Perhaps appropriate to Easter weekend, there’s some revival and reorganization going on on my wargaming bench this weekend. I’ve owned a pair of MDF paint bottle racks from the now-defunct Impudent Mortal, the first since 2014 and the second since early 2016, but paint collections expand over time and I outgrew those storage solutions a while ago, leading to an increasing clutter of paint jars along the back corners of my bench. The two IM racks are still going strong and will head off to someone elses’ bench fairly soon.
A few weeks ago I finally put an order in to the always-reliable Warbases for, among other things, a quartet of their Vallejo Paint Bottle Rack units. They’re individually smaller than my existing IM racks (45 bottles vs 66) but I can stack two of the Warbases units vertically in the same footprint and win storage space that way.
By way of a mini-review, the Warbases Vallejo Paint Bottle Racks are nice simple boxes, with four flat sides and the interior of two sheets with holes, the back holes smaller than the front. Dropper bottles will fit either upside down or upright, and because the racks are simple boxes they can stack and butt against each other. Assembly was a few minutes per box with white glue.
One of four bottle racks assembled.Two 28mm handcarts on sprue. Roughly business card sized.A mini bottle rack that will (in theory) keep ready-use or project-specific paints handy.The mini bottle rack assembled, painted white, given a semi-gloss varnish finish, and with paints in it.
The Dropper Bottle ‘Test Tube Rack’ is a nice little piece of work that arrived on three MDF sheets, about ten pieces all told. Took a couple of minutes to fiddle together with white glue; there’s an instruction PDF on the Warbases website that has some useful guidance. I sprayed mine white (which took several coats, MDF is thirsty) then did a quick satin varnish coat for a finished look.
The four big bottle racks are out on the patio being spray primed white to help keep my bench as bright as possible, so this is probably the last photograph of the bench in it’s current configuration ever to be published!
The full workbench in all it’s chaotic crowdedness. The two three-level racks at the back corners are due to be replaced with four of the Warbases bottle racks once those have acceptable coats of white spraypaint on them.
A bit of 1/1200 naval action this week, as well as the usual random stuff lurking around the edges of the bench!
Aziz, Light!
Over the holidays I finally got around to something I’ve been wanting to do for several years, install more lighting over my hobby bench. I’ve got a pair of Ikea task lamps on either front corner of the bench each with a big daylight-balanced (4000K or so) bulb in them, and OK overhead lighting, but middle aged eyes need more light so I finally got around to installing a bunch of daylight LED strip lighting. Four feet of it, cut into a pair of two foot strips. Lee Valley has all the stuff to make this pretty easy, if you’re lucky enough to have an LV nearby. Ikea does too but their stuff is pricier and less flexible. The LED tape light is 120 LEDs per meter (30 per foot, nominally) so they give nice dense even task lighting.
LED tape being set up on my kitchen counter. It’s all 12V after the little transformer box in the foreground, so it’s easy and safe to work on if you have very basic electrical skills! Also, very very bright. Very. Would have made Aziz’s job so much easier…
On the Workbench
The new light strips can actually be seen reflected in the gloss varnish on the two harbour pieces below!
The workbench! Details in text, but yes, that’s a sea serpent in the centre.
On the actual workbench, two harbour pieces and a shore battery for 1/1200 boat games. With three coats of gloss varnish the harbour bits are done, and there’s just a bit of detail and cleanup to do on the shore battery.
On the right on painting sticks is a batch of 1/1200 boats a good friend 3d resin printed for me sometime last year, or possibly late 2024. There’s a pair of big Liberty ship freighters, a pair of little coastal freighters, three Tribal class Royal Navy destroyers, and a batch of eight German Siebel ferries – one gun platform version and seven with various vehicle loadouts on the decks. The two round bases are another coastal freighter that I cut in half to make a pair of wreck markers, one of which is blowing up real good as it sinks.
