Archive for the ‘Pirates’ Category

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From the painting desk #67 – A piratical assortment

October 12, 2019

While I’ve been printing a lot more than painting recently, I’ve still managed to complete some pieces! I’m definitely seeing a risk here, though – printing is fun in itself, but it’s also adding stuff to the painting pile something fierce.

I recently read a book on Barbary pirates. Or rather, make that two books (both are very interesting, and well worth your time by the way). While I’ve thus far been mostly interested in pirates of the Caribbean variety, I must say that a little foray into the Mediterranean and North Africa does tempt me a bit! Luckily I had a couple of Barbary style pirates from Foundry kicking about, so these went on the table.

Foundry 28mm barbary pirates

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These two miniatures offered me the chance to use quite a colourful palette, so I threw in some turquoise and rich purple. I wanted these two to stand out a bit from my other pirates, many of which I’ve painted in more muted tones. For the skin tones I went for a bit darker look than usual. As with most of the Foundry pirates, these were fun and easy to paint and turned out pretty nice!

The next three pieces are printed ones from the Depths of Savage Atoll Kickstarter that I’ve mentioned quite a few times by now. They were very much test prints, so they have some minor issues such as some lines on the pirate’s blade and some soft detail on the parrot, but I didn’t want to throw them away. Waste not, want not and all that.

Depths of Savage Atoll miniatures

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From left to right (if it wasn’t obvious) there’s a parrot, a hulking pirate and a strongbox. Parrots are obviously iconic in a pirate setting, and I decided to paint this one as something instantly recognizable, a scarlet macaw. It was a great chance to break out some really bright and lovely colours, and I’m really happy with the end result.

The big pirate didn’t really impress me initially, but once I started painting the mini I quickly warmed up to it. In my project to overcome my freehand painting aversion, I put some tattoos on him to add some interest to those large skin areas. I could’ve gone for more intricate designs, but I’m quite happy with how these simple pieces look. I wanted them to look faded and a bit rough, which also makes them more forgiving.

The third piece is a strongbox. At least that’s what I painted it as, all steel and brass. It wouldn’t be difficult to paint it as an actual octopus on a wooden crate, but I wanted a kind of Pirates of Caribbean mystery chest vibe – a piece you could build a scenario around.

I’m looking to get some more painting done this weekend, stay tuned for when I post about them…in December, knowing myself.

Posted in 18th century, 3d printing, Pirates | Tagged , , | 15 Comments »

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Photonstering

September 15, 2019

Apparently I am now what is called a Photonster, as I’m completely hooked on the Anycubic Photon I mentioned in my previous post. I’m really not exaggerating when I say the printer has been running almost day and night after I got it, and I’m in love with the results. There’s been a bit of trial and error, but so far only a couple of prints have failed and even those were due to user malfunction and could actually be salvaged.

Obviously my main interest has been in 28mm miniature stuff (although I’ve also printed a pair of earrings for Emmi), and the printer is wonderful for that. I’m still playing with the settings a bit, but it appears that it’s fairly easy to get a lovely result with minimal if any print lines showing. The detail level is more than adequate, easily ahead of Reaper Bones minis for example. It’s not on par with resin or the best metal casts, but it’s not far behind either.

I was initially worried about everything being very messy and time consuming, but those fears proved to be unfounded. The plant-based resin I’m using is very low odour, and now that I have my cleanup routine for the prints in place, even that bit is easy. After printing the prints are dunked into isopropyl alcohol and scrubbed lightly with a toothbrush to remove excess resin, then rinsed with water and detergent and then cured with UV light (in my case by putting them out in the sun, I’m still waiting for my UV lamp to arrive). It’s a bit of work, but no more than say, removing paint from old minis.

