Dead Man's Hand Lawmen

I painted these some time ago now, but forgot all about them until I came upon the photo's today. I've also done painting plans for a couple of the figures in Excel, with the intention of embedding the spreadsheet in the post for anyone to open and save or print off. Unfortunately I can't get Blogger to play ball. I think I did everything right, I created a public folder in skydrive and shared the file which gave me the URL which I copied and pasted in HTML when creating the post. I put the anchor tags (<a> </a>) at either end of the pasted text and then published, but it just didn't work.

So to plan B. I decided to just print the spreadsheet and then scan it, thus turning it into a jpeg enabling me to insert it as an image. Dead simple, so I thought but I'd just upgraded from windows 8 to 8.1 and my Kodak 3250 all in one would not scan the document. Funnily enough it will print but not scan. I've down loaded the latest upgrade for the printer but still no joy. The scanner is working because I can copy documents but it just wont communicate with my computer.

The reason I'm telling you all this is in the hope that someone with greater computer skills than me may give some helpful suggestions in the comments box. I was planning on doing these painting guides/planners on selected figures, hopefully people would find them of use. They're not painting instructions as such as my style of painting as been explained time and time again by far better qualified people, (Kevin Dellimore for example). I'm thinking more of a compilation of painting recipes, with a painted figure given as a visual reference.

Anyway enough of my rambling here's the photo's, hope you like:

Gladiators

Finally started my gladiators. These are for my own personal use rather than to sell or commission work. I'm trying to slot them in between everything else and I've got about five packs of them to do so should have them done in the next decade.

More Woodland Indians

I've been busy with household maintenance of late (I just couldn't put the work off any longer) but I did manage to finish these Crusader Miniatures Indians. I did intend to keep them for my own M&TH force but I've decided I prefer the look of other manufacturers such as Conquest and Galloping Major. So these will be going for sale on ebay if anyone's interested.

I've also posted pictures here http://www.sdean-forum.co.uk/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=35576 where you will find comments  made by other painters.

Cadarius the Wizard

I've been admiring the Reaper miniatures that Mr Steve Dean as painted recently, in particular a wizard (http://www.sdean-forum.co.uk/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=34557) that he did a couple of weeks ago. These are the kind of figures that got me into painting many moons ago. I think I'll always return to fantasy miniatures when my enthusiasm wanes a little, they remind me of what it's all about.

Tau

Another experiment, this time I was looking for something that would clean up plastic. I found this GW Tau that was all gunked up with paint that I think belonged to my son. After perusing the detergent section of my local supermarket I decided to give Cillit Bang Grease and Sparkle power cleaner ago.

So I sprayed some in a plastic bag, popped the mini in and left it for about three or four days. I then gave it a good scrub with a cut down tooth brush which fetched most of the paint off but I popped it back in again for another soak for another day and then gave it another clean. There were bits of paint left in the places that the tooth brush couldn't reach, so I got a pin and scraped as much of it out as I could. All in all it didn't do a bad job, in fact I cleaned the Druid and Thief with it too, so it works on metal as well and isn't as smelly or toxic as paint stripper or ascertone. I also gave a blue background a try. It's not my best paint job as the figure was already glued together, but fun never the less.

Talisman Druid

Had a bit of experiment with background colour but I'm not sure I like the green.

Talisman Thief

I was in the mood for a bit of fantasy, so I dug some old minis out and this was one.