Another Zombie and Survivor painted

Hello, again. I managed to paint a couple more minis today.  One Studio Miniature Zombie and one Hasslefree Minis Adventurer.
Zombie coming up, ladies first, you know.

This is one of the Studio Miniatures Zombies from set #2. I really like this mini. Great little details yet simple to paint. She reminds me of the poor lady they brought in wounded in 2004 Dawn of the Dead.

Next up is the Survivor. This is Hasslefree Minis' "Gruff". I've decided to adopt him as my avatar mini. He even looks a little like me, except no glasses. But I do have a beard, beer, and a katana.

Pic below is Gruff's back. Hasslefree sculpted him with a cool raised emblem on the back of the shirt. I added the USN on his ballcap. I have a similar hat, a little more likeness for my avatar.

To make him more like me I gave him black socks to go with his shorts and sneakers. My kids hate it when I do that. I don't think they've figured out yet that I do just to mess with them. :)

Thanks for looking.

Another Cityboard Update

Hi, folks. Had a pretty productive day today. Finished another Sarissa Precision building, dressed up the Bank with signs, made some Proxie Models Billboards, and found my Last Night on Earth game with the minis I painted a while back. Even managed to do a couple of jobs around the house for the sweet wife. Also got treated to some nice eye candy from Mother Nature.

 Looking out the window while working on some stuff. Got treated to a few cool critters in a tree in the backyard.

I decided to make one of the SP buildings into a little one story beauty salon. My son Stephen suggested the name.

View from the front with a couple of the Last Night on Earth games minis.

Side view with an LNOE Sheriff and the Victory Force Minis Zombie Dino Mascot.

Rear of the building with a Hasslefree Minis Ken and one of the LNOE zombies.

Other side of the building with a few more LNOE zeds.

Pic above shows the rooftop. I used texture from WorldWorks Games Armory. The mini is the LNOE Nurse.

Interior shot. I used wallpaper made from scrapbook paper and the rug on the floor is from WWG Police Dept. Another LNOE survivor.

Perspective shot through the window with another couple of LNOE minis.

Another view of the side featuring another LNOE survivor. I did a wash on the exterior and used weathering powder on the lower portion of the wall.

Here's the LNOE Lady survivors together. My fav is the Nurse.

Here's the Gents from the LNOE game. I think I like the Sheriff best.

A group shot of the LNOE Zombies. I think I need to hit the LNOE minis with some Dullcote.

Well, that's it for now. Thanks for looking.

A couple more minis painted: 1 zombie & 1 Survivor

Hi, everyone. Last two days have been kind of crazy. I've been off work but we're still in the middle of moving and unpacking. In true gamer fashion, my gameroom was top priority but now I'm stuck with the honey-do list.  Today I got the washer and dryer going. I won't bore you with the details. The hot water heater wasn't working. Haven't had a shower in 2 days. (Did I mention I was off work?) Electrician said it was a blown fuse. I bought a new fuse and installed it. An hour later wife notices an unpleasant burny smell. I couldn't smell jack, still got the cold from hell. Eventually opened up the closet for the water heater and the quick disconnect is quietly smoldering away in the corner. "General Quarters, General Quarters. All Hands Man Your Battlestations. Reason for General Quarters, fire in the water heater closet. This is not a drill. Provide from Repair One." (I'm Repair One- that's Navy Damage Control lingo BTW). I ran and hit the breaker, hit the fire with the little household extinguisher, and set up a fan to desmoke the space. Yee-MF'in Haw. Called the electrician. "Hep Me, Hep Me." Dude was there in like 15 minutes from a pretty good ways away. Everything is fixed, now, and we even have hot water. My sweet daughter Kelli who lives here in town brought us a wonderful Chicken Tetrazini casserole for dinner (kitchen still being renovated). And my wife even surprised me with a nice 6-pack of beer.  So now my day has turned very nice. I managed to snap a few shots of a Zombie and Survivor I got painted over the last few days.

Pic above shows our cat Tiffany taking over a corner of the game table. I like having her up here with me.

Pics above are my 1st Survivor. Hasslefree's Ken, which I think strongly resembles Ving Rames from Romero's 2004 "Dawn of the Dead". A great mini. I was very pleased with my paintjob until I see it on the monitor. I gotta fix the pants and maybe darken his skintone a little. Still, not bad for a no-talent hack like me. :)

Pics above are the Victory Force Miniatures Mascot Zombie Dino. A very characterful mini with great detail. There's a nice little backstory with my purchase of this mini. Victory Force had their Christmas Code 25% off sale with free shipping during the Christmas holidays, but it did not extend to their random 10 packs of Zombies (they're already really discounted). I asked them about it and they told me if I bought one of the regularly priced Zombies I could get 25% off that Zombie, plus free shipping for anything else I ordered with it. I thought that was pretty cool so I ordered this Dino Mascot and 3 ten-packs of the Random Zombies. Great customer service and an excellent product.

