Happy New Year!

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?