Painting 28mm Horses (Part 5) - Palomino Horse version 1

Hello it's me again back with the 5th installment of my series on painting horses, this time its the turn of the 1st version of a Palomino horse.



Thanks for stopping by.

Regards

Loki

Painting 28mm Horses (Part 4) - Red or Golden Chestnut Horse

Today I bring you right up to date with my series on painting horses with the last version of Chestnut variants that I use.



Thank you for reading and watching until next time

Loki

Painting 28mm Horses (Part 3) - Standard Chestnut Horse

Today I bring you the 3rd video I have produced on painting horses so far, This one is a particular favourite horse colour of mine and used a lot in Cavalry units I paint.



Thank you for reading and until next time
Regards
Loki

Painting 28mm Horses (Part 2) - Black Horses

This video is the 2nd in the series I am currently making on painting 28mm horses. I will post the other videos that I have completed and made live in the following days and I should have you all up to date by the weekend.



I will state that although I have shown two possible colours to use, there are more you can add yellow or blue tones to the black to create further variations.

Regards
Loki

To the Strongest - Vikings verses English Kingdoms.

With the boys off from school I am on parental duties for the week and as yesterday resulted in me getting no work done so to speak it seemed a good opportunity for me to drop in on Kevin who has his boys this week and while they all play together, we can use the time to have another game of To the Strongest. So with plans made I travelled the 15 minutes to Kev's for a little Dark Age run out.

We are both taking a crash course in the Ancient period rules at present having been asked to play test the ECW version, something we are both looking forward too. We have played a Britons verses Rome Game and had a great time with us finding our way in the game after a couple of turns and only had a couple of questions to resolve with Mr Miller the rules author who duly explained the issues and we understood. So lesson two came around today and this time we jumped periods I choose 120 points of Vikings from the early medieval list and Kevin choose 120 points of English Kingdoms. We decided it would be an Invasion scenario with my camp edging a tributary of a river and it was his job to stop me pillaging the countryside.

Kevin has his forces deployed on the left of the picture above. While I am on the right.

A close up of Snorri Whitebeards plundering vikings.

On the Kevin's right flank, my left after a couple of turns, which seemed to contain a lot of aces for both players in the command phase we were getting closer to combat.

While Kevin's Left flank and my right Flank had stalled, those damned aces again causing havoc with cohesion of units

First blood came to the Vikings as they quickly dealt with a unit of light infantry caught in the open, and closed in on an English division.

The Vikings then threw a small division on the other flank to try and pull Kevs center apart.

Kev tried to rally his Kings body guard as the Vikings closed in from all sides, is that an Ace I see.

However the brave English held firm and started inflicting disorder on the viking force who were being done for by those aces or bad command cards at the wrong time.

After an epic struggle the English triumphed and stole a very narrow win, with both sides having lost a division each to demoralisation, but a stroke of luck for the English came as a series of excellent command cards meant that the vikings lost another unit and handed over the last of the victory medals.

I had an excellent day gaming and my boys had a great time playing, I fully expect another battle in the very near future. These rules have me quite enthusiastic and I am enjoying the feel of the game play, we will try out different armies again next time, before we run out the ECW playtest rules. I will do a review of the rules after several more games so that any opinion I give will be an objective and fair one, and not one based on a couple of games.

Well folks that is all I have for now thanks for reading.

Regards
Loki

Time to share some knowledge - Painting Horses part 1

I have long considered that I am more of a painter than a wargamer, maybe because my earliest memories are those of me sat painting row upon row of 1/72 plastic Airfix Napoleonics with good old Humbrol Enamel paints. I get a lot of enjoyment from the process of turning a bare figure into a fully painted representation of its unit.

Over the years, my techniques have changed and my all round painting skills have improved. In the early days the skill was getting a figure block painted neatly, even back at the start of my journey I had to have everything neat and tidy. Paint of the wrong colour on the wrong bit of uniform of equipment had me hurtling back to fix it. From that I advanced to the block and drybrush method, slowly and steadily I altered things until eventually I got to the stage I am at now.

One big hurdle in my life has always been self doubt and overly critical of my own work. Combine that with depression that rears its head every so often and occassionally it causes problems. Be it the cause of motivational loss or just unhappy with a piece of work. However, the last couple of years I sought proper help to get all that sorted, and I have to say it was the best move I made. I have things to help me get through the dark patches really quickly and they work so I wont knock it. Being macho about not dealing with it and refusing to seek help really compounded the issue and made it ten fold worse over the years.