What have I been printing? Sharks! Pirates! Battlemechs! Monkeys! Parrots! A dead whale (yes)! I definitely see a very, very real chance of going overboard here. Luckily enough I’m at a good place in my hobby right now, more in the “time to get rid of stuff I don’t need” zone than the “I don’t know what I’ll use these for but I’ll get them anyway because” one. Shown below are a couple of the pieces I’ve done – a shark and some fins that I already painted up, the aforementioned whale carcass, another shark model from PrintYourMonsters and a pirate from Depths of Savage Atoll. I undercoated the pirate to bring out the detail.

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The whale carcass with a Black Scorpion pirate for size

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With the whale I botched the print a bit – another user malfunction – so had to fix a gap between its head and its body. Nothing new to anyone used to bigger models, though! As you can see from the pictures, the whale is massive. After hollowing the model instead of printing it solid, it cost me something in the range of 5€ in resin, which isn’t an awful lot. The pirate shown also shows how the printer really makes it viable to print 28mm minis, I have metal stuff that has less defined detail.

So, if it’s not clear by now, I love this machine and I can’t recall the last time I was so excited about a hobby thing. While this may of course be a passing thing, I’m sure going to ride this wave while it lasts!

 

Posted in 3d printing, Pirates | Tagged , | 16 Comments »

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From the painting desk #66 – Gun battery

August 4, 2019

A little over a year back I got in on the Slug Industries Spanish fort Kickstarter and I’m happy to report that I’ve finally finished one of the pieces from it – a separate gun battery. I think the gun battery is a very iconic part of Caribbean pirate imagery, guarding those ports and looking menacing.

The paint job was a mixture of stippling, washing and drybrushing, and I probably should have kept notes as the fort itself will inevitably look different. I wanted a fairly light look, leaning more to brown and yellow than dark grey, and I’m quite happy with it.

You obviously can’t have a gun battery without guns, so I painted three cannon from Thomarillion to go with it. These were a right bastard to paint, mainly because I didn’t spray prime them, leading to those super annoying tiny tiny spots of bright unpainted metal hiding in nooks and crannies that you only spot when you think the mini is finished. As they are quite ornate pieces, I decided to paint them as bronze cannon and I think the effect is nice, I’m really happy with the tone!

Having started painting cannon, I came across a piece that I built during the very early days of my pirate project, four years back. As some faithful readers might remember, this is of course the Cagafuego which finally got painted. A massive, old WHFB Empire cannon on a scratch-built naval carriage, the Cagafuego makes for a nice centrepiece to the gun battery when heavier firepower (or plain old intimidation) is needed.

I was in a bit of a rush and photography is a little off as a result. I set up both a vanilla version with the regular cannon and a pirate-crewed Cagafuego version for some atmospheric shots.

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Finishing this piece was a nice thing in many ways: there’s always a sense of accomplishment when you get a big item out of your painting queue, it was surprisingly quickly done (I spent one evening on it), it looks pretty Azazely awesome on the table and if I ever want to run a game, it’s a very playable piece for a scenario. Job well done, me!

Posted in 18th century, Pirates, Scenics | Tagged , , | 8 Comments »

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From the painting desk #65 – The Kraken Arms

July 22, 2019

Every pirate town needs a tavern, obviously. While I originally bought a Warbases modular building for this very purpose, it was when I came across a Citadel Lake-town house from the dreadful Hobbit films that I knew I’d found my tavern.

It’s a lovely piece of plastic kit that can be assembled in a couple of different configurations. I put it together to minimize the fantasy/medieval/Tudor aspects to keep it in line with the rest of my pirate buildings. In addition to the building itself, there are four pieces of jetty, a larger jetty platform for the building to sit on and an outhouse. There’s also a small rowboat that I haven’t painted yet.

My paintjob for both the jetty pieces and the building followed my usual formula, with a heavy reliance on washes and drybrushing. I went with a muted blue for the tavern itself with green for the door and window frames and some yellow curtains to add a splash of colour. I made the outhouse a very worn green. As you might notice, I couldn’t be bothered to shoot the tavern from every angle, but rather just rotated the building to show its different sides. Click on any photo for a larger view.

