Well, I have let things slip around here and have not posted for a good while after my keen start there. For this I apologize.
There was a family visit from overseas with my parents and in addition to that, enter drum roll, I come back to you gentle readers as a married man. Yes, it’s true, someone’s now got to put up with me 24-7.
In any event, despite the lack of evidence around here, there has been work put into the Poke of Pike project. This was a bit difficult at times as, being highly unreasonable sorts, neither my mom or my wife took well to my repeated proposals of sitting around in undergarments and painting wee Spaniards when forced to make an itinerary for the day. In response, they in fact formed something of a cabal with veto powers!
But now sanity and equilibrium have returned and there will be no more of this nonsense about ‘going out to restaurants’ or spending ‘quality time together as a family’. Hah, tosh the lot of it! No, no, the heavy burden of wearing pants around the house is now over and we’ll be right back into pouring over colored spreadsheets with miniature purchase plans, banging holes in tin bases to slip tiny steel shafts into and dandying over which preposterous color combinations should be meshed onto each base so as to maximize the pageantry.
Here, here!
I must confess I did do some painting on other projects including some Warmaster Skeletons. They are supposed ot be undead Egyptians, but while i can accept that the dead can walk, i find it hard to accept that the dead are going to walk all the way from Egypt to a wattle and daub village.
"We're Renaissance Skeletons....."
But work has been done the Renaissance as well.
The biggest change is I have decided to scale back the project a bit as far as the number of figures and all. While my parents were here they bought us a new wargaming table. They might have said something about a dinning room table, but it sounds a bit superfluous and we we will likely go back to eating on the floor using our hands and supplemented with a rough knife I have fastened out of flint. This is all well and grand, but the table is only about a meter square as they somehow thought we should content ourselves with a table that fit the apartment. I have a few other candidates as far as tables or spaces to put a table, but the advantage of this dining room table is that it is ready at any time to go.
So in any rate, this means I need to cut back a bit on the scope. Initially, I thought this sounded like a great sacrifice, but I realize it also puts me much closer to having complete projects as I don’t have to paint up 600 figures per side to have a go at it (although I plan to have over 1500 figures for this project later, I want to get some games in with less).
Anyway, I plan to fasten a grid board with 7cm hexes to cover it. Originally I had made some 9cm hexes, but this is getting set aside. This will save a lot of space and I am hoping to find a little ‘night table’ shelf kind of thing that matches the height of the dining room table and then I can use it to extend one of the flanks of my battlefield a bit (18 hexes wide would be great).. But even at 1 Meter, I’ll have room for 14 squares, which isn’t too bad and about matches with Command & Colors Hex grids for example.
So any way, to match with this I have decided to rebase my stuff around circles and pill shaped ovular kinds of things. My original bases were a bit scrappy looking anyway, so it’s not such a problem and I can even use some of it anyway as in many cases all I need to do is trim them down and then work the edges. Another thing I am doing is figuring out how I can base stuff up now, but then swap some figures around later once I get some different packs with different poses. So I have worked on this a little bit, particularly in regards to the pikes which need a lot of poses to look good and are packed in tight so they don’t facilitate swapping. I have a plan for this and will cover it when I start basing my Landsknecht, which would be soon, but I just scored four packs of GW Elite Handguns that my Mom brought over from storage, so I need to paint them up first.
The Pikes look quite cute on these circular bases I think and I have finished basing my Militia Pikes, of which there are eight regiments of 20.
Anyway, for the next update I will have worked some kind of a photostation and will show off the work I have done.
Poke of Pike Weblog 