Raiding the Dusty Wastes

Emotionally I am exhausted. Physically I am a wreck. Looking back I am proud but so worn for the moment I can’t bask in the glow of finally getting it done. I’ll take it slow for a little while before my next project. Truth be told I started it but sidelined it to finish the Arabian Knights.

I have now built an army. I can build others, but I’ll have a better plan before I start doing it again. I feel like I have finally earned that Butt-butt-ding.

I completed my bombard crew and found myself in a state of elation and sat grinning as I looked over my army. I was almost satisfied with it all as my figures covered the transportation tray. I was not quite done. I still had to give my leader his banner. My greatest challenge was patience.

I committed to freehanding the banner as I had no chance to get the digital work done. I’ve not made any time for it after losing the previous iteration of it. So to whatever I could imagine I lept onto.

My djinn had the decal on its back in 25mm and I had some extra copies in 20mm. Being unsure of what would fit at the time I thought it prudent to get two sizes just in case. I cut out the border portion as carefully as I could and affixed them to what would be both sides of the flag.

Waterslide decals are fragile and will easily tear. It gets worse when you try to transfer an open ring. I ended up going through all the transfers I had before I had a viable flag. It didn’t help that the second to last decal tore AFTER I had it on the paper and was blowing air on it to help drying.

After sealing the flag I wrote out the name and title of my leader. I think writing Arabic at scale without much knowledge/experience in doing so proved another level of challenge. I said screw it and I vow that anything at scale I do will need to be transfers. With all that done I glued it together and then sealed it all for play.

Step one: attain a state of emotional discomfort that pushes you to try and alleviate the condition.

Step two:  turn to your creative hobby outlet for relief and dive head first into the insane world of deep detail while discombobulated.

Step three:  as the saying goes in the film ‘Jurassic Park’, “Hold onto your butts”.

What does one do when facing catastrophe? You turn to mini painting and weather the emotional stuff. It’s better to get the win as a salve for the spirit sometimes. In this case, blundering forward in applying brush to figures to complete my army has been quite helpful.

The arms for the artilleryman carrying the cannonball were done hastily but came out better than I expected with some paint. The bent arms and hands shielding their ears for the other two weren’t all that difficult by comparison. I need more practice with sculpting to have better results but for small details out of a much larger force I think this is just a case of “I feel like I screwed up here and it bugs me”.

Beyond that the other details of note are the stacked cannonballs that I salvaged from the bits bin from ym FLGS. The barrels were leftover resin from a purchase years ago. The tarp actually was paper I used VMS Paper shaper, a resin, to form and make more interesting. I made the powder tools from wire and plasticard. The plunger in the hand of the crewman was textured with fine pumice. The rounded portion of the measure laying on the ground was was just more sculpting putty. The flag some paper glued together with a Little Big Men Studios transfer on a wire rod.

Yep, any field weapon is its own mini diorama. This was something I knew I needed to get done. I dragged my feet with not having the confidence to complete it. Watching sculpting work done on YouTube helped me feel better through exposure. Feeling crappy otherwise, both with and without the company of other hobby nerds, helped kick me along to get this done.

So I’ve gotten my caravan done. That means I only have my artillery to finish. Ugh, I hate having to sculpt. It’s nearly done though and it’s just one figure that I hate to work on. Thanks to the crew pointing out Tom Mason I’ll relax my ire and watch to get inspired.

This will be done before the Spring Clean. It’s more of a must really. I have single figure projects lined up to complete that I’ve long neglected.

*sigh* OK, I’ve done this much not to finish it.

Ok, I’ve gotten serious about drawing down this project to a close and have finished the first mini featured. No, it wasn’t what Ben received on the mail but it is the same figure from Reaper.

On to more stuff as I get prepped for the new army for the new year.

Giftmas is sorted and time to wind down… or so I thought.

Egads! A runner up position!?! That means I need to work on this project and finish it. Ehh…. right after the Big Book of Battles addition I thought about and decided would be great thematically.

What is an Arabian Night’s tale without some sort of caravan? I’d say that the SAGA scenario for defending them would be jut a bit bland if you don’t spice it up like a good lamb shoulder.

I’ve decided on using 80x50mm bases (I have a few to spare) which are perfect for the scenario. I’ll have a pair of camels on two which will be lead by a couple of merchants. The figures are Gripping Beast pack camels and some lovely old Reaper models in metal. The last figure which leads the lot would be a Gripping Beast Muta’tawia leader and a group of Middle Eastern goats. Seeing that these are a specific breed I went and searched them out online.

This will be wrapped up one day before Lloyd paints Rome.

Still plugging along I’ve managed to keep the material printed for the dice tower/terrain piece. I just need to varnish it and I’ll be happy to call this piece done. Now, with Giftmas preparation almost wrapped up, I can dust off the last models and say I have a completed army of my own. Ugh.. damn the fact I have more in line for the future. As I’ve heard it said… “That’s a problem for future me to deal with”.

With the duel between @sundancer and @brennon I have thrown in to provide my own support for terrain construction for better looking boards in the community. It was a simple idea for a dice tower that has been made manifest for the magnificence of the mighty Hasn al Qlb al Akrab.

It really does the job well but I’ll need to get the dice holding pen(?) landing zone(?) remade as it came to me in a seriously warped state despite being shown that it was all set to go from from the printer.

As always I have inspiration for the work buy it all boils down to how involved I want to be as I wind down this project. Can I actually say it’s winding down as I keep doing stuff?