Challenge Day 95 - Final Final Entry Submitted

OK, so this is going out a few minutes into Day 96, but I've been rather busy this evening.

Curt has finally caught up with the backlog of submissions and my Mongols are now posted.

I've just sent off my final final submission, which is the NAC fleet.

I'm currently sitting in 5th place, just 18 points ahead of Miles. I'm hoping that I'll get enough points for the spaceships to counteract the points he'll be getting for his bonus round entry and keep me ahead of him. Unfortunately Ray has infected Fran with the Sandbagius budgiesmugglerensis virus which became evident with his completely bonkers entry to the final bonus round - about 250 15mm zombies, survivors and some vehicles. When the points come in for that entry he will jump straight ahead into 5th place.

Challenge Day 93 - NAC Fleet Nearly Done

I had been hoping to post my Mongols tonight, but it seems that Curt has a backlog of entries and they haven't been posted yet.

Yesterday's multi-player FoGAM game was great fun, even if things went very badly for my command. We were doing a refight of Alarcos 1195, which saw the Kingdom of Castille fighting the Almohads in central Spain in the middle of July.

My command was the Andalusian contingent on the right wing (mostly light horse with some rather crap infantry). My aim was to hold up the Castillian left wing and if things went well to try to turn their flank. However a couple of silly mistakes with positioning combined with an unexpected charge by some crossbowmen into my light horse saw me in trouble from quite early in the battle.

Things also went rather badly on our left wing, although they did manage to destroy a few groups of Castillian knights. In the centre things were less certain as the lines of infantry hadn't made contact by the time we called an end. The result was a narrow victory for the Castillians, mostly aided by their use of ahistorical tactics!

I forgot to take my camera with me which was annoying. Hopefully some of the other players will send me pics they took which I will post here.

Thanks to Gordon for hosting the game and for the most delicious lunchtime repast.

NAC Fleet

I've made good progress since Saturday and have very nearly finished painting all the ships. I've just got one bit of detail painting left to do (black stripes on hazard panels) and some touching up, which I should manage to get done tomorrow evening. On Wednesday I'll spray them with satin varnish to match the ships I painted at the end of last year, add flight peg toppers, take photos and send the pics off to Curt as my final final entry (there won't be time to get anything else painted before the closing deadline).

Quick pic of the ships as they are right now:

Challenge Day 91 - Paint Table Saturday #19

Having skipped the last couple of these, here is my contribution to

Click pic for link to Sofie's post

The last time I took part in this, I had just started work on my buccaneer commanders and dragoons. I'd also made a start on my entry fee figure for the Challenge.

The latter did get finished and entered for the Favourite Character bonus round. Before I send him off to Curt I need to do a little bit of touching up and give it another coat of matt varnish as some parts are still very shiny. The buccaneers, however, have only seen some progress. Painting these has stalled for now.

With only a few days left until the end of the Challenge, I decided today to make a start on painting up some more spaceships as these should give me some reasonably quick points to (hopefully) keep me in 5th place. These ships are the extras I ordered to upgrade my NAC from "Intro Fleet" to "Mega Fleet". There are 3 scout ships, 3 corvettes, 2 escort cruisers, a heavy cruiser, a battleship, a battle dreadnought and a super dreadnought.

So far, I've done the base colours and drybrushing of the hull. I'm hoping to get a couple more steps done tonight leaving just detailing to be done over the next few evenings.

Challenge Day 90 - Favourite Character Bonus Round

Yes, I am still alive thanks. I simply felt like taking a break from blogging.

Anyway, some updates are in order I suppose.

Mongol Command and Light Horse

Finished this evening, pics taken and sent to Curt.

Buccaneer Command and "Dragoons"

Not touched for nearly 2 weeks. I'll see what I can get done this weekend.

Gaming

On Monday I played my 2 games for the first round of our club Saga tournament. I lost both thanks to atrocious dice rolls in both games (combined with unfortunate troop match-ups in the first). My Normans were facing off against Gavin's Scots.

Last night Simon  and I finally got around to playing a couple of games of Full Thrust Lite. I lost both from some unlucky dice rolls, but the second game could have gone either way until the last turn. I think a big problem was that we were playing on a 3' x 3' mat, which was too small an area to manoeuvre our fleets properly.

