Monday, December 17, 2012

Painted 10mm GHQ Confederate Stonewall Brigade Regiments

Today I've just got some pictures of two recently finished regiments to add to my Confederate Stonewall brigade. The miniatures are 10mm GHQ from the pack "Marching in Shell Jacket & Forage Cap (CSA)", with some command figures from other packs. I still have two more regiments to finish before my Stonewall Brigade is complete. I've already done the Rockbridge Artillery and General "Stonewall" Jackson himself.

Monday, December 10, 2012

Painted Wargames Factory Skeleton Warriors

I finished painting up a unit of Wargames Factory skeletons. I gave most of them some old Games Workshop coffin lid shields that I've had sitting around a long time. I also used some left-over weapons from the Mantic skeletons, and bunch of shields from other things. The idea with this unit was to have them look like recently raised skeletons, so they haven't yet been equipped like the rest of the army. So, many of them just grabbed the lid from their own coffin as a shield and picked up whatever weapon they could find. I can use them as extras in a Warhammer game for when I raise more skeletons in any of my other units than I have miniatures for, which is why some have spears and some have swords. Or I can band them all together into a unit of disorganized-looking newly raised skeletons.

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Black Powder American Civil War Battle Report

The Story
A detachment of two Union Infantry Brigades, and some accompanying Cavalry, is ordered to return with all possible speed to meet up with the main body of their army. They march almost non-stop, with very little food or sleep. Through skillful maneuvering, a small force of Confederates has managed to get behind the Union detachment and deploy between them and their destination. Hungry and exhausted, the Union soldiers come upon the Confederates. They outnumber the enemy, but are already in bad shape. Nevertheless, they have no choice but to fight their way through the enemy to meet back up with their army.

Monday, October 8, 2012

GHQ Painted 10mm General Stonewall Jackson

This is just a quick post to show off some pictures of my completed 10mm GHQ Brigadier General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson. This command stand will be for my Confederate Stonewall infantry brigade, which I'm currently working on painting up.

Monday, October 1, 2012

GHQ Painted 10mm Confederate Rockbridge Artillery Battery

I completed my version of the Rockbridge Artillery Battery, which was part of the Stonewall brigade of infantry, for my 10mm Confederate army. It originally contained cannons taken from the Virginia Military Institute, which had gun carriages painted red. They were probably quickly repainted, but I've portrayed them red to add a little variety and make this battery stand out more on the table.

Monday, September 17, 2012

Painting Skeleton Warriors

I have a lot of skeleton warriors to paint for my Vampire Counts army, so lately I've been working on coming up with a good method for painting them. Since I have many to do, I need a very quick assembly line method of painting them that will look decent enough from a normal viewing distance during a game. I don't need them all to look perfect when viewed close up, since they will be packed together in units and viewed from a distance. They just need to look good as a unit, and I need to paint a lot of them.

With that in mind, here is the process I have come up with. It is fairly fast, and gets pretty good results. The unit I tested this method out on was a unit of 25 Mantic Games Skeleton Warriors. All the paints I used are from a prior set of Citadel Paints, so the names are not the same in their current paint line. However, there are probably equivalent colors that just have different names now.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Warhammer 40k Space Marines vs Chaos Space Marines battle report

Chaos Space Marines Warhammer 40k
This was only my second game of 6th edition Warhammer 40,000, so we undoubtedly did some things wrong. It was a 1500 point game, me playing Chaos Marines and my opponent playing Space Marines. The goal of the mission was to capture and hold the four objectives, and the deployment was standard long table edges. There wasn't much of a story behind this game. Just Space Marines and Chaos Marines fighting over some random stuff. The objectives were a wounded Space Marine over on the ruined Temple of Skulls, some ammo crates just sitting amongst some rocks, a guy fleeing from a crashed plane, and a piece of the crashed plane.

Monday, August 27, 2012

Warhammer 40k 6th edition Imperial Guard vs Tau Battle Report

This was my first game of 6th Edition Warhammer 40,000. We played a small 500 point game to try learning the new rules. I played my renegade Imperial Guard, and my opponent played Tau. Since it was such a small game, we played on a 4' by 4' board, and set up some ruined buildings for terrain. The mission gave victory points for destroying units. Deployment zones were 12" away from a diagonal center line. The Tau set up first and had the first turn.

The Story
The story behind my renegade guard is still evolving somewhat. Basically, they are the personal army of a nobleman on a very feudal world with a large number of nobles who are constantly struggling against each other for power. This particular nobleman has run afoul of the Imperial authorities because of his peculiar and heretical interest in alien cultures. He has been interacting and trading with Tau, Eldar, and other races of foul xenos, and he even uses some of them as mercenaries in his army.

Tau authorities have discovered that a few of their race have defected and joined this human's army, and they aren't too pleased about it. They have sent a small force to infiltrate the planet and capture or kill their wayward brethren. They discovered a squad of Tau mercenaries in an infantry platoon that was isolated patrolling some city ruins (for some irrelevant reason). Seeing their chance, they set an ambush for the patrolling Imperial Guardsmen.

