so why not?