Shifting Gears

Here at the WorkShop, we're shifting gears. It’s been damn near nothing but paint for months now. And ya, you've gotta paint the stuff, but seriously, my love is truly for the modeling end of things. I love the little nicks in the finger tips, crust of superglue under the finger nail, and dust dust dust as I grind away metal and resin. Ah, modeling time....

Not that there hasn't been some painting work done, and there will be pics to prove it soon enough. In fact, I got a fancy new camera for Christmas, some nuefangled 8 mega pixel digital thing from Cannon with a button labeled, "Super Macro," so the picture quality around here should improve sharply. Anyway, I've got three platoons from Easy Company fully, 100% painted. Not finished -- they still need flock and show, which will happen to the whole army all at once at the end -- but fully painted. I've also get the entire company "Base Painted." That's my own term for it, but basically all the big parts of the miniatures have their basic color on them (boots are brown, pants are green, skin is light brown, etc.) with no shading or details at all. This has become my own personal minimum standard to put a model on the table. I won't field basic primer, but I won't wait for a finished model either. I just really wanted to plow through and get the force playable before I started doing anything else.

And I will now be doing something else. Like I said, its time to get the super glue and xacto blades back out, and I've got plenty to work on. How about a nice new Sherman tank company? Three full platoons of Shermans, plus Sherman 105s, Tank Destroyers, Cavalry Recon, and a few other odd bits, like Sherman Flail tanks. Ya, I know, technically they are British not American, but how else are we Yanks to stop the rising tide of the undead? It’s a US Anti-Zombie platoon, and that's final!

I've also got all the parts for a big Late-War expansion of my German forces. StuG IVs, Panzer IVHs, two platoons of Pumas, and a bunch of Tigers are the order of the day, though a few of these units still have one or two vehicles waiting on the FLGS to get them in for me. And I finally got around to buying some artillery, so Jerry can go boom-boom from far away, which should be nice.

So there you have it -- despite the fact that all I've written about on this blog is modeling stuff, most of that work is about 6 months old, and its been nothing but painting since late Summer or so. Some of that stuff -- Chinese army, SciFi Germans, etc. -- is already up on here, and some will be getting all gussied up for the camera soon. But I'm shifting to modeling, which probably feels like a bigger shift for me than it looks like it would from reading this goofy blog.

I even got in a game of Warmaster Ancients over the weekend, so the Chinamen have actually seen the table. Of course, I forgot my new camera, but thankfully Caesar was there with a pic I could pilfer: