COBRA Ends the Year

Hi All,

This is the last post for the year and until August 2011.  I tried to get up to 365 models for the year, but quality was slipping and I was really running out of time.  340 isn't bad.  You're in for a meager post of barely finished or unfinished stuff from the painting table before I put it in the cryogenic chamber.

First is Destro and two COBRA troopers.  I actually painted the Baroness, but forgot to take her picture. The models are old "Warzone" models from Target Games.

Here's picture of a zombie apocalypse survivor, with her back turned to show you she's carrying a "Left for Dead" first aid kit; a failure of an attempt to make concertina wire; and a COBRA foe, Snake Eyes.

Lastly, are the unfinished troops I simply couldn't knock out by the New Year.  A British WWI mortar crew, 2 officers, a previously unidentified French Carabiner (Hinchcliffe Models), and some COBRA ninjas.  The wrapping things the ninjas are wearing on their forearms and lower legs were giving me Hell.

Well that's it.  Have a Happy New Year.

Love, Baconfat

"Season's Plagiaristic Greetings"

As my oldest (lazy) boy slept in and did not take out the garbage this morning.  A long time ago I bought a a replica Helmet.  It was listed for about $50 and, but it had a fracture and I bought for less than half. . Anyway, I had to try it on.

An imperfect fit! Okay, this is a posed shot; but the Old Glory figure has a similar helmet on too!

Actually this is not a real post, but a tribute to a funny post off my favorite blog, http://wabcorner.blogspot.com/

Again, Happy Holidays and hope everyone is doing well.

Remotec Lego Robot

Hi Viewer,

A little off the normal topic.  During the Seahawks game, I made a little EOD robot out of a Lego Advent Calendar tractor, a blank CD-R, and other assorted junk/model bits.  We don't really use the big heavy metal robots anymore.  The small plastic ones are lighter and quicker which makes them preferable despite the reduced capabilities.

Sprayed black, highlighted Vallejo gun metal, with a super quick GW Silver highlight job.

The road is a pressed sand and glue mix with loads of black paint (to give it an asphalt look), a black gray highlight, and a black stain.  It's not that shiny in real life.

A lot of terrorists use red det cord.  The copper wire would be the enamel coated copper wire used by the bad guys in many command wire IEDs.  I only used one strand because the wire I found was rather thick.  The electric tape was just a tiny strip of paper painted black.

I gave it away as a present, but someone was nice enough to take a picture for me.  (Dean, that's why this one isn't yellow).

I also made a terrorist with a nice little suicide vest, but it disappear off the desk the day after I brought it in.

More Perry British Line, Awful Zombies, a French Carabiner, UNIT Soldiers, and a Sprinkling of 40K

Hello Fellow Internet Traveler,

My lovely wife misplaced and recently found the camera, so I decided it was a good time to post more useless information in my attempt to use up the internet and waste the time of my SIX (!!!!!) followers.  Yes six, that's right and I've been to five of their blogs and they all have great blogs.  One doesn't have a blog, but I'm sure it would be interesting if he did have a blog.  I know he has good taste or accidently hit follow.

Well I had seven followers, but one was actually a pornographer promoting websites.  In the name of friendly bloginess, I visited his some of blogs.  The material was very amatuer, had unattractive "performers", and the text wasn't in my English.  I sadly let my 7th follower go.

On another note I've been really trying to paint as many models as days of the year.  If you look to your right on my painting log, you can see I'm going to miss the target.  If I wasn't leaving the country (very soon) for seven months, I might be able to pull it off.  More importantly I need to pay attention to the family, finish up projects at work, and pack.  I doubt I'll do any painting while gone as the living arrangements don't allow for such frivolities.   I may post one or two times more this year, but after that I must bid anyone reading this a fond adieu.

Enough whining, here are 2 UNIT soldiers and their dashing officer and their abnormally large yet somewhat expressive melon head.  For those who are not fans of Dr Who, UNIT stands for United Nations Intelligence Task Force.  It should therefore be UNITF, or scrambled around UNFIT.  I would have called them the Fast Action Response Team (FART), but North Korea and Lithuania voted me down when I brought the matter to a vote.  Kim Jong Ill and Dalia Grybauskaite, YOU SHALL RUE THAT DAY!  The UNIT is some sort of UN military team only filled with British people who defend us humans from the paranormal or extraterrestrial.  Due to their extremely large heads and therefore thick skull, they do not wear helmets.
















Here's six more Perry plastic British Line troops.  There were seven but one of the cats absconded with one.  He's lost so there's only six.  I lose more troops to family pets than I care to think about.  The ferrets wreak havoc on lower shelves when they break in; they can't resist knocking everyone over or occasionally stealing little men.  We used to have a St. Bernard that would wag her big fluffy tail and fling troops across the room to often be later stepped on.  We once had a cat who enjoyed chewing on pikes and spears.
















Next up an unfinished French Carabiner from a manufacturer whose name is lost to my memory.  If you know please do leave a comment.  The colors of the reins and straps are not decided, because I don't know the most correct colors.  And apparently the horse color is wrong, he should be black according to what I've read.  They quit wearing white or something about the time they lost all their black horses in Russia.  I have a small unit of these who are in terrible condition and painted really really badly.  I have sworn to fix and repaint them all before I buy the Perry ones and place these back in box to be badly damaged again.

Here's a Blue Moon zombie standing next to giant Reaper zombie lady whose breasts are exposed.  She is about as attractive as the ladies on my former porn follower's blog.

Now here are seven truly atrociously painted mediocrely sculpted zombies from Wargames Factory.  Ok, the sculpts aren't that bad, except for the flash and lack of detail.  I just hate assembling them.  On second thought they really aren't that well sculpted, and I don't have to be a talented sculptor to notice bad sculpting.  Also, there's something about the plastic that causes my always reliable Superglue to not work that well.  Oh, and the necks are huge.  I didn't assemble these, my favorite son did, in my plans to create zombie horde diversity.  Strength through diversity!  I did chop a few up to make creepy crawling zombies.  I really do like Wargames Factory and their products and from what I've heard their great customer support, but I hate their zombies.

Here's a Mega Miniature Crossbowmen of unknown citizenship.  He and about eight identical clones came in a pack of manlets I bought.  I tried to give all his fellow crossbowmen away, but no one will take them.  Comment if you'd like them, give me your email, and I'll mail them to you.  I don't like duplicates.
















Here is a 40K ork (orc with a k is how you write orc in the future) that I'm painting for my boy in return for going through the pain of assembling the nasty little zombies.  He's almost done, but I figured I better take a picture now before the beautiful wife loses the camera again.

To finish on a boring note, I've been flocking parts of a trench table I've been working on and may never finish.  I decided to put liquid in the craters and failed miserably.  I put in a blackish ink mix and it looks terrible.  I'll fix it and try a lighter colored fluid.

Next time I post I hope to show you some minor Global War on Terror Lego work I've been doing, as well as a  zombie apocalypse survivor, and some Cobra troopers.   I am easily distracted and promise nothing.

Merry Christmas if you like Christmas.  I hope the wife gets me some toy army men and I hope yours gets you some too.

Love, Hugs, and Kisses,
Baconfat

Perry Plastics, Siege Junk, a Couple Zombies, and More!

Hi,

I have a few pictures for you today.  I should have more soon as I'm only showing you what I finished.  There's quite a few more almost done.

First are 4 more Peninsular British Line.  I painted them as the 6oth because they had both red coats and rifles in green.  To my dismay I recently read that the all rifle units were in the peninsular.  The only blue cuff units I could dig up I think are maybe the King's German Legion, the Swiss Roll-Dollins, and the French traitor unit (can't remember their name right now).  Some of those had light blue and not my darker blue.  I've painted the around 40 of them now and glued Peninsular heads on them, so they're going to the peninsula regardless.