A shot of the full kit, showing the modularity

The kit is full of nice detail like this

An aerial view of the tavern

Wouldn’t swim nearby

Brighten up your tavern with some fresh mustard yellow curtains!

There was one part of the painting process that I had been dreading for a while: freehanding the tavern sign. While I’m happy with my painting skills when it comes to miniatures, I consider myself to be somewhat rubbish when it comes to freehanding anything more complicated than very simple glyphs or the like. Still, I wanted a tavern sign matching the tavern’s name – dubbed The Kraken Arms by this point – so it was time to grit my teeth and freehand an octopus. Quite surprisingly, it turned out pretty nice! In fact, nice enough for me to duplicate it on the other side of the sign as well. The sides are not identical, but very much passable. Did you know, by the way, that octopi do not in fact have tentacles, but arms? See, punny and scientifically correct.

Behold the mighty Kraken with its fairly cute little button eyes

Obviously you can’t have a tavern without people to run it. I had plenty of  potential customers in the form of grog-thirsty pirates, but an innkeeper was needed. I had luckily picked up a suitable mini (along with his wife) from Black Cat Bases some time back, so it was time to get them painted. I had a suitable Front Rank miniature lined up as well, so I decided to finish him too. I also asked Emmi to pick a mini for me to paint and she happened to pick out one from Black Tree Design’s Pirates of Treasure Island line that was very well suited to the surroundings so I’ll show him in this post while I’m at it.

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This lot was really fun to paint! I’m a big fan of Black Cat Bases’ large, cartoonish style as well as Front Rank’s clean and simple elegance. The Black Tree Design pirate – the first from their Kickstarter that I’ve painted – took paint very nicely too. I love models like this with a limited number of elements, common in historical miniatures I think. A lot of fantasy stuff tends to be drowned in hundreds of buckles, straps, pouches, bags, daggers, more buckles and the like, and they get pushed back in the painting queue. Considering my backlog and slow painting speed, that is a long, long queue.

The innkeeper, wife and old pirate are obvious, but what do you think about the tubby man with the pewter tankard? Wealthy patron or greedy landlord?

I had a good time painting this lot, so I’m happy to enter them into Azazel’s Jewel of July community challenge! I need to do this kind of thematic thing more often, I think.

Posted in 18th century, Miniatures, Pirates, Scenics | Tagged , , , , | 19 Comments »

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From the painting desk #64 – An eclectic mix

May 11, 2019

I’ve been on a bit of a painting kick lately, so I’ve got a grand total of five new minis to show you! Funnily enough they’re from five different companies too, which goes to show that I don’t mind mixing ranges and manufacturers in my project. It’s been good having some painting mojo back – painting has felt really fun and I’m pleased with the results I’m getting. As for the minis, here we go!

Black Cat Bases African lady

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First up is an African lady by CP Models that I picked up in a Bad Squiddo sale. I kept the palette super simple and tried a tone I hadn’t really used before in the pale green. I think it turned out really nice and I’ll be sure to use that tone later on as well. A neat, simple model, she’ll work well as a generic civilian in the West Indies.

Black Cat Bases pirate queen

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Next up is a pirate queen from Black Cat Bases. Nice and characterful, she was a joy to paint. To go for much bolder colours, I drew inspiration from one of my favourite pro wrestlers, the pirate princess Kairi Sane, and went with an almost white overcoat with blue cuffs, and a blue tricorne with gold trim and a white feather. While I tried to keep it from going too over the top, I think the end result is a suitably ostentatious pirate lady.

Freebooter's Fate Tiradora

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The next mini I completed is a recent Salute purchase, a Freebooter’s Fate mini by the name of Tiradora (which is just Spanish for “female shooter”, so not really a name at all). This was the first Freebooter’s Fate mini I’ve painted, and I’m quite impressed! Crisp detail and nice smooth surfaces made this a joy to paint. While the catalogue mini was painted white, to me the mini looked obviously African, so I went with a dark brown skintone. Another mini I’m happy with!

