New Project-Oldest Minis; Airfix 1/32 WW2 Germans

These are amongst the first miniatures I ever had. Alright, they are toy soldiers. I found them, and a horde of their fellows, after they had been in storage for over 20 years. These are Airfix 1/32 Germans. I bought them in Drogheda, Ireland in 1973. I've got a couple of young boys now, and I thought I'd paint these up for them. I didn't take the mold lines off, and the painting is basic black undercoat, one coat of colour, a coat or two of Future over that, all followed by a coat of brush-on matt varnish. I like them.
These are the entire horde of plastic toy soldiers, including the ones since painted in the picture above (the Germans are blue). You can see a Timpo Crusader footman on the top. There is a Timpo horse, sans barding, visible there as well, and there are many more Timpos below the surface. I purchased those one at a time in London, England in the year 1969. My father used to take me down to a toy-store/newsagent on England's Lane, Camben Town, early every Saturday morning and I'd get one knight and my brother would choose a Beano or some other comic of the time. Fine memories. I had to clean these. The smell of them was appalling, unwashed as they were for near 40 years.

Winter and other things

This is my back yard.


I am deep into the minutiae of the EIR painting project and the details of painting 140 odd pila and an equal number of gladii are best left aside I'm sure. The basing of the Romans continues apace, but again there is potentially an aspect of tedium to this so I will not share it until as a final result.

In other news, I have sold all my WW2 coffee table books and picked up a variety of dosh, including this smashing book.


I also purchased 2 starter boxes of Hell Dorado miniatures, the Lost and the Immortals, only to discover that barring the intervention of a white knight the company is closing shop in June of 2009. The French miniature scene continues to perplex and madden in equal measure. First Ilyad breaks up in a messy divorce, then Rackham commits a disordered seppaku, and now Hell Dorado crashes and burns in mid stride. I mean, what is going on over there? And who are these ever anonymous sculptors, the true and only strength of the French wargames miniature world? Can we arrange for work visas for them? Permanent residency? And of equal importance, can someone sensible please get the moulds of these much lamented miniatures?

New Feature-Book Reviews

I've decided to start a new feature on my blog, namely, book reviews. All books that I review will be related in some manner to the hobby. I'm going to start with Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, a book my father gave me for Christmas this year. The review will be finished some time in the next week.



As far as my painting is going, I have been feverishly working on Roman cavalry and on my basing for both the cavalry and my infantry. I will post pictures of the cavalry in the next few days.

Next up, I am selling my collection of limited edition (a number of which are OOP) JJ Fedorowicz folio books respecting WW2 on eBay at the following link:

http://shop.ebay.ca/merchant/okeir

I was just gobsmacked when I saw this latest release from Helldorado. People are saying the face of the Naga is a bit featureless, but I think the art of the piece is far superior to anything I've seen in the hobby for many a blue moon.



By the way, the English rules for this game are at this link:

http://www.helldorado.fr/ressources/telechargements/telechargement_id19/fichier.pdf

Finally, I picked up the Impetus rules and the first supplement, courtesy of a fellow from Phillie who had a hankering to read up on Jochen Peiper.

That's all for a few days.

The Golden Hills of Eriador

The newest army at my house-The Patrician Ellie-Dumptruck Confederacy

Words are besides the point! Well, except to point out that the bowls are fortifications for the commander in chief.

The Bloodletting continues, and other musings

I'm selling off stuff at a fairly convincing rate over on my Alderass blog, so much so that I'm now toying with the idea of selling painted armies. The experience is starting to remind me of a short story my father wrote, where a man gets hooked on selling his possessions whilst his wife is on holidays, and she returns to find that he has sold everything they owned, lock, stock and barrel.

Maybe it's in the blood? ;-)

I had originally planned on selling off various Rackham metals I collected back in the day of second edition Confrontation and the original Rag'Narok. Rackham is trying to rebrand these metals now as "Legends" and to sell them at an even higher price point then it used to before it lost its way, but this will probably only work if it has a monopoly on the North Korean toy market. I saw virtually the full range of Rackham metals on sale at 50% off at GenCon, and you can find them on the internet at 75% off. What a sad disaster it has all been.

Now back to the idea of selling my painted armies. As so many others have done before me, I went a bit overboard with the Privateer Press miniatures, and even after ridding myself of almost $600 worth (MSRP) of NIB stuff over the past few days, I still have an awful lot of NIB and painted stuff on hand. The thing is that I actually have no one to play a game with where I reside these days, and even if I did, I have come to realize that I really don't need everything I have. I'm a short step, therefore, from realizing I don't want anything that I have.

I've purchased a lot of choices that I don't really want...is it our daydreaming that bankrupts us? I always thought that daydreams were harmless.

What I might do then, is just to sit down and figure out a few core army lists, and then sell the rest. That's a choice, isn't it?

News - The Bloodletting begins

They say George Washington died from an overvigorous bloodletting. I hope I survive mine, but it is beginning now. My lead collection will be halved over the next couple of months. The prices will be 50% off MSRP plus shipping with insurance and PayPal fees. Everything shall be shown with pictures on my blog for this operation which is titled, appropriately enough, "Alderass". The link is on this page.

In other news I am painting away at the EIR. I am doing the mass painting thing, all 200 plus foot at the same time. At a certain point I will divide everything up into units and then finish them as such. There will come a time then that I shall be posting completed units fairly quickly, but that time is a ways away yet. What to do about the shields doth perplex me. I'd like to hand-paint them, but it's not realistic to do that, so I'll probably get Little Big Man transfers I expect.

My very first painted miniatures...sniff!

I discovered this picture when I was looking through my archived photographs. I painted these GW WFB Empire halberdiers just under 12 years ago using Citadel Colours over a sprayed white undercoat. I had no notion of highlighting, shading, washing, drybrushing or, well, of anything really beyond the basic techniques I has used as a boy when applying Humbrol paints to my Bandai tank kits. Years later I applied a not particularly effective wash to these miniatures, signs of which have gathered rather unconvincingly on top of the slashes on the several of the lads' pluderhosen. The picture was taken pursuant to an online auction. I have no regrets. Really.

Every blog has a readership of one

That may be true, but to those that wander in, greetings.

This blog presents merely a glimpse of the writer. Nothing truly personal will be displayed. It is about the many hundreds of hours of my delvings into a strange hobby that has yielded to me friends, travel and, in a strange sort of way, a family.

I will begin with a display of several of my early projects. These are invlove GW products for reasons that hardly require explanation.

The name of my blog refers to the childhood home of these endeavours, their true beginning. It's a quote from Rilke I happen to like:

"And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world's sounds - wouldn't you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories?"