And the winner is...

Its strange that I thought this blog was dead. But the last couple of days, playing with my flickr pics, I noted that over the three years I have been using flickr, this was my most viewed picture. Why that is I don't know. Maybe its the composition? Maybe its because all of the other images you see of these seem to be single miniatures on their own. Maybe its because I cant spell Uruk Hai. But whatever the reason - when you search for Uruk Hai on google images this rates quite high, and for that I'm proud. No seo, no Google adwords, just image traffic. Proud. This image first appeared in this blog posting.

Doctor Hugh

A while ago I heard a news item on The Signal about a company called Heresy producing a ‘Captain Nathan’ figure. I bought this immediately and it sits in my collection mounted and undercoated, like most of my collections. But I’ve been watching the site with interest as to what other figures might come along. There has been a Rev Shepherd miniature and a HayLee one. I’m waiting for the River and the Inara ones personally. But recently Doctor Hugh and Dr Masterson arrived, and I purchased the two crew models and a Doctor Hugh. I like what they are doing with this. I also think this miniature is pretty excellent. He’s got the pose perfect. So in the end I copied the paint scheme that is on Heresy’s site, and am pleased with the results. I opted for blue eyes, although I’m not sure if Mr Tennant’s eyes are that colour. After a Google image search to see what colour the Doctor’s Converse were, I discovered to my annoyance that he actually wears a brown pinstripe suit. But my model’s suit is staying grey. I spent a while trying to work out if pinstripes would be visible at this scale but in the end decided I had better things to do with my time. Mal’s trousers are painted. HayLee has her basecoat. But that’s for another time.

Troll from Skull Pass

A while ago I bought a metal troll, and looked everywhere for a painting guide for it. And although it was a pig to assemble, being a multipart model, it still lays half painted in my todo pile. So when I got another troll in my Skull Pass set, I was more concerned that I would mount and fail to finish this one as well. But over the last few days I've decided to spend a while painting, and have been battling away with my Mordor Orks which now officially qualify as the longest I've taken to paint anything.

But in a break from them I spend a couple of hours painting my new troll, based on a guide on the Skull pass website. Now this guide was a very simple one, just explaining how to basecoat the main colours for the model. All of the guides on that site are like that, I suppose because they don't want to showcase the Eavy Metal guys work to beginners to discourage them. So I followed the guide, basically Catchacan Green and Commando Khaki, but blended the colours up to highlights. And in about three hours tops, with an overnight break to allow the base varnish to dry, I got this model finished. Very satisfying and I'm pleased with it.

I may hunt out my metal cave troll and have a go at that with more greener colours and see how that looks in the end. Right – back to my Mordor Orks. Sigh.

21st Century Dwarf
So I finally got around to opening my White Dwarf 30th Anniversary model. As I suspected it comes in multiple castings - Four plus the base.
One of the castings contains two parts, the shield and the White Dwarfs head. The shield is quite a good piece as it has the hands of both of the dwarves who are holding it built in, with sockets - so that shouldn’t be too bad to glue together. The shield also has a hole that a pin from the White Dwarf's foot so that he can be glued on. That doesn’t look to complex. What worries me is his head and beard, as as usual there is not much of a socket, so this will need to be pinned if possible, but its hard not to drill out of the top of his head if you get the angle right. Not looking forward to that.

The slayer and Bugman, they are both single castings (apart from their hands holding the shield) And they both have slottabase bars. But the base that they supply doesn’t look big enough for them to fit onto this - so that’s a bit strange. I googled a picture of the painted model for a colour scheme, and notice that on the demo model the dwarves are standing on pavement, that reaches out over the base to make them fit. I don’t really want to copy that directly bit I cant really see another way to do this.
So here is a posting! Just to show I've thought about this - however I wont be painting this model any time soon. If I do any miniatures painting it will have to be some of the dwarves that I got in my Skull Pass set.

Ok so it looks like I've not posted for months. You would be correct in that assumption. This is linked to the fact that I've not painted for month. The Real Life is more important at the moment. But the only thing I have done miniature related is taken this picture of my dwarf. I like his eyes.
See You. (Jimmy)

30th Anniversary Dwarf
One of my oldest and favourite miniatures was the Dwarf on Stilts which I believe was a special edition. Quite a few of my early painting attempts were of dwarves, I think because Citadel had just introduced the plastic variety and I probably could afford them at the time. So I was annoyed to see in White Dwarf online that Games Workshop were pressing an anniversary dwarf to celebrate 30 years of itself. I nearly resisted until they sent me another email saying free postage. Now it was £15, but you did get 3 dwarves, The white one, Grombrindall being born by Josef Bugman and Gotrek Gurnisson. When I showed Roo he spotted that Mr Gurnisson was a Slayer and that was about it. Ordered. And it was only available for the weekend. But Alas! Tuesday morning a letter arrived from GW which I thought was saying that there were none left, but when I opened it it just said there was a problem with my payment card – probably due to the speed in which I typed the number in. So I phoned them up. Very happy with the service from these guys. Never spoken to anyone so happy in a call centre either. He told me I was one of the first to get an internet order in as well. So there you go. So today it arrived and it was a problem! The problem was the picture above. The box looked so excellent that I want to keep it unopened as a collector thing. Wonder how long I'll last?