On Your Mark...

  I have spent the bulk of my hobby time since my last entry preparing for my rookie season of the Analogue Painting Challenge which gets underway tomorrow. The advised points goal for rookies is 300 pts (equals 60 28mm figures); I am pretty confident that I should make it but I have a couple of projects I want to pursue outside the challenge so I wanted a fairly low bar. This lot should take me to my goal:

It includes:

• the dock sections and boats from GW's Lake-town House Multipack
• 8 Crusader Norman Crossbowmen
• 8 Flemish Mercenaries made from Conquest Games' Norman Infantry
• 6 Conquest Games Norman Archers
• 8 Crusader Dark Ages Irish
• 6 Brigade Games Cowboys and Gunslingers
• 4 Blackstone Fortress characters
• 21 Blackstone Fortress baddies
• 3 mounted ECW characters from Warlord Games
• 3 ECW infantry from (2 Perry's, 1 WG)
• 1 Renedra North American Store

If I manage to get through that I have two bins of odds and sodds primed and ready to go including more ECW, Samurai, Anglo Saxons, 15mm Carthaginians, 3rd edition Genestealers, 3rd edition Stormtroopers and some 6mm GHQ Soviets.

I did get distracted from painting prep by some trees. On a recent shopping trip to London Drugs (a Canadian retail pharmacy chain) I came across some Lemax Butternut Trees in their seasonal section.

These are twisted wire trees set in resin bases. If you don't dig the bases the trees come out with a bit of prying. I was content to leave them in. For winter scenes they are perfect as is, but I wanted to make use of all those wire branches to get a nice canopy so I pulled them apart.

 After that I got a bit ahead of myself and I gave the canopy a bit of primer as I wanted grey branches. I had to go back and add some 3M Stripping Pad material to the canopy, prime again, and followed that with some Rustoleum Chalked Ultra Matte spray (Cocoa Bean) on the trunk, obligatory drybrush and wash.

Then I started the process of adding Scenic Express SuperLeaf:

In the end it was a little more work then I anticipated, but not as much as making the trees from scratch.

The trees were about $12 each, which works out to about $3.50 less per tree than Woodland Scenics premade large deciduous trees that I have (not the Premium Trees). On the one hand these trees are about an inch shorter than the WS trees and you have to add a canopy if you are not going to use them as winter trees; and twisted wire trunks are not everyone's up of tea. On the other hand the trunks are painted (if I had been more careful I could have avoided painting the trunks) and my method for adding the canopy presents a nicer, open canopy than the opaque canopy created by the clump foliage that comes on the WS trees.

Refurbished ECW From Ebay

 This past June I found a Canadian selling some second hand ECW figures on ebay. It's pretty rare to see such a thing. Although not a steal, the price was OK, and I knew I would have to tune them up a bit to fit them into my collection. It proved to be a little more work that I thought but in the end acceptable. 

The figures were from a mix of manufacturers; the picture below gives you an idea of the painting on the minis and the different ranges. Whoever painted many of the figures did very little to clean up the castings before starting; lots of mould lines and bits of flashing were painted over.

I believe we are looking at (from L to R) Old Glory, Old Glory again, Renegade(?), Redoubt (?), Perry. 

I think the bulk of the musketeers in this wing are either Old Glory or Redoubt, with a couple of Perrys  in the front rank and possibly one or two in the rear rank:

The rear rank of this wing is mostly Perry:

The pikemen are mostly Perry; I am unsure of the command figures :

One of the pike bases is made up of new figures. Just for shits and giggles I decided to put figures from 4 different manufacturers on one  40 mm base; we have - from left to right- 1st Corp, Avanpost, Perry and Warlord Games.

The large size of the 1st Corps figure and distinctive sculpting of the face makes it stand out when compared to the others at close range. The Avanpost figure is resin with sharp, fine detail but is quite fragile (I broke his scabbard when assembling him). I loved painting the smooth finish of the resin. I think that perhaps the Perry moulds are getting a little tired; the casting was a little rough in spots with flash, some minor pitting and, what I can only describe as, lead 'lint'.

However, at gaming distance the large size of the 1st Corps figure, the poor prep from the previous painter and any other minor issues are not even noticeable.