About Me

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War-gaming and figure collecting and painting have been the one hobby I have always had an interest in, and have found always possible to do, no matter the weather or other circumstances. At present it is my daily relax at the end of the day, when kids are asleep and all is calm, I find peace with my paints...

Wargaming

In terms of gaming and figure collecting I prefer the 28mm scale for just about all periods; ancients , medieval, pike and shot, horse & musket and fantasy. Its just a nice size figure to paint, for the detail without being excessive in size, nor too fiddly to handle.
For WWII, I prefer the 15mm scale game Flames of War, as I feel if you are going to include tanks at 28mm scale then the range becomes a little contrived if you are trying to shoot your main gun, the rounds would probably land in the neighbours garden...

Most pictures on this blog can be enlarged for viewing by clicking on them. Where a blog post has an embedded video, and you wish to view a picture in that post, right click on picture and view in new tab or window, and this should keep vid playing too.

Please feel free to leave comments, feedback always appreciated. All spam will be removed.

Please note, whist I have not gone down any formal copyright procedure route in terms of this blog and its content, if you wish to use something from it, either pictures of models I have painted or games in action, or written content, just drop me a line, and ask first. Its the decent thing to do!

Sunday, February 26, 2012

Airbrush, and the next generation continued...

Well I finally managed to get my halftracks completed yesterday, adding all the decals and varnishing them on. Just waiting for the this evening to go dark so I can get some decent lighting for pictures under the fluorescents in my gamesroom... Then I'll post these to Curt at Anologue Hobbies...

Having completed this task, I decided to unpack the airbrush that I had ordered and that had arrived earlier this week:



 Thanks to mate Greg, for showing me his airbrushes, giving me an idea how they work and a recommendation, I picked up via trademe from a dealer in the South Island.
Here it is set up in my garage, good to go...



And here's it first use, I base coated Christophers FoW 8th Army British with Iraqi Sand for their predominant uniform colour...


Its now motivated him to pick up the paintbrush again, here he is having done their helmets, now working on their skin colour...


Good lad! Makes his dad proud :-)
Posted by at 3:30 PM
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7 comments:

  1. Excellent to see Christopher under way with painting his 8th Army. Great to see a new generation of wargamers. Sadly, my son didn't seem to interested in continuing with the hobby. But must say that when my daughter bought "History of the Peloponnesian War" yesterday for her first year of university studies, I thought she might become a possible recruit for ancients gaming!!!

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    1. Thanks Roly. I think having seen the airbrush do a lot of the work for him, he realised it wasn't going to be such a hard job, and he got quite motivated to press on... I kept getting shouts of "4 done now dad...5 done now dad..." etc... we watched Band of Brothers this afternoon while painting together... Later this evening it was 'A Bridge Too Far', so he's definitely got his WW2 head on at the moment.

      Scary thing was when Tracey saw what the airbrush could do, I got cries of "Oooh , you could some stencil work on walls, something elvish..."

      I can see the airbrush may have me busier than I anticipated...

      Great to hear the Ancient Greeks have your daughter interested. As I recall your did always yourself have a thought to doing some hoplites, especially now they're availabe as cheaper plastics???

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  2. Oooh Shiny! An airbrush, wow! I think if one of those turned up at 'Awdry Towers' then there might be cries from my dear lady wife, but perhaps not in such a positive nature as Tracey's.

    Painting with 'Band of Brothers' and 'A Bridge Too Far', it doesn't really get any better than that does it?

    Enjoy the rest of your weekend, my good chap.

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    1. I know they cost a bit, and I've always pondered getting one for a long time now... I dont expect to do anything clever with it. I just wanted something that would help speed up my painting. (It was a bit like when I was thinking about getting a dremel, again another sizeable investment, but once you've got it, you start making all those things you had thought about for so long, and its worth it...)

      Especially doing FoW armies, where the majority of the figure is one uniform colour, then pick out the other details, wash the whole model in shading wash, and then touch up a few highlights...

      I hope the time saving and painting through-put achieved will see the lead/plastic mountain reduce, and stop wifey-poos whinging about buying more stuff when I still havent finished 'those boxes over there'... she has a point!

      Plus if it gets number 1 son painting again, so much the better :-)

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  3. Wow that looks like a great toy!!! I bet you'll have fun with that, you'll be trying to paint the fence before you know it! Great to see your son painting away!!

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  4. An airbrush! Scary! Isn't it a bit like a Tiger tank though: you use it for thirty seconds and then have to spend the next two hours cleaning it? I've always avoided them for that reason!

    The little chap looks jolly engaged, however!

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    1. LOL, nice analogy ;-)

      Actually clean up has been fairly easy - just a few minutes. Ive used it twice now - the 8th Army as shown, and last night base coated my 15mm PaK40 crews. Airbrush worked fine on this second go, so my 1st clean up attempt must have been fine...
      I'm using tamiya airbrush thinners with the vallejo FoW paints, and then squirt some thinner only through the airbrush once finished.
      All cleaned up in less than 5 mins...
      And it allowed me to base coat all 19 crew figures in a couple of minutes...
      I think where you are doing lots of figures the same main colour, you're onto a winner in time saving!

      I'm pondering breaking out my LOTR gondorians. I've got heaps of then undercoated black ready to paint, but couldn't be bothered to paint all that 'silver' armour - I may airbrush them all now sometime soon... I'm just a little wary of putting metallic paint through it, that will be the rest test of clean up procedure!

      Delete

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Games of toy soldiers and dice

Looking back as a younger player, I recall I probably took this all a little too seriously, exploding into flung dice and figures if things went wrong, my luck was bad and I lost...

Now I realise, the fun is simply in playing and enjoying the game, win or lose. And learning to laugh if lady luck farts in your face...So long as the game looks good with painted figures and realistic terrain, I am thrilled to get a game.

And of course an opponent of a similar mind set helps too, to make the game an enjoyable occaision.

These days I spend far more time painting figures and making terrain than I do get to play actual games, so when a game comes around I have usually forgotten half the rules and the subtle tactics of the specific game, invariably resulting in a loss! But as long as it looks good, and I have a laugh while playing, I'm happy.