Now I am painting Full Time to earn a crust, it is not always the easiest job in the world but every time I complete a figure, unit or Army for a customer I get a sense of satisfaction from the whole job. Best of all I get to work from home and have more time around family.

I have long been a believer in sharing what I have learnt and I have over the last few years shared some things with fellow bloggers on how I complete certain aspects of figures. From how I work a face to colours used for x or y jacket, often just the little things. On the odd occasion I have been asked how I painted an entire figure or unit. That is something I have been thinking about in a bit more depth these last few months. My problem has been working out how I could achieve such a thing, my computer skills are just about competent but don't get technical on me. My literary skills are almost non existent and don't get me started on computer graphics, I am hardly past cropping and auto white balance on a photo.

Now although I have stated my inadequacies well enough, I have persevered and formed the basis of something that hopefully will work allowing me to better share my knowledge with a wider audience. I am putting together a series of guides for painting and have started the process over the last week or so using the video as a medium and uploading to You Tube.

I do not intend to teach anyone how to paint in most of these guides, as with the internet age there are enough tutorials and You tube videos available for learning a particular technique. I prefer to think of them more as a full colour palette for working a figure, allowing you to replicate the figure / unit / army with a good degree of consistency.

Consistency became more important to me at first when I was doing all my work into the Vallejo paint range and making my own Triads. It became even more important when I started painting professionally though, simply because if you start painting an Army you need it to be cohesive in the colour palette for many periods, particularly Napoleonics in my opinion. If you do any large scale army having the rank and file troops in the same colour uniform matters. In times gone by, I like many people have started a project and walked away from it, returning weeks later only to discover I could not remember the colours I used. Now I have my trusty note book and record the colours I use for units so if I get distracted or heaven forbid the wife tidies up the Great Hall, I can at least pick up where I left off without spending hours trying to colour match the figures first.I also record alternate colours for certain things like variants for horses.

So here we go then with the 1st video, If you subscribe to my channel then you will get the new videos as they are uploaded but I will publish them on my blog as well for all to see.



Thanks for reading.
Regards
Loki

All work and no play lately -

However I do not feel stressed, or concerned at the lack of personal time. I have come to accept that things change, and as my boys get older my free time is spent with the family more and more. Plans I made for getting things completed during the summer went awry, with the lads off school for damn near 7 weeks and me having to hold the fort on childcare duty for the majority of it. Stupidly I thought that I would be able to work and supervise without issue, I soon learnt that supervising squabbling siblings becomes more or less a full time occupation in its own right. This impacted heavily on what I was able to achieve and my work schedule, reducing me to only being able to complete projects for clients that had fixed deadlines attached. Fortunately most of my clients are on an as units are ready basis or are aware that their may be delays beyond my control so my head has not collapsed under a blanket of despair as I claw back from being 7 weeks behind on the schedule I have.

I have learnt the art of bulking up my desk in order to work several things at once, something that would have given me nightmares a couple of years ago is now a necessary evil. As you can see above last week I had a unit of infantry on the go and some cavalry waiting in the wings. With this kind of workload it is inevitably going to have some impact on me painting for myself but also has impacted on me getting out to game to a degree although the later is mainly due to my wife's working hours. Taking the time out to blog has also suffered as my focus is on work and after a 12 hour day I am not so inclined to be sat at the computer thinking of something to write. All blog posts that do require completion are those for Brigantes Studio, which has become the main focal point at present. The other issue I get, is those issues that working within the industry produces with alarming frequency. I am made aware of my services being needed by X or Y customer for new releases, just they cannot give firm dates for when they will have the figures to pass to me and this almost always happens with me getting the short straw and having a batch of figures to turn around in a week before they are released, thus wobbling the status quo again upsetting the schedule and causing delays down the line.

This week started with me finishing the previous weeks bits while working another unit of infantry alongside, so as you can see I am almost in a constant state of production. Taking time for myself to do personal stuff would feel irresponsible at present until I have made excellent headway into the backlog, so it is highly unlikely any of my own figures will be worked for the remainder of this year. I realise this post may seem all woe is me, but actually it's the opposite and serves to show that I have plenty of work and in this climate that is a very good thing. I am in fact very fortunate to be able to say I have a schedule that will keep me in work for the whole of 2017 as well. Most of all I enjoy what I am doing and that is a very rare thing, So I am going to make the most of it!

I leave you now with a shot of my workbench this morning, having finished a unit of Cavalry and infantry this week, I have also made good headway with another unit of infantry, completed 3 commanders, prepped and started 2 gun crews, and prepared another unit of cavalry. The completed units will all appears on the Brigantes blog in due course for those that are interested so until next time....

Happy painting ...

Loki