14 December 2006

Yo! Ho! Ho!

I've been waiting on the weather to cooperate with me so I can prime the last few Skaven miniatures for my army. So far it's been humid, so I decided to paint something I've already got primed, a pirate! This is a Foundry pirate with a sort of Andre the Giant build. I did a few experiments on this miniature. The first was his red hair and beard. I started with an actual red basecoat, but that looked a lot like Ronald McDonald, so I mostly covered it up with Vermin Brown, which has a bit of an orange color to it. Then I used Blazing Orange to highlight it and finish it off. It's hard to see in the picture, but it looks very nice in person.
The flesh on the severed head was another experiment. The guy kept looking a little too lively, so I mixed some Rotting Flesh paint in with my skin tones to give his face that dead, bled-out look.
I toyed with smearing blood and gore on the sword, but every time I see the blood effect on a miniature it ends up looking sort of hokey. I may try it out later if i can find a good tutorial that looks a bit realistic. I suspect realism may be achieved by using more browns than reds.
I like the Foundry Pirate sculpts a lot, especially after painting a million Games Workshop figures. The Foundry sculpts are very simple. This guy consists of only a few blocks of color, but he looks very convincing and was fun to paint. The Games Workshop figures can be fun, but the sheer amount of detail and skullz on the figures can get tedious to paint and to look at. Overall I really like this miniature and I'm hoping that once I get my WWII Micro Armour project under way I'll be able to spring the cash for one of the Foundry Pirate Hordes, with 60-some random pirate miniatures.


And here's something that made me laugh today. When I came home from work I noticed that the garbage men (sanitation engineers?, waste removal persons?, the noble men and/or women who remove unwanted items from the curb as a civic service?) had left the neighbor's garbage cans in the driveway, which is normal. The trailer park manager has probably requested that they do that so we'll actually bring our trash cans in on the afternoon of trash day.

Anyway, later on I went out to get the mail. As I got to my house I saw the neighbor coming down the road in his truck. After I went around the side of my house I heard an awful grinding metal-on-metal sound. The neighbor completely ran over his garbage cans. He jumped out of his truck and commenced to swear and kick the garbage cans all over his driveway. It was quite the display of rage.

Oh, and one more thing miniatures-related. A while back I ordered the Russian '41 - Drive on Minsk book from Skirmish Campaigns. The book ended up being short one page. I e-mailed one of the book's authors and he hooked me up with a file containing the missing page and offered to replace the book for me. I left the decision to replace the book up to him as I can easily get by with a printout of the file. Today I got a message from him that all of the books are missing that page and that he's sending me a copy of their newest book free of charge. So it's like a free Christmas present.

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