Yes, that is a sea serpent in the middle, a gloriously goofy sculpt from Footsore’s Harrowhyrst line sculpted by the incredibly talented Trish Carden (follow her on BSky, she’s awesome). I’m not sure it’ll ever appear in a naval game, but I might set the serpent up on the edge of the table just to worry the players…
Also some of the usual random clutter, like a base of 28mm chickens and another of ducks tucked in behind the lineup of vessels…
Planning a 28mm (32mm? whatever…) small shuttle suitable to get high priority cargo or a group of heavily armed ruffians/operatives/etc on and off the planet of their choice. Basically keeping it to about the footprint of a Letter/A4 sized sheet of paper, definitely inside 12″ nose to tail so it fits width-wise in a banker’s box for storage.
I laid a handful of figures on graph paper and figured that for the six-or-so figures I wanted the cargo bay to handle it needed to be somewhere around 70mm wide and 110mm long (and about 40mm tall internally, but that’s for later) so I cut up a few bits of card, grabbed the graph paper, raided the bits box and started laying things out.
Very early shuttle planning. The cargo bay is a separate piece of card so I can move it around. Click for larger.
The current plan is to build the box of the cargo bay first, then use the four hexagons as internal frames for two engines, then do wings under/around the engines for a stubby vaguely aerodynamic shape. Planning extended sides to protect the landing ramp from engine thrust, and a long vaguely streamlined nose at the other end.
Other details very, very much To Be Determined as I start building! I have raided and sorted the Bits Mountain and in addition to the plastic hex bases seen above there’s a few other things I’ve put aside.
Stuff! Wheels from Gaslands plastics for landing gear, various other scrap or leftover plastic bits for details, a blister of resin computer screens from the late, lamented Antenociti, a couple of which will probably show up in the cargo bay.
The weird eyes are from the local dollar store, there’s various leftover plastic scrap and kit pieces, an old blister of Antenociti comm screens that’ll provide cool details inside the cargo bay, and some other bits and pieces for decades of hording/collecting this sort of stuff.
Actual building is supposed to start Feb 1st, so stay tuned!
To finish up, the traditional workbench shot. Lots of painted figures I need to move into storage to clear the decks for this shuttle build!
The workbench, with shuttle planning underway. Some Mantic Terrain Crate SF fixtures on the left, a whole clutter of mostly-painted figures at the back that need to move to storage solutions, and lots of other clutter…
Best of luck to the other BSC 2025 participants, looking forward to seeing what they do!
The workbench this week… is up and running in our new condo! We had an offer accepted at the beginning of February, got the keys ten days ago in mid-March, and are largely settled, set up, and getting on with things.
Set up in my new office/hobby lair but still looking fairly familiar. New larger cutting mat, though.
Gradually getting the painting and hobby stuff sorted and functional; the new room isn’t as large as the one at our rented place but forcing me to organize and stay de-cluttered is not actually a bad thing…
Tiny Messerschmidts for some fokkers to fly around in. (credit for that joke apparently goes to Douglas Bader…)
Decided to work through the stash of 1/1200 WW2 aircraft I got from Last Square a few months ago, starting with a trio of Bf110s and five Bf109s for the Luftwaffe to cause trouble in.
Always the random Reaper figures. Need to add some details to one or both treasure piles so they aren’t so obviously identical, but they’re neat sculpts!
I’ll be at Trumpeter Salute 2023 in Vancouver in about three weeks running a 1/1200 naval game of some sort, probably KM Schnellboote attacking an RN-defended British coastal convoy this time. This’ll be the first Trumpeter Salute since 2019 (a smaller event happened in 2022 but I didn’t get to it) so it’ll be fantastic to be back!
(Or, The Workbench This Week, 12 April 2020, also known as the 43rd of Marprilay, Blursday the Somethingth of Pandemic)
Strange times, faithful readers. Strange and stressful, and one of my stress responses is to flit from project to project, starting things and then flitting off before they get very far.
This long Easter weekend, though, I’ve been nudging myself to actually move a few things noticeably closer to actual completion. The first small sign of this is the three critters below, two cats (from Eureka, I think) and a Reaper War Dog finally moved along to the flocking-and-base-detailing stages.