Secondly are four more 60th Rifles.  I painted them using the dip method except for the skin which I tried the Dalimore method.  Four shades of untalently laid flesh looks worse than my dipped or washed skinned faces I normally pump out.

Here's a willy nilly pic I took to show anyone remotely concerned if they could mix Old Glory Nappies with Perrys.  No, you can't, at least not in the same unit, unless the British models are taller than the Prussians.

Here are three more zombies.  Next post should include alot more zombies.  Well the first one is a Reaper model and the other two are Blue Moon, which I buy from Old Glory 25's.  You may notice all my zombies have crap bases painted a boring gray.  Well either I haven't come up with a good base scheme for my zombie horde or the walking dead simply don't deserve good basing.




















Before you mentally criticize the next model, realize it was one of the first models I painted around 25-30 years ago, as a kid.  I haven't got much better, so feel free to criticize all the other shoddy work.  The Nick Lund sculpted (I think) Grenadier brand dwarf is one of the gunners for a giagantic bombard made out of enough lead to make sixty dwarves.  Well, he's here because he was terribly chipped and needed rebasing.  He might look worse now.

Now that I am rambling about fantasy models, here are two more GW Empire artillery pieces I've finished.  They're metal and oldish, I don't know what else to say.

Here's a manlet I painted, I've now got about 20 of them painted now, for a giant siege battle I'm never going to run.  The model is from Megaminiatures and the Perry model is there for scale.



























I said I was only showing you finished models but I wanted to show you a silly sneak peak of another UNFINISHED random project I'm working on.   When I was young and played with 75-100mm plastic army men with kung fu grips, my favorite were the valiant forces of Cobra.  I did some scraping of a Target Games (out of business) model and started painting him like Destro.  Destro, who for some reason has a metal mask that moves with his facial expressions.  I imagine it's mercury based; I've always thought heavy metal poisoning was why the brave Cobra warriors never killed a single JOE.

I'm also painting up some Cobra troopers which would be farther along but the primer I used doesn't hold paint that well and Target models aren't that fun to paint for me.

COOOOBRRRRRRRAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks for visiting.

love and kisses,

BAAAAACOOOONNNNFAAAAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A Dozen Zombies and More!

Hi,

I've added a number of zombies to the horde.

First this group of evil zombies are four Wall Street business men responsible for the world's financial crisis. The models are from Blue Moon's "Things that go Bump in the Night" line. Blue Moon make decent models but all the men in box 8 "I Can't Seem to Get a Good Night Sleep" set #2 all seem to have 1970's style haircuts.

Here is a Reaper Zombie model that I really thought was terrible. That was until I painted it. The sculptor outwitted my terrible painting with a good sculpt. Reaper zombies are quite large, maybe 32mm scale.

Here's two Mantic Games ghouls with zombie paint jobs, next to a dull witted Wargames Factory Zombie, sans arm. I didn't know where his arm was when he bumped into the painting cue, so I painted his dead a** anyway.

Here are some sliced up Heroclix models with additional paint for zombification. I know they're super hero ladies, but can't remember any of there names.

I've been expiramenting with chain link fence creation and here's what I've made so far. They are out dated metal cast (for broken bones) frames glued into cardboard. One is "dirt" and the other is on black cardboard, until I can figure out how to simulate asphalt.

I have a bunch of painted "Empire" GW models including artillery crews without artillery pieces. I painted a few up, here are two of four that are done. I simply painted the base colors, painted on "dip" and then flocked them. I'll have more done real soon.

This is a Ral Partha organ gun that I started ages ago and recently decided to get off the painting table. It's a silly gun that looks extremely heavy with no way to move it. An enemy could simply choose to avoid it.

During a zombie model search I found this prepainted ghost. I really appreciated how much better the minimum wage third-world country painter could paint than me. So I bought it and upgraded the base.