Citadel townsfolk brawler

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Sometimes you end up painting old stuff, and that makes me feel warm inside. This model is an old Citadel one from the 1987 Travelling Players set. When this model was released, I was five years old and Emmi wasn’t even born yet. There’s something really cool about that. I’ve actually had this mini for a while, as he used to be a part of my WHFB Empire army. One day I just figured that he might fit in well with my pirates, so I stripped him of his old paintjob and did a quick repaint. As his facial features sort of suggested it and I had been painting brown-skinned minis, I figured I’d paint him with darker skin too, and I think it looks good! You may notice that his basing with the flowers suggests that he isn’t a part of the pirates or the maroons faction, but rather a member of my townsfolk. I’m thinking that he maybe works on the docks (and now I’ve got Bon Jovi stuck in my head, it’s tough) or is the bouncer for the local tavern.

Black Scorpion pirate

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My last entry in this post is a mini I’ve wanted to paint a long time. As I’ve been thinking about the various characters that inhabit Tyburn Island, one that has been firmly lodged in my head is a hired sword nicknamed “The Razor of Nassau”. Don’t ask me where it came from, but it’s this guy. I love this mini, he just oozes menace and has that gunslinger vibe about him. To go with this, I painted him in full but worn black, with a red sash for some visual contrast.

I’m happy with this lot for a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s nice to get stuff painted as it’s been quite a thin year so far. Secondly, this batch turned out quite diverse – a couple of females and not everyone’s white. It’s not a huge thing, but it’s fun on both a visual level and out of principle too. I’ve got more stuff lined up too, so..yeah, cool!

Posted in 18th century, Miniatures, Pirates | Tagged , , , , , | 13 Comments »

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From the painting desk #63 – It’s…pirates!

March 30, 2019

Finally more painted pirates! These have been on the bench for a while, and they’re pretty much the first miniatures I’ve painted all year. While I’ve done some terrain building and painting, minis have fallen by the wayside a bit. This should be rectified shortly, as I’ve promised to paint up some stuff for Salute, and that’s exactly a week away.

Foundry maroon with Black Scorpion pirate

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Another maroon from Foundry, I love these guys and I’ve painted a couple before. Simple, elegant sculpt, simple, not so elegant paintjob. It does the trick though! I asked Emmi to pick the colours, which was surprisingly fun. I notice myself going back to tried and true combinations of colours, which can mean things getting a bit samey – I can’t remember how many times I’ve used the combination of Vallejo Khaki and Vallejo Cayman Green. What can I say, they’re lovely, muted tones with awesome coverage.

The second one is a pirate from Black Scorpion, with a massive axe and some equally massive mutton chops. He’s somewhat reminiscent of Mr. Gibbs from the Pirates of the Caribbean films, and I’m sure I’ve seen him used as a proxy somewhere. Funnily enough considering the previous paragraph, his vest is Vallejo Cayman Green and his trousers are Vallejo Khaki, what do you know!

I’m super stoked about going to Salute! It’s become a yearly tradition by now, and very much a social event and a great chance to meet all the lovely folks I’ve befriended over the years in this hobby. This year I’m looking forward to bumping into Alex of Leadballoony fame as well as spending time with the nice people from the Random Platypus forum. After Salute we’re heading up north for a hundred miles of hiking along the Pennine Way, which I’m possibly even more stoked about. This will likely mean that the blog will be dormant for a couple of weeks, although considering my rapid-fire posting, you won’t be able to tell any difference.

Posted in 18th century, Miniatures, Pirates | Tagged , , | 17 Comments »

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Terrain upgrade

February 27, 2019

Like many other hobbyists (I assume), I have terrain pieces amassed through the years. After showing some old green hills in my previous post, I figured there might still be some use left in them. While I claimed they were from the 1990s, thinking back I’m fairly sure they’re mid-2000s as I remember us making them in my current apartment, so 10+ years old at least.

