We are closing in on the end of 2020. For many reasons it feels a bit like a lost year. Despite the chaos and sadness in the world, I managed to deplete and refresh my "Pile of Shame" a couple of times. However, as I go into the end of the year, there were a couple of things I wanted to tidy up before 2021.
One of my goals for 2020 was to try to paint what I purchased. This year, I purchased a few things:
1. Victrix War Elephants
2. Victrix Greek Light Cavalry
3. 4Ground Gangster Terrain
4. Brigade Aeronefs
Let's check in and see where we are at with these projects?
Victrix Greek Light Cavalry
Once I finished off all my Copplestone Casting gangsters, I ordered some Ancients. In that batch I got these Cavalry and the War Elephants. The Republican Romans were on back order, and I had to replace the order much later in the year. Too late to get them in the painting queue.
These guys give me a nice unit for Men of Bronze, Heirs of Empire, and Wars of the Republic. Not much to say about painting them really. I had just finished painting my 6mm armies, so it was a difficult transition going back to 28mm.
I have never been a fan of painting cavalry as it feels like a 10 man squad is making me do twice the work thanks to the horses. Horses scare me to paint, but they have been turning out fine lately. I still have a ways to go to make them look more "natural" but these are good enough for the tabletop.... at least in my armies anyway!
Victrix African War Elephants
I was surprised that I was able to get two Elephants out of this kit. I was only expecting one. It also came with crew to make Romans, Successor, or Numidian Elephants. If I had been smart, I would have made the crew swappable..... but I am not a smart person.
I decided to just base them on washers because..... I had them handy! Perhaps that is "minimizing" their impact on the table, but I like it. I was glad I had some leftover transfers from my Macedonian Pikeman to help jazz up the shields on the towers.
On these models I used a combination of Army Painter mini paints and Apple Barrel Big Box Acrylic paints. The Elephant skin tones were mostly the cheap acrylic paints, with a nice Army Painter wash. The base was also just cheap acrylics with cheap moss scattered across it.
Below is a terrible picture of the War Elephants deployed on the shelf with the Macedonians.
4ground Gangster Buildings
One of the goals of 2020 was to get some nice terrain to go with my Copplestone Casting Gangsters, so I could take some photos. I wanted to add some nicer photos to Turf War from my collection so I could post the rules on Wargames Vault.
Thankfully, 4ground had a line of pre-painted terrain that fit my needs really well. I ordered some from Noble Knight Games about mid-year. I orders 5 buildings from the "Chicago Way" line. They were 3 Shotgun Houses, Oldfield Tires, and Southham's Tobacco Shop.
These are very nice kits, but maybe even a bit too detailed for what I needed. Each one took me about 3 hours to put together and that was a bit more than I wanted it to take. However, there no denying that they look amazing on the table.
Here is an example of the Shotgun house.
Each model has full access to the interior for taking your fights indoors. Annoyingly, I kept putting the doors in backwards! I was also really impressed that Southam's had actual "glass" to put in the windows too. Each store model also had really great little posters and adverts that really "bling up" the model.
Aeronef Fleets
I grabbed these up in order to start doing playtesting for V4 of Castles in the Sky. I sold the work to Osprey, but have since decided on a few updates I wanted to make to it. Therefore, since V4 is pretty different to the ones I had on the blog in the past, I need to test it further.
To that end, I purchased the French and British Grand Fleet packs from a distributor. They are the older sculpts, but will do nicely for what I need. Below is what the French Fleet started as:
The Brits have 2 Battlecruisers ( of two different makes), 2 cruisers, 3 light cruisers, and 5 destroyers/escorts of various types. I still have a Battleship left to paint, but did not need it in the immediate future so left it out of the fleet for now.
Blimey, you certainly have been a busy bee.
ReplyDeleteBuzz, buzz, buzz!
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