May 2017 – Steve’s Hobby Blog

Ahoy there matie!

Arcane scenery at Partizan

To be truthful, my modelling and painting progress has been curtailed over the last week or so. The weekend was entirely spent preparing and attending the Partizan show at Newark. Normally, this in itself would be the subject of my blog. However, we were so busy that the only time that I left my stand was to go to the toilet – I’m sure that this is too much information – but the upshot is that I have no pictures of the many great games that were on show. As you can see, I do have some pictures of our stand so you can get an idea of how we looked!

Deezee and the new Woodland Scenics range

Our Aprentice Pete Harris with Julie. Meanwhile in the background, Duncan is laying out Trent Miniatures!

I would like to repeat comments that I have made in previous blogs and on social media. Partizan is my favourite show of the wargames circuit, both as a trader and on the rare occasions when I venture out from the stand, as a customer and enthusiast. The new Venue is superb. Well lit, plenty of space and a decent cafeteria and seating area for refreshments. The show team led by Laurence Baldwin, could not be more friendly and helpful. The show is neatly split into four sections; Traders, Historical Societies, Demonstration games ( look but please don’t touch) and Participation Games (get stuck in).

The Blitzkrieg team, Jake, Gav, Paul & Phil receive their award from Show organiser Laurence. Photo courtesy of Wargames Soldiers & Strategy.

I was delighted for our colleagues at Blitzkrieg Games as they were awarded the prize for the best Participation game. And well deserved it was too. Their table was constantly in use and the highlight of the day was a fiercely contested battle between Father & Son that drew in onlookers through the sheer enthusiasm of the game. A fantastic advert for our hobby. Well done to Paul, Gav, Phil and Jake for creating such an open and inviting game. Watch out for Partizan 2. In the meantime if you would like to see pictures of the day, follow this link across to the official facebook page:

Partizan Wargaming and History Show

So what is the nautical title of my blog all about then? Well, once I had recovered from the exertions at Partizan, I did find time to start some modelling. I had blagged a ‘first cast’ of the new Trent Miniatures ships boat that Duncan is about to launch (Yes, the pun was intended). I still have ambitions to create a Napoleonic Marine landing force, primarily for use in some future Caribbean campaign and when I saw the new release on the Trent stand, next door to ours, I couldn’t help but get yet another boat for my force.

As yet there is no crew available but they will come in time. The boat is also without oars or a mast, again they will be added, either as part of the model or as a separate accessory pack. In the meantime, I just wanted to get one painted. Here’s my progress so far.

The new Ships Boat from Trent

I have gone for a fairly basic paint job. Once I had washed the resin cast, I primed the boat with Army painter Leather brown and when dry, gave the whole boat two liberal coats of Dark tone ink to bring out the grain and detail on the planking. It was then a case of dry brushing with various mixes of Vallejo Golden Brown, New Wood and Old Wood and finishing the details in black, as you can see. Unusually for me, I didn’t really think through how I intend to finish the boat. I was just too eager to get some paint on! So I am now debating with myself as to whether I should add a mast and sail and make it a supply ship (which is my favourite option) or whether to buy or convert a crew and have it as yet another landing party.

I also have vague ideas of converting it to a rocket launching ship. The fact is, I now have the basic hull finished and I can now experiment over the coming bank holiday, weather, Family barbeques and gardening duty permitting…

You Need Personality

To paraphrase the song by Lloyd Price ( it was released in 1959 so I’ll forgive you if you dont know it….) you need Personality in your army to really make it interesting! Which is just one reason why we are such fans of Trent Miniatures here at Arcane scenery. As well as producing the usual range of Rank and File troops for the Napoleonic Period, Trent have gone to great lengths to ensure that there are figures representing some of the lesser known characters of the time. If you are building an army you will of course want Generals and Leaders and whilst most manufacturers will produce generic officers, not many of them stray beyond the ‘Big Names’ Napoleon, Ney, Wellington, Picton etc

Trent Miniatures produce quite a collection of Characters from the Revolutionary period and from quite separate theatres. So if you are looking for something a bit different, have a look through the Trent Range. If it’s British Characters, how about Sir John Moore, Sir David Dundass, Stapleton Cotton or even the Grand old Duke of York himself!

The Grand Old Duke of York!

The Irish have plenty of choice too. There’s Joseph Holt, Michel Dwyer, Robert Emmet and the main man, Wolf Tone:

General Wolf Tone

The French Revolution also had a counter revolution by Royalists in the Vendee and Britanny. The leaders included de la Rochejaquelin, de la Tremouille, d’Eblee, Marquis deLescure, Francois Charette & Jaques Cathelineau, all available as personality packs from Trent.