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Now, when these were built, we prized durability a lot. The hills were carved from blue foam and then covered with a pva/sand mix. A phrase from an old White Dwarf sums it up: “In the morning you’ll need dynamite to shift it.” Of course the sand we used was a very cheap one, so it’s coarse as anything (and I’ve still got about 5-6 kg of it down in the basement). This in turn led to the hills (and the gaming boards built in the same manner) being terribly miniature-unfriendly. Basically, if you knocked a metal mini over, it was almost certain to chip. Good times!

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I was already contemplating throwing the hills away, but as they already existed, I started thinking that they could be revived and actually put back to use. Out came the craft store acrylics, the static grass and the tufts, as well as some coffee stirrers, tea leaves and some sunken resin barrels and what do you know, they actually turned out pretty nice! The static grass helps with the aforementioned chipping issue too.

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They can be used either as table edge pieces or put together to make a larger island. Painting them as islands obviously limits them to more nautical games, but I’m fairly certain I’ll have some of those with my lovely new ocean mat.

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Here’s what they look like with scenery items and miniatures placed on the pieces.

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I think it looks mighty nice! Finally, a before and after shot:

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Sorry for the slightly overexposed quality of the photos, the pieces are so large that I had to rely on daylight rather than my usual lighting – and to be honest, I couldn’t be bothered to tweak camera settings.

 

Posted in Miniatures, Pirates, Scenics | 20 Comments »

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Custom mat from Deep-Cut Studio – a review

February 16, 2019

It just so happened, that I wanted a gaming mat for sea battles – possibly unsurprising considering my pirate infatuation. Turns out such a mat isn’t all that easy to find! You’d assume it to be a common gaming mat staple: a lovely, greenish-turquoise Caribbean seascape is pretty iconic and it’s not like pirate gaming isn’t popular. However, this assumption would be wrong. While there are seascapes available, many of them are very much a dark blue. This is nice in itself and probably fits most naval games wonderfully, but it’s not ideal for evoking a sunny Caribbean/West Indies feel. Furthermore, I wanted the mat to be mousepad material as it’s easy to store, lays flat and has a nice feel to it.

After doing plenty of googling and window shopping, I ended up looking at Deep-Cut Studios’ custom mat printing service, Print-O-Mat. I was overjoyed, now all I needed was a suitable image, and surely one would be easily available. How wrong I was. As is apparent in hindsight, you need a very big image for a quality print, and I was going for a 3x3ft map – roughly 90x90cm to fit my small table. While there are beautiful stock photos of Caribbean waters, you need a very high resolution for a high quality mat. After spending hours searching through various photo archives both free and commercial, I settled on something especially designed for the purpose: a printable battle mat image from Tiny Worlds. A bargain at $4.50, it suited my needs wonderfully. While it was also very blue, purchasing it as a file meant that I could simply use Photoshop to tweak it to my needs. I edited the colour balance to make the mat more green to evoke the correct genre feel.

Original on the left, colour-tweaked on the right

Pleased with the result, I headed to Deep-Cut Studios’ site and used their simple interface for creating the mat. The final price for a 90x90cm mat was around 40€ with a flat postage rate of 15€. Deep-Cut is situated in Lithuania, so no customs charges for a Euro customer. I was quite happy with the price altogether! The mat was very speedily delivered in a work week, and boy, was I impressed with the end result.

As you can hopefully see in the photos, the mat is crisp and vibrant. While colours are a tad darker than the original image, it’s still a faithful rendition and looks pretty much just like I imagined, and it should be noted that the lighting conditions and camera settings distort the colour in the photos! I threw down some super old hills that were originally made for WHFB way back in the 90s (I think) as well as some of my badlands/scifi cork outcrops that make for surprisingly nice rocky shoals. I love how it looks.

