Wednesday 30 July 2014

WW 1 Tommies started - Two officers finished

After my sunday airbrush session I couldn't resist to get some more paint on the Tommies. To act as my first guniea pigs I chose two officers from Great War Miniatures' excellent World War 1 range:
Painting them was great fun. The sculpts are very well and the figures are full of character. For the choice of colours my special thanks to Mark Hargreaves. Most of you will know his blog "Over open Sights" and the excellent miniatures he presents there. Mark is a gifted painter as well as a very helpful chap. He's offering some painting guides on his blog and was kind enough to answer me some further questions. So my colour choices base on his tutorial with only a few replacements for colours I didn't have.

As usual I used Vallejo Model Colors and some inks and washes from various manufacturers. For the first time I didn't use spray varnish. Instead I employed Marabu Mattlack (matt varnish) from the paint pot. It was very easy to apply and dryed cristal clear. A really good alternativ to the spray cans with which I didn't make good experience only.

The bases aren't finished yet. I'm not sure whether I should static grass as usual or rather stay muddy. Probably a compromise of both...

Monday 28 July 2014

I'm back !

Many apologies for my long absence !

For the last three weeks I had a holiday and was busier than I thought. Although it was a great, enjoyable and precious time with Mrs Monty and our the family kept me on the run.

So there's a lot of stuff to work off during the next weeks:
- read the new posts on my favourite blogs
- prepare two AARs
- sent some pictures of the few miniatures I finished lately
- ponder about a 100K raffle which might be within arm's reach rather soon

Anyway yesterday I had finally the chance to spend some time with my tin men. So I installed my mavble airbrush cabin on the balcony and prepared figures and paints:
My ersatz-airbrush booth
A couple of friends made me a present of a box of WWI Tommies for my birthday lately and it was time to start painting them. To make things easier I wanted to prime and partly paint them with my reliable airbrush gun.
So after two hours of constant blowing I had about fifty Tommies primed and pre-coloured as well as three Normans and their horses. To be honest such a long airbrushing session is somehow exhausting but it saved me a lot of time I presume...

Monday 7 July 2014

Monty's Caravan with a new livery !


You might have noticed that I changed the layout of this humble blog slightly. Honestly I've been pondering about the old colour sheme. Finally I found it too dark and too plain. So I experimented with some of the other blogger layout sheme and decided to try this brighter one.

Actually I was thinking about the dynamic layouts as well but didn't dare to make such a large change in one step. At the end I didn't want to mix up the complete blog.

Next I'll have to fix the header. Actually I want a nice picture there but I'm unsure, what to combine...

Please let me know whether you like the new design or not.

Saturday 5 July 2014

Painting Table Saturday - Pretty little horses

As you can imagine the last week was pretty busy. We had to arrange our family business with the new member but all in all it went really well. Fortunately Anna's much more relaxed than here older sister and mother are from time to time. She really takes after her father.

So I was able to spend some time at the painting table. Unfortunately not too much progress. Especially the real project have some delay but nevertheless there are some horses on my workbench to get some progress this weekend:
Probably you recognise them as some of the Perrys' heavy French cavalry mounts. Currently I#m preparing them for another game of our retreat 1812 game. My idea was to base them with exchangeable metal bases which seems to work rather well. But meanwhile I realized that it isn't actually horse which I don't like to paint. It's Napoleonic horses. Everywhere a strap, a ribbon, a piece of braid and other embellishment. It's so time consuming!

Anyway enjoy your weekend !

Friday 4 July 2014

Attention! Attention! --> Miniature auctions for charity !

During the last months a couple of bloggers prepared and presented a FIW game. While Loki, James and some other chaps from the UK prepared the game and the board, there were bloggers from the whole world supporting the idea with painting a couple of miniatures.

Maybe you remember my humble work on some British Redcoats:
Complete post: Here.

You'll find a couple of pictures from the presentation here and here.

Finally all the excellent figures used for the game are for sale !

The ganes of the auctions are designated for "Help for Heroes" the charity project the "Bloggers for Charity" are supporting with this initiative.

Please have a look at the auctions of the initiative (here) or ponder whether you want to spent a few bucks for well painted miniatures for a good cause.