Street Corner: From the times of the single wing offense

The painting bug finally bit me, and I was ready to paint. So I finally painted my football player and in one sitting. These are the colors of my fictional college team, the Assyria Tech Charioteers (from my Arcadia rpg.)

This figure, as you may recall, was from the Sleuth's pack from Copplestone Casting's Gangsters line. To complete the conversion (summarizing previous posts), I detached the slotta and bent his left leg back into a running position. The gun hand was clipped off and the arm bent down in preparation to carry the ball. Next, I sawed the top of his head flat, and used the top of another figure's pith helmet to form the top of this figure's leather helmet. I used some greenstuff to form the ear covers on the helmet as well as to form up some shoulder pads. The last item was the ball. I used a metal ball that I got from Impact! Miniatures, and I used greenstuff to sculpt a hand onto the ball. Unfortunately, the hand came out too large, and is a bit misshapen. But I'm still happy with the figure as a whole. This small ball-hand assembly, I pinned to my figure. Paint and based, the figure is done! My first figure in a few weeks.

I don't know what the hell I'm going to do with this figure, now. I reckon' I need to make 21 other players. That'll take forever unless I make a few lucky finds, or my mind just clicks right for conversion ideas ... or I learn to sculpt a whole figure myself. In the meantime, I'm happy with another successful conversion.

Not that I haven't been doing anything

Holy smokes, it's been almost two weeks since my last post. Work has been hell.
Well, yesterday, I cleaned up my workbench to get ready to paint. I have a few Street Corner figures assembled, primed and ready to go; I just have to put brush to paint.

Besides work, I've taken  up chess (yep, I suck at it), reading (Maltese Falcon), a new roleplaying game (Fiasco), and doing small paintings of the new bar and grill in town (I've Picassoed my way to a bunch of free lunches there.) And the weather has been warmer than usual, so I've also been out taking long walks (to de-stress from work.)

But I won't leave you high and dry; here are a couple pieces of art from the new bar:

Street Corner: Quick football update

Got the ear flaps and shoulder pads sculpted. I also go the "ground" sculpted away from my football.
The sculpting is all a bit rough, but I'll hide it with my painting :)

I also, after the photo was taken, sculpted a very rudimentary hand onto the football. I think it will work all right (again, I think I can compensate my sculpting skills with my painting skills.)

No I need to figure out some uniform colors. Pants will be canvas, and shoes and helmet will be a basic leather brown, but I need to decide on a color/color combo for the jersey and the socks. I'm leaning toward blackish blue (or just black with blueish highlighting) with yellow trim, or maroon/brown/cardinal.

Street Corner: Conversions coming along

I indeed had a bottle-shaped piece of greenstuff for the bottle my hobo is carrying: Save your bits of greenstuff! A quick note: The figure I'm using as a hobo I believe is supposed to represent the Continental Op, the original hard-boiled detective. So having him hold a bottle instead of a gun doesn't change the character much.

The ritzy man's cane was about as easy conversion as you can make.

Then we come to the football player: I looked at about every piece of greenstuff I had for making his helmet, then I saw this German colonial officer's helmet, and my mind immediately knew what to do. Yeah, yeah, I know; I mutilated one figure for the sake of another, but this German had been in my bits box for a long time. He just didn't fit in with anything else I had.
I still need to make ear flaps and sculpt a hand onto a football (if I add a football at all. I have one ball with which to try, so I might as well have a go at it.)

Street Corner: A few conversions begin

Got my pack of sleuth's. I have enough gangsters, so anyone who had a gun in this pack has had it removed. The rest of my plans are labeled on the picture.

The football helmet will be of the leather variety. I'll make it using greenstuff. I've cut the top of his head off (filed it flat as opposed to actually cutting it, that is) to make it easier adding the helmet. I need to flatten the sides of his head as well (to make room for the ear flaps.) I've also changed his the figure's pose a little bit, pulling his right arm down and throwing his left leg back a bit to pose him more as if he's running (or jogging.) I'm thinking about making him a football (or just using an old bloodbowl (non-spikey version) ball. I'm going to try to sculpt a separate hand right onto the ball, so I don't ruin the figure by taking his hand off before seeing if I can indeed sculpt a hand and ball.

