"Zap" Rowsdower

"Zap" is another figure from the Highlander Studios adventurers pack. I'm thinking he's either suppose to be Wild Bill Hickok or maybe Custer. Either way as soon as I saw that mane of hair I knew I had found my Rowsdower.

Looking down the business end of those Conflagration Beam pistols.

 
For those that haven't seen Final Sacrifice, Rowsdower is the action hero of a low budget, Canadian  B-movie. Here is a good review of it at Canuxploitation. Canada's answer to Chuck Norris is of course dressed in a denim jacket, white pants and sports some great hockey hair. I tried to paint a VSF version of the same outfit.

Jacket and hair make the man my Grand-pappy always said.

The movie version sports a shotgun and a smelly jacket as his weapons of choice. The jacket looks just as smelly but I decided to not mess with the sculpts twin blaster pistols. I think the hardest part was trying to make a denim look to his jacket. It's really suppose to be buckskin but I've seen plenty of denim jackets with the same fringe on them when I was growing up, although they usually had some sort of band logo ironed onto the back. I tried to keep the denim look but keep it a more muted blue.

Zap and Charles Allen investigate a mysterious shed. Chuck is sorta my version of Troy from the film.

And finally a picture of the man himself in his original form. 

The Good Professor

Here is one more of my sculpts painted up. Professor Emil debuted on the blog quite some time ago. He actually has a back story worked out in my Steamworks setting but for now I'm just going to use him as a pretty standard mad scientist.

With him done I think I only have two of my sculpts still to paint. However, I've just started work on sculpting some new ones so that tally might not last too long.

I tried giving him a patterned scarf but I'm not sure how well it came out. Painting plaid in 15mm is some what challenging!

I made sure his lab coat had the required dirt and grime stains from previous experiments.

Here are my favorites so far that I have sculpted. All together they kind of look like they should be in a League of More or Less Ordinary Gentleman.

I doubt that I've ever mentioned this on here before but my wife and I have both recently taken up bird watching. She has decided to start a new blog chronicling our misadventures of trying to see the local wildlife an hopefully take their picture. If you would like to read what we've been up to please visit or you can just stop by and take a look at all of the nice pictures she takes of birds, bugs, and the rest of nature. You can find it here: A Bird on a Blog is Worth Two in a Bush.

Monster Mashup

In an effort to beef up my monster collection I made my own Shoggoth. I wanted to make him a little more amoeba like and in a more aggressive pose than the one I painted from Reaper miniatures. So here is a more or less step by step to my slapdash method.

I started by making the basic shape  and a bunch of spheres out of leftover DAS I had while making cobblestones.

I then cut the spheres apart and super-glued them to the core. They were kinda rough so I hit the larger ones with some fine sand paper too.

I then started to build up the body with some Procreate. I attached him temporarily to a big base I had lying around to hold onto while sculpting.

I tried to make the flesh kinda ropey but fluid, like he was made out of lumpy pudding. I also gave him some tentacle like appendages because tentacles make everything better.

I've also been looking for other possible candidates to add. I've found a couple prepaints for Arkham Horror from Fantasy Flight Games that I think might work. These will probably hold me over for a while although I'm keeping my eye out for the Cthulhu Wars miniatures. I missed the Kickstarter for it but I definitely like the look of them, especially the Elder Gods.

Shoggoth - I'll paint him up like my Reaper one I think.

Crawling One

Star Vampire - It seems like Sherlock is having a hard time of it today.

Monsieur Jaques

I've been working away at my painting up my previous sculpts and here is one more. I finished sculpting this guy it seems like ages ago, here's the original post. I think he works pretty well as a Victorian worker or criminal or whatever. It might be hard to tell in these pictures but that's suppose to be revolver he's holding. I guess he had a bad shift at the factory or maybe he's on an unexpected adventure. I'd really like to sculpt a few more unarmed civilians to fill in the streets a bit more and give it a little life. Shopkeepers, house wives, some workers, etc...

Is he looking for some trouble or is he just jumpy due to the enormous cat hair on the ground.

I kept the palette simple with him and knocked him out pretty quickly. I actually found a picture of some people dressed up in period clothing from a show about people trying to live as 1890's farmers in Snowdonia. I'm guessing the show was a while ago as the website hadn't been updated in a while. I might have to try to track it down I used to enjoy watching that type of show although I'm not entirely sure about the authenticity of some. 

In this case the it was nice to see a color picture of common people's clothing instead of just the top hats and tails that most people go for in recreations. I will say the clothing was probably a bit to clean and I'd be interested  in seeing some production pictures from the end of the show after they'd been sweating in them busting sod and quarrying slate.