Two housecats and a war dog. Click for larger.
The cats have been on the edges of my painting table for almost exactly five years now, as my email archives tell me I made the Eureka USA order for them (and other stuff) back in March 2015. There’s another two of them somewhere in the “nominally in progress” mountain somewhere, but this white cat and the orange tabby will have to do for now.
No idea how they’ll be used in games yet… maybe I’ll come up with a Pulp Alley games that involves chasing cats around a quaint English village looking for a clue one of them has attached to their collar. No gunfire, you’ll scare the cats into hiding!
The rest of the workbench. L to R: ECW cav, Renedra building, Frostgrave and ECW plastics, the critters, werewolves, and such! Click for larger.
So what else is on the rest of the workbench, hopefully lurching closer to completion? A whole mix of stuff (surprise…)! I’m quite please with the progress I’ve made on the nice little Renedra Wattle & Daub Outbuilding, some long-neglected ECW cuirassier are seeing basing progress, I’ve been building some Frostgrave wizards and soliders as mentioned in my last post, and the whole mess of werewolves (over on the far right of the photo above) are meandering onward.
Stay home, stay safe, attempt to stay sane, and I hope you and yours are well.
Much chaos in my non-gaming life, so time and brainpower to actually paint is kind of hard to come by, but this weekend I sat down and organized my pike & shot foot figures for Pikeman’s Lament and other English Civil War or Thirty Year’s War gaming.
I now have exactly 60 figures assembled, based, and in progress for this project; I know it’s exactly 60 because the 4Ground 25mm bases I’m using come in batches of 60 and I just finished the first batch of two that I’ve bought!
All the pike & shot foot so far. See text for details, and click for larger.
Starting from the far left, there’s a unit of musketeers in blue uniforms, then a pike unit in blue (on the close-order base from Warbases). To the right off the back edge of the cutting mat is another dozen musketeers, this time in green. In front of them is six foot characters/officers/leaders and one mounted officer, and on the skirmish base to the right is the first six forlorn hope firelock musketeers. Finally in the front right corner is another dozen pikemen, in green uniforms. All the figures are from the Warlord Games Pike & Shotte range, all plastic from their infantry regiment box. This is one full infantry regiment box plus a couple of extra sprues picked up separately, except for the firelock/forlorn hope figures who are the first of the Forlorn Hope/Firelock Storming Party box I’ve assembled.
The blue pikes are closest to being done, and a few of the green musketeers got finished as part of LPL11 recently. Most of the bare grey plastic figures were assembled just this weekend to fill out various units and add some more leader/officer/character figures to fill out some units.
Unassembled, I’ve got another 14 musketeers, enough for a second full unit of “blue” musketeers. That will give me a “full” pike and shot unit of 2:1 shot:pike ratio, which will look good on the table! There’s also another 12 firelock musketeers, and a dozen cuirassier heavy cavalry. Finally I’ve got another dozen regular cavalry fully assembled but not shown above; six of them are fully painted and the other six have been almost finished for… about four years now, or maybe longer…
Four new foot characters, and some finished ones behind. Click for larger.
The four new officer/character figures are made with arms from the Warlord plastic pike & shot infantry command sprue, and a mix of pikeman bodies and bodies from the command sprue. The two on the left are pike bodies; the two on the right are command sprue bodies. The two completely finished and based figures in back alongside the mounted officer are also made the same way, with two spare pike bodies. I have more command or character type figures than I’m ever likely to need for Pikeman’s Lament, but they’re fun to assemble and there’s lots of single-figure small skirmish games out there like Pulp Alley that I could see tweaking for an ECW setting!
As soon as I saw how the figure on the far right came together I thought about cutting the head of the halberd off and turning it into a magic-user’s staff of some sort! Hmmm, mix and match the fantasy Dragon Rampant with Pikeman’s Lament? Dragon’s Lament? Pikeman Rampant? The two games use the same basic core rules, so it might be possible, and gunpowder/Renaissance fantasy (vs more standard medieval fantasy) has always been an interest of mine!