The cane for my ritzy debutante will be a simple brass-wire affair. I had another idea for him: I bent his arm down a bit for the cane, but while the arm was still raised up (and without the gun), I thought this guy would work well as a big band conductor (just add baton). Not at all a bad idea, and it'd be about the easiest conversion to make. The hard part would be converting a big band for him to conduct. (I've seen Black Cat Base's jazz band, but I'd need a "big" band ... and a club for them to play in ... and a building for the club ... and a bunch of sportsmen and floozies to fill the club ... and you can see where this is going and why I'm making this guy a simple man-about-town, instead.)

I'm not sure yet how I'll do the bottle for my hobo. It'll probably be greenstuff as well. I may have some greenstuff scraps somewhere that fit the shape I need.

Not much else to say. I just wanted to get a photo up of these fellows before I changed them up too much.

Street Corner: You wanna (brass) knuckle sandwich, pal?

Here's the last of my pulp gangsters. Another one withOUT any conversion work (save for adding a little extra to the base.)

For his pants (a bit difficult to see in these pics) and hat, I used Foundry's Granite, which I like. The jump between shades in the triad palette is a bit much, so I suggest mixing intermediary shades. Otherwise, I enjoy the greenish-gray quality making this color good for older, muted-color clothing (I was getting tired of trying to find yet another new brown shade to use.)

I went ahead and gave him some golf shoes. Why? It was something different to do. And they seem to match well with his shirt. All in all, I like the scheme for this figure: Simple with nice contrast.

I want to work on improving my craftsmanship with the urban bases. I'm happy with the results, I just need to get better at cleaning up the edges, especially when sculpting on these non-lipped bases. But the only thing I sculpt these bases for are my pulp figures. I guess I'll have to get more. Ahhh, excuses.

I may pick up just one more pack -- the Sleuth's pack. I'd get it more for the Sam Spade figure, but I'm thinking the Tin-tin "Boy detective" figure in the pack might be easily converted into a long-coveted 1930s American football player. What would I do with only one such figure? Hell, I dunno, paint'em I guess :)

Street Corner: A couple Joes

Painting is coming slowly along, but it's coming. Here are a couple more citizens for my Street Corner project. The man to the left has had his gun filed away and replaced with a newspaper; my stand needed some business. The other figure is a straight-up paint job.

The only other citizen I'd like to get my hands on is Copplestone's Sam Spade figure (in the Sleuth's pack.) I'd like to get some more citizens (and fighters,) but I'd rather have some new Copplestone sculpts. I may need to turn my brain back on and see what kind of conversions I can do. With the citizens, it would be much more of a challenge, given the relative static poses. A conversion I'd like to try is a reporter and a photographer. There's a Back of Beyond figure I know I could use for the reporter, but the photographer eludes me for the time being.

Another random desire: I'd LOVE to have (and I'm certain these do not exist) two teams of old-fashioned 1930s American football players. I think that's about as niche as you can get for 28mm miniatures. I think the only way it'll happen is if I win the lottery (and pay Copplestone for a private commission.) Hmmm, maybe Bronze Age's generic figures could be a good starting point to convert my own....

Red Riding Hood

"Red Riding Hood." That was the only request from Jeff when he asked me to paint this elf for him. I painted her a layer at a time, in those little breaks between other figures. I think it took me about 6 months to get her finished. I kept the scheme simple.

Really, the only thing that makes her Red Riding Hood is the red cloak. The rest, I kept very elfish -- mostly cliche -- but I know that's how Jeff likes his figures. He gives me a lot of leeway, but he has his preferences which he doesn't always tell me, but I've learned over the past couple years painting for him. In any case, as long as the paint job is clean and competent, Jeff will be happy.

I'm still not quite in the painting mood. I was gonna try to jumpstart painting this evening by painting my few pulp figures, but I realized only after I dipped the brush in paint that I had forgot to check those figures to make sure they were entirely primed. So I finished some priming touchup on the pulp figures, and in the meantime, pulled Riding Hood off the shelf and finished her.

I've been touching the future with my thoughts about what to paint next- as in what project. I'm no where close to deciding, but it's a good sign that I'm about ready to start painting in earnest, again. One minor project I was thinking about was doing a couple arena officials for my apocalators, or maybe a couple post-apoc civilians/spectators with all the trimmings (shopping cart, trash bags, backpack, coats, blankets, food cans etc.) All in good time. The weather is slowly getting cooler, so I'll soon be stuck indoors with little to do.

The figure is Reaper's No. 3166 Alistrilee, Elf Archer.