Lastly are four RAFM eastern Roman archers, that I painted 20 years ago (quite terribly) that I've touched up. Two of them appear to be missing heads or bows, but are really using the WAB 2.0 rule for Eastern Roman invisible bows and ghost heads. It's an obscure rule hidden in a French Canadian rules Faq that must be ordered via snail mail directly from Forgeworld, but somewhat useful versus NKE armies.

Baconfat

Learning Warlord Games Black Powder Rules

Hi,

Just a quick post as I've not been painting the last two days. I've been reading and did a quick play test of the Black Powder rules. The book is amazing, it's full of clearly explained rules, witty humor, and pictures of impossibly well painted miniatures. They seem like they'll be fun and easy to learn.

To better understand some of the game mechanics, one of my dogs and I lined up a few army men and rolled for initiative. There was no terrain and they were lined up way to close (16ish inches apart). Not worth posting, except that one side was completely destroyed and the other left completely unmolested.

Here was my opposing general.

Army one (infantry) consisted of three standard size units of regular infantry with smoothbore muskets and two smooth bore foot artillery pieces. Army two (Hussars) consisted of four 12 model Hussar units.

You can see the armies foolishly aligned on a plain of paint flecked plastic.

When initiative was rolled the infantry grasped the...initiative. It turned instantly bad for the Hussars of Army Two. Each of the infantry units shot at the Hussar units directly in front of them. The Hussars all took quite a few casualties and became disordered or shaken. The unit that took four casualties from the cannons immediately broke, fled, and was removed from play.

The Hussars turn one: being disordered and shaken the remaining three units were forced to just stand their ground.

Infantry turn two: Once more shot the living "S" out of the Hussars, who turned tail and ran away.

It was a particularly stupid game and I won't try anymore play testing until I take the time to set up terrain on a large table. I would suggest setting the game up as instructed and not in a space small enough for a DBA checkers game. I also won't face battle against such a clever dog until I better understand the rules. I'm also going to read a Brigadier Gerard novel tonight for pointers on the proper use of Hussars.

Love Baconfat

British Rockets and Beginnings of Crawling Zombies

Precious Reader,

I've completed some 28mm Old Glory British Rockets. Ok, maybe they're assembled incorrectly, but they did not come with directions. I found a blog, where someone else had assembled theirs and I copied them. I have since seen an Osprey book and either Osprey or I mounted their rockets a wrong.

I sprayed them with a gray primer. The painted wood is Model Color Azure. The rockets are Model Color Black Gray. The metal bits are Model Color Gunmetal Grey. The bare wood is Model Color New Wood.

After that I squirted white glue all over the base, dipped them in sand, and let sit overnight. The next day I painted them with a black Minwax wood stain. While drying I painted the sand brown, tan, then light tan using cheap craft store paint (Apple Barrel Brown, Crafts Smart Golden Brown, and Apple Barrel Sandstone). I applied a little flock and fake grass. When that was all dry I touched up the paint job a little bit.

I would suggest to anyone else, that they paint before assembling. The underneath parts where a chore.

I love Zombies, but I can't stand assembling Wargames Factory zombies. It's funner I just found if you chop some of them up. Chopped up zombies will assist with the variation, as I don't want any duplicate zombies. I added glue gun glue for guts on one. They're unpainted, except for the blood I quickly doused on simply for fun.

Love Baconfat

Prussian Artillery Crew Done...Not Well, but Done!

Dear Cherished Visitor,

I've completed an eight man crew for one of my two Prussian cannons. The models are Old Glory metals. The first unit of my Warlord Blackpowder Army is finally done. Blackpowder armies are quite large with at least 15ish units each. The units themselves can be quite large as well. Standard infantry units range from 24-30 models; Cavalry range from 12-16; Artillery units are a single gun; I think I may have lots of artillery.

