awesome partners OR how i got some help for a new project....

Some of you may know I have the most awesome partner in the world!  She's always been very supportive of my hobby - well she's gone a step further and agreed we're going to spend a small amount of time every week where I'll teach her a bit about painting and together we'll get some of my pile of unpainted figures done.  Here she is having a go at painting a Spyrer while we were up at the cottage one weekend.

concentrate...  concentrate...

The goal is to get a full set of miniatures ready to act as battle level 1 baddies for Warhammer Quest.  I decided that instead of using the standard square bases that we were going to make some bases using washers, business cards, sand and a bit of flock.  These are pretty simple to make, have a little more weight than plastic bases, match the bases on my WHQ Characters and provide the same advantage in terms of being simpler to use in a dungeon setting (allowing models to face pretty much any direction - so flailing arms and weapons don't necessarily impede each other).  We stuck some packing tape on top of the washers and cut up chunks of business card to glue on top.  Once that was done we glued on some sand to act as rubble in between the "stones" of business card.  They were simply painted with P3 Greatcoat Grey, and then drybrushed them with P3 Frostbite. Sarah learned how to drybrush - first technique in the bag!  She was worried about how they came out but I couldn't tell the bases apart (ie. who did which - and I still can't!) so I think she did a fantastic job.  We then just glued bits of flock wherever it needed it, either to cover up mistakes/missed spots or where it would look realistic and natural.  Here are the bases we did - a reasonable batch that will base 12 goblins with spears, 12 with bows and a minotaur.

25 washer bases complete!

I really want these miniatures to have an eclectic look to them - they are a bunch of smelly creatures living in a dungeon - of course they aren't going to have a uniform look! I also don't really care too much about shading or highlights.  The best way to achieve this is going to be simple neat basecoats and rotation of colour placement.  As it happened, some of the old figures I put into this project were already painted to this reasonable level.  Gives us a bit of a head start and hopefully gives Sarah some examples so she can understand what we're aiming for.  This pic is of the first batch of "pre-painted" figures, there are a few more whose feet broke while removing the old bases, they will get fixed up and we should soon have around 11 models complete.

first figures finished!

That's it for now - I will definitely be back with more posts once we actually paint some figs ourselves!