A gathering of Chouans!

The picture above shows Chouans with the flags of (from right to left) Brittany, The Prince de Talmont (Antoine Phillipe de la Tremouille), and the standard of Charette (Francois Athanase charette de la Contrie). The flags are produced by Flag Dude, should you wish to obtain them.

The French have their own Generals to sort out the rebels across the Empire. You can choose from General Brune, General Humbert, Joachim Murat and yes, there is a Napoleon as he was as First Consul.

General Brune is just one of the French Generals available

Other personalities include Tousaint L’Overture from Haiti, Andreas Hofer Hofer, fighting in the Tyrol; Pasquale Paoli, rebeling on Corsica and even Tecumseh, the Shawnee leader who fought from the American war of Independence through to the 1812 War in the USA.

The Hofer gang taking cover in the tyrol

Back to the European theatre, there are a couple of Polish Generals to collect, General Antoni Kosinki and General Jan Henryk Dabrowski.

The joy of all of these models is that the personalities tell their own story. A quick search on Wikipedia will reveal details of the careers of these characters and help to bring to life the detail of the Revolutionary wars. This is often a good way to discover the background to a particular conflict.

Many wargamers have to deal with the dreaded collectors bug that strikes from time to time! These characters wont help cure this affliction but they are nice to collect and paint simply to add to your collection. I cant ever see myself painting a Polish Napoleonic army but I am tempted to have a go at painting Kosinki or Dabrowski as a display figure for my cabinet. I find that sometimes a break from churning out units and armies to just paint one character figures is a good way of getting your painting mojo back, if ever you are feeling a bit jaded at the thought of yet another battalion of redcoats or blue coats!

Pascale Paoli would make an interesting Guerrilla leader on the Peninsular.

To view the full Trent Miniatures collection, follow this link:

TRENT MINIATURES

At the time of writing, they are all available post free from Arcane scenery – if you are not familiar with the range, you may just be surprised at how many useful items they have!

Jonas Jones Rides again!

The last time Jonas Jones wrote for the blog was back in 2011! But he’s back again, armed with his Jewellers saw, pin vice and super glue showing you how to make the best of the United Irish Command pack from the Trent Miniatures range. Now, without revealing Jonas ‘s true identity, it is fair to say that he is an enthusiast of the Trent Range and loves nothing more than to carry out simple conversions on the figures, if nothing else than to prove that you can do as much with metals as you can with plastics.

So in his own style and words, here is his ‘take’ on the United Irish (rebel) Command pack from the Trent Miniatures range:

‘ Ir98/03, the United Irish (Rebel) Command pack contains four figures from five basic poses, supplied at random. Instead of one of the four poses shown in the main photo, you might get a standard bearer (That’s him leading a couple of Gunsmen in the next photo. You will need a pin vice to drill a hole through his hands, which takes just a few seconds, time that you will get back with interest by never having to stick the flag back in ‘cos it’s come out for the umpteenth time!)

IR98/03 Irish Command

Don’t panic if you don’t get a standard bearer , because of course almost any pikeman can be ‘converted’ to a standard bearer simply by giving him a standard instead of a pike! Incidentally, the standard shown is supplied by Flag Dude, one of several designs that he does for the Great Irish Rebellion.

Two of the figures shown – the officer pointing and the bagpiper – come with separate heads, which are easily fixed on using superglue, and give more scope for variety. Also the guy firing his pistol has three different head variants. also supplied at random. (There’s the other two in the photo of the unpainted castings.)

Officer Variants

Now, re that bagpiper. We’re pretty sure that knowledgeable chaps and chapesses like our readers will know that Irish bagpipes have two drones, whilst Scottish bagpipes have three. Given the large Scottish immigration into Northern Ireland (Ulster) we feel fairly sure that both types would have been kicking around in the Emerald Isle. So we’ve opted to give our castings three drones on the grounds that it’s much easier to snip off one drone to “Irish – ise” ( remember when they are smiling) your bagpipes than it would be to add a third drone to a two -droned casting. The photo showing the two side by side should help you to differentiate your ‘Och aye the noo’ from your ‘Begoora’….

Bagpiper variants

Finally, here is a picture of Father Michael Murphy carrying the very flag (Flag Dude again!) that he was carrying when cut down by canister shot at the Battle of Arklow. Trent miniatures don’t actually make a Father Michael Figure. This is a conversion of one of the pike men from pack Ir98/15. He’s had his arm removed with a fine saw. It only takes four or five seconds but if you are pushed for time, you could simply snip it off with some Flush Cut cutters in two seconds! The arm has been replaced by the sword arm from the mounted Officer (Ir98/19) who comes with a selection of four separate right arms, giving you three spares for your bits box and scope for lots of simple but exciting conversions. All you need is the aforementioned saw/cutter and pin vice & drill. Oh! and a dash of imagination and patience!’

