From StuartL - The Tyrant of Badab

After the end of the Chambers of Challenge, I spent a few days getting my hobby room sorted out. I had to arrange all of the Challenge XI minis for photos and that took a couple of days, then I had to find homes for them all, and that took a while too. Thankfully though, that's all more or less taken care of and I can concentrate on painting again. Or not. Towards the end of the challenge I was getting itchy feet (or itchy hands to be more precise) and wanted to start sticking minis together, trying out a few kit bashes and generally get stuck into the big pile of sprues I have cluttering up the place. So I'm probably going to be taking this Vaccine Challenge at a slower pace to begin with as I get more of the assembly side of the hobby done. 

One project that I am keen to work on is my Warhammer 40,000 Badab War collection. I have one army built and painted for it already (The Tyrant's Legion from Imperial Armour 9) and a second underway, (Space Sharks), but I have plans in my head for several more. After decades of buying marines, I have a million of the blighters and not that many painted 40K armies. Back when I was a callow youth of 25-30ish, I never really bothered with painting that much. It was only when I got into historical gaming that I started to force myself into an 'Only painted minis on the table' mindset. Now that I am focussing on 40K again I'm going to try and get some more marines done. 

To start things off, I have painted Mr. Badab War himself, Chapter Master Lufgt Huron of the Astral Claws, aka the Tyrant of Badab. More accurately, I have RE-painted the model. I originally had it done up in grey, rather than the correct metallic silver colour for the Astral Claws. 

I have also taken this opportunity to mess around with weathering pigments on the legs, base, armour vents and flamer barrel. A character model is perhaps not the best thing to be experimenting with to be honest, but too late now. 

Overall, I'm quite happy with the way the pigments worked, but I may go back and tidy up the stone base the mini is standing on.

As the winter challenge was pretty intense in terms of duels and points, I am not going to be keeping score during the Vaccine Challenge. This is going to be a more casual, more relaxing time I think.

From SanderS: A Wizard and Barbarian venture into the Vaccination Challenge (10 points)

 Hoi,

 

Says the Barbarian: "These are not the figures what I wanted to enter the Vac Challenge with!" With the AHPC done I actually had thought to settle down in an easier and less high paced painting regime, but I still need to finish the Stalingrad commission and well you know; a huge pile of unpainted lead is still awaiting me. 

There's also still a ton of Heroquest figures in that pile and so I started off with these two heroes from the basic boxed set. I have several boxed sets and these are painted for the school club.

Well at least I have a post in and I am now going to try and write a wrap up post for the Challenge proper.

Cheers Sander

From MartinN: Full throttle into the Vaccination Challenge [26 points]

Well, usually I feel somewhat exhausted after the three months of AHPC but not this year apparently. I'm still on fire and chomping at the bit to crack on with my foray into the world of 20mm wargaming. Thus this Vaccination Challenge thingy should be just the ticket to keep me focused.

So to follow on from my last post over on the AHPC blog we have the ZIS-3 AT gun for which I had already painted most of the crew (bar one). One of the things really appealing to me in 20mm or 1/72 is the sheer amount of stuff you can get. 

Whereas in 28mm you'd be hard pressed to find a crew of six for your AT gun, let alone one that could be arranged in almost mini-diorama style, all figures below except the gunner are AB Miniatures. Best of all they sell the crew without guns so you can take full advantage of all the model kits out there. I went for a rather cheap but cheerful gun by Zvezda, the gunner came with the kit. The gun is not overly complex and went together easily. But I still managed to loose a small but important part I had then to scratch build.

Anyway, I'm rather chuffed by how the gun turned out. It'd have been nice if there'd been a few more shells with the set but you can't have it all, right?

Next is a set of Soviet medics with casualty. As AB only released a set of Soviet medics this last saturday (and I of course had placed my latest order on Thursday) I went with Zvezda again. I've to say I really like their offerings as they scale well with AB and for the most part have excellent detail.

I didn't paint on any Red Cross markings as I believe to remember to have read that these were, due to the nature of the conflict, rarely observed on the Eastern Front, thus likely to have been omitted by the troops anyway.

I re-positioned the head and left hand of the female medic as to better interact with the casualty, but other than that it's the stock kit. In retrospect my Soviets might probably be a little too uniformly dressed with no variation in their clothing at all. That said it sped up painting no end and actually looks quite nice when arrayed together.

