The Blog of Michael T. Murphy and his lifelong obsession with "little army men" and their imaginary glory, miniature wargaming, and other things...

Monday, March 16, 2015

March Update! (aka: "The Ides of March" or somewhat thereof...)

Greetings dear reader;
Egads this thing (blog-wise), is becoming almost "regular"!
What's up with that?
It's odd how suddenly this thing seemed to kick up on it's own.

Okay, so I've recently returned from approximately 2 1/2 months of travelling hell for work. One week I am in Indiana, the next week Ohio, with Corporate calling me wanting me to be in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the following week, and then the next week off to California, and then back to Indiana, with plans for 2 weeks in Kenosha and a week following in Ohio....
Yeah...things like that.

So this weekend I decided to use it to get my "Painting Mojo" back up and going. 
Saturday wasn't so well. I spent a portion of time, cleaning up the hobby/work table. Sometimes the "project" is cleaning up your area, so you can keep working on projects. With Mini gamers that is often the sad truth. We collect things...little pieces of plastic, cardboard, odd shaped containers. 
What one person sees as a "round, plastic, cover cap to a spray can", we, on the other hand, see it as as a "Operational Radar Dome for a secret base build deep into a mountainside...."

Yeah...our minds work that way.

So Saturday was that day when everything took twice as long, and wasn't as productive. A 10 minute painting job took 30-40 minutes. I just couldn't get into it, and I left the table feeling frustrated.
And I have a lot of figures in my "to paint queue"....


(My painting queue is set up in stages, this is the stage of "ready to go to the painting table next. If you look closely you can see a wide variety of figures including one old Grenadier(!) vampire, as well as Rafm, Ral-Partha, Pulp Figures, Blue Moon, Old Glory, Foundry, Tri-Tac, Westwind, and some others...I think I have some Bolt Action, ShadowForge, and others around also...)

So I did what any other good gaming person, did...I fumed....
And planned.

On Sunday morning I got up bright and early , and came in with a fresh mind and a fresh start....

It also helped to have my wonderful wife (Gawd bless her!), bring me breakfast at the work table....
I have an amazing wife...ya know that?

(Eggs, bacon, toast and jam, and fresh coffee too!!!!  A great way to start a day of working on figures!)....
As a result I was able to crank out....a lot....

One of my projects was to finish a mass set of graves I had gotten in the mail from my buddy Michael Mitchell of Hawgleg. So I had primed them the day before and base coated them, and today was painting the tombstones, weathering, and flocking and sealing. 
So I got 18 of them done...the full set...
Some of them I made with a dirt/rocky covering for desert/southwest style graves, while others were given a more grassy tone, and found of them I put flowers, weeds on, to make them "remembered", or "grown over and forgotten"...


("Yeps....it's a grave situation I have here....)

Below are some close-ups of the flowery graves...showing the different tufts, etc. These are some of the pieces I've been working with that I got from Little Wars last year.





 


But there's more that I did than just making graves....
While bouncing between "Irish Pub Radio", and Radio Riel "Dieselpunk", I sat down and cranked out these four in relatively quick fashion.

I call them "The North-Side Ladies Tea and Crumpets, Poetry, Sewing, Temperance, Suffrage, Occult Research, Croquet, and Murder Society"....

(The Ladies Society....always on the edge of adventure....one way or another...)

As I have finished up one project and yet see more 28's coming my way (Besides my paint queue, I made a rather large order to Bob Murch for Pulp Figures),  I started thinking about something that has been laid wayside for approximately a year now...and that would be my beloved 15mm figures.
It's been a while since I've given them some love....

So looking in the drawer, I pulled out some "Soon to be painted" vehicles for The Fandango Republic, (Bongolesia's neighbor to the South) for some future border skirmishes....

(Some potential future firepower from Bongolesia's neighbor to the South).....

Hopefully I will be getting more done here in the next couple of weeks, as I finished painting up some figures and play-test my Chili Verde game...

More to come....

Thanks for reading...