3 Yolk of Oxen

01.21.2023

I'm pretty sure I don't keep it a secret that I suck at painting animals. Horses, a tiger, a deer I thought was a pig. They turn out ok, but it's only by sheer luck.

At some point I picked up a pack of oxen. Sure, these look simple enough to practice animal painting on. I then did my natural thing and tossed the pack with lots of other D&D unpainted minis and forgot about it. I forgot about it so well that at 2 more times I had the same idea again while I was out shopping.

I'm still in my non-spray-paint friendly outdoor cycle, mainly due to wind, so the parking garage I started during Christmas is still on hold. I should just accept that's going to stay on hold until April or so. As it is, I decided my impulse paint project would be those oxen I had forgotten about. I want to say "I picked them so as to better my skills" but honestly for the things that I [will] "want" to paint, I just wasn't in the mood. Thus, oxen it is!

The oxen were a pain. In retrospect, I think the indoor humidity was higher than normal as I had really bad brush stroke lines when painting. That meant another coat to try and cover those brush stroke lines. And while I'm at it, what's the difference between painting what should be an ox with how I think a cow looks?

After a couple of days the brush strokes were covered up enough. I went a little crazy with different colors on manes just to make them look different. Oxen don't have blonde manes. Very, very light brown. With sun bleached highlights.

Now I have oxen. No idea what to do with them, but they now live in the collection. Next up for priming while waiting for April is a batch of Hasslefree minis that have been sitting on a shelf for 3 or 4 years.

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New Years Walking Dead

01.03.2023

After wrapping up Zombicide Invader I had goals of not painting alien zombies. At least for a little while. The main thing I wanted to work on over my work-imposed holiday break was a parking garage from TTCombat, which would five people visiting the mall a place to park. It's a 3-story parking garage, so I decided to prepare and plan how and when to paint parts instead of gluing it all together and hoping for a scheme that would work. You never think about what color(s) a parking garage might be until you seriously consider painting something realistic.

After a little investigation through Google Images and visiting the parking garages of Grand Theft Auto 5, I had a plan. The key here would be putting some parts together (like stairwells) and paint, then add more parts and paint as needed. It was a good plan. I think it would work. I don't know yet, because the weather hasn't cooperated.

As I spray paint in the garage, with the door open, I need the weather to cooperate. Normally in North Alabama that means keeping an eye on the humidity. For Christmas this year, the weather decided to spend some time in the single digits, and I'm too much of a baby to go out in the open garage when it's that cold. This was followed by a jump to 70° and rain/thunderstorms. I knew "winter" was going to cut down on my outdoor/garage activities, but I really expected a window of a couple of days to work on this.

Instead I went to the last batch of minis I primed a while back. Random Walking Dead minis. These were all duplicates I've gotten over the years, and to be honest I don't remember what any of them are other than Sniper Andrea, Governor, and Governor's Zombie Daughter. I did a fair job painting these, but nothing exceptional. Nothing horrible either!

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Zombicide Invader: Complete

12.01.2022

And now numbers 153-158 of the Zombicide Invader minis are complete.

I tried a little something different this time, as what I started off with was not going to work in any fashion. Normally I prime white and just brush-paint everything. While I started that way, when I began my first "I want this green" soldier I found my green was uneven and streaky. I'm not going to fight this with 5 minis. As such, I primed them all black. I never prime black as I can't see any details. After that, I fake-zenithal primed by spraying with Vallejo Olive Drab from above. And you know what - it worked for what I wanted to do.

I went from there and added a little color for lights and bits. If something (guns) were to be black I just got out the black paint. A normal run of metallic drybrush and plain black bases, and they were done.

There was 1 other mini that went a different color route since he was wearing a coat, but I went with a different color scheme this time. While sorta-Iron-Man, also sorta-Hellboy.

And with that I have wrapped up an almost year-long project of painting everything for the game so that if the opportunity arises over Christmas to play with Keith and Jer, we can play. Which could very well happen.

What's my next big project?

