Tables of Interest - Historicon 2021

In typical fashion, I am almost exclusively a day tripper. Usual caveats: I may very well have missed a room or to - it was pretty dispersed in my opinion and I'm not sure I saw everything. I was there from opening to around 3-4 pm do missed games that began outside that window. Here's what caught my eye at Historicon on Saturday 11/13/21 at the Valley Forge Casino Resort, best looking games, plus what surprised me in the dealer hall at the end:

Of the periods I'm interested in, this Rorke's Drift one is the best game I saw all day - beautifully done!

I've little to no interest in gaming Vietnam as readers of this blog should have picked up upon by now. That said, this table was the best overall I saw all day. Gorgeous!

 

This is a battle mat for a 15mm crossroads encounter yet to be set up. No? Oh, it's the carpeting in the main hall. Very inspirational, I wonder if there are scraps around.

This is a battle set in Baum's Oz - it is eye catching with some fun elements to it. Little bit kitchen-sinky about it all and no real cohesion to the overall effect, but certainly novel (see what I did there)!

RavensFeast- a Dark Age skirmish set (provided free to all the convention goers) being played here -  a runner up table for me in terms of visual appeal and quality - I like to see all the seasons reflected and this one hits the mark. I'd like to see more white birches around.

Gnome Wars - 10 years ago this would  have been on a billiard-table green piece of felt. Some nice details here.

Some ACW thing - the rolling terrain and mats look great but the unbased regiments and tabletop clutter mar the effect. I'm sure it was a fun game and the table otherwise looks great!

Interesting back drop for this ?LOTR? game

I like the storybook quality of this one. If only my HOA was as tidy with the landscaping.

ACW but in New Mexico?

Folks are eschewing lush green tabletops a lot these days.

This was a pretty good looking ECW game run by: an English guy! ECW seems very rare in the US and it takes an immigrant to do it properly. Beautiful table!

Simple but effective.

An airborne scenario that I'm told is still used in training today.

One of the few tables that were following the theme of the convention: Aircraft of War: Balloons, Bombers, Helicopters, and more...

Great WW2 North Africa game! Not really my period either, but this is what I'd want it to look like.

Interesting game boards for Musketeer era skirmishing. The bottom is to be a busy marketplace, yet undecorated. It reminds me of the Lost World game books, a paper, scossors, rock kind of gameplay. Looked fun!

Italians in Ethiopia - the rolling hills are the real draw here.

Beautiful, Men who Would Be Kings (Osprey) game here - Darkest Africa. I always like these last stand scenarios: Rorke's Drift, Camerone, etc

This little set up was not a game in progress but an auction item, a nice one too.

Gunfighters Ball! This was the first thing one sees in the Dealer Hall this year and it's a beut! The propreiter has really pulled out all the stops with this demo game - every conceivable detail has been thought of. I didn't get any shots of the game itself but I'm a sucker for well painted western figs!

The renaissance man behind GB sculpted, painted, designed the game from the bottom up. Amazing output and I was certainly surprised that this was the first I had heard of it. Best presentation of the show in my book - really well done!

Despite no Old Glory, no Brigade Games, I found plenty of vendors to spend on. 

What I find striking about Wally's Basement every time is how common everyone seems to be ditching their Napoleonic armies. I feel like we're losing something in the US, but in retrospect, it's a wonder why the Napoleonic Wars were a thing at all here. 

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

Backed up!

My "return" was short lived - enthusiasm is at 100, but I'm so backed up I can't move. Reorganized some stuff so hope to get back in soon!

 

Citadel Contrast Paints: Flesh and Hair Variants

 

My obsession with Citadel Contrast Paints continues! This time for some peasants for no particular game - though most likely fodder for any number of Fantasy villains.

I thought I'd create a useful reference on the differences between the three "human" flesh colors they offer, but honestly, they are so subtle side-by-side it's hard to really rank them. I think you could use any of them and be satisfied.

This was the darkest out of the bottle and I thought it would be my favorite so I did two out of the four bases with it. As always, it requires the simplest of attention and it's all done. Everything pictures here is just one coat, pretty fast.

Guilliman is the lightest with Darkoath in the middle. Very difficult to tell and the shadow created by the longer hair makes it seem darker than they appear.

Darkoath Flesh

This is the lightest out of the bottle.

As I said, I think you could use any of them and be quite satisfied with them. I'll finish these up quick and see how they look all completed. 

 BONUS: I did the hair to see of that would help you see how the faces turned out: 

The best colors in my judgement are as follows: for gingers, Gore Grunta Fur; for blondes, Skeleton Horde is the most natural; for brunettes, Wyldewood looked best to me.

