Gen Con Booty Report

So, as I’ve mentioned, I was at Gen Con in Indianapolis a little while ago. It’s not just a place to get together and play games and demos and tourneys, it’s also a place to buy things. Many, many things.

Stuff I bought home from Gen Con... and a cat

The black case at the top of the photo is from Max Protection, and it was billed on the packaging as a “Miniature Case 2.0” and the photo showed a troop-style foam cutout inside. I found when I got home an opened it that it did not have that kind of cutout inside, it had spaces for card decks. Maybe I can fit warjacks in those holes, we’ll see. Otherwise, I’ll have to see if Battlefoam can cut me a custom piece of foam for it, which will cost more than I paid for the bag, but it’ll be worth it.

Very Moist

It’s been terrible weather for miniatures the last week or so. Cold and damp weather makes spray primer a disaster and Dullcote spray even worse. Painting in the humidity is probably not terrible per se, but my painting is sometime iffy enough that I haven’t really wanted to push it. It’s okay weather for model construction though, so I’ve been building and doing a little tiny bit of conversion on some Imperial Guard soldiers. I’m going to be making a generic squad of ten guys for Flying Lead and I’ll probably just be painting them military green or something. Nothing fancy. However, I do plan on building the rest of the ten guys in the box as more fodder for my yet-as-unnamed mercenary force, so they’ll have the same blue and bone color scheme as the other mercs I’ve done so far and I’ll be replacing their heads with something cool from the folks at Pig Iron Productions. I used heads from their line for my merc Space Marine Scouts, and they’re really a lot of fun to work with and make figures look great. And, PIP makes some pretty cool minis themselves, so if you like sci-fi soldiers, you should really check them out.

However, I won’t be starting on those guys for awhile, as my new big project should be arriving by the end of the week, and then I’ll have a lot of work to get done. A lot.

A Productive Weekend

I got some things done this weekend, and I don’t just mean some cleaning around the house and getting out to a few local shows. I did a decent amount of hobby work and got some miniatures further along on their quest to being finished.

There's a football in there somewhere

I bought Blood Bowl (Games Workshop) more than 15 years ago, and I played it a little, then kept it in my various closets from apartment to apartment. It’s a great little game of fantasy football, and not how the term is used these days. In this case, the ‘fantasy’ means elves versus the undead, or humans versus orks, that kind of thing. Though designed by an English company, it’s based off of American football, but it’s a lot more violent, with players being killed pretty frequently. It’s a pretty good time.

Recently I got one of those weird ‘wild hairs’ in my you-know-where and decided to get the figures all modeled and painted up. I pulled out the box, cleaned the flash off of the plastics, and based the ork team with a layer of simple sand. Once that was dry, I was ready for priming.

Since it was a nice day with little wind (important since I don’t have a basement or a garage) I decided I should try and get a few more pieces primed, as well. Besides the ork team, I also primed a unit of Widowmakers and a Manhunter from Warmachine (Privateer Press), and I primed the second half of my figures from Pig Iron Productions.

Newly-painted soldiers

These figures are from their Heavy Infantry line and are great little models. The photo above shows the first half of the squad that I just finished painting. Unfortunately, when I primed them last year, I either did it wrong (maybe holding the spraycan too far away from the figures) or the conditions were bad or maybe the primer had just gotten old. Either way, they ended up with a pretty rough, dusty texture once the primer was dry. I painted them anyway, even though they nearly looked fuzzy in comparison to other miniatures I’ve painted. I used brush-on varnish to seal them, and put it on kind of thick. This helped to smooth the texture out a bit, but I’m still skeptical.

I’m going to try to paint this newly primed batch the same way (if I can remember which colors I used) and hopefully they won’t look too weird together when they’re all mixed into one squad. If the ‘fuzzy’ ones just don’t look right, then maybe I’ll get to try my hand at paint stripping, which will mean more research time with the big global info teat. I certainly could have worse problems.