MASSIVE SKULLS

Just a quick post, if you need any huge skulls for scenery get down to your newsagent or tesco's and grab a copy of this:

Its one of those magazines where the first issue is dirt cheap whereas any subsequent issue is nearly £6 but for only 99p for the first issue you can't go wrong with a massive skull. It's missing the top of its skull but whack on a tiled roof instead, fire some windows in the eyes and BAM! necromancers house. You're welcome

I BUILT A HOUSE!!

Sorry to my 10 followers for the lack of updates recently boring stuff like work and a cold got in the way.

Anyway I got a bit distracted from painting figures and decided to make a building, I was partly inspired by all the great stuff I keep seeing on other peoples blogs and various forums. Before I go on have a quick look at some of the things these awesome people are doing and if you come away with no inspiration after looking at some of these links there's something wrong with you.

First up is Dampf's fantastic blog and his terrain articles on Baking Irons that includes some amazing step by steps on creating all kinds of terrain pieces.

http://dampfpanzerwagon.blogspot.com/search/label/Tutorial
http://www.barkingirons.co.uk/j/game-systems/flintloque/terrain

There's some amazing things going on in the boring Mordheim forum terrain section and it's worth a look even though some of the projects make me hugely jealous
http://boringmordheimforum.forumieren.com/f4-scenery-and-terrain

Again this is a Mordheim project that someone is putting together that looks amazing.
http://www.lead-adventure.de/index.php?topic=30667.0

Lastly this is the pinnacle of  model making some of the things on here are astounding, the sites in German but is pretty easy to navigate, check out the Mortheim table (second link) words cannot describe it's wondrousness.
http://gidian-gelaende.de/03c19899280940b01/03c19899c4139102b/03c198995a14eed01/index.php
http://gidian-gelaende.de/Material_HP/Wolfgang/Mortheim/album/index.html

Enough of other peoples stuff here's my second attempt at a house (the first being a wooden shack I built about 10 years ago):

Front shot with old citadel pre-slotta druid for scale, I wasn't sure if the door was too small as he looks a little too big with his base but without I think it's not to bad.

Tip on making tiles rather than cut out millions of individual tiles do it in strips like so:

Just make sure that you cut off the strips slightly wider than you want the tiles so that the next layer has something to stick to.

Once you've cut off your strips just trim off the ends (grey area) to make the tiles less uniform and there you are roof tiles.

Closer shot of the front door, I've since added a little more detail in the form a door handle and tweaked the hanging sign.

Ignore the power axe, the chimney is made from polystyrene coated in an air drying clay called DAS which I also used on the walls to give them some texture. I've since added a split log wood pile next to the chimney and will add an axe nearer to completion.

Here's the back garden with corrugated card garden plot. I'm going to add a lot more detail after I've painted the house (hanging herbs, barrels, plants etc) I've got my eye on some miniature plants for the plot of land.

Let me know what you think it needs for finishing touches and I'll see what I can do about incorporating them.

Cheers

Quick update

Just primed up a bunch new and old stuff

Also got hold of few cool old mini's from a bring and buy at the Reading and Newbury wargames thing on Saturday:

Also here's the progress on the undead that I'm painting:

That's all for now a more wordy update later in the week

Reaper Miniatures and other

I just received my first ever order from Reaper, I've coveted their figures for awhile and thought I'd finally take the plunge and place an order.
First off really quick shipping from the US to the UK, I placed the order on the 31st of Jan and received it yesterday morning (7th of Feb) awesome turnaround as I didn't pay for any supper fast shipping. It arrived well packed and with a free paint sample which was really good of them. If you have chance go and check out their website as they do a ton of unique mini's that would be perfect for loads of different settings and games.
 Here's what I purchased, if you want to see more pics, head to the Reaper site (http://www.reapermini.com/)
These pics are taken from the reaper site and show a few different peoples painted examples so all the glory is to them whoever they are :)

All of these bar the last one are for the all female adventurer party I'm building for my wife. Can't wait to give these a spot of paint especially the frost giantess as the figure is amazing, she has a very Princess Mononoke feel so I might try and copy the colour scheme from the film but to be honest the painted example on the reaper site is pretty amazing so I may use that as inspiration.

