Works In Progress #1 - Humans, Aliens and the Undead

Although I want to continue to keep posting completed projects to Tangential Contrivances, I've been thinking that the blog can also provide a space for me to chart progress on longer running and/or ongoing projects, especially army building ones, which is where Works In Progress posts like this one will come in.

I took advantage of the extra days away from work that the latter part of festive break brought to make some progress on a quite few things this week. 

First up is a bit of a wildcard, but shortly before Christmas TTCombat revealed they've a 32mm scale game set in their "Drop" universe in the works by releasing limited edition preview miniatures from each of the main factions. The sculpts are really evocative and I couldn't resist picking them up, though unfortunately I'm waiting on a replacement Post-Human Republic Hellion as the one I received was miscast but the cast quality of all the others was pretty good and definitely within the tolerances I've come to expect from TTcombat's resin range.

L-R: Scourge Warrior, Shaltari Warchief, United Colonies of Mankind Recon Drop Trooper, Pu gari Mercenary and Resistance Fighter.

I've been a pretty big fan of Dropzone and Dropfleet Commander for a while now, so it'll be interesting to see how Striketeam Commander shapes up and what else appears in the miniature range. In the meantime, these should make for an interesting painting project some time.

Also moving forward this week is one of the armies I've planned to work on this year as I was able to source some Rangers of Ithilien to supplement the Warriors of Minas Tirith I built just before Christmas and get them all based. At the moment, I'm in two minds as to whether or not to save Faramir, Damrod and Madril until I've painted these guys or just to get them built, but there's no real rush so I might just focus on the rank and file for now and will probably split them into two batches for painting as the Rangers will be in muted browns and greens in contrast to the black and silver of the Warriors.

Continuing with the New Year, New Army theme, I knocked together some additional Gravesite Markers for the Soulblight Gravelords using some parts from the Deadwalkers kit...

...and finished basing the remaining five Deathrattle Skeletons so they're all ready for priming now. Colour scheme-wise, my current thinking is to draw upon how I painted Watch-Captain Halgrim last year, so black armour plate, ruddy-brown surcoats and tarnished metals will be the order of the day for these revenants. The Gravesite Markers shoils present some fun opportunities to paint something a little different to mouldering bones as well as being useful for gaming. 

In preparation for a game of Warcry next week, I spent some time putting together a pair of dice trays that came with White Dwarf a couple of months ago so we can keep track of things a bit more easily and I think I'll try and get the Jade Obelisk warband built during the week so I can give them run out on the tabletop.

Finally, I got a couple of really good days of painting in and finished up a character for the War of the False Primarch project who has been hanging around on the corner of my desk for quite a while.

While I dont think every week will be quite as productive as this, especially with our wedding rapidly approaching but I'm happy that some planned projects are definitely off to a good start and that is clearing a bit of head and desk space for some of the others I have in mind for this year.