I painted the Mascot Dino's eyes Vampifan style. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and I love the way Vampifan does the eyes for his zombies. I thought about about doing him Barnie-style, but Vampifan already did that, so I went for a sort of Fred Flintstone's pet Dino theme.

That's all for now. I'm for a hot shower. Thanks for looking.

Luckyjoe

1st Sarissa Precision 28mm CityBlock Building painted

Hi, everyone. I just finished painting one of my Sarissa Precision 28mm CityBlock buildings. I got the bundle deal of 6 buildings as a Christmas present and finally painted the first one. I had a good suggestion for painting it over on Lead Adventures forum from tjantzen in this thread. He was smart enough to spraypaint his before assembly. Mine are already assembled and wood-glued so now I have to paint them assembled. It would have been a lot faster and more cleanly detailed if I had spraypainted them prior to assembly. So if you've got some SP buildings that haven't been built yet, please consider spraypainting them first. Okay, Public Service Announcement over, on to our regularly scheduled post. :)

I was worried that spray paint might obscure the very nice detail on the building, or cause the mdf to warp. Especially since I think they look pretty damn good even unpainted. I may leave one unpainted, but I didn't want 6 unpainted buildings all the exact same color on the table. Plus, I recently spray painted an MDF GameCraft Minis Old West building and it was fine with spray paint. So, it turns out is the SP building.

I used Krylon Ruddy Brown Indoor/Outdoor Primer and it worked great. No warping, no obscuration of detail. As an added lucky coincidence, I had some Americana "Traditional Burnt Sienna" acrylic craft paint, which is almost a perfect match color wise to Krylon Ruddy Brown primer.

I used another Americana acrylic craft paint for the trim on the ledges, "Buttermilk" and Americana "Slate Gray" for the sidewalk. The windows were painted with Citadel Boltgun Metal. The two minis are a Studio Miniatures Zombie and a Haloclix. I think the SP buildings are very well sized for 28mm.

Pic above shows the side door with minis for scale and dramatic accent. :)

This is the back of the building. I will probably add signage and I still need to do some weathering.

Pic above shows the other side of the building, with minis placed on the roof. The parapet comes to the perfect height.

Pic above shows the interior of the ground floor from the front. I used printouts from the WorldWorks Games "Bank" set for the walls, floor and stairs.  I still need furniture and can't decide whether to use paper from the Bank set, or to splurge on some of the nice resin stuff out there. Paper will be free since I already have set, but it takes me a long time to make the paper stuff, lots of fiddly cutting, folding and edging. And I usually end up with less than stellar results. Resin will cost lots more, but is definitely easier and more durable. I debated adding a real stairway instead of the paper perspective one. That would necessitate cutting a hole in the floor of the next story, and I know I can't get laser precision cuts, so for now, I'll go with the paper. That's a suggestion I'll make to Sarissa Precision, perhaps make some floor versions with cut-outs for stairs.

Pic above shows the interior from another angle. I think using the WWG paper printouts for texture is a very nice option with these buildings.

Pic above shows another angle of the ground floor, featuring the excellent windows and doors. I considered adding blisterpack plastic for "glass" in the windows, but I just like being able to have minis point guns out windows, so opted to just leave them open. I may add glass on a later model just to see if I like it.

Here's a perspective shot through the front doors and windows.

Another shot through the windows upstairs.

Here's a view of the upstairs interior. I just used a carpet texture form the WWG Bank for the floor and another perspective view stairs. The stair cut-out was mounted on mattboard and is held in place with double-sided repositionable tape. The carpet is held in place with non-removable double-sided tape. I decided to just leave the walls plain, and just went back over the Ruddy Brown primer with the Burnt Sienna craft paint. I may go back and add wallpaper at some time, but I figured this floor would be more utilitarian than the main floor.

Pic above shows the rooftop. I may go back and add some roof detail, or use some Litko Cornice Braces under the overhang of the railing, but it works pretty well now. That could be another suggestion for Sarissa Precision; please make some rooftop stuff, like stair access sheds, billboards and such.

 Here's a shot of the painted building in place on the cityboard. Next to it is another SP building, one of the three #64 buildings you get in the bundle. If you notice, that 64 has 3 stories. All of the buildings in the bundle are 2 stories tall, however, if you want more variety in height, you can simply pull one of the floors from 1 building and add it to another. With this configuration, instead of 3 two story #64s, I now have one each of a 1story, 2 story and 3 story #64. I like this ability to make different vertical sized buildings. Plus, Sarissa allows you to purchase additional floors when you buy a building. I wonder if they allow you to just purchase additional floors in a subsequent order. I don't see a way to do it on their website.

Last pic (above) shows one of the back lots with the painted SP building in place, street furnishings, and a Proxie Models Billboard on the rooftop. 
Well, that's all for now. I'm really pleased with these Sarissa Precision buildings. My fears about warping and obscuring detail if I painted them have been laid to rest. They take paint well and there's no loss of detail at all. However, I should add, if a little heavy overspray does occur and you accidentally fill in the lines between stones, you can just scrape out the overspray with a tooth pick or craft knife.

