Getting there...

It’s just that the grape-picking season interfered with the hobby.

In the meantime..

.. just look how they like one another <3

I ain’t dead, how about you?

Well, it’s been a while.
The magic never faded, even though the online fad for 15mm sci-fi has obviously passed it’s peak.
Guess this makes my new blogging kind of oldschool, i can live with that :)

As quite some folks, this time i actually got back into the hobby to drag myself out of a huge breakdown. It works! And best of all, quite some people i love have since shown quite some interest in my little tinkerings <3 <3 <3

Still, getting right back to modelling felt intimidating, so i kicked off with some Blue Stuff castings, just to learn the ways of the putty again.

Anyway, it turned out great fun!

I tried copying what i had at hand to teach myself how this stuff works and will try to use the results for coversion bits. And now i can barely wait to sculpt something myself and bluestuff the crap out of it!

Makes me kind of feel like Olga the Hutt, having my little, temporary collection of little people in carbonite ;P

Btw, i can really recommend this stuff, makes life one hell easier. There’s a bunch of YouTubers out there to tell you all the technical details - what i can add is to get a handful of tea candles to put under your melting jar, just to keep from boiling tons of water over and over.

Despite having got carried away slightly during the tests ;P i wouldn’t recommend copying 15mm minis too much. I like my little manufacturers and value their work, to say nothing of the fact that the relatively low prices compared with the high cost of good putty make it pointless to seriously infringe any copyrights.

Having said that, if like me, you’re heavy on conversions, i have to also say that working on a putty recast is much easier than on a metal original. So as much as it makes little sense to raise whole armies from putty, a bit of Blue Stuff here and there is still worth trying :)

Black & white WIP pics! Cool new idea :D

Well, okay, that wasn’t much, and yet it felt like one beast of a task to post anything after so long. At least, there’s finally some 15mm content here. I hope to follow suit with more creative stuff. Being alive is actually very nice sometimes.

Thanks for dropping by <3

The scale-down

Well, this would be the nearest i ever got to 15mm sci-fi. The ultimate classic - Colonial Marines in 1/72.

The murky interior of Hadley's Hope..

After seeing the movie, looong ago, i was dying to possess a squad or two of those guys and, not being much of an internet user back then nor realising that somebody might be actually manufacturing them, i decided to put some together myself. DIY was always great fun :P

The last shot from surveillance cam no. 426, level 3, before all contact was lost.

The Smartgunners were the absolute favourite of course, so i kicked off with watching the pre-drop , insertion and combat scenes in slow-motion for half a day to draw out the design. A pair of old ESCI British WWII Commandos have been promoted to be the basis. They required some stripping of the original webbing and Brens, as well as a bit of arm-twisting. One got his sleeves scraped off and muscles sculpted. Then on went the harness, headset, back flashlight and finally da big shoota herself.
All this was scratchbuilt, mostly from paper, card and wire. Plus a slice of plastic sprue for the ammo drum. Funny times these were. I didn't have a hobby drill, but wanted the barrel to boast some serious calibre real bad, so i rolled a strip of thin paper around a paper clip and soaked it with superglue. I also remeber making the headset cable out of a piece of salvaged lightbulb filament.

Try to spot the mistakes in the gun ;)

My painting skills were mediocre at most, as were the paints i could afford, so the guys look like crap at close-up. Not much to say here. I didn't brave lettering the original guns' names (besides, Drake’s sense of humour was way different than mine), but added the danger stripes to one of them and a troops slot symbol from 40K to one of the breatplates.

The original plan to recruit a whole team came to nothing in the end. I just got as far as preparing tvelve flashlights and cut M41-like card roughs. Same happened to the attempt at the paper APC, found here some other day:

Khurasan arrived since then, so i guess i'm going to get those marines after all. Watch this space.

Thanks for visiting!

Lift off

Welcome, nice of you to drop by.
So, in a nutshell:

1) Yes, i've been out of the hobby for a couple of years,

2) No, i've yet to paint anything in this scale, even though i've got some 15 mm metal under the bed. I guess i bought them some four years ago, so they have definitely ripened.

3) Yes, i've been much into other scales. It's the only thing i can boast for now, so you can feel invited to my background story, the battelier

Apart form the GZG and Khurasan, Spacejacker from TSS and dis from Multiverse 15 are the main culprits, as to me being sucked back into toy soldiers, and an utterly different scale too. My utmost respect goes to both. This blog is at least partially a homage to them. Hugs, guys!

So, what is this gonna be about? Sci-fi is my absolute favourite, but since i'm a bit short on budget lately, i'm more likely to kick off with some of the stuff i've got at bay. These are late imperial Western Romans for FoG/DBA and 17th Century Russians. The first found their way into the waiting line as a result of my interest in the persona of Julian the Apostate, the latter mainly as an expression of support to a local company which had braved actually publishing their own 15 mm game. Since when i got them, my approach to historical wargaming had evolved into not wanting to have anything to do with the thing - the reasons for which you might well find here sooner or later - so the minis are waiting for their turn to become some sort of space-faring ancients or interstellar pike&shotte. We shall see.

See you next time :-)