A Quick One Before 2019

Merry Christmas, Happy new something etc. Have a blog post for Christmas. I've got plenty of things 'almost done' so I thought it would be nice to show some works-in-progress for a change as I haven't done that for a bit.

I'd also like to mention the recent Meeples and Miniatures podcast where they are brave enough to discuss their mental health issues in detail. I thought this would be worth a mention as I've mentioned my (still ongoing) mental health stuff before and men need to talk about it more.

Peltasts almost finished, including two spare bases to fill out a 100 mm x 40 mm unit for Kings of War. Lovely uncomplicated miniatures from 1st Corps.

The first group of peltasts (1st Corps) is technically painted, but one of the shields keeps falling off and I seem to have rubbed the paint off the hair in parts due to over-enthusiastic basing. I contemplated correcting these issues before I headed off for the family Christmas but I decided a break would be for the best.

I've not put too much effort into the paint job itself, just neutral colours and basic geometric patterns on the shields.

A very kind early Christmas present from Suzanne. Especially generous as the snow effect is £10(!).

The process of indoctrinating Suzanne into the world of wargaming took a step further as we took a trip to the independent model shop in Wolverhampton. I picked up some snow effect paint (£10!) and foliage, which will be glued down to circles for 2mm woods (idea from here). She picked up some Fallschirmjaeger (German paras) as well as the required paint, brushes, glue, anti-tank gun, armoured support etc. Stick with cocaine kids, it's cheaper.

Bad photo of my current tally of Celtic warriors.

Preparations for the Four Foot Snake Thing in February are underway. I've now got all the models I need, I just need to assemble and paint the beggars which I have, of course, taken back home to take advantage of the free time.

Unexpectedly Blue (I blame the lighting) Fire Giant Queen. The poor quality of the camera hides my deep suspicions about the hair. Snow effect quite nice though.

The fire giant queen is sort of done, by which I mean all of the model is covered. I'm just not sure about the fire effect on the hair. It looks fine at arms length 'tabletop distance', but upclose it is rather sloppy. I think the issue is that for the fire effect, I've tried to paint the hair close to the scalp in white, receding to red and then black via yellow. This does look the part, but it is in competition with my standard highlighting  technique of painting the raised areas with light (darker in this case) colours. This means I haven't really done any highlighting in the traditional sense and that makes it look rather crude and flat. I've left it in a drawer over Christmas and I'll take a fresh look later. Perhaps inspiration will come to me via a trifle-induced fever dream.