2025 Painting Log

I’m posting these here just to keep my model count up to date. This is my second entry for the UKGE painting contest, in the board games category. You can read more about the project here.

I’m never sure whether I should count terrain as “models painted,” but in this case I think I will — for the most part I spent just as much time on the terrain pieces as I did on the characters.

I also managed to squeeze out five more Red Alert crewmen for my other contest entry.

2025 models painted so far: 126, for 8 different games (and one painting contest).

For the most part I’ve sworn off Kickstarter, but I was happy to back a recent campaign from Bad Squiddo for these Pulp Heroines. I think Bad Squiddo is a bright spot in the miniatures hobby and I love what they do.

I don’t have anything in particular in mind for these, I just thought they’d be fun to paint. They’re meant to be pulp or WWII characters, but a few of them are pretty timeless, and could work for 1960s spy-fi (hello, 7TV), or even post-apocalypse (hello again, 7TV).

The plaid coat was definitely me making more work for myself, but I’m very pleased with the result. She looks like she could have stepped out of a Guy Ritchie movie.

I painted these with a mixture of styles and techniques. For most of them I was leaning into the Kevin Dallimore triad method — I’ve read two of his books on painting and I think I’ve got my head around what he’s doing. I’m finding the technique particularly useful for faces and hands.

For one of them, however, I fell back on the tried and true base color –> wash –> drybrushed highlights technique. See if you can guess which one it was…

When doing the checkout for the Kickstarter, I couldn’t help but add a few more models to my shopping cart (more than doubling my order in the process). Once again I just picked models that caught my eye.

The floating woman will probably find her way into a 7TV Ghostbusters game I’ve been planning for a while now, the ninjas will most likely be used for Test of Honour, and the astronaut won’t look out of place in the Colony 87 game that Crooked Dice is working on. I’m not sure about Mata Hari or the snake cultists, Savage Core maybe?

2025 models painted so far: 139, for 9 (or so) different games

“…might be that he’s waiting for some crazy cowboy to touch his pistol so he can shoot him down.”

— Unforgiven, 1992

So, I’m jumping back into Dead Man’s Hand.

I played a bit right before they launched the Redux edition, but as is often the case, I got distracted by other things and never got back to it. While wandering the halls at UKGE, I stumbled across the Great Escape Games booth entirely by accident. I hadn’t had any intention of getting the new rule books, but there is something about seeing the physical product right in front of you… I picked up the Redux rulebook and cards, the two recent supplemental books, and a few faction packs of miniatures.

I also got one single Legends of the West model, English Bob. He’s clearly meant to be the character from Unforgiven, but I think he could also pass as the first Doctor, from the Doctor Who episode where he gets a toothache and goes to Tombstone in search of a dentist…

At UKGE I also picked up several MDF wild west buildings from Warbases with an eye towards replacing my mostly papercraft town with some more permanent structures. I’m looking forward to getting back into the game, if only I an find the time…

2025 models painted so far: 140, for 10 different games

This game was top of my list to look for at UKGE, along with Guards of Traitor’s Toll. Imagine my delight when I found both of them on sale at the same booth!

Traitor’s Toll will be a staggering 60 models that I’ll need to piece together from sprues, so naturally I decided to do this one first. Six models is enough to play, although I did get the set of goblins so I’ll be able to try out the bonus Wartnose version hidden in the back of the rule book.

The models were a joy to paint. I did them in a mix of styles — I wanted bright, bold colors so I mainly used the triad approach, but also a fair amount of speedpaint and washes.

Thanks to the low model count and some quick papercraft fences (thanks, Dave Graffam!) I was able get the game to the table in no time at all. It uses movement templates similar to Gaslands or X-Wing, but they’re chosen semi-randomly so the game is unpredictable, silly, and definitely not to be taken seriously, if that wasn’t clear from the giant stoat..

2025 models painted so far: 146, for 11 different games

Like most Star Wars fans of a certain age, I really enjoyed Rogue One and especially the Andor streaming series. As a rule I think Star Wars has always worked better as a setting than as actual movies. So many of us grew up playing with those Kenner action figures, we spent far more time making our own adventures than we did watching the films, films that look great and are populated by intriguing characters acting out stories that are actually pretty silly once you really start to look at them closely.

The Mandalorian reads to me like two kids playing in the sandbox with their Star Wars toys. To belabor the metaphor, The Book of Boba Fett reads like what happens when those two kids are forced to let their younger sibling play too (Boba Fett riding a rancor?).