Here's a new shelf I recently acquired free from a great friend. The holes where one sticks the studs to hold the shelves are not the same on either side, except where I have the individual shelves currently. Normally I match the wood and add more shelves as tiny men don't take up much room. So I won't be able to maximize storage on this shelf unless I drill more holes. It's not an emergency, as almost everyone on it's not painted anyway. I think it take two more shelf sets (a grand total of six) to give every army man room to stand around and collect dust. So if you accidently stumbled upon this page and have some extra shelves you're willing to give away and you live in Western Washington, please leave a comment saying as much.

I've taken another picture of my filthy painting desk. The stuff in the back row space men things never seem to get taken care of. New additions include: some Rus which will probably end up in the lonely back row quickly (as I have no intention of making a Rus army), some more zombies, British rockets (put together incorrectly by me), a couple manlets (for siege fun), an ancient French Carabiner model of unknown manufacture, and a few fantasy pistol toting horsemen. I had spilt some paint and didn't want to waste it and the pistoliers were the first primed models I could get my hands on that needed that same color of paint. Normally, I cry over spilt paint.

Love Baconfat

Zombies, Rocket Crew, Cannon, Abandoned Buildings, and Terrain.

Hello dear beloved viewer,

I've slapped paint on few more zombies. I'm up to 38 complete with another 30 something in the works.

First up, is a zombie child. It's a USX miniature which I believe is actually RAFM. The line is actually quite large, maybe 32mm scale and full grown USX/RAFM zombies probably won't be added to the pack. They dwarf some of the prepainted Horrorclix stuff. Regardless the undead child is in, because child zombies are very rare.

Second is a Heroclix Invisible Woman that's been chopped up and painted undeadish. I find myself forced into killing superheros to get a more fair ratio of female to male zombies. I shaved off her Fantastic 4, painted her a white tank top, touched up her pants and boots, stabbed her a bit, chopped off half an arm, and liberally applied blood. Heroclix actually are quite easy to zombiefy because of their soft plastic and prepaint equals priming to me.

Thirdly are two terrible prepainted sculpts. I believe they are for Dungeons and Dragons, but zombies are zombies and prepaints save time. All I did was dip them in wood stain to hide the sweat shop labor paint job and paint their bases gray. Zombies don't need to be pretty.

Here are two Mantic brand ghoul models. I saw a advert on theminiaturespage.com come that Wayland Games was offering free Mantic ghoul samples. Free is good. These ghouls had extrabits and are sculpted quite well. The downside is they had weird horns growing out of them (about three each) and what appeared to be railroad spikes randomly stuck in them. They were easily removed. I also removed some of their clothing, because they were both wearing skirts. Skirts would be fine if I was creating a Scottish zombie horde. They'll be a fine addition to the pack.

Due to the fact I'm painting these zombies for the Zombies board game, I painted uptwo of the official Zombies miniatures. They are very small compared to the rest of the pack members, but it seemed right to include a couple. People come in different sizes.

Here is an Old Glory British rocket crew. There done wether they really are or not. The little yellow straps all over their jackets was infuriating. I also have no idea what color the furry trim of the officer's jacket should be. I couldn't find any Osprey books or online pics to help. Yellow and white looked silly; so the trim ended up gray. I'll paint some rockets for them to shoot soon.

Below are some artillery pieces I've been working on. I painted the Victrix British cannon ages ago, but only recently based it. The other two are Prussian guns. The crew will be done soon and posted.

Here are two abandoned buildings that are nearing completion. I am going to make sidewalks out of thin foam board and throw in a little rubbish. You may notice there's a severe lack of rubble. I don't think I like painting rubble. I'm going to try and make some red brick buildings next and I'll make some rubble for that.

Lastly, I thought I'd show my one subscriber how I store my flat terrain. It's hanging on the walls wherever there's not shelves of little tiny toy army men in the way; but one picture of one wall will suffice. I simply carve little chunks out of the foam bottoms. They sit quite well on a nail in the wall.

Love Baconfat