Is that him behind me? I swear it was a cat the size of a battleship.
By the way that's the little chunk of cobblestones under his feet again. Not as blurry this time. (My lovely photographer took these as I'm sure you can tell since they actually look nice.)

HMC Auster

One of the Mk.1 Tempest Class from the Armstrong Colossus Works, HMC Auster was commissioned in 1861.

 This is the second Colossus that I painted up for my armies, and once again it was based off of a Privateer Press Warjack. In this case a Cygnar Sentinel that I've had lying around forever. In fact he has appeared in his partial paint job from when he was going to be used for Warmachine several times in pictures on the blog to show off scale.
 

A single pilot class, the Auster was built around the new Hotchkiss Rotary 3lb Cannon.

Uniquely this class had a head that was able to move freely. While increasing range of vision it left the pilot dangerously confined and the design soon fell out of favor.

 I decided to finish him up but first I cut away any details that were out of scale, mainly handles and gauges, and ripped off the shield. I tried some different techniques than I normally do to try to make him look more like a 15mm mecha than a 28mm robot. Mainly filters to try to give it a better sense of scale, and careful drybrushing to emulate airbrush techniques. I also tried to keep the weathering in scale as well. I think it came out fairly well but I think next time I might try to make more modifications to the actual model to emphasize the scale first. I have a new plastic Cygnar Charger that I'm going to try out some ideas on.

It was first thought that the pilot would would be able to reload in the field. However, under battlefield conditions few pilots have the skill for the delicate manipulations required and field armourers are still required to keep the colossus in the field.

The Auster saw deployment with the Mobile Light Battery during the American Intervention. The Battery Recognition stripes are still evident.

Also at some point over the past week I reached both 20 followers ( 21 now actually, Welcome Edwin King!) and 2500 hits. I'd like to give my heartfelt thanks to everyone who reads and comments on my blog. I started it as a personal project to keep me motivated but I've been surprised to find it very enjoyable to be part of an online community and for readers to find some interest in what I've done. Thank you Everyone!

The Evening Constitutional

I realized that I never actually put up a post on these two although they were in the background of some pictures previously. Mr. Reginald and Mrs. Amelia Pelham are some of the first 15mm miniatures that I sculpted along with Sherlock Holmes way back a year and a half ago when I started on the Steamworks project. (You can find the original posts here and here.)

I think she turned out alright although the face is a little weak. Reginald however is the worst of my sculpts. Poor proportions, bad detail work, and a really boring pose. Oh well, he'll look fine tucked away in the back of a crowd and at least I learned from sculpting him.










On other fronts I've done some more test cases with stamping cobblestones. I read on Iain Robinson's blog ( a really nice model railroad blog with some really inspiring pieces of work) how he white glues wet DAS to a cardboard backing to prevent warping and cracking. I tried this technique and it works well, although he uses thin card impregnated with resin to keep it stiff. I didn't and mine has some warpage but I expected that. I also used it to make some base work on washers and I like the end result. I think gluing it to the tiles or plastic card will work out in the future. 


Recutting the stamps I think helped the most.



I noticed that the DAS does seem to take less detail then the other clay I used.

Here the square is painted up and I used it as a little courtyard. Blurry the usual hallmark of a picture I've taken.

Lower Fickleham Expansion Continues





I finished up three more buildings for the village. I changed up the colors from the first set a bit so that when they are all together there is a bit of variation. I went with some browner slate for the roofs and more of a grey color to the rendering on the walls. I painted the stone/brick work the same way as before but the mortar ended up a little to bright for me. Not sure how that happened but I put an extra brown wash on it and it looks better now.



The smaller stables building. Or at least I assume that's what it is.

As I mentioned before these are all resins buildings from Crescent Root Studios. They also sell them painted but I opted to paint them myself. I wholly recommend them as they are really nice casts. I understand they are doing some laser cut MDF buildings as well although only in 28mm for now. If they put out some 15mm buildings I'll probably get them as well.

The Durand home ...

And from the other side.

My only reservation has nothing to do with the buildings but the fact that they are really intended for WWII Normandy, or at least they look like they should be in Carentan to me. (On a side note I've been rewatching Band of Brothers so maybe that's influencing me.) I'd like to make some brick and stone buildings without the render on them for a more English look to them. Of course I'm basing all of that purely on my personal perceptions of what period buildings should be. I haven't really been able to turn up much research on whether most common man's homes had render applied to them or not. Although I have found out that the mortar was usually grey as it was made with industrial ash mostly, and I guess the render would probably be similar.  

Either way I still have a small home with walled garden, two more outbuildings, and a  large manor house/ inn to go before I worry about making my own.

Lower Fickleham as it stands at the moment.