The last stand!

Hi, here are some new pictures of my effort to take nice pictures of my miniatures as I'm likely to compete in the LPL contest at the Lead Adventure Forum. Here are some pictures of my painted Zulu's and British soldiers.

A general shot of the skirmish.

A closeup of the British firing line. I hope you like the photos,

Greets,

A source of inspiration.

During my everlasting searches on the world wide web, I stumbled upon this inspirational blog which motivated me to start and paint my own 15mm shanties. I'm also playing with the idea to start a project in 15mm scale involving UN troops vs. militias or a riot police vs. rioters! But first I will attempt to finish my small "England invaded project", I still need to paint 20 figures. Not talking about my 20mm Japanese and German army. But here are some links with eyecandy from Jon's wargames minis blog!

Some awesome UN trucks and shanties:

http://jonswargamesminis.blogspot.com/search/label/Ak-47

Cool looking African army supplied by the Russians:

http://jonswargamesminis.blogspot.com/2010/01/my-lumatan-army-for-ak-47.html

Using cheap trucks for mobilising his army:

http://jonswargamesminis.blogspot.com/2010/07/indiana-jones-toys-for-ak-47.html

Greets and many thanks to Jon for the inspiration!

Old School Terrain, part 3

Not much talking just a picture of the collection! This time the windmill of the medieval village! This is the highest piece of the terrain collection except for the massive fortress of helmsdeep. A cool feature of the windmill is that the blades can actual rotate by rotating a frisco stick on the backside of the windmill's tower. Stay tuned as I'm showing my fortress of helmsdeep in part 8!

Now, I need to dust off the fortress and it's surrounding hill, it has been up my closet for probably 2 years.

Greets,

Old School Terrain, part 2

Hi, here's the second part of my old school terrain collection while my small uruk-hai army's bases texturing is drying. Yesterday I've managed to paint up 15 uruk-hai warriors including a berserker and a four men engineer team complete with bomb! Next in the painting queue are some leaders such as Lurtz and 6 warg riders. I've also based a bunch of mutants, monsters and gang members for my Chaos on the Red Planet! Back to the terrain, here you can see a small cottage which is part of a larger group of farm houses. A windmill and large farm will follow soon, so stay tuned!

Greets,

Old School Terrain, part 1

Hi, here's the first piece of a rather large collection of terrain that my father built and painted for me when I started to play Lord of the Rings skirmishes in 2006. Nice to know is that my father had no experience in building model terrain before he started to build terrain for me with as piece de résistance: the massive fortress of Helmsdeep! All of the building were made around a wooden base decorated with pieces of scrapwood, cartonboard and smeared with some sort of tar (the stuff used to seal roofs).

The church was one of the nicest buildings of the collection! The roof tiled with handcut cartonboard rooftiles which was a very laborious task. The door was made out of a piece of dark hardwood, I guess and the cross was made of soft wood carved with a Stanley knife. This building was extensivly used in Lord of the Rings skirmishes in which Rohan warriors were tasked to defend their village against all sorts of invaders from Orcs and Warg to even Elves! I hope you liked this nice piece of old school terrain collection as more is to follow soon!

Greets,

British battalion

Hi, here are some pictures of my newest 20mm battalion, this time some British. I've bought these Esci miniatures at the B&B of Crisis 2010 at a price of only 2 euros! Well, that's a cheap battalion. Such as all of the Italeri or Esci boxes, the miniatures are extremly well detailled but a little bit oversized compared to the small Airfix miniatures. This isn't much of a problem as I haven't got any British battalions, so these will be the fifth faction following the Americans, Germans, Russians and Japanese!

The battalion will exist out of

- 1 commander (1 figure)

- 4 squads of 4 bases (32 figures)

- 2 Piat bases (4 figures)

- 3 heavy machinegun bases (6 figures)

The sturdy box, covered with some lovely artwork.

The miniatures still on sprue.

Another close up of the sprue, I like the soldier which is carrying wounded comrade. Before I will start to paint this battalion, I will first try to finish the bases of the 2 German paratrooper battalions!

Greets,

Under the cover of darkness

Hi, I've recently been playing with my camera in an attempt to produce some good photo's. The following photo consists out of 4 militiamen which are sneaking through a cornfield at night in search for food or the enemy!

All the miniatures are made by Artizan Design and painted with GW paints. The miniature pack is named "Goumier command" but I decided I could use them as some militiamen supplied by the British, American and French. I really like the commanding officer which I painted like a French gendarme or policemen.

Greets,

German paratrooper battalions

Hi, here are some new painted additions to my 20mm collection. This time I managed to paint up 2 german paratrooper battalions which completly exist out of Airfix miniatures and cheap chinese copies of these. When using these cheap alternatives, I stumbled onto the problem of lots of identical poses. This problem was however quickly solved by cutting of some legs to convert charging miniatures into kneeling ones.

The 2 paratrooper German battalions each exist:

- 1 commander (1 figure)

- 4 squads of 4 bases (32 figures)

The most left white circle indicates the original charging miniature, the second white circle shows the converted miniature. The other converted miniature is shown by the grey circles, the lowest one is the original charging miniature.

Here's another shot of the battalions, waiting for the finishing of the basing. I'm hoping to finish these battalions and their Pak 35 support gun as soon as possible.

Greets,

New motivation method

Hi, as some regular blog visitor or follower will know I'm more a terrain builder than a miniature painter. In an attempt to stimulate myself to paint more miniatures, I've set my myself some goals and adapted some sort of motivation method.

Goals

I will paint each month at least 50 miniatures either 20, 25 and 28mm! In an attempt to record these numbers I've added a montly status on the right side of this post. If I manage to succeed these numbers I will paint at least 600 miniatures this year! For the month January I've painted 69 Fallschirmjager, 3 American Airborne Soldiers and 1 Pak 35, a staggering total of 73 miniatures.

Motivation system

Method 1

As motivation to reduce the massive amount of unpainted miniatures especially plastics, I've joined the "Honorable Lead Hoarder's Vow 2011". This vow, is a motivation to keep up the painting as the score is featured in my profile. The score depends on the purchase of new miniatures and your output of painted ones.

The formula: score = (mini's completed x 0,75) - ( purchased mini's)

Method 2

Another method is to give points to my painting results, each point equals an small amount of money by which I fund the hobby purchases. This amount of money is increased with a fixed sum of hobby money each month.

20mm miniature = 0.5 point

28mm miniature = 1 point

Finishing a unit = 20 points

I hope this post, didn't bored you too much!

Greets,