I've decided to carry on counting my points throughout this year till the beginning of the next Challenge. Both to motivate me and keep track of my progress. Thus with a Challenge total of 477 points plus the 26 points of this submission I'm currently at a 503 points. 3 points above my target for the Challenge.

With my government currently making a complete laughingstock of itself I'm rather sure to be among the last to submit to this blog. Hopefully it's the last time we "need" a Quarantine Challenge though.

OK, that's it for the moment. Next up some armour maybe.

The Opening Entry for the Analogue Hobbies Vaccination Challenge.

 Welcome to the Analogue Hobbies Vaccination Challenge!

I thought I'd kick off the AHVC with a figure that would help salve the thoughts of those folks who are feeling uneasy about the upcoming jab.

This figure is from Uncle Mike, the publisher of Strange Aeons. I describe this model as Sarah describes me: A little rough around the edges, perhaps a little sketchy, but with lots of character.

We've been told that my age bracket (It's *cough* 24 *cough*, if you must ask.) is scheduled for vaccinations in late April/early May, so for my personal goal, I'm hoping to get 120 points done before I bow out.

This fellow will give me 5 points towards that target.

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Administrative Stuff

The Vaccination Challenge (VC) is open to all who have not had their Covid-19 vaccination. If you're interested in participating just drop me an email at curtcampbell aht mac doht com.

I will serve as moderator until the last participant is vaccinated, or interest wanes.

The only rule is that once a participant has received their vaccination they will be allowed one last farewell post before they withdraw from the Challenge.

Participants can post as much as they like, set up duels, conduct side challenges, etc. Feel free to use the point structure from the AHPC as a basis if you wish (which I'm using for my points tracking).

Stay safe, play nice and have fun. 

- Curt

From Curt: The Close of the Quarantine Challenge - 2mm Terrain and Units for Waterloo

Hi All!

Well, here we are at the end the Quarantine Challenge and I must say, 'How did it go by so quickly?!' Geez, it just seemed like yesterday that we had started off in the first few days of spring - wow, the time just zipped by. 

First, I have to apologise for my somewhat on-again-off-again participation during the QC. The warmer weather has made its typical gravitational pull on my hobby time, but that being said, I did manage to get a few things done during this past few weeks to present to you as my last hurrah.

Last summer I began a 2mm Napoleonic project using 3D designs sourced from Forward March Studios. During that initial burst of productivity I managed to create two decent sized forces, one for the French and another depicting the Anglo/Portuguese of the Peninsula.

As June 18th marked the anniversary of Waterloo I thought it would be fun to revisit this project and add a few more units and terrain specific to that campaign.

After snooping around, I picked up a batch of building sets from Brigade Models which depict several locations that are iconic to that battlefield. So what we have here is the chateau of Hougoumont, the walled farm of La Haie Sainte, the church at Plancenoit and the inn of La Belle Alliance. Everything except La Belle Alliance has been based on 4" MDF squares as I wanted each base to act as a 'sector' for gaming purposes.

For Hougoumont and La Haie Sainte I wanted to include their formal gardens and orchards as they played an important role in the battle. For the garden walls I used thin plastic sheeting and for the hedges I glued down trimmed figure packing foam (the stuff you find in blister packaging) which I thinly coated with Liquitex before painting.

La Haie Sainte with its attached Orchard

La Haie Sainte with French columns and a square nearby.

Hougoumont being attacked by a French battalion in line.

The village of Plancenoit became a critical battle within a battle. I have the first base done depicting the village churchyard. Historically the possession of the churchyard seesawed between the Prussians and French throughout the late afternoon - a real charnel house. I plan to add another two bases to better reflect the entire footprint of the village.

Plancenoit's churchyard mocked up with some extra buildings and plasticard bits.

Plancenoit's churchyard with two French columns approaching.

Finally, the inn La Belle Alliance. Napoleon used the inn as his headquarters the morning before the battle and it was nearby to this location that Blucher, the commander of the Prussian forces, met up with Wellington in the evening of the 18th upon their victory over the French.

La Belle Alliance with a penny to give a sense of scale.

And, dug up from the photo archives, here I am at  La Belle Alliance er, Le Caillou when we visited the battlefield in 2008.

For La Haie Sainte's formal orchard, and for the odd individual tree here and there, I decided to create my own from bits found around the hobby desk. After a bit of experimenting, I used the same packing foam I used for the hedges and trimmed them into roundish shapes using small topiary scissors. 

I then pierced the foam with 1/2" brad nails dipped in hot glue to serve as the tree trunks. Once they were set up I coated the foam in Liquitex and then painted them up using craft paints. 

