Major Ballsup's Hobby Shed

I've had more time for hobbying this month.  I finished off quite a lot and also spent a great day at Salute.  Salute used to be a shopping trip for me but since writing the blog it's become more of a social event which has been really rewarding.  This year I got to speak with a few more people that I correspond with online and we had the regular bloggers meet up.  Thanks to Ray from onelover-ray.blogspot.com for the photo. Completed I've been whittling away at the Victrix Unarmoured Late-Romans set since last August and I finally got round to completing all the figures this month. First up were the 12 spear/sword/dart armed Romans.  These had been painted a while back but I’d been procrastinating about shields.  At the end of March I got my finger out and ordered all the Little Big Man shield transfers from Victrix and I’ve been adding those.  The oval shield transfers are a bit fiddly to place correctly but a bit of paint has sorted the ones that aren’t quite true.  I se

I’ve got out of the habit of posting completed work this year, so what better way to get back to it than with some B&B figures from Oathsworn Miniatures.  I started collecting these wonderful miniatures back in 2016 when I met Jo and Michael at Salute, but these are the first I’ve painted since 2019.   I picked this quartet up at Salute last year and I just managed to finish them before their first birthdays!  If I’ve not started a miniature within 12/18 months I tend to question why I bought it and it’s then likely to be moved on.  This helps me to keep a perspective and keep the backlog manageable.  Not so with Oathsworn they’d never be moved on.  First up is this lovely Fox Mage.  I have quite a few of the foxes.  The Red Fox is my favourite native mammal so it’s natural I’d collect a few of them. Next in order of size we have the Black Rat Pi-rat.  This is the first rat in the collection.  I really like this mini he’s so full of character and like all of them was a joy to pain

It's been very busy this month in the real world and I was also away for the last week of March.  This meant that I only managed to get a few decent length hobbying sessions in with the majority of my hobbying done in odd minutes here and there.   This is the only blog post I've managed this month as I've still not had time to take some decent pictures of the figures that I completed last month.  I'm hoping work will calm down in April and with the increased daylight I'm aiming to catch up, get some stuff finished and post more frequenly. Completed The only figures I completed were six Victrix Viking figures from the command sprue.  The sprue contained two Beserkers and as this month's entry for The Plastic Crack Podcast Online Painting Challenge (OPC) was to complete a champion this pair of bruisers fitted the bill.  Taking part in the OPC is working for me as it has helped me to focus. In progress Just before I went away I did make some good progress with the

Once again it's been a very busy month.  At one stage in the month I really thought I wasn't getting anything done hobby wise and then looking back as I write this I've not done that badly. Completed I spent the first part of the month prepping for a game that I haven't yet had the chance to play.  This involved: Weathering four Red Army Su-76Ms and two ISU-122/152s.  These are all 1/76th SHQ metal models that I made something like 20 years ago.  The ISUs are hefty pieces which you could brain someone with.  Lovely models.  Working on city terrain.  I made a load more rubble/ruin scatter terrain, which you can see all about  here .  I also added more weathering to the buildings and generally dirtied them up and cut out and painted a load of cobblestone sheets.  28mm Second World War German infantry.  I completed a squad of using a mix of Warlord Games Afrika Korps and German Grenadiers that I got free at Salute 2023.  I kept them very generic so they'll do as SS/sec

2024 and 2025 will see the 80th anniversary of many of the great city battles of the Second World War, such as Warsaw, Budapest, Königsberg and Berlin to name but a few.  With this is mind I've been looking at my terrain collection.  My city terrain is centred around some marvellous 20mm MDF buildings I got from Commission Figurines at Salute back in 2014.  I built some rubble piles a few years ago, but when I got it all out of the loft it didn't look very impressive so I decided to make some more. The first job was to sort the base materials.  I used four different materials: cork board; 5mm foam board; old plywood bases and old credit cards.  The cork board and foam board are great materials for this type of terrain proving height, being relatively strong, easy to cut and very lightweight.  I started by pulling apart pieces of cork board to the rough sizes I wanted and then set about the pieces with a Stanley knife and an old screwdriver.  It's very easy to carve irregul