Major Ballsup's Hobby Shed

After finishing off the last of the Sikh-Wars figures I realised I had very little left to paint apart from 12 Perry Miniatures plastic ACW and a sprue of five Great Escape Games Gunfighters. I'd got these to combine with a pack of NorthStar Cultists to make these sinister critters (more here ).  There's 5 bodies and 5 pairs of legs on the sprue and a plethora of arms and heads.  I think they'd be enough to make 10 different enough figures, which is what I believe you get in a full pack.  I only use 28mm for skirmish games now, so I'm interested in making them as different as possible hence why I  tend to only buy the odd sprue.  When I made the cultists I complained that the hands on these Great Escape figures were massive.  There's still a few like that but it seems they were more the ones with the older, larger Colt pistols.  The ones with the Peacemakers look much better.   They painted up really nicely.  There's lots of details...

Back to normal Summer time weather in the UK this week - dull as ditch water and around 20 C.  I'm not complaining at all, it certainly makes it easier to do anything.   Painting/modelling   I completed the Apocalyptic/Dark Old West Cultists which you can see here . I cleaned up, primed and started painting a unit of Bengal Light Dragoons for the First Anglo-Sikh War.  This is the last unit I've got left to do for this project.   I cleaned up a pack of three British Generals, the last of the Sikh Wars figures.  Research & Reading After spending time last week looking at Ancients and Medievals and finding nothing to really inspire, I revisited an old interest of Japanese warfare.  And this has inspired me, specifically the Medieval era of the Gempei Wars and the Mongol Invasions.  I'll be posting on this in the next few weeks. Incoming! On the back of my rekindled interest in Medieval Japan I ordered up two Osprey Campaign books....

2022 to date has been the year of 20mm figures.  All my figure painting has been in this scale and the other week I felt like a change. Inspired/intrigued by pictures I'd seen of the 28mm Northstar Cultists, my initial idea was to kitbash these with some Perry Confederates. I ordered up some sprues from SGS Models and they came very quickly.  However, I felt the Confederate arms were too slender, so I went back on SGS's site and ordered up some Great Escape Games Gunfighters.  A couple of days later, these arrived and looked a more similar heft.  I chose the arms with the earlier weaponry as my fictional Apocalyptic/Dark Old West is pre-Civil War, so I didn't want Colt Peacemakers, of which there's a plethora on the Great Escape sprue. With some judicious application of Greenstuff and cutting I managed to attach the arms to the Cultist bodies and they came out OK.  One thing I'm not too keen on is the size of the hands.  They're MASSIVE!  What is it wi...