Humanities Professor - 23 Aug - Idle Pulping

[Idle Doodler]

Thanks guys!

[Idle Doodler]

First update of the new year!

I'm aiming for 2018 to be my Year of the Scene(ry), so here are some pictures of the first month's efforts.

More description on the various pieces on my blog.

[d phipps]

Looks like you are off to a great start!


HAVE FUN

[Idle Doodler]

Oof, it has been a while! D&D-related distractions have kept me away from my paint brushes for the last couple of months. I shall do penance.

However, with one D&D campaign recently coming to an end, I have an extra slot after work free to return to tabletop affairs!

I have started rebasing (again) my collection, opting for very economical plastic binding sheets. The tests I ran them through indicated their flexibility might result in fewer occasions to glue a figure back to its stand. It has also held better to miniatures with a smaller foot surface area.

Thus, I am now working through my old zombie apocalypse minis, touching up the various knocks and scrapes they have accumulated over time as well. There are a couple of paint jobs which have not stood the test of time particularly well, but they will do for now. They were originally made at a time when I was far more interested in trying alternative combinations of plastic survivor parts, avoiding the plethora of gun options in favour of more British-like homemade weapons.

The Administrator


The Sports Psychologist


The Executive

[Idle Doodler]

I have found that constructing terrain is still a slog - I do not have the same degree of patience for it as with painting. I have a TTCombat suburban house in progress, and a set of apartments still in their wrapping, and I am hit by a wave of lethargy whenever I sit down at my desk, wood glue in hand. I am a child of my generation - I need terrain quickly and easily.

So, still faced with a surplus of business cards, I tried to design some more basic terrain.

The previous efforts have sufficed for the last few months, but they are a little too abstract for my liking, and having had our watertank burst above us and flooded us out of our bedroom at the beginning of the new year, I have a newfound dislike of flat roofs.

Hence, this time around, I have experimented with a design more commonly seen on British streets:



Please excuse the poor photography distortion - they are the same size!

These two terraced houses are my prototypes. I used the same doors, windows and brickwork as before, and flipped the business cards to vertical, adding a bit more of a presence on the tabletop and allowing the impression of an extra floor. The roofs overlap and in theory just sit comfortably on top, pattern taken from what I believe was a free stock picture online.

A key design choice this time round was to do away with the interior, which I judged to be a luxury I could do without. I have so very seldom used the insides because the original business card houses were just too small to even abstractly portray an intern scuffle between minis, and I figured that abandoning one design feature would allow me to try another one:



As fortunate as I am to have a hobby space to myself, it has very quickly filled up, and therefore I am on an economy drive. Fold-flat buildings are therefore a Good Thing.

These took me about an hour and a half to put together, the second much quicker than the first. Now that's a time commitment I can cope with.

[von Lucky]

Looking good - this new found energy also seems to be a Good Thing (TM).

[Idle Doodler]

Thanks! Alas, this Good Thing is being somewhat undermined by this Ruddy Weather - a top-floor flat with three walls and a flat roof facing the sun throughout the day do not a happy hobby room make...

[Idle Doodler]

Sleeping, database management, travelling on public transport - all these things are made more unpleasant with this heat (honest, Great Western Railways, where are your trains with functioning air conditioning?). To this list I add painting. No matter how wet my palette, the paint dries on the brush and the miniature before I can spread it across. I have spent half my painting time scraping off lumpy layers of paint with my fingernail over and over again.

Progress is therefore even slower than usual on the painting front.

So, back to rebasing the back catalogue of zombie hunters with a view to utilising them in some modern pulp games:

[Idle Doodler]

I have had this chap sitting in my to-do pile for a good while now - he was part of my first order from Hasslefree Miniatures, all the way back in October 2013.



He has been given a range of different right arms, from his original pistol to cricket bats, before I finally settled upon configuring him as a character of indeterminate battle-readiness. His new arm comes from the Studio Miniatures zombie sprue - one of the few unarmed right hands I could find.

I'm still not particularly happy with the glasses, though I feel these fleshtone lenses work better than the white ones I've given some of the earlier miniatures.

[Idle Doodler]

Another long-owned-but-never-painted figure, this one was either a birthday or Christmas present and has sat untouched for a long time.

I had intended for him to be an Indiana Jones-esque academic, so obviously he needed a hat. The selection on the Perry Civil War soldier sprue proved to be close enough in scale - I snipped one off and crammed it on the scalped head.

I experimented with a more wash-based approach on this fellow's clothes, which I don't think have been captured particularly well by my phone's camera. Perhaps the trousers need another layer of highlights. In person, however, I'm satisfied that they look sufficiently 'posh professor' for my purposes, if perhaps a tad bright. It was another use for the sepia wash, of which I am becoming particularly fond.

[d phipps]

Excellent work!