So Maybe I Lied a Little...

So I know last post I said things would be quiet around here due to the upcoming move; this has not stopped me from picking up a figure (my "lead pile" is already packed up, so I *had* to buy a new figure) from Just Games and putting some paint on it to mark the end of the work week and blow off some steam.

This is a "Cave Troll" from Reaper's Bones line, though originally released in metal many years ago.  I love this sculpt and it really defines what a "troll" is to me, in fantasy terms; this is the image that term brings to mind, with the pointed ears, upturned nose and massive underbite.

I tend to see this figure done in shades of gray-green, blue-gray, or dark, slate-y gray; I decided to go more "albino cave monster that wallows in its own filth."

I basecoated the skin in Reaper's "Leather Brown," a good yellow ochre shade; over this, I did a heavy drybrush of a 40-60 mix of Leather Brown and "Aircraft Gray" (50-50 looked too yellow still, not gray enough).  Once that was dry I washed the figure with a thinned down coat of "Wild West Rose" and, once that dried, I gave the whole figure an extra-heavy drybrush of straight "Aircraft Gray," followed by a lighter drybrush of a 50-50 mix of Aircraft Gray and Pure White.

Tusks and nails were picked out in Stained Ivory, and the loincloth was painted Worn Olive.  The troll's scalp and body hair, as well as the loincloth, were then washed with Citadel "Nuln Oil" to grease them up.

Still the base left to do, but otherwise not bad for about two hours' worth of work (quite a bit of which was waiting for the rose wash to dry).

All Quiet on the Gaming Front

Things are going to get quiet around here again as Gina and I prepare to move into a new apartment on June 30th.  To facilitate the moving process, we've begun packing a lot of "non-essential" things - so while our clothes and such haven't been packed, things like her yarn stash and my wargaming/painting supplies have been.  I don't anticipate having the time to work on anything between now and the 30th, so better to have it up and out of the way - we're planning on doing one hell of a deep clean of the apartment before we leave as a courtesy to the landlady, and having stuff neatly put away facilitates that that much easier.

I'm pretty pleased with myself; I got my craft supplies - glue, knives, clippers, baggies of bases, etc - neatly packed into a single Tupperware container, while another (larger) container has all my unbuilt plastic figures and leftover sprues of parts sorted and contained.  I even got my terrain squared away.

Next will be packing my RPG materials - I'm only running one game this month, and possibly playing in another, so most of my stuff can get boxed up immediately.  All my AD&D materials, all my OSR stuff, and 99% of my Call of Cthulhu stuff can go right in a big plastic tub to await moving day.  I've got I think three separate binders full of graph paper that I should probably condense down, and that's it for that chunk of the packing.

Last big thing is regular books.  I've done a pretty significant cull of my personal library, bagging up books to donate to the library when they're books I know I'm unlikely to go back and reread or that I have duplicates of, so there's not a whole lot left to pack up.  The nice thing is I think Gina and I's collections of books will fit nicely into the two three-tier wooden bookshelves we have, which frees up the six-tier metal shelf to house kitchen appliances when not in use and free up space in our new, smaller, kitchen.

Atticus was a big help organizing the book cull, as you can see:

Once we're settled, I've got a couple things in the pipeline ready to be worked on.  I've got a stack of Reaper Bones skeletons still in blisters from Christmas, and I've backed the Skull and Crown Kickstarter for Renaissance-style skeletons as well, expected to ship in July.  Between these, I'm looking at producing an undead force that I can rotate between different rulesets - Kings of War, Dragon Rampant, and lately I've been looking at Ral Partha's 1986/87 "Chaos Wars" ruleset, resurrected through a series of wildly successful Kickstarters over the past few years by Iron Wind Metals.  The rules are available for free from Ral Partha, and ChicagoWiz's breakdown of the rules allay a lot of my concerns and make it feel a lot smoother than my initial reading of the rules had suggested to me.

There's been some talk between myself and a few local wargamers of my acquaintance about putting together our own wargaming club to satisfy our interests in games like Frostgrave, Kings of War, etc., that aren't supported in the local stores, with my new apartment serving as unofficial clubhouse for once- or twice-monthly gaming get-togethers...I'm hoping we can make that work.

So that's where I am at the moment, hopefully this will all work out.