Friday, August 10, 2012

Painted Pegasus Hobbies Gothic City Terrain

I got around to painting my Pegasus Hobbies Gothic City Terrain pieces. It was a pretty simple and quick paint job. I first primed everything in black. Then I did a heavy drybrush using dark gray craft paint and a cheap 1" wide brush from the hobby store, followed by a lighter drybrush using a lighter gray color. This turned out pretty well, and I just had to paint a few details. The biggest was painting all the window bars and the metal parts on the door (and lantern/torch fixtures) in Tin Bitz followed by a drybrush of Boltgun Metal to give it an old, rusted metal look.  I painted the tops with Burnished Gold, which took a few coats to cover completely. Then there were just a few other details, like the wood of the door and floor supports, the fire on the torches, and the light of the lanterns.  Here are the results.

Monday, July 16, 2012

Painted Renegade Imperial Guard Conscripts

Here are some pictures of my last batch of renegade Imperial Guard Conscripts, converted from Victrix plastic Napoleonic French Imperial Guard.

Thursday, May 31, 2012

Still More Painted Renegade Imperial Guard Conscripts

I don't have much to say about these guys. Just more conscripts in the same style as the previous ones. One more batch to do and then I'll have the whole unit finished. Some of these had the washes pool up more than I'd like, probably from me putting it on too thick, so I'll have to be careful about that next time. On the plus side, it just makes them look extra muddy, so it's not a big deal.

Thursday, May 10, 2012

GHQ Painted Confederate 33rd Virginia Infantry Regiment

The next brigade I'm working on for my 10mm American Civil War forces is the Confederate Stonewall Brigade. I started out with the 33rd Virginia. I found some information about the uniforms worn by the 33rd Virginia at first Bull Run which said they had worn dark blue frock coats and white belts. I decided to paint my 33rd Virginia this way to add some variety to the brigade, and I like the look of the white belts. Here are some pictures of the finished regiment.

Saturday, April 21, 2012

Pegasus Hobbies Pre-Painted River Set and Wooden Fences

A while ago I ordered a couple of the pre-painted terrain sets from Pegasus Hobbies. They are pretty inexpensive and save a lot of time in painting and preparation, so they definitely seem worth it. I got two sets of their river pieces, so that I could stretch across the table lengthwise if I wanted, and some of their wooden fences. Here are some pictures of the terrain with some 28mm miniatures for size comparison. This is only showing one of the two river sets. Each set has two long straight pieces, two short straight pieces, and two 45 degree curves.


And here are some pictures with some of my 10mm Civil War miniatures. This makes the terrain pretty versatile, since I can use it as a stream in 28mm games and a river in 10mm games.


The paint job on these is probably just as good as I would have done painting them, if not better.  And the time it saved make these definitely worth getting. If I had bought unpainted terrain, it would still be sitting on the shelf unpainted, but these are ready to use in a game right away.  Pretty good deal if, like me, you have a big backlog of painting projects or just aren't that good at making or painting terrain.

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Pegasus Hobbies Gothic City Terrain

A while ago I got a couple of the Gothic City Terrain kits from Pegasus Hobbies to make some Warhammer 40,000 terrain with. I initially was planning on getting one each of the four different gothic city terrain kits they make to combine into one large building, since I don't like buildings on the table that would only be large enough to be an outhouse in 28mm scale. I actually only ended up getting two of the kits, the Gothic City Buildings Small Set #2 and the Gothic City Ruins. The kits are larger than you'd think, so the result from just those two kits ended up pretty large.

The buildings are decent for the price, though I do have a few warnings. First, it does take a lot of effort to assemble these kits, partly because of the tons of mold lines that need to be cleaned, especially in the windows, but also because some of the pieces just don't fit together quite right without some significant filing. It took a huge amount of filing to get flat surfaces where some of the pieces joined.

Second, the kits aren't nearly as modular as they seem to be. There really is one way they are intended to go together, especially with the ruined walls, and if you do it a different way you are going to have problems. For example, with the ruins, as with all the wall pieces, they look different on one side than the other. But they didn't design it so that you could easily choose which side you wanted to be inside and which be outside. With the other building set, you can assemble them with whatever side you want facing inside, but once you choose, you have to do it all that way. Since the pillars are attached to the wall sections, if one wall piece is set up one way, the next one has to be the same way, so you can't switch the inside and outside walls for different parts.

Anyway, I combined the two kits to get a decent sized piece representing just the front part of a ruined church building. I added in some of the pre-painted Pegasus Hobbies Gothic Rubble sets to have some rubble inside the ruins. Here are some pictures of the results, with a few of my converted Imperial Guard figures for scale.


I didn't glue all of the pieces together, which allows me to partially disassemble it. This was mostly to aid in storage, so it can be broken down to take up less space. But it will also allow me some variety in how I set up the building, or allow me to use just a ruined corner or other individual piece if I don't want something so big. Here you can see how it disassembles and an alternate setup.


And here are a couple shots of the whole thing packed together for storage, so the huge building takes up relatively little space in my closet.


Hopefully this has been helpful for those considering the Pegasus Hobbies Gothic City Terrain sets. If you have any of them, I'd love to see what other people have done with them. You can generally get a good deal and free shipping on these from Amazon:


Here is a link to some other Pegasus Hobbies Products