I'll probably never use the Gore Grunta for hair unless it's a civilian model where a redhead would add variety. Hard to tell here but Snakebite is not a natural hair color so won't use that again here either. Cygor Brown is, as always, too dang dark.

I also won't use Aggaros Dunes for hair either - it makes hair just a tad too yellow to be natural when Skeleton Horde gets it just right.

 Thanks for looking - questions, comments and followers are welcome and encouraged! I'm starting to build up a presence on Facebook so search for "One of My Men Became Restless" there. Or click the link here: https://www.facebook.com/One-of-My-Men-Became-Restless-100659928063858/

15mm Coastal Town with Quay

Anyone know the name of the manufacturer of this one? I've had it for a few decades, and painted it in the 90's sometime. It's dense foam and I associate it with Minifigs' Limeys and Slimeys rules and sets, but can't confirm.

At any rate - enjoy! It's an extraordinarily useful piece and can serve anywhere in the Caribbean or along an Iberian, Italian or maybe even a Moroccan coast. 

(Figures are Peter Pig.)

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

15mm Peter Pig Pirates! Part 2

Over the years Peter Pig has updated many of their older sculpts in their "Range 10: Pirates" range that are really lovely and in my mind one can never have enough so I picked up the new ones recently with which to augment the growing horde. I will buy nearly any 15mm pirate sculpt. Period. My mind is broken beyond repair obviously on the matter.

Regardless, there were three packs that had only a little of the fiddly bits on them, thus making them good candidates for Citadel's Contrast paints: Pirate Gun Crews, Unarmed Pirates, and one called "Hostages" or pirates with prisoners. 

This blog shows a ton of examples of the effects of these paints and I had to, in order to get the promise of speed fulfilled, choose models that were predominately a single color. That meant, ghosts in blues and greens, wraiths and spectres in black, gravestones in shades of grays, and wolfen beasties in varying shades of brown. I churned out a hundred plus figures in very short order, and was sufficiently burned out to need a 16 month break from hobbying. But I'm already back at it, but still not done monkeying around with Contrast paints. 

These weren't going to be as easy as a ghost which is mostly a one and done effort with Contrast. But I still was wondering how much faster they would be to complete seeing how these had very little kit sculpted on, trousers, skin, hat and sash and you're done. My typical method is black prime then up to 3-6 layers in increasingly lighter shades to final highlight. A single application was going to get that done in just a few strokes. And indeed they came out very very quickly. I did hardly any touch ups, just moved the blob of stain around and let it go. Where it takes time is carefully not staining adjacent parts of the model, so one has to be quite precise in laying down the color. Otherwise you risk having that color show through the translucent colors of the adjoining parts. Red from the sash, spilling into the white of the pants would be very noticeable.

In advance, I'll tell you where I cheated: the heated end element of the match of the gunners. I did the bases in the traditional way so they'd match their predecessors. I highlighted the swab buckets too as the Cygor Brown was just too dark and dense. Metal parts on hilts and pistols also got traditional metal treatments. Cygor Brown was also used on the skin of the pair of African water carriers and is really too dark to be useful. That color in particular doesn't work well anywhere I've tried it and thinning it with water or even flow enhancer doesn't really work either. (This is too bad as I'd be able to finish a large force of 15mm Essex Zulus in an afternoon if it would have more dynamism to it.) It's basically just a wet dark brown and never really sinks into the crevasses but sits at full strength all over the model. 

On with the pics!

Here's the gun crew  - the Africans came out so dark - maybe that's best here? I thought about highlighting them after but that would have kind of defeated the purpose of the exercise so I left it.

Here's the new crew alongside the older gun crew models I had finished years ago. The new ones are smaller, or maybe better defined and less blocky than the originals. Lovely models all.

These are the newer Unarmed Pirates. I have a rule for all my pirates that no two sculpts would be painted identically. Even the skin tones on the three topless models are the three different human flesh colors in the Contrast range.

Flash on

The skin is literally one wash of the Contrast paints and it's over. No shades, no highlights, no touch ups of any kind, just quick, multi layered colors. It took just a moment to do. Very fast. Pants, shirts, hats, all the same. One color wash and done. Painting the bases took longer than painting nearly all of these models did.

Pictured in the back row are the original Unarmed Pirates included here for comparison.

Hostages! This came out long after I had bought my initial collection from PP and never had predecessors as far as I know.

Unfortunately, a lot of the colors I own are very similar to each other at this scale - the skins and the blue and grays for the coats at left. Even the browns are very subtle at this scale.

There's nothing more satisfying then folding newly painted troops in with the old ones. This tray is only half of it - civilians, Imagination auxiliaries (mostly Minifigs Renaissance models) and more naval troops are in the other.

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