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Wednesday 16 August 2017

Dog-ri-la Or How I Learned To Stopped Worrying and Love Basing

My other half is away for a few days and I was expecting to go out for the day but decided against it when the weather started to look a little bleak. Oh good said I, a day where the kids will be playing and I can get on with ever I want to do. Computer games and painting figures. Now that I have some varnish I thought I could get on with a bit of finishing off and painting.

I really wanted to do some painting. Whilst surfing I have seen a few people who keep a tally of what they paint for the year. Although I am keeping track of what I do, keeping a list of what you have done seems a little too like Bridget Jones' Diary for me. anyway, I think that The New Cruelty demands I paint.

So after a few hours of playing Civilization (having played it till 4a.m. the previous night) I thought it was time I did a bit of painting. Just as soon as I sat down the dog started going a bit mental. This has continued throughout the day. My other half chose a dog breed that is essentially a bit clingy as well as being big and energetic enough to need a lot of exercise. So that is how may day has ended up. My life has been all about creating dogtopia. I have thrown and kicked more tennis balls and dog toys in one day than I have in the last month.

Although painting has been off the cards, no chance of doing any fine detail work, I still wanted to do something. So I splashed a bit of ink on some basis and sprayed on some varnish. Then I spent a bit of time putting on some flock and scatter. And here we are. Whilst I am planning to go out tomorrow, I expect to get another coat of varnish on them and then I can put them away until needed.

As I was scanning the work bench I realised I didn't actually have that much prepped and ready to go. Four Human catchers and six linemen, four goblins and and ogre and that was about it. Pretty much all the figures on the bench are now painting. So as I couldn't paint maybe I could sort out some stuff for when the Blood Bowl stuff is done. So I worked out what I wanted to do next.

The storage boxes are full of stuff. If I started painting what is there it would probably take me a couple of year to finish them all off. So I selected what I thought I needed to do next. Then came the glue and the sand.

Despite my fairly chaotic approach to painting, there is a plan to what I do. According to the plan I need certain types of figures. Most of what I buy for fantasy games is fairly dark age in its appearance. The Viking Game is still my most worked on game and my most underplayed. Despite this I still want to paint figures.

For well over a decade my group gamed with about one hundred figures. This pretty much limited figures for player characters not to mention only have one set of monsters which were some late eighties GW night goblins. I swore to myself that this would not happen again. With my game I try to limit players to the human race and I have a few norse themed non human races, specifically dwarves, light elves (or they are wood elves) and dark elves (which are not GW type dark elves but actually high elves). What has put me off doing other races is the absence of figures for them. I have talked about this before here so I won't go on about it here. What I am trying to do though is to make sure I have a pool of suitable figures for player characters. Fighters are easy. As well as some mundane plastic Viking types and units of infantry, there is probably a couple of figure trays of figures suitable for figures. Some of these can do double duty as barbarians, rangers and the like. I have some female fighters but the plan was always to get some more, I just haven't got round to it. When the project was in full swing the only female fighters I could find were by Foundry and they were a bit too high fantasy if you know what I mean. The Dice Bag lady now has quite a few I could use.

Thanks to Frostgrave I now have over a tray of wizards and magic types. I could probably do with more female mages. By the time I have finished with the plan I dare say there will be two trays of mages. I am somewhat over achieving here.

Where I am underachieving is in bards, thieves and clerics. I have three bard figures in the sense of the skald or scop. There are a few other figures I have that are unpainted that have something like a mandolin and so don't really fit the plan. In the game there are christian type clerics, and those for druids and the norse gods. Whilst there are no thieves as such, there are plenty of shifty types. My painted collection of clerics consists of about five druids, eight christian types and maybe the odd figure that would pass as a norse man of the gods.

So in about two hundred words, here I am the next lot of figures on the desk is a bit of a mixed bag but there are a few more clerics and some thieves. There are few odds and sods. One is a potion carrier from the Frostgrave range which I think will do nicely as a norse cleric. There are a couple of Midlam Miniatures Clerics as well. The thieves are mostly Frostgrave again and some of these are actually meant to be magic users but with the right paint scheme they will fit the part. And a few other figures which are again all Frostgrave.

I realise that now has got this far. But if you have, it would be nice if you could leave a comment.


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