On Sunday I will be taking part in a multi-player  game of FoGAM organised by Gordon, pitting Spanish against Moors in the El Cid era. It should be fun.



Favourite Character Bonus Round

It's almost 2 weeks since the gallery was posted by Curt and nearly a week since the votes were counted, so it's about time I posted some pics of my entry here.

My Favourite Character was also my entry fee figure for this year's Challenge. I had decided to do Unteroffizier Feldwebel Rolf Steiner from Cross of Iron. I'd always found this to be a powerful film and a rare example in the West of showing WW2 from a German point of view. Many years after first seeing the film I read the book it was based on and this gave me an even stronger appreciation of Steiner's character. An NCO committed to his troops, despising officers (with the possible exception of Leutnant Meier), the officer class and everything they stand for he was a real leader of men trying to survive in a world gone mad.

Finding a suitable figure proved to be impossible, so I had to convert a figure (Warlord Games Waffen SS Officer with MP38) by means of a head swap (Warlord Games head in field cap), weapon swap (well, the front part anyway - a PPSh-41 from a Warlord Games plastic Russian Infantry Weapons sprue), hacking away some of the belt equipment, filing off shoulder straps and using green stuff to sculpt the front of a crew neck sweater and a hood for the smock.

I'm quite pleased with how the stubble effect on his face has come out.


I need to do a bit of touching up of the figure before I send it to Curt and to give it another coat of matt varnish (it's still very shiny in patches).

Challenge Day 80 - 200k Hits!

Good evening one and all!

Earlier this evening saw my 200,000th page view. As you can see from the above pic I just missed this momentous occasion. This milestone has come about quite quickly after another milestone - my 500th blog post. I guess I'd better sort out a giveaway of some kind to celebrate.

This week I'm on a training course, week one of the NEBOSH General Certificate in Occupational Health and Safety. Unfortunately our tutor is setting us homework, which means a couple of hours of reading every evening. Of course, this means I don't have as much time for painting. The good news is that I'm not as tired this week - I think it may have been a low level virus that was dragging me down the past fortnight.


Mongol Command

No progress since Sunday. They are almost done so should be quick to finish when I get round to them

Pirate Commanders and Dragoons

I did the third colour set last night and stockings for those wearing them. If I have time after this evening's homework I will try to get the hair done and maybe the shoes and boots.

Mongol Light Horse

I glued the riders to the horses yesterday and this evening have primed them.

Challenge Day 78 - Sunday Update

Well, the past week wasn't kind to me. I didn't pick up a paint brush between Monday night and Saturday evening because I was feeling incredibly tired and in no fit state to paint. To be honest, I almost didn't do anything yesterday, but with the deadline looming for the "favourite character" round I wanted to at least try to finish my figure in time.

In the end I did finish the figure before the deadline, although I'm not happy with the pics I took. Curt has already managed to post the gallery for this round. It's certainly an interesting mix of figures submitted by people as their favourite character(s).

Although I haven't done much painting over the past few days, I have managed to do some prep. All of the ships for my ESU mega-fleet have been done (assembly, priming and painting to be done later). Today I've been prepping 24 Mongol light horsemen.

Hopefully I won't be so tired in the evenings this week and will be able to crack on with my current projects - the Mongol command group, the pirate command groups and the pirate "dragoons".

Just a quick workbench photo to show you:

As you can see, I've just glued the Mongol's horses onto sticks for painting. Tomorrow I'll glue the riders to the horses.

Challenge Day 74 - Tow Trucks In Space

I had submitted this over a week ago along with the horde of pirates buccaneers, but with Curt suffering a backlog of entries during his Valentine's weekend getaway it didn't get posted until Monday.

So here it is at last - a Lady Christina class recovery and repair ship from Ground Zero Games. I decided to do something fun with this and painted it in the livery colours of the Automobile Association, one of the UK's main roadside recovery organisations.

To give an idea of the size of this ship, here are two pics showing it alongside a 15mm UNSC Light Infantry rifleman from GZG.

I haven't managed to do any painting since Monday night as I've been getting home from work knackered again. This doesn't bode well for finishing my Steiner figure in time for the "favourite character" bonus round, not for getting enough figures painted to achieve my new 2400 point target. Oh well, that's life I suppose.