I also just received a Freebooter (http://www.freebooterminiatures.de/) beastman for 99p on ebay which looks amazing along with some Disciples of the Red Redemption for £2.99 so I have plenty to get on with.in the next few days/weeks

POUND-LAND EXTRAVAGANZA!

I decided to have a mooch around the pound-shops yesterday and saw these bags of house construction toys that looked promising

For £1 I thought it was worth a go as it could probably be easily turned into some cheap scenery.
It can by the way:

All I did was take six sections of the 'brick' pieces and cut off the unused connection pegs at the top and bottom, I then used these to fill in the spaces at the left and right ends of the wall section and then glued the two sides together (3 pieces for front and 3 for back). The tiles on the top of the wall is a piece of card that I scored and rounded using the end of a paint brush. Once that was all glued together it was a case of dry brushing up through the greys to get the stone effect, overall I think it came out pretty good. 

If you're buying these it may be worth having a quick look at the different bags as I bought two and one the bags doesn't really have many of the solid brick wall sections compared to the other pieces. 

The 'OK' window could easily trimmed into a small doorway or window and you could quite easily use the brick sections for flooring.

Whilst in the pound shop I also picked up a bag of insect toys:

I'm attempting to make an undead war-band for skirmish based games and the 'giant' maggots are a welcome edition. Also in the pack are millipedes, flies, spiders, cockroaches, scorpions and ants, the smaller insects look pretty well sculpted and are made of a harder less flexible plastic and will look pretty good when painted up whereas the millipedes, scorpions etc are made of a more rubbery plastic that I don't think will take paint. On opening the pack I found that the maggots are made of that always sticky type of material which is a pain in the arse to handle. After lots of swearing I managed to eventually get them to stick to a base and not my fingers. To get them to 'set' and make them paintable I gave them a brush with super-glue from one of those tubes with an attached brush which seems to have made them relatively solid. 

Let me know what you think:

Once I get some more bases I may give the ants a go and painted up like Fire ants they should look pretty good.

New painted Mini's

Three more mini's finished (Huzzah!) Two unidentified ogres and a Grendadier Ghost

Out of the three I'm happiest with the Ghost as it took no time at all to paint and I think the results are pretty good whereas the 'ogres' seemed to take forever and I seemed to be forever missing areas.
I've also decided to go for 30mm lipped bases from now on as it gives everything a display feel which is nice and the lip makes fitting in solid based mini's a little easier.
Here's a picture of the £0.99 notice board display mat that I mentioned in my last post along with a couple of small scenery pieces I threw together, tomorrow I'm attempting to repair the bigger board that I started last week in the hope that I can de-bald it and possibly use it as the first part of segmented gaming table. Another great find this week was a huge container of 'Home Decor' Decorative stones for £0.50p from a shop in town that's going out of business, it's pretty much fancy railway ballast but at a fraction of the cost so happy days, I may go back and stock up...

Also this week I received my first order from Heresy Miniatures (http://www.heresyminiatures.com/shop/) this week which came amazingly fast and also included a free drumstick lolly :).
They've got a random zombie offer on at the moment, £1.00 a zombie so I got 5 and a load of 30mm lipped bases (you can never have too many zombies)

Really good looking mini's but very very skinny which will make de-mold lining a challenge but for £1.00 I shouldn't really complain and they seem more realistic compared to certain other companies hyper-cephalic gorilla handed sculpts. Two of them are also stark naked and heresy haven't shy'd away from making them anatomically correct so some time soon I'll be painting tiny zombie cock and balls.
Here's a size comparison shot with an old Citadel Zombie for reference:

There's a Newbury and Reading wargames Society bash on next week that I'll be heading too searching for a bargain that hopefully should be interesting: 

http://www.colours.org.uk/index_files/Page486.htm