Major Ballsup's Hobby Shed

August has been a good hobby month.  After my return from holiday  last month  and finally grasping the nettle that was the 15mm Landsknechts I've made some steady progress.  Completed I've completed the six Victrix warriors from the Dark Age Archers and Slingers set that I'd started at the end of July.  I really enjoyed working on these, I can't praise Victrix figures enough.  You can see more of them here . 15mm Grumpy's Landsknecht officers.  These were lovely little characterful chaps.  I painted these while doing the first batch of pikemen/halberdiers, but as they are based individually I could finish them off. 28mm Wargames Atlantic Second World War German Sentries.  I knocked out a couple of sprues of these.  There's more pics and my thoughts on the kit here .   On the back of reading about the Seven Years War I had a look at my collection, specifically the terrain.  I've never been that happy with the tree sta...

I didn't do a revision to the initial 2023 plan at the end of April (the first third), mainly because I felt I hadn't stuck to it.  I'd definitely gone down a couple of rabbit holes.  Over the last six weeks or so I've refocused and got back on track so I thought I'd revisit the plan. New projects for 2023 Late-Romans/Pre-Arthurian (28mm) -  👍 I've started to look at this properly now with a first batch of figures in progress.  I'd already more or less decided to go all Victrix prior to seeing the early renders of the  early Saxons in 2024 which really settled it.  I'll  be moving on the Wargames Atlantic sprues, they just don't measure up to Victrix.  The South African Border Wars (1/300th) -  👍  This new project wasn't on the original 2023 plan.  I'd been looking for a small scale, larger scope project for awhile and this grabbed my imagination.  I'd bought and painted examples of most of the afvs used in the conflict...

Completing the last batch of Victrix Dark Age Archers  had given me the plastic bug, so I dug out the box of Wargames Atlantic (WA) WW2 German Sentries that I'd bought at Salute. There's thirty two men and eight dogs in the box.  I used the majority of two frames and an additional gorget from a third to make up a Feldgendarmerie section of nine men and two dogs with one figure modelled as Gestapo.  All the Feldgendarmerie wear the gorgets and have painted the correct waffenfarbre arm of service colour on their shoulder straps.  I used a head from the Resistance set for Herr Erwin Plick of the Gestapo,    This is a pretty simple set with a reasonable choice of heads and arms.  It's well worth downloading the assembly guide from the 0200 Hours section of the Grey for Now Games website .  As with all plastic sets some of the arms don't work with some of bodies, so always test before gluing.  The figures are very slight, much more so th...

As a bit of a palette cleanser while working my way through the 15mm Landsknechts, I started on a half dozen Victrix Dark Age Archers.   I'd completed a  first batch of these in January and it was good to get back to them.  The original intention was to use these as Norse warriors for my Ragnarok project.  Since then though I've been looking at making them more useable for a longer period of history.  Therefore, with the exception of the sword armed warrior who is very Viking, I've tried to make them quite generic.  As before nearly all the parts came from the Victrix Dark Age Archers set, with a few extras from the Victrix Viking sprue.  These were used to make the sword and seax armed figures.  There was the usual amputations and other bits of minor surgery to make things fit and that's all part of the fun with these plastic figures.  I followed the same process as before and methodically took notes of what parts I used for each figur...

Background The Garden of Statis in the Eternal City.  Two ancient enemies, exiles in time, exiles from their homeland confront each other. The forces The Lost of Byzantias - Five hardy warriors led by Nikolais the Spellsword. The Elfkin of The Dreaming City - Agile and fast Elven warriors led by Dyvim the Commander. The full stats for both forces can be found here .   Table Set up I played the game on a 2ft x 2ft board, standard size for a 75 points game of Sword/Space Weirdos.  The terrain was set up to represent the symmetrical nature of the Garden of Stasis.  Round One  The Byzantias win the Initiative roll.  Stephanos the crossbow armed Hunter takes one action to move up and gain line of sight (LOS) on Dyvim the Elf Commander.  He then fires at him but the shot misses.  For his third action he spans his bow to begin the reload process which will take two actions.  Activation now passes to the Elfkin.  Hashgan the Elf Fighte...

On my return from holidays I cracked on with some of the 15mm Grumpy's Miniatures Landsknechts that I'd bought last winter.  I'd ordered one of each of the characters variants (officers and musicians) and a whole load of pikemen, halberdiers and arquebusiers which came with a good variety within each type.   I'd been after these since 2011 after buying some of Grumpy's 16th Century Portuguese to use as officers for my Elizabethan collection.  I believe the moulds have changed hands a number of times and I couldn't find a seller.  Periodically I'd search for them with no luck until Eureka Australia starting selling them.  I wasn't keen on paying the post from down under, but luckily to my joy I found Eureka UK were now selling them.  I'd just sold a few painted 28mm WW2 LRDG for a very good price and I immediately reinvested the cash. I went with a grey primer thinking that this would give a good neutral base to start from.  It was a poor choi...