25/28mm Acheson Creations Palisades & Monster Fight Club Bushes

I love these bushes from Monster Fight Club. I got them unpainted at Historicon on a lovely discount. You've seen them in many of the backgrounds of recent entries in the state in which they were purchased. That was remedied this evening and they took to dry brushing quite well with little fuss and even less effort.

I need to get another set or three. They are made of hard plastic and have hollow interiors big enough to hide a few figures or so within. At the same time I picked up some other scatter terrain from them - a stump and some fallen trees as well as as large stones and stone piles big enough to create some rough terrain with lots of cover. Those will appear at a later date.

Here's how they came - just in green plastic:

These wooden walls have also been seen unfinished in many a background shot. It was just the basing that needed finishing and that too was completed this week.

I don't normally like featuring two different products together unless they are intrinsically linked in some way but these do, strangely enough, work together well.

28mm Victrix Austrians for scale

When I first saw these walls, I intended to use them as fences for rural, Russian yards, but as you can see they actually are palisades and not garden fences. I should make up some firing steps, but I know I won't bother.

Some WIPs

Nice set though - I'll still use them but will have to find another purpose for them.

As always, thanks for looking - questions, comments and followers are welcome and encouraged! I'm doing more and more on Facebook so follow my page there too! https://www.facebook.com/One-of-My-Men-Became-Restless-100659928063858
 

25/28mm Acheson Creations - Stone Walls

These came out well - and this was after a disastrous start! I really hate scrapping a project and starting it all over and it is a very rare occurrence, but this was the worst large scale modeling disaster I've ever had. Read on!

 

Started well enough. Gray prime with a lighter zenithal - maybe heavier than I had imagined. In retrospect, I didn't use primer but paint (I think). I think I drybrushed the top in another layer of white acrylic in a pre-hilighting experiment - you can see it to better effect in the Citadel walls and fence in the background there.

After a long session of picking out  the odd colored stones, decided to apply my trusty ink/medium/flow improver/water wash I had used to good effect on the other walls seen here. And right off the bat - a big fail! For some reason I have not 100% divined, the wash was repelled. Either the paint served as a repellent or there was residual soap? in the crevasses? Or as I idiotically imagined, the material itself being a form of resin, was unpaintable,

Maybe it was just one - oil from the fingertips? And, no. I tried three of four and the problem persisted on each. What on earth? I put 'em aside dreading to have to redo them and monked around with other stuff til I thought I would just wash them again with brush and soap figuring the paint that was there might come off leaving a flaky mess behind. But try as I might, the paint there remained, but something was clearly interfering with the adhesion. Since they held up well under scrubbing I gave in and painted them in a black spray primer instead of the gray paint.

So here we go again with the coloring applied by hand this time. For these lengths I leave a spot to hold onto then, next session, I reverse and hold the cured end to get the rest.

After this heavy dry brush of tan, I picked out individual stones again. Followed by another drybrush of something else.

That very same wash that didn't work before, worked perfectly unchanged this time. Big sigh of relief. At left are the washed/stained ones, with the right side on deck. My daughter thought they resembled teeth. Indeed. They are a bit unusual; the rounded edges imply old river stones. I don't love the large divots the tops have but, I spose rain and dirt accumulate in them so I left it --keeping the toothy impression.

More drybrushing, painted up the wood in ways I will not repeat again (a Mahogany Ink and Vallejo Old Wood make for a inharmonious marriage), and some flocking where required and, La!

At the end they came out just fine and will do much to help set the scene for the Colonial Horror project I dip into here from time to time. The mat is from Cigar Box, and the Pumpkins are from Reaper.

Believe it nor not, yet more walls and linear obstacles coming up!

 As always, thanks for looking - questions, comments and followers are welcome and encouraged! I'm doing more and more on Facebook so follow my page there too! https://www.facebook.com/One-of-My-Men-Became-Restless-100659928063858

28mm Acheson Creations - Firewood Stacks

Nothing fancy - and probably not worth a post. But since these just went OOP as AC has (mostly) shuttered this month it may be worthwhile.

 

Crusader Peasants and a Pegasus Russian house for scale

Thanks for looking - questions, comments and followers are welcome and encouraged! I'm doing more and more on Facebook so follow my page there too! https://www.facebook.com/One-of-My-Men-Became-Restless-100659928063858

28mm Reaper & Acheson Creations Wolf Pack

This is a combined, 8 member, wolf pack from Reaper and Acheson Creations' Primeaval Designs range.

These were a significant stumbling block and I sat on them for quite a bit because I wanted to get the fur right. People ask me how long does it take to paint them? Well probably three years from start to finish. I, for now, have the luxury of time.

I'll do separate wolves for Gothic Horror/Fantasy (goblin riders, etc). But these are for the 1812 Retreat game I'm building. As such, I want them more natural and realistic than the usual black fur/red eyes motif more suitable for those games.

Here are the confirmed Reaper Wolf Pack. Tufts by Silflor. Per usual, I used Liquitex light modeling paste to build up the sides to the base on the figure sloping it down to the edges. These area all based on fender washers. Snow technique is simply a 50/50 blend of white glue (to give it volume) and white craft paint.

The fur of real animals does not always lend itself to a traditional dark to light build up - at times it's in reverse - the tops and backs are dark and the underside is light. Plus there's so much going on in the color patterns and what parts have brown, where do the white patterns begin and end, etc.

So the faces I painted normally - that's what everyone looks at first and so I wanted that to look right. Then I put in bands of colors - a light gray/white for the legs and under carriage. Then a band of tan that blends up into a band of medium gray followed by a band of black along the center tops. Each band had a base color and a highlight. At the highlight phase I allowed those strokes to pollute the band above it. At the very end, I dry-brushed Off White over the entire model to harmonize it all. No washes at all on these.

All paints were Vallejo.

Here's the other pack. I've been so spotty about keeping track of what figures are from what. I probably saved the identifying packaging somewhere but who knows?

The sculpting on these is noticeably more coarse than the Reapers are but I think with the paint that  I obscured that fairly well, and that they blend in together mostly imperceptibly.

This one seems like more coyote than wolf.

My Googling shows less red in the mouth area than I was tempted to do. Good. The teeth sculpting was far more impressionistic than accurate. Careful painting hid that.

Unlike human eyes, wolves don't have a lot of sclera showing. After all the work, I chickened out on putting in the pupils. that's not like me at all and I may put them in later but I'll live with the extra menace the "glow" provides.

I have plenty of Russian figures done but this Vivandiere is the only French one. It's important to me to make all of the French uniform in style and color so I want to paint them all up in one go - almost 200 figures. I've never done anything in numbers greater than 30 so I've been apprehensive about tackling it but I'm running out of distracting miscellanea and will have to address them soon.

Thanks all for looking - questions, comments, followers are welcome and encouraged!