January Hobby Update

02.04.2018

I was off to a slow start on the hobby front in January. The first shotgun house from 4Ground took longer than I thought it would to put togehter, because of course I had to try to do everything the hard way. While the outside of the 4Ground buildings are colored, the interior is just MDF. I had it in my mind to add wallpaper - I could do this with my trusty Paint Shop Pro! I also wanted to add glass to the windows. Glass, which is really the clear paper used in overhead transparencies.

The interior and exterior walls of the house are 2 pieces. Originally I was planning on sandwiching the transparency paper/window between the wallpaper and MDF wall. The transparency is thin enough that it fits between the inner and outer MDF flush enough that it doesn't bow the MDF or require any sanding - I checked, and even started a test sanding just in case. I scanned the walls and used this as a template in Paint Shop Pro to lay out my wallpaper.

Turns out my scanning process was one of those overkill areas. using the scan as my template for the wallpaper left a little white space around window and door frames. Looking back, just using the wallpaper texture of the whole area and then cut out the holes for windows and doors after gluing the wallpaper on would work just as well. Just be sure to do this part before gluing the inner and outer walls together. It should be easier to get into the windows with a razor blade to cut away what's needed that way.

Following the 4Ground directions I was armed with super glue, clothes pins, and rubber bands to hold everything together. It worked amazingly well. 48 years old before I went out and bought myself clothes pins ($1.88/100 at Wal Mart). I dry fit everything before gluing and it paid off a couple of times when I was about to put the wrong slot A into slot B. It didn't pay off when I didn't pay attention to the 2 roof pieces and glued the interior supports to the OUTSIDE of the roof panels. I didn't recognize this until the glue had set well. I could have tried to fix it, but I didn't trust pulling things apart to not break something along the way. In the end I found a nice roof shingle texture and jsut printed out a sheet full of shingles to glue to the roof. It fits right in with the PlastCraft houses that I've already made. My residential section now has 3 houses!

On the figure front I stuck with Walking Dead minis. Morgan (with son Duane and zombie wife) and Maggie & Arnold (with random zombie) were the first WD minis I've painted since November. My detail skill was lacking on this batch and things just weren't clicking. Skin tones weren't looking right. The paint was either too thick or too runny. Sometimes you have to admit when things aren't going right, but I didn't want to give up or start over. If ever there was a time for "board quality", where things look ok from 3 feet away, this would be the time to take that. And take that I did.

Roughly halfway through the mess of the above, I went ahead and primed a "prone figures" pack of 6 minis. I was expecting all of these to be zombies, but a half didn't have the zombie-holes that mark most ofthe WD figures as zombies. I ended up doodling with these while messing with the first batch above. As my specialty is normally washes, I applied different washes to the prone minis, playing around with colors and seeing what might and might not work. It was a nice little test. If nothing else these minis are a lot more colorful than the route I usually take.

By the time the first batch of minis were based and sealed, the prone batch was ready for basing. Basing these was just adding some grass flock as there wasn't too much free room on the base thanks to the prone figure taking up so much space!!! A day later these were sealed and done.

Thanks to a clerical error in my spreadsheet, my original counts for what was left to paint were off. In the Walking Dead group of minis, now I've got

• 90 painted
• 35 to paint

 

The next batches are already started. Ezekial, with a tiger, and Chris & Julie are mostly finished. The batch after that I just primed today and includes Rick on a Horse. I have no idea how to paint Rick on a Horse. This should be interesting. Frustrating. And interesting.

As I like organization and the good use of a proper use, which I learned in no small part thanks to my hetero life partner, here's my updated summary spreadsheet. Green rows are minis I want to/am likely to paint and play with. Orange rows have a low probability of being worked on (but I actually liked painting those Dust figures when I was getting started, so you never know). Red rows have the least chance of getting painted. Am I really ever going to paint 600 Zombicide minis?

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