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Overall verdict: I’m super happy with my custom mat. Great quality and quick delivery at a very reasonable price point. While a part of the credit obviously goes to Tiny Worlds for the original image, I’m really, really happy with Deep-Cut’s service and will likely use them again.

Posted in Miniature reviews, Miniatures, Pirates, Scenics | Tagged , | 13 Comments »

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Rubble City go go

February 1, 2019

Painted stuff! Not miniatures as such, but very useful nevertheless. Inspired by both Azazel’s monthly challenge and my lack of time to focus on miniatures, I figured it would be fun to add some generic scenery pieces to my table. All of these are from Fenris Games, one of my favourite companies for miniature terrain, and part of Fenris’ Rubble City range. For a change I figured I’d photograph the pieces on the gaming table!

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I actually painted these fieldstone walls last year after buying them at Salute, but as I gave them a bit of touch-up, I thought to include them here as well. There’s nothing super special about them, but that’s pretty much what I like – they’re nice, clean and generic enough to go with pretty much anything.

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There’s a similar charm to these rubble walls and corners that I got as part of Fenris’ Rubble City Kickstarter. Like the fieldstone walls, these are super clean sculpts and very crisp casts so a veritable joy to paint.

Paint jobs were simple, but I’m happy with the end results. I painted all the pieces using mainly craft store acrylics. I started with a dark brown base coat, stippled on browns and grays, followed with progressively lighter gray drybrushes. I then slapped on some Agrax Earthshade and finished everything with Athonian Camoshade (think Agrax Earthshade but green) at the base of each piece and painted splashes of the wash here and there. I think the stone looks quite naturalistic, which is what I was going for!

These are really useful gaming pieces, so I figure’d I’d show you a couple of shots with figures. The walls and ruins fit wonderfully into my Caribbean setting, but would definitely not look out of place on any fantasy or even modern table.

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Posted in 18th century, Miniatures, Pirates, Scenics | Tagged | 21 Comments »

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From the painting desk #62 – Dastardly pirates

December 15, 2018

Plenty (for me) of painting done recently! I haven’t added all that many pirates to my pirate crew recently – that changes now. I realized I have a ton of wonderful pirate miniatures, and what do you know, they could be painted! With that intro, here we go:

Three 28mm pirate miniatures

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On the left is a female pirate from Bad Squiddo that I bought on our visit to CRISIS in Antwerp in early November. While she’s pretty much on the borderline of almost being too fantasy, she’s just suitable enough. A lovely sculpt in general, her hair looks weirdly unfinished which gave me a bit of a headache. Are those ribbons? Dreadlocks? In the end I just painted everything as hair. That gripe aside, she looks very menacing and has a sweet Jack Sparrow/Black Sails Anne Bonny mash-up vibe. The axe is brutal, too. The miniature is also a great example of a non-sexualized female pirate miniature, we definitely need more of those.

Next up is a carpenter from Black Cat Bases. While he’s not explicitly pirate-y – he could well be used as a carpenter on a merchant ship – I added him to my pirate crew. A lovely, characterful sculpt that was fun and easy to paint. What more could you ask for?

My third pirate in this lot is one of my favourite pirate minis of all time, a knife thrower by Foundry. He’s one of the most characterful pirate minis in existence, and looks like a really rough customer. I used a darker skintone (as with the female pirate) for some variety, I think a pirate crew should be a motley one. There’s a narrative element as well, as in my imagination he’s not a European – I’m sort of thinking Queequeg in Moby Dick, so some South Pacific blood in him. Absolutely loved painting this one!

These three are a welcome addition to my crew. They bring my pirates up to a total of 18 or so – might be time for an end of the year group shot?

They also serve as a great reminder, that when basing and painting style are consistent, you can easily mix miniatures from different manufacturers despite the somewhat different sculpting styles.

Posted in 18th century, Miniatures, Pirates | Tagged , , , | 18 Comments »

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