I haven’t actually sat down with the Pikeman’s Lament rules to put together some companies, but the figures assembled and based here are enough for a full size 24pt force with some different build options. I’m going to try to get one or two of the almost-finished units actually pushed through to completion this week, and hopefully get a PL game of some sort in next Sunday, but we shall see…
Same room as before – our guest bedroom/office/workroom – but we’ve moved the shelf unit I used as a painting and building bench to the other end of the room, away from the door. It’ll be slightly closer to my computer desk, which is out of frame to the left in the photo below. I’ll have a bit of natural light from the window just to the right, and more space for shelving along the wall below the window eventually.
It will also make the room more usable as a guest bedroom, because the guest bed is now right close to the door and all the messy hobby stuff is at the other end of the room!
The relocated workbench. Click for slightly larger.
The next several Lead Painters League entries are barely visible in the photo, lined up across the centre of the shockingly tidy desk surface. If that CSI TV-show “Enhance… enhance… enhance” voodoo were real you could peek into the future and see my next four or five LPL11 entries in various stages of completion, from “Ready to photograph” down to “O Dog am I going to get these done in time?!”…
I’ve been back to painting Infinity figures recently, after being distracted by somescenery for a bit.
Over on the Official Infinity Forums there’s been a Painting Pledge/Support Group thread every month for a while now. I tend to be a bit of a scattershot distracted painter, so pledging a few figures to get properly finished in a month is a good way to keep me a bit more focused.
This month I pledged a pair of Kameel Remote combat robots and a Hassassin Barid Hacker figure to get done. I’ve also been trying to finish a few more of the other random figures around the place, and have been doing fairly well on that front too.
Left to right: Two Daylami and three Ghulam Light Infantry, a female Authorized Bounty Hunter, Hassassin Barid Hacker, Hunzakut infiltrator with Rifle+Light Grenade Launcher, and the pair of Kameel REMs. Click for larger.
Primered for my September “paint pledge” over on the Inf forums. TR Kameel, Barid Hacker, EVO Hacker Kameel. Click for larger.
Top view of the completed (except for the bases) Kameels and Barid. Click for larger.
Front view of the September paint pledge figures. Click for larger.
A vast pile of bare pewter Haqqislam figures for Infinity, and a few in progress… Click for larger, as usual.
It’s been a quiet month here on the Warbard, but things have been ticking along in real life. The space station scenery for Infinity is taking shape, and today I sat down and cranked through assembling every single Infinity figure I owned. There were far too many boxes and blisters hanging around, so now there’s a long line of bare pewter figures waiting for putty and then primer before actual painting can start!
I’ll try and get some space station photos up later this week; I like how it’s coming along.
We’re also getting into the convention season locally, with the new LANtasy taking place in mid-March and Trumpeter Salute 2016 over in Vancouver on the first weekend of April. All I’m doing at LANtasy is playing Blood Bowl, probably with my existing Skaven (rat) team, so prep for that is minimal. For Trumpeter I’m running a Pulp Alley game set in the jungles of British India between the wars; I have enough figures for that and enough scenery, but might try and get a few extra figures finished and one or two bits of scenery. I also need to run a game or two of Pulp Alley to remind myself how the rules work, as it’s been ages (probably over a year?) since we last played it!
New paint rack in place, top right, and an Impudent Mortal elevator spread out across the bench.
My Impudent Mortal order arrived last week, and I’ve assembled the new paint rack already. It’s an exact duplicate of the one I bought back in 2014 and should help keep the rest of my workbench relatively uncluttered, at least of paint, figures, and small projects that can go up onto the shelves of the rack somewhere!
Spread out across the foreground is the components of Impudent Mortal’s Near Future Elevator Set, which should make for good looking scatter terrain on our Infinity tables soon! More about those in a future post as I actually start assembly of the first one.
Also in progress and needing a post soon is new dugouts for Blood Bowl, to go along with the scoreboard I made in November.
