I've done some more evening mini painting - it's a nice change to doom-scrolling, and staring at smaller or larger screens. Also every evening of mini painting brings us closer to the day when we can actually start playing the game... (Yes, I know that it's theoretically possible to play the game before the minis are painted. Or with just some of them done and some not. But, ah, they just look soooo much better when painted. And to be fair, it's not as if we have nothing else to do in the evenings. There's mini painting, for instance!)

There's some figures that are just for one of the sub-stories, but most of them will come into play over and over again. Like the villagers - four of these guys, all looking the same. We've decided to also paint them the same, and not do different colour clothes for each.



They were the first batch of pieces from that game. They are finished now, and already have their first glossy coat of varnish.



The photo is a little blurry - these are quite hard to take decent photos of! The green things they are mounted on are bottle caps, serving as a handle.

The next guys I'm working on are the shadows - basically the main baddies that turn up again and again, and make everything worse.



These are about half done, they need some cleaning up of spills of the pink/purple, and some shades and highlights, and some details.

And then there's the main baddie for that story section, and some thugs with knives, and an inn-keeper, and another guy, and the four virtues... and of course Solomon Kane himself. Who has some very odd things on his sculpt, and it's not so easy to figure out what belongs to which garment, and how they might look best!

They are finished! After a good while of painting sessions, all of the QuoddHeroes miniatures are finished, and protected by a double coat of varnish. Yesterday they went back to their happy owner, hopefully to see many fun game sessions there. We've been promised an epic session playing that game once the general situation will allow it again.

It was a lot of fun painting these - especially since there were many different styles, and a few new playgrounds to explore. There was a light source in one case, and freehand details to draw in in another, and doing glazing, and playing with drybrushing and different kinds of washes, and edge highlighting, and a lot was learned in that way.



In the game, the cubes move by rolling from the face they are standing on to one of the adjacent faces, so that another face then sits on top. Each has a special action connected to it, so you need to plan your moves carefully in order to get where you want to get. Accordingly, there's two of each of the cubes, one to sit on the board while playing, and the second identical one is used by the player to handle. Actually turning it in your hands while thinking about what to do makes an incredible difference to just thinking about it, and is really necessary.



Each of the sides looks differerent, to make it easy to see which one is which, and they are all shown on the player board, of course. Sometimes they hold something in their hand on one side only, sometimes on both sides. Usually there's quite a difference between the left side and the right side, but not always - the mini on the far right, for example, only has a tiny watch as a difference between left and right.



They all have a face, and feet, and carry something like a backpack on their backs, or there's a cave or hollow with something inside in some instances.



Those were a bit tricky to paint, but hey, challenge accepted!



In some cases, the image on the player board and the actual sculpt of the miniature were a little different, and in a few cases, there were significant differences, which also made things a bit tricky. I was trying to go for "as close to the player board as possible" in these, which meant trying to match the colours, or painting in some details not in the sculpt.



I also tried to make the two in each pair as identical as possible, which was not always easy, because I like to paint with mixed colours... and you inevitably have too much or too little of an individual mix. For me, it's usually way too little, and then it is hard to match the mix again for the second piece.

Two of them don't really match the colour on the player board really well; one is a bit too dark (the magenta-furred one) and one a little too blue (the robot-like one), but overall, I'm really happy with how they all turned out.

So there's another thing for me to look forward to when the pandemic gets under control: Actually using these in game play!

Happy New Year to you!

I hope you had a good transition into 2021, and that it may bring you joy and see you in good health throughout!

We've very much enjoyed our time off, even though things were much different from how we usually spend both the holidays around Christmas and New Year's eve plus the days afterwards. There was no larger family gathering at Christmas, but we did get to see both sets of parents, spaced apart to make sure there was no risk of carrying any bugs from here to there. There was also no hanging out with a bunch of friends like we usually do - so we ended up having a fondue with just the two of us (delicious, but a little weird, and not as much fun as having a whole group around the table), and having our traditionally "toasting mousse au chocolat", and chatting with friends via videochat instead of being together in real life. There were walks, and boardgames, and mini painting (more about that later), and generally we had a really nice time.

Now it's back to the usual work for both of us. One of the first tasks, of course, is catching up on emails and other things that came in, and sorting out those. For me, that also means doing all the start-of-year bureaucracy things, such as tax-related stuff (Germany is going back to 19% VAT rate), and this year, no hooray for that, also figuring out the impact of Brexit on my shop. Which has happened by now, but deserves its own post!

Like in the preceding years, I spent some of the time painting miniatures. The last batch that was finished has long since gone off to its new home together with the game, because one of our friends definitely needed their own copy of Flashpoint... and we'd actually run out of minis in our own games.

[caption id="attachment_5741" align="alignnone" width="300"] The finished Flashpoint minis.


Originally, the Flashpoint guys are all solid colour in the player colours, and there's six of them. I've painted only the figures themselves, leaving the bases in the player colour base, and adding the corresponding colour stripe as a detail to the oxygen tank they all carry on their back.

