Printed Orcs...

I'm always looking out for new orcs and these resin ones caught my eye on eBay.

I've really struggled with the painting lately partly due to being really busy at work. Work has used up all of my creativity lately,which doesn't leave a lot left to put into projects. 

The worst thing is I just end up sitting watching people paint on YouTube. This can be soul destroying when you have your own stuff to do.

To help get me back into picking up the brush again I thought painting my favourites...orcs, might be just the thing I need to ease me back in.

My idea would be to surround these delicate resin prints with metal figures to act as a buffer. So these larger Uruks will probably end up in the middle of the bases, flanked by lesser orcs. These metal orcs from Medlam Miniatures should do the job.

These new orcs will be part of my new Gundabad army. The larger orcs will have a very dark black skin colour and will march under tattered red standards.

I'll have to be careful with some of these resin weapons, as these are the ones that will get snagged on sleeves etc. the heavy 60x60mm bases won't move and the swords will be snapped.

These new resin figures are giant and are perfect for big Gundabad Uruks.

 UPDATE: Right, I've picked out the worst offenders and replaced their long weapons with ones from an Oathmark sprue

I think this one was the worst as it sticks up above head level. This was a prime sleeve catching weapon and it had to go. I drilled into the hand and put a shorter plastic spear in. It's now rock solid now it's buried in.

This is a nice figure, but again with the resin going up it had to be swopped out. A plastic mace is put in its place with the hand being super glued in place.

There are a few other long weapons but these are either pointing horizontal or pointing down. These I can bury in the mass of metal miniatures to protect them more.

Supply Waggons

Back on the English Civil War road with these supply wagons. It's nice to have a couple of horse drawn carts packed with supplies for the table. Some of these cart loads are obviously for ancient times, but they will do for civil war too.

I covered the beds of the carts with clumps of hay, I won't stick the loads in so they can be removed.

I set myself a challenge to paint these carts and supplies with just what I had with me on the table. So a lot of craft paints and washes were used. This hay cart was painted a while ago but now it has a load to go in it.

These carts and their loads are from war bases. The carts are MDF kits as many of you will know already. These are all from different ages.

 I will paint mud on these wheels too like the ones I did before.

Play Test

Today, I went along to the Prince Rupert's gaming day and took along my Clone wars project. Obviously, being a bit of a niche project it was very different from the usual WWII games, but I did manage to get two willing players have a crack.

It was nice to have a big table to spread out on and to measure maximum weapon ranges for a change. After explaining the Tactical dice throws at the start, the game quickly fell into play.

Everything was going swimmingly until with my eyes zooming back and forth from table to notebook, I got my nemesis...a vertigo attack. These attacks have plagued me for the past year and a bad one can put me in bed or even hospital. Vistibola Migraine is the scientific name and it's starting to become a life changing pain in the arse.

For a moment I dreaded packing the game away and getting back home in the car with the world spinning. Luckily for me the anti sickness tablet kicked in and I slowly started to recover.  I was pleased to see the players had picked up the easy routine of the game and had cracked on.

It was good to see someone else play through the rules and enjoy the figures.

The scenario evolved around rescuing an injured Jedi in a crashed shuttle. The Droids reached him first and eliminated the surviving Clones. Securing the Jedi they set off for their base line. There now followed a mad dash to catch and destroy the Droids and rescue the Jedi.

Finally after a long and drawn out running firefight, the Clones caught up and got him to safety. It could of been a scene straight out of the Clone wars cartoon, which made me happy.

Dwarf spider droids crawl over the research lab in search of their next quarry.

I didn't go too mad with the units, it was hard not putting everything on the table.

The players actually enjoyed themselves which was nice to see and there was some good feedback at the end, which was useful. The main one being that when units loose health, their ability to fight should also go down too  So when they reach two pips on their health, maybe take two dice off their attacks. The same for vehicles too, this is a good point and I'll write it in.

The Homing spider droid using its beam weapon never gets old.

The downed Jedi with what's left of his company.

 I'm glad I took it all along to try it out on a big table, it's a shame about the vertigo attack but to be honest, I don't think the players noticed so all's well that ends well.

AT-RT walkers

Time to break out the light cavalry for the Clones.

 

Interesting to see the walkers in 501st livery.

Okay, so breaking these out and basing them up on 40mm bases. A few need larger bases due to their running poses.

I plan to create companies of Five models, this gives me enough for three units. I think these sculpts are the best in the whole Clone wars range. There are eight different poses and all of them are great, I think they are my favourite units in terms of what they look like.

The next step will be to colour them in Republic armour grey... Tamiya grey primer.

The actual designs differ slightly but are close enough as to not to worry. The aerials have been thickened and packs have been added to them. I set about to remove these and add my own ones using brush bristles. However, on seeing them again, I thought they looked really good, so I left them along. I did put aerials on one that had broken in the packet though, just to see what it looked like.

One thing I did do on these models which worked well, was to grind their bases down with a Dremel. I have a few models where this wasn't done and I can tell. The Dremel worked wonders at just knocking off the sharp edges of the printed base, this will be so much better when it comes to basing them.

Being 'All Terrain Recon Transports', I thought it proper to put in some rough terrain for them to run over. For this I used pebbles from the driveway and bits of tree bark.

So as to not get overwhelmed by these detailed models, I plan to paint five at a time. I might even do different legion colours for one of the companies.

Even I was surprised at the amount of resin that came off these bases.

UPDATE,

I've started to paint the models now and given have them an oil wash. I also painted on a lot of dirt around their feet to make them look more weathered.

Logs and tree trunks were added to the bases, these really go well with the leaping walkers.