Father Michael Murphy

I hope that this short article from Jonas will inspire you to look at again at the Trent Range and perhaps other metals. The next time you are about to ask ‘does anybody out there make this figure or that figure?’ perhaps the simple answer is to pick up your saw and pin vice and make it yourself. It’s surprising just what you can achieve!

If you would like to see the Trent Miniatures Range, Click here:

TRENT MINIATURES RANGE

You can read more from Jonas and see his other conversions here:

OFF WITH HIS HEAD PART ONE

OFF WITH HIS HEAD PART TWO

For all the tools that you will need, click here:

EXPO TOOLS

And finally for Super glue and fillers:

GLUES AND FILLERS

Painting the Warband

An early May Bank holiday is usually an opportunity to get some painting done as the weather is generally pretty poor. This was not to be the case though. What with gardening, ‘Granddading’, and DIY, I barely managed to get to the painting desk. I have made some progress, though, and my warband is gradually taking shape. I’ve mentioned previously that I have not done any real research into Japanese Samurai other than to look at lots of pictures of other peoples models, casually flicking through my one Samurai book and putting together a Pinterest board of various Samurai images. You can see my board here:

SAMURAI PINTEREST BOARD

There was one colour scheme that caught my eye, the blue and red Ashigaru looked pretty good and so I based my colour scheme on this with a few tweaks.

My warband inspiration!

The picture also helped to clarify how the various armour plates and bits of clothing were supposed to look. There are slight differences between the bowman and the musketman but I now had the general idea as to how they should look. As usual, I would take a few liberties, or as I prefer to think, ‘artistic licence’ when it came to painting the figures – usually to simplify the painting process. I also like my models to look a bit on the ‘bright side’ for the gaming table.

So, having assembled the figures I gave them a priming coat of Army painter black spray. I then used a size 6 brush to drybrush the figures all over. The main purpose of this was to bring out the detail on the figures so that I could see what needed painting and where. The secondary purpose was that the armour was then highlighted and the detail brought to life.

Painting the warband

This was the first batch that I did – you can see that I have also painted the flesh and trousers. I used Vallejo 70992 neutral grey to dry brush these guys.

The bowmen, dry brushed and ready for painting.

The bowmen have been given the same drybrush treatment but this time, I used a lighter grey 70870 medium sea grey to up the contrast. I think that a light blue would also work well and I might try this on the next batch! I painted the flesh with 70927 Dark Flesh, the shirts with 70840 Light Turquoise and the trousers and weapons (spears & bows) with 70957 flat red.

Ashigaru Bowmen with detail added

I then painted the ‘socks’, face scarf, ties on the legs, detail on the bows and arrow feathers in off white 70820 and the arrow shafts in 310 old wood. At this stage most of the block painting is done. However, to give a bit of definition to some areas, I have given the faces a coat of skin wash 72093 and used both army painter strong tone and Dark tone ink . The initial effect is to make things look worse.

Ink washes applied

The ink does help to define the shadows and the next job will be to carefully repaint the same colours but to leave the ink shadows in the recesses. It might sound like a bit of a faff but it does work. That is as far as I have got with the bowmen and obviously I need to finish these off but here are the Spearmen that I have completed.

You can see that by carefully repainting the raised areas on the faces, you get a bit more character with the figures. I have also painted the sandals using 70822 black brown and added some detail to the weapons using Steel 70864 and brass 70801. I’ve also painted the hats 70862 black grey for no other reason than I wanted them to look slightly different to the armour. I’ve used 70817 scarlet and 70961 sky blue to add some highlights to the tunic and trousers. The basing is very rough at the moment. I will be adding some grass tufts and probably some flowers to make them a bit more interesting!

So that is how my warband is shaping up so far. There is still some way to go to have them completed. It doesn’t help that I tend to fuss and go back over models that I thought that I had finished as I learn how to paint the models and review the pictures that I have taken. It is also a different process to the one that I use to paint my Napoleonics. With these small skirmish warbands I like to try and have a go at painting using inks & highlights rather than resorting to quickshade. I think that it is worth the effort though, I hope that they will be well used in battle over the coming months!

If you would like to purchase the Vallejo & Army Painter colours that I have used, you can find them in my shop here:

VALLEJO PAINTS

ARMY PAINTER PAINTS

SAMURAI RANGE

At the time of writing, with the exception of aerosols, all items are available post free to most worldwide locations.

Monthly Archives: May 2017