Pop over to Bloggers for Charity and buy your self some Cracking Figures

Over on the Bloggers for Charity blog +Gary Amos is running an auction with a difference to be able to bid (by email in a confidence) you have to follow the blog and help promote it on the blogosphere. This is a cracking idea as the BfC is a great project that has been gathering pace since its conception in May 2014, in that time it has grown from a one off game for Tripples 2014 to a twice annually run game planned and created by the wargaming blogger community, with all figures and terrain for each game painted/created by bloggers and sold off after the second game with all proceeds going to Charity in 2014 the Charities are Help for Heros and Men Matter.
 If you want to know more follow the link and check out the blog, it you feel inspired you can help in any way you want.

 

Zulu War Commission and Ronin

I will gloss over Derby as I am sure that many people had a good time at the show I did not nuff said. Once I got back home I cracked on with the first 4 Zulu War figures for commission these pictures I have sent off to the customer for the OK and then will complete the other 20, these are from Empress Miniatures and I have a couple of hundred of these to paint for me and my Dad.

To go with the Ronin buildings in the last post I had a delivery from Perry Miniatures which will give me enough for a few forces, I loved painting the Perry's Samurai for the winter challenge so they were my first stop when I was looking for figures to play Ronin. Before you ask about the base's they were from another of my hair-brain ideas that will not be going any further and as I have almost 100 of these base's I wanted to try them out, and I think they fit well they will give my Ronin figures that little bit of difference and as you can see they do in fact rank up if I ever need to. (base's from Warbase BTW)

Monks

Ronin

Handgunners

Samurai

Bowmen

I am busy prepping a few more commissions for ECW and LOA, so James is a busy boy.

Ronin Buildings and Masai Warriors

Today I had a delivery from Spain, not bad postage time as I only placed to order last Saturday from Plast Craft Games these will be for my games of Ronin on my brand new gaming boards. They are pre cut on plascard and come with resin doors and windows, I will be spraying certain bits red and the resin black before I put them together and I do not see them taking too long to build and have ready for gaming.

On the painting front this week has been mostly taken up with painting Masai Warriors for Marcus of Wargames Foundry, will be dropping them off at "not" Derby on Sunday.

Along side these guys in the last few days I have started on a Zulu War British commission, early days but always like the period.

Getting More out of G+

OK so many of you already use G+ on your blogs but are you getting the most out of it?. I have just a few tips that I find useful so I wanted to take the time to share them.
First when you share a post with G+ it always adds the first picture it finds on the post, some times this may be the profile picture of the first guy to comment which can be very confusing, I have seen my own picture show up a few times on others shared blog posts. To avoid this when you click on the share and the pop up window appears if you hover over the picture you get the option to scroll through pictures available

so you can select the picture or have no picture.

The best thing I have found with G+ is message's with your friends, you can have a message thread with one or several people and only those you select can see the massage. Also when you get a reply it is highlighted on your dashboard and you can respond without leaving your dashboard.

in the G+ screen you click on the share whats new box.

Remove the Public by clicking on the X

Type in the name of the guy's you want to get the massage

Type in your message, you can add files or pictures then click share

When you get a reply it will show as an alert on the top right of your dashboard

You can read it and reply without leaving your Dashboard.

I hope this helps out a few people but for many I have just told you what you already know so sorry for that. Tomorrow I will have some painted figures to share, till then have a good night and keep those brush points sharp.

Painting Update

I have been under the weather for a few days with out going into details I will just say its good my painting room is near my bathroom :)
I have been a busy boy though and progressed several different projects, I have tow more Pulp Fiction Spys completed plus the next Ebay figure (Wee Wullie). I have been busy painting more Masi Warriors but did not get them photographed.
Today I dashed over to Foundry and met up with Loki, I now have my wargames boards and they are fantastic, I spent an hour chatting to the Foundry boys about Blog-Con and will compose a post about that over on the Blog-Con blog tonight or tomorrow.
Anyway had a mad dash around the house this afternoon finding documents so I could act as a guarantor for my daughter's rental flat, it is all sorted now and she picks up her keys on Monday (no painting for me that day then lots of box lugging)
Anyway enough chat on to some nice completed figures.

Tour of a Commission painters office

So last night was one of those nights where Insomnia hits me (not often but has hit me before), this led to me hitting my painting table after 3 hours of looking at the bedroom ceiling. I did get some great painting completed and have 2 more figures ready for Ebay, these are two Officers that I have left over from another of my impulse buys. I have also pushed the Warlord figure up to the last bits (the easy bits) of the red strips on socks and black Tartan stripes.
As I was waiting for the varnish to dry on the officers I thought it might be fun to share my office when I am doing commission work, some of you may even pick up a tip or two.
So an over view is shown below as you can see I have my paints in easy reach and have to confess that gradually the migrate down on to the desk till I can move and have a tidy up and put them all back on their shelves.

Now any one who paints historical models will have reference library, I must admit mine is minimal as I find these days the web is a great tool for uniform guides so I tend to only invest in books for periods I game myself.

As explained above I use the web a lot for uniform reference so it would be impractical to be going up and down the stairs all the time so I have my laptop to my side on a computer table that holds my to do pile. I also use this to keep an eye on blogger.

You will find some times the customer will send his own reference's or you find reference material in the figure packs, I find it great to stick these to my bookcase so I can glance at them whenever I need to. To the right I have a list of my current commissions with notes of any special instructions and time scale I am working to, I have not added a picture of this as it has the customer details on it.

The last bit to show is where I store all my non paint tools and supplies this holds my glue gun, air brush, base's basing materials and any other kit I may use.

Enough of the inner working of my office on to what I can produce when I have the time, below are the pictures of the two officers the Warlord figure and some African Warriors.

one of the officers was a poor cast right across the face which I could only fix by taking the end of his nose off, he looks fine as a table top figure but so the bidders will know about it I have a close up of piggy man.

On the way to Ebay

I have very quickly found that the best way to make money on Ebay is with single figures, for my units I will stick to Colonel Bill and my blog. So I have been digging out any single models I have this time I am working on the special model Warlord gave with the Last Argument of Kings book and a couple of Napolionic British officers.

I am also working on some commissions, this time some African Warriors just the shields to finish on these two.