The Andor series is often called “Star Wars for adults,” and it is. It tells a sophisticated story with a lot of adult themes (occasionally a little too adult, in my opinion). But it should be viewed as the exception rather than the rule.

As adults, we want new Star Wars material to make us feel the way it did when we were children, but of course it can’t do that, because (probably) we’ve somehow forgotten that it wasn’t just what was on screen, it was what was in our imagination when we played with those toys. For most of us it explains our enduring interest in tiny fighting men, especially those of the Star Wars variety.

Whew, that was a bit of a ramble.

Anyway, here’s Cassian Andor with his trusty robot pal and a couple of nameless troopers. I’ve been mixing up different painting techniques a lot lately — these were all done in a combination of basecoat –> wash –> drybrush highlights (we need to come up with a stupid name for that), Foundry-style triad, and speedpaints, which I frequently find myself using as a highly pigmented wash.

I’ve also changed up my varnish game a little bit. I did these first with a coat of AK Interactive matte, which is a little on the satin (semi-gloss) side. Once that had dried I followed up with a layer of AK Interactive Ultra Matte mixed 2 to 1 with Speedpaint medium. So far I’m finding that this gives me a nice flat finish without being quite as chalky as the Ultra Matte straight out of the bottle.

2025 models painted so far: 150, for 11 different games

The rules for Hairfoot Jousting offer a variety of pitches for games to play out on, each with a table of weird random events that can happen during the game. One of them involves a row of barrels, out of which a clown can appear, who then runs around the pitch getting in the way and distracting the jousters. So naturally I would need a halfling jester.

The search led me to Midlam Miniatures, who have a wonderful assortment of medieval/fantasy townsfolk and civilians (plus some truly weird beekeeper cultists). They had the jester I was after, and plenty more besides. I ended up ordering about $50 worth of stuff, including two more jesters (all three were a set, I couldn’t break that up), a few tavern wenches, a stern looking nun, and the intriguingly named “man running with small bemused pig.”

I’ll most likely be using the rest of them for Guards of Traitor’s Toll, and I’m also starting to think about the crossover potential between Traitor’s Toll and Hairfoot Jousting…

2025 models painted so far: 153, for 12 different games

Joseph McCullough and Osprey Games snuck a little bonus into the back of the Hairfoot Jousting rule book — Wartnose Jousting, a re-skin of the game with Goblins and…let’s call them less charming critters replacing the jolly halflings and their fluffy mounts.

I do have to say that, while I had a lot of fun with the halflings, I had even more fun with these. I used a wide mix of different techniques, but mainly Speedpaints with drybrushed highlights over the top. For a few elements I went with a more traditional basecoat-wash-highlight, like the naked mole rat and the centipede, and I even did a bit of Dallimore triad, especially on the giant cockroach.

I also finished the two bonus miniatures that came in the boxed sets, a practice dummy for the halflings and a clockwork knight for the goblins.

2025 models painted so far: 161, for 12 different games

Star Schlock is rapidly becoming one of my favorite games. Army building relies on stat cards created by the publisher, so it’s not quite as “do whatever you want” as, say, 7TV, but I love the ’70s/’80s theme, and the official models from Wunkay are great.

What’s more, they’ve provided alternate stat cards for many of the miniatures, so you have a lot of game options without investing in a ton of models. And, the characters are generic enough that there are many opportunities to substitute stuff you may already have, as I did in a recent game, using some old Harlequin Doctor Who and Beast in the Broch Future Freedom Fighters models to stand in for Star Schlock’s Eternal Empire faction.

The Mutant Overlords are individual characters (rather than a single unit) for the mutant faction. I’ve played against them a time or two, but I haven’t actually played the mutant faction myself. I mostly got these because I’m a huge fan of the original Planet of the Apes films (these are modeled after the underground-dwelling atomic bomb worshippers from Beneath the Planet of the Apes).

These two random aliens don’t actually have corresponding characters in the game yet. One thing that is a little maddening about Star Schlock is the number of models without cards, and the number of cards without models. Cards without models isn’t much of a problem (all games are miniatures-agnostic, after all), but models without cards are a little frustrating because thus far there isn’t a system to calculate stats, abilities and point values (it’s weird how reluctant most game developers seem to be to provide players with those tools).

2025 models painted so far: 174, for 12 different games