First Zombie Painted

Hi, everybody. I painted my first Zombie of 2012.  A Studio Miniatures one from set #2, the Chicken Mascot. Since I first saw this mini on Vampifan's site I wanted one.

This was a fun mini to paint. It has great detail. I used some Tamiya Clear Red for the wounds. It's still a little fresh and shiny in these pics.

I also did a little work on one of the Sarissa Precision Buildings. Sprayed it Krylon Ruddy Brown primer. It took the paint well, no detail lost and no warping. I printed out some textures from the WorldWorks Games Bank that I'll use for the floors and walls. Maybe I'll make that building a bank.

Thanks for looking.

28mm Modern Cityboard Update

Hi, everyone. I managed to get a few more things done for the 28mm Modern table for All Things Zombie gaming. I got modeling paste on the bases for 8 Studio Miniatures Zombies, scratchbuilt a dumpster, and finished my Steakhouse made from a GameCraft Miniatures Old West building.

Here's the dumpster.

It was made from plastic from a set of plantation blinds. The slats were extra ones which my wife cut off when she sized them. I ended up with several 3 foot long slats of 3mm plastic that's 2 inches wide. It has a wood grain. I've been using it for flooring in some of my Mordheim builds. I wanted to use it for this dumpster because I wanted it to be sturdy. The trim on the edges is cardstock and the lids are from corrugated paper. The pick up slides on the side are made from pieces of craft stick. R&B Hauling is the company that picks up my trash IRL.

The lids for the dumpster are held on with a piece of black duct tape. I wanted to have access to the interior. I painted on some chainmail to show where the paint has worn off and gave the dumpster a dusting of rusty red weathering powder.

Dumpsters seem like a good thing to jump up on when zombies are coming. Plus I used the mini to hold the lids down. They kept trying to close. :)

Next up is the 28mm GameCraft Miniatures Old West building. I'm using it for a modern day old west themed steakhouse. I really like this model.  GameCraft Minis did a great job on this building. Beautiful job on the etching. The only thing I didn't like was that GCM doesn't include the floor with the building. You have to buy it separately. I ended up using a piece of Sintra for the floor. I was afraid that spray paint might warp the wood, or obscure the etching of the planks, however, I read where others had used spray paint without any ill effect, si I gave it a shot. I used a light coating of Krylon white spray primer. It did fine. There were a couple of places where I sprayed too heavily and lost the gap between the boards, but I was able to clean that out with a toothpick. There was no warping at all. I did not have the foresight to paint the green trim pieces first before applying them to the building, so that added a lot to my painting time. Still worked out okay, though.

I didn't build the model the way it was intended. It has a very nice front porch railing that I left off. I wanted more room for the models. The front canopy is designed to be horizontal. I mounted it at an angle instead and raised it up to allow more room for minis. I also cut out part of the doorframe to allow more mini head room, like CAPT Jake from TMP did, on his build of this model. The sign was a mixture of google fu and Paint mounted on matt board.

Pic above features the ubiquitous Haloclix mini for size comparison. Haloclix are on the big side, so if he can fit, most other brands should be okay.

Pic above shows a side view. The doorway is a little small, probably more suited to true 25mm than 28-32mm moderns. I added a sign from one of the Microtactix City Streets sets. I used some weathering powders on the base of the building. The roof has a Hirst Arts air conditioning unit to modernize the building. I weathered it with a rusty red weathering powder. Note the lift of the roof at the back of the building. It's not from warping of the roof piece.

Pic above is the back view of the building. More signs from Microtactix. The gap between the building and the roof piece is especially noticeable at the left back corner.

Other side view. Another Microtactix sign. The signs are mounted on matt board and held in place with double-sided removable tape.

PIc above shows the interior. The walls are textured from Fat Dragon's Rio Draco set, and the floors are from WorldWorks Games' Mayhem Armory. The tables are either scratchbuilt (rectangles) or 1/4 scale dollhouse furniture, as are the chairs. The counter separating the room is made from balsa and popsicle sticks. The grill and refrigerator unit are from WWG's Mayhem Mall set. The refrigerator is too tall and is causing the roof to raise up.

Pic above is another interior view from the rear. It's hard to tell in this pic, but the WWG refrigerator unit is a little too for this building. It keeps the roof piece from seating correctly. I'll have to cut it down a little.

Here's a perspective view through the front. Pic below shows a couple of menu boards I made from what I guess are supposed to be door pieces from the GCM building.

 

I did the signs to go within the frame on Paint and printed them out. They're also held in place with removable double-sided tape.

Here's another side shot of the building with the WWG refrigerator removed. As you can see, the roof fits much better. I don't want people to think it's a problem with the GCM parts. They were perfect. It's a very nice building at a great price. I will definitely be getting more of these.

That's it for now. Tomorrow I hope to start painting one of the Sarissa Precision CityBlock28mm buildings, and maybe my first Studio Miniatures Zombie. I think I'll do the chicken mascot. :)

Thanks for looking.