There you go, fast and easy microscale trees.

I also added a few more units to my British force, battalions in line, column and square.

Here's a unit of British infantry in column. It's interesting that the Brits had their colour party positioned in the center of their formation as opposed to the French, who had their's leading from the front.

Here is a side-by-side comparison of two differing column formations. See how the French formation is more compact due to the three-rank doctrine? Neat. To me this is one of the highlights of doing this in 2mm as one can convey, basically in 1:1 scale, the wide variety of formations that were used by the various powers. Pretty cool, eh!?

The same goes for the line formations. In this scale we can see the British two-rank doctrine creates a formation that is substantially longer than an equivalent sized French unit. You can see that unit discipline and firepower is the focus here.

Here is a British battalion drawn up in square formation.

And finally, you may have noticed the smoke markers that I've used in some of the previous photos. I've discovered that in large games we often need a visual reminder of what units have fired from those who've not, so I had these MDF markers made up by Byron over at Northern Lights Terrain based on some sketches I bodged together. 

The markers are simply three irregular shaped layers of MDF glued together to give the impression of gun smoke. I find that they're easier (and less messy) to use than pillow ticking. 

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There you have it! Thanks for sticking it out to the end. These were a lot of fun to work on and I'm looking forward to using these when we can all get back together to game in-person. 

To close, I want to thank all our participants for treating us with lots of wonderful models to keep us enthused while we were being isolated and keeping safe. I hope I see you all in a few months when we get ready for Challenge XI.

Remember, be excellent to each other.

Curt

From NoelW: This week I painted a complete army!

Although it was only 2mm:

I'm developing rules for 2mm land battles that interleave with Warlord's Black Seas naval rules. My rules are pretty simple, as the idea is to cover joint land/sea operations, in which the naval game is the priority. I'm thinking about the Finnish War between Sweden and Russia (1808-9), for example, much of which involved island hopping with various actions involving transporting land forces back and forth, bombarding of besieged fortresses and so on. But there’s no shortage of joint operations in the Black Seas period – in the East and West Indies, the Mauritius campaign, actions against pirates in the Persian Gulf and the Barbary corsairs of the North African coast, the French invasion of Egypt with actions around Alexandria and along the Nile, several Russo-Turkish wars, the Greek War of Independence - the list is temptingly long.

At 2mm, there’s little point in trying to represent all these different armies in their specific detail, so I’m creating “abstract” forces, roughly Napoleonic in appearance, built around brigades of four battalions/regiments. This one is the blue army, currently representing Sweden. Next will be the green army, for Russia. I’ll hope to follow that with a more irregular force to represent the Ottomans/Mamelukes/Greeks/Tripolitans and so on. Then a Red force for Britain and maybe eventually white and black, too.

At this scale, I’d be hopeless at trying to represent either plausible uniform facings or flags, so each brigade has battalion flags of the same colour. Effectively the “battalions” are counters representing the current strength of the brigade, with attrition of the brigade represented by removal of a battalion. The idea is closer to a board game representation like Risk, rather than a true figure game.

In painting I took most of Curt’s always useful ideas, (thanks, Curt) though not delivered them nearly so well. I blame the figures I’m working with! Curt has beautiful, custom-printed 2mm figs, whereas mine are Irregular – perfectly serviceable, but rather undefined sculpts and somewhat variably cast, too. A little irregular, in fact. 

I shouldn’t complain, though – I was lucky enough to buy these at a show where the reseller was clearing them, and sold me several thousand figures for £30! This single army contains about 500 figures, for example, and takes up less room than a single battalion in 28mm so if you want the “mass look” and aren't looking for detail, there’s nothing better. Or cheaper.

As is usual for me, my final offering for the Challenge is quite large, but also a hotch-potch of bits and pieces. Lest you think I've had a sleepless week, I should point out that several of these pieces have been ongoing throughout the challenge, only completed in the last few days.

Going up a couple of scales, I finished the artillery for my 15mm French army for Minden. This is progressing slowly (2 years now, and counting) but slowly getting there. 8 guns of different calibres:

Moving to 28mm, I painted four resin walls that had been colonising the bottom of a terrain box, using a painting scheme I hadn’t tried before, looking for something like sandstone. And, actually, I’m quite pleased with how they’ve come out: basically an initial wash of slightly thinned Citadel Contrast, drybrushed with Vallejo’s Pale Sand. One thing that I think has improved these quite a bit is to paint and flock the bases in the same style as my 28mm figures.