The minis are not very detailed, but there's enough of it to serve as a guideline when painting, and I had a lot of fun trying to do the day-glo and reflection stripes on the jackets and trousers as close to US firefighter reality as possible. I've also tried to hint at fire reflecting in the face shields, more or less successfully. Most importantly, though, I did have fun.

Also, comparing them to the minis in our own FP game, it was very obvious that I've gotten some more practise! Flashpoint were the very first ones that I ever painted, and the colour range was more limited back then, plus I didn't look up the actual real-life uniforms. They do look quite, quite different as a result (though I'm not unhappy with ours at all).



Plus there were two last unpainted special minis for our own game, so I did get to add some of the newer style, and painted with a somewhat defter hand, to our collection.

And then... there were no more minis left. Which started to feel a bit sad with the end of year approaching, because it's been a favourite pastime during that time for the last years. Fortunately, another friend of ours has plenty of games with plenty of miniatures, and not the time and ambition to paint them all himself. So he was able to come to my rescue, and I'm now good for another while painting the fancy cubes from Quodd Heroes...

How was your transition into 2021? Did you do things "as typical as possible", or something completely different?

Plans are something you make... and then revise according to circumstances. We had planned to go for a bit of a hike last Sunday, but then it rained (finally! though by far not enough)... which meant we spent it at home, doing diverse small tasks.

One of them was varnishing a batch of painted miniatures - four of them for the game "Faceless". As always, those minis look a huge lot better painted than they did unpainted, and much scarier as well (which is the intention, of course).



They are still sitting on their painting supports, and they are very shiny right now, having been treated with glossy varnish. As soon as weather conditions and our schedules permit, they and the other finished minis will get the second coat, matte varnish, and then they are finally good to play with.

We do the two coats because the glossy varnish is said to be more resilient, but doesn't look as good on minis as the matte one. Plus, with the two layers, you know that you should reapply varnish if glossy spots appear on the minis, but because there's still the glossy coat once the matte one has worn down (if it actually does from handling), the paintjob itself will not suffer. Not that our minis get such super-heavy use, but then, you never know...

...require special measures. Or special bits of creativity.

We used to have semi-regular boardgame evenings with friends, and these are, of course, out of the question now. However... I also invested, quite recently, in a new and special tripod for my camera, for research trips such as the one to Augsburg (because I realised when going through the pictures that the yield-to-crap ratio could profit a huge lot from a better angle when taking the pictures, and that means a special macro tripod with a boom).

So. What do you do when you want to play boardgames and have a) willing friends, b) a fair number of mobile end devices, c) a cupboard full of boardgames including a substantial number of co-op games, d) adequate internet access, and e) a nice large table?

Right.

This.



We had to swap the beautifully painted minis for the standard-issue solid coloured ones, for better visibility on the screen, but it all did work pretty well.

And yes, we managed to rescue enough people out of the burning building before it collapsed - it was close, though!

The trusty online dictionary tells me that the English equivalent to the German "Was lange währt, wird endlich gut" is "Good things come to those who wait". Which is a fancy way to tell you that finally, finally... the miniatures for the Space Cadets game are painted and varnished and matte-varnished.

FINALLY.

I've had a lot of fun with them, and then I sort of fell into the trap of wanting to have them perfect, which meant that it was still fun, but a very long-term type of it. Also, some of them were really hard to paint with all the nooks and crannies, and tiny details. Which meant that I had to be relaxed and awake and fit enough for the painting, and there had to be enough light, and that was not always the case, especially not when there were lots of other things to do, so they took a bakcseat for a while, until I pulled them out again, and did some more work on them.

Then they were finished, and we did our research homework on how to seal them. The savvy Internet told us that a very good way would be to use glossy varnish as a first coat, as it's more durable than matte varnish, and then use an anti-shine coat on top. Which means that if you handle them a lot, they will get shiny first, before there's real damage to the paint - and you can just re-matte-coat them. (And that's probably way, way over-engineered, but hey. Who cares, right?)

So we had the plan, we had the varnish, but what we did not have was the coincidence of a) decent and warm enough weather, b) no wind and c) time and leisure to actually apply the coats.

Until this weekend, when all came together and I could finally, finally finish them off. So here, after this wall of text, is your picture proof:


I'm quite happy with how they turned out - and now we can go and save the Earth as Space Cadets!

... is turning small plastic things from looking like this:



into looking more like this:



These are minis from the boardgame "Space Cadets - Away Mission", where you're playing a group of human rocketeers who have to save our world from the evil alien invasion. The guy in the back right of the pic is a "Thrall", a subdued human that can be freed. The rest... they're all proper aliens.

Even though I spent a lot of time painting, I'm not all finished yet. There's still more aliens to do. This guy is about finished, apart from some minor works that still have to be done:



and he has lots of friends in a similar state:



...but there's about a dozen more of them who are still less finished and need to catch up. Plus there's another alien race (the bugs) and yet another group (the leaders) and, as the final and crowning project, the hero miniatures.

So I'll be having some more fun with these things in the next weeks - and I'm already looking forward a lot to the time when all these painted armies hit the table.



Brain in a Jar, anyone?