Tarzan/Conan, King of the jungles of Hyboria

Here's an excellent Reaper Chronoscope figure with a quick paint job thrown on. This is No. 50237 Jungle Lord. I was pulled to this figure because to me, he looks more like Conan than Tarzan; but I can accept him as either/or. He also fits in either my collection of Conan (and other fantasy figures) or as a tangent to my Street Corner collection as the jungle man (more specifically as a character confronted with my Tramp Steamer and crew.)

The paint job is a bit rushed; it took only 30 minutes to paint this figure entirely, but I think he turned out just dandy. I needed to get this figure done, so that I felt like I wasn't wandering too far from painting, hence the rushed job. I still want to get the few Street Corner civilians on my table painted up. Hopefully, I'll get to them sooner than later.

New school RoboRally bots

Here are (most of) the plastic robots from the 2005 release of RoboRally. It was difficult to get into the mood to paint these; I'm not fond of the soft plastic (though, I understand these are super-durable and will stand up to hours of handling, moving, rotating, reversing and U-turning,) but I got through them. They're not my favorite paint job (and nowhere near my best), but they're (finally, after 6 years) painted, you can tell which robot is yours by shape OR color, and each of these seven bots matches a set of dice I put together for playing RoboDerby (which some of my friends seem to prefer over RoboRally.)

My only concern is that these are not properly primed. The spray primer left them tacky (due to the soft plastic,) so I went over them with a couple thin layers of black, instead, before painting. Hopefully, my group can get a few games in to see how long the paint lasts until it starts chipping off.

(Note: Hammerbot is the one missing from this photo.)

Old school RoboRally bots

I've been preparing bits for playing RoboDerby Express (including slightly larger boards so that the robots from the actual RoboRally game fit in the squares. So while I was getting stuff together for Express, I decided to dig out my bots from when I first purchased the game way the hell back in 1994- old school first edition, yo!

So here they are in all their glossy, cartoony glory:

As you can see, it was difficult to ascertain the orientation of a few of the bots, especially Spin bot (blue) and "Run" bot (far left.) A later printing (edition?) of RoboRally had new metal robot sculpts with arrows sculpted on the bases. The latest edition of the game retained the arrowed-base theme. 

Right now, I'm painting the plastic bots from the new edition of the game, though, they're not looking the greatest; it just doesn't feel right painting cheap plastic bots. I'd like to get a hold of those 2nd printing bots, just so I can have some metal robots to paint for the game (that, and to have a more complete selection of bots.)

Other info: What's RoboDerby Express? It's a simplified version of RobRally for those people who don't mind moving robots about a board, but who don't like doing it for three hours. It's a free print-and-play that uses dice instead of cards for movement. More information can be found at Boardgame Geek here.

During the lull

I haven't even sat at the painting table in the past week to look at what needs to be painted. It's a combination of busy work month, taking a break after a train of painting projects, and working on a boardgame for Victory Point Games. It's my own idea. I won't say what it is yet; I'll wait until actual playtesting begins before I let you all know. It's probably something you wouldn't expect me to do (or something you'd think that suits me perfectly, depending on how you look at it.) Once designing and playtesting begin in earnest, I'll see about keeping a design diary posted to this blog.

But YES, I do have a couple figures sitting on the table that I DO want to paint. Just a couple civilians and another fighter for my Street Corner project. One of the civilians and the fighter are pretty much straight out of the box. The other civilian is a conversion; The original figure held a pistol at his side. I've removed the pistol and replaced it with a newspaper. My newspaper stand needed some business.

The figures aren't new; I just drafted them out of my black and white collection. No worries- the majority of the black and white collection will stay intact, especially the actual gangsters. I'll simply be repurposing a few of the civilians (that, and I don't really want to put in an order when I only have an itch to paint a couple figures at the time being.)

P.S. In case you haven't already, and if you're a connoisseur of boardgames, take a look at Victory Point Games. Godawful terrible bits, but fantastic rules. A lot of major boardgame companies put out some flashy games with tons of pretty bits, but only a few of those games have actual decent gameplay. I've only played a couple of VPG's games, but they're great. I still haven't won a game of Nemo's War, and I still don't know how I'm going to accomplish that. Also, Circus Train, originally (and still available at) a VPG game, is being given the full treatment by GMT games. I haven't played the game yet, but I've had my eye on it.