Next, a Warbases Rolls-Royce armoured car, painted for the Western Desert. I found this model a bit of a pain to assemble correctly, partly because the apparently comprehensive online instructions aren’t perfectly clear about a couple of details, but mainly because of my awkward fingers. I shall rely on my wife for all future model building.

As this is my only contribution this time round to the Bolt Action side duel, it brings my total here to 785, so I defer once again to StuartL. Next Challenge, young man, I promise I will paint you into a corner!

Next, a Scorpion. That’s not another armoured car, but rather an actual stinging arachnid the Rolls Royce might accidentally run into in the desert. This, I think, is a Citadel figure possibly from their pre-slotta days and will join my D&D/Frostgrave monsters. (Look how good its camo is - you can hardly see there's any figure there!)

Moving on to human figures, I finished a few more for my Punic Wars collection. A herd of 21 Warlord Cisalpine Gauls:

and a contingent of 9 Carthaginian Citizens (Victrix):

My original plan had been to paint dozens of Ancients, for a side duel on ancients but these are all I’ve managed in the whole challenge – a mere 150 points, so apologies to all concerned. (Just noticed the bent spear, too, presumably happened during photography - so I need to replace that now. A general's work is never done...)

Another command base, this time Prince Rupert of the Rhine.

I’m not sure who sells this model, but it’s clearly a Copplestone sculpt – a beautiful piece of work. I’ve now two Ruperts, not being able to resist this second model, so one will probably double as Prince Maurice of the Palatinate.

And finally, a smattering of Italian Wars figures. Here is Niccolo da Tolentino:

and again with a few companions. 

Tolentino was a condottiero most famous for winning the Battle of San Romano (1432), immortalised in Paolo Uccello’s painting of that subject, from which the Perrys took the image for one of their Mounted Italian Command (from their European Armies range).

Together, this gives me imaginary points in this last post of 451 and takes me to a final tally filling 34 of my 46 rather over-ambitiously planned slots. Though some of these additions are rather less than I’d hoped, and the overall total of imaginary points for the Challenge as  whole is rather less than I’ve made in the non-Quarantine challenges, I’m still pretty pleased, as there's only 3 projects in my list of "projects I really ought to finish one day" which have not progressed through this Challenge. (Final details below).

Thanks to Curt, as always, for his hospitality, forbearance and brilliant contributions. Thanks to every one who has posted for some great painting and a fair haul of good ideas. Thanks to everyone who has given me comments - always uplifting, and often giving that necessary kick to motivation. 

That's it till November, I guess. It seems a long time to wait. I wonder if lockdown will be over? And, who knows, maybe I'll have painted my entire collection by then... (Excuse me, there's a knock at the door. A big black van and a couple of men in white coats. I wonder what they want...)

FINAL TALLY:

Project	New Task	‘Points’	Old Task	‘Points’
Agincourt
AWI	Farmstead	3	US Butterfly British 16 foot	30 80
Black Seas (1/700th)	2 merchants	20	25 2mm units	150
British in Egypt: 1801			Generals de Rolls’ regiment	30 60
Cape Wars	12 infantry	60
Carthaginians	21 Cisalpine Gauls	105	9 Citizens	45
Crusades	Command group	20
ECW	4 walls	2	Prince Rupert	10
French in Egypt: 1801	Guns	50	Command Gun crew	75
Frostgrave/fantasy	3 Treemen	24	Frankie Scorpion	5 5
Italian Wars	Niccolo da Tolentino	10	4 miscellaneous infantry	20
Lord of the Rings	Swan Knights Denethor Hama	60 5 5	Harad cavalry Harad infantry	60 45
Minden (15mm)			8 artillery pieces and crew	96
Ottoman
Peninsular War			12 Spanish	60
Republican Romans
Sikh/Afghan Wars	Command stand 8 Irregulars	15 40	11 irregulars	55
1860s British IF	Command base	15	Union rebasing	0
1880s, the Sudan	Buildings	15	18 British	90
Walmington/Sealion	6 landing craft	30	3 Civvies 6 zombies Bandstand	15 30 2
Waterloo			Congreve rocket	20
WW2 Desert	3 trucks 39 Afrika Korps Rolls Royce A/C	30 195 10	15 Italians	65
Zulu War	NNI Frontier Horse Natal Carbineers	30 60 50	Pearson & Chelmsford 4 foot	25 20
TOTAL		854		1093