Permalink gaming miniatures Zombicide Invader

Zombicide Invader: Last of the Aliens

11.25.2022

Back in Feb. I first posted pics of starting to paint Zombicide Invader. My goal was to paint everything (158 minis) by Christmas. Christmas is a month away. With these 4 done, there's 6 left to paint.

I'm horrible at painting non-human-people. Animals, aliens, robots, etc. Unless I have a painting guide for every detail on a given mini, I tend to not "see" what those details are. I'm not sure why this is the case, but I've always been this way. These aliens (and pirate) from Zombicide Invader have color schemes on their character cards, but I'm not going to go dig out those cards. I searched the intergoogle for color schemes I liked - and i didn't like any. So, I made the bad decision I usually make, which was to wing it. Normally winging it ends up with color combinations only found in comic books from the 60's and 70's. Non-60's/70's wing it color pallete!

The aliens in this batch were pretty much out of my comfort realm. A stereotypical Martian. Green is a given for me, but how to not make it too cartoony? I embraced the cartoony, but managed to tone it down with silver/gold metallics. Cat-Woman something, who ended up with a Leeloo Dallas Multipass inspired Orange/White color scheme that worked well enough to cover up how the "fur" and face turned out. Pig-guy, who's skin color got primed over twice to cover up "too bubblegum pink" and "too much people" and ended up with something in between with a lot of washes. Dirty pig guy in the end, I think. And the pirate (why?) with a bulbous, maybe a bat-sloth on his shoulder. A bat-sloth that a shape but not really any details (maybe I over-primed?).

This is the last of the aliens in the Invader set. All that's left are people-heads atop armored bodies. Those armored bodies will get the Starship Troopers color scheme, with which I'm not overly worried about messing up.

6 more to do, and a month to do them in. I've got a good feeling.

Permalink gaming miniatures Zombicide Invader

Sarissa Trailer No. 2 & 3

11.15.2022

A mere 7 months after finishing my first Sarissa Trailer I've finished not just the other one, but both other ones. Other two? Both of those.

On the first trailer from April I painted and weather everything before punching the pieces from the MDF. This time I was going to try a slightly different tactic which would hopefully help those MDF-colored seams from sticking out. Since I knew, in theory at least, how this trailer was supposed to fit together, I was going to try to color match the white and striped parts after punching the pieces but before gluing it all together.

And it worked. Pretty much.

I don't think some of my lines are as straight as before, and maybe some pieces don't fit as flush as I would like, but it works. And it didn't take forever to get together, with the associated fretting if any of it's going to work. The special bonus was that I didn't glue any of the walls. With primer, sealant, masking, sealant, stripe, sealant as my process, those layers provided a tight enough fit where things came together. Maybe it'll all fall apart later, but for now it's a nice snap together model.

One thing I waited to do until everything was together was to weather the trailer. Honestly, I had forgotten I had weathered the 1st trailer before putting it all together. Since I had already added the plastic (transparency paper) windows I didn't want to get carried away with weathering and the needed heavy layer of sealant after. Thus, a milder weathering was added. I also skimped on the interior, leaving it primer-white with some paper printed wall decorations. I used my delayed weathering as an excuse as when I went to apply sealant I didn't mask the windows. The sealant helps make for dirty windows where you can see inside, but can't make out any details.

Lastly was the Airstream trailer. I was curious as to how this thing was made since it's an MDF kit. Turns out it's an inner MDF frame with a cardstock shell to bend and glue on. With it being an Airstream my plan was to apply silver spray paint, but the cardstock that comes with these kits tends to soak up spray paint if you're not careful. Luckily I have a plan B - a silver Sharpie and some colored brush-pens to add a little color on the door (because that was a lot of silver) as well as blue-in the windows.

As with any mostly-cardboard thing that has to be applied to curved surfaces, it worked but not as well as I hoped. There's gaps, but I was already starting to tear things apart to get them to fit in the right spot so I left it at good enough.

Now with 3 trailers I can start a proper mobile home community.

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