Time... She really does fly.

A year has passed. Man... that feels so right, on so many levels, and so wrong on others.
I've been busy. We fixed up our condo, bought a house with a big yard, started fixing that up. There's yard work and house work and regular work and through it all I have to find time to be a dad and a husband. It's tough to do but not impossible. I have to sacrifice my hobbies a bit to make it all work. I still work on stuff but it's 5 minutes here and 5 minutes there. The hobby suffers but not as much as the blog. I HAVE been working and I PLAN to post about it but it's just not very high up on the list at this point. My daughter/family is first (of course), then the job (so we can keep the house and make it nice), then the house/yard work. THEN comes the hobby time. Don't mistake this as complaining. I LOVE my family and my house and I have no issues with putting them first. I just want a balance that allows me to do what I like to do as well. Maybe someday I'll even figure out how to do that. Maybe...

In the meantime, I'm still working on my zombie stuff and plan to post on that soon.
I also grabbed a copy of Betrayal at the House on the Hill and Mars Attacks. There will be posts on that soon as well. Soon = less than a year.
:)

ERTL Farm House Set

I picked up one of these online. The ERTL stuff is listed as 1/64th scale (same as the Machine Shed. See that here, here and here) but I think it runs a little big.

Here's a repainted Heroclix mini for comparison.

 and

It's a small-ish house but it works for me. Well... it WILL work as soon as I finish it. ;)

How will I finish it? 

Well..., I started by cutting down some left over illustration board to fit in as interior walls. They measure 1-7/8" high. The short walls are 4-1/16" wide and the longer walls are 6-9/16" wide.

Next, I cut them and placed them in the house to make sure they fit. Adjust/trim as necessary.

Next, I grab a knife and "score" into the board from the outside using the windows as my guide. You could use a pencil or pen here too, I just went in with the knife.

Then cut the windows all the way out.

Place them inside to see how well they work. As you can see in the picture below I also measured out the floor space and cut a piece of board to fit. Right now, since I haven't decided if I'm going to glue the walls in or not, I recommend cutting the walls first, then measure for the floor. This way when you place the floor in it helps to hold the walls in place. My idea is to be able to swap the walls out so that I can have different color walls or paneling or things like that.

Next I grabbed a bunch of coffee stirrers and started laying out a floor. The more narrow the better as far as I'm concerned.

I started by laying out 4 sticks and measuring them for the width of the interior floor. Then I started glueing the floor slats to the support sticks. I had to add extra support sticks periodically to help keep the sticks close together and to keep them from bowing or warping.

Next time I'm going to vary the pattern a bit more, this is a little to "patterny" for my tastes. It should look more like a hardwood floor.
Yeah... nitpicky... I know.

It does look pretty cool when placed inside the house.

That's it for now. Coming up I plan to:

  • Create another hardwood floor for the second level

  • Create the attic

  • Create a basement space

  • Paint the exterior of the house

  • Figure out how to make some better shutters
  • Make it so that the door can be opened. Maybe.
  • Make some interior walls that can be arranged in different configurations.

  • Create a stairwell

  • Make or buy some furniture

  • I'm sure there's more but I can't think of anything else right now.

Painting Goal for February. Complete!

The goal: 10 miniatures a month.
Here's 11 for February. 
7 zombies and one fresh victim.

Left to Right: Heroclix Vertigo (with a greenstuff robe), Horrorclix zombie, Zpocalypse Hospital Horde, I forget the next one but it's a metal mini, then another little girl from the hospital horde and another Vertigo clix.

In the front row is a downed zombie from the Wargames Factory Zombie Vixens set and a Heroclix conversion (mostly a HC black Mask mini) victim.

Next up? 2 Survivors and a construction worker zombie.

Superboy with added bats (greenstuff again), another Aaron Cash clix and a Horrorclix zombie with a Detroit Tigers hat on that I can't get a good pic of.

Painting Goal for January. Complete!

The goal: 10 miniatures a month.
Here's January
5 zombies. It's hard to tell from this picture but the zombie cop on the left kinda looks like Burt Reynolds. The little girl zombie is still clutching her teddy bear and on the containment suits I added some clear plastic visors to them.

The cops are Heroclix (Aaron Cash with new hands) miniatures and the other 3 are from the Zpocalypse Hospital Horde set.


5 Survivors (yes, I am including the motorcycle).
It's hard to tell in this pic too but the blonde detective has a bloody bandage over her nose. The miniature was damaged and it looked weird as I painted it, so I flattened it out a bit more and gave her a busted nose.

The survivors are all repainted heroclix miniatures

Life and stuff...

With the added expense of daycare my wife and I decided that we could no longer afford our studio space. We gave it up in the fall and I moved everything into a storage space. The goal was to have enough room in there to be able to go in and do a little work now and then.

Sadly, that goal was not attainable. It starts with properly labeled boxes and the intent of having an organized space and it ends with a mad dash of cramming everything into whatever available boxes you have and throwing it into the storage space.

The new, altered, goal was to just be able to find stuff so I could bring it home to work on. That goal has been met. So far.


Speaking of goals, I have decided to try and paint 10 minis a month. Or 120 miniatures by years end. I'd also like to include building a few IHC Homes of Yesterday and Today model kits. Lets say 4 of those (I have 6 or 7 of them).

 I have all 5 of the storefront buildings.
     300-14 Second Hand Rose

     300-15 South Street Smoke Shop

     300-16 Rita's Antique Shop

     300-17 O'Weeds Greenery

     300-18 Grant Cary's Apothecary

And 2 of the Gingerbread houses:
     300-2 The Queen Anne House
     300-3 Steiner House

I will take some pics at another time (and detail my plans for them), until then these ebay pics will do.

All in all it seems like an attainable goal as I have already painted 21 minis. So, January and February are basically covered before February starts. Though I suspect that at the end of the year I'll have about 50-60 painted and maybe 1 IHC kit put together (I have already started on one IHC kit as I type this so that should get finished). I have to add the ERTL farm house to this list.

Dinosaurs!

I have been trying to collect a decent set of scale (1/48th, O, 28mm) dinosaurs for awhile now.
I've been pretty lucky so far and have quite a few now. I found these guys the other day at Tuesday Morning for $5.99. I figured $2.00 a figure isn't bad for these guys.

They're pretty close to the correct scale (and hey, who says all dinos are the same?). Here they are with a converted Heroclix mini.

They're aren't perfect by any stretch but they can be with a little help. The good? Close to scale. There is some nice detail in them, the T-Rex even has the bottom of it's feet sculpted (for making footprints), and they are pretty cheap at $2.00 each. The Bad? The seams are really clunky on them, but I figure a little x-acto knife magic and, probably, some green stuff and they'll be in good shape. They definitely need a new paint job, though the T-Rex is pretty OK.

One final bit. The side of the box pretty much sealed the deal for me. These bullet points make absolutely no sense. 

Game Board

Awhile back I realized that I would never get anything done if I didn't figure out a way to focus on my projects. I start on a project, get about 1/4 of the way into it and think of how I could make something else. That would then draw my interest into the new project leaving the old one sitting on my desk. Repeat that thought process about a 100 times and you can paint a picture of what the studio looks like. I have an area of "to paint" miniatures, and an area of "to convert" miniatures, some random 1/48 scale cars to weather, a few 1/48 scale motor homes & ambulances to convert, a pile of white plastic fences that I'm building a gate for (that opens, of course), there's some mesh to make chain link fences, a box of o-scale train tracks, 4" card board tubes and fake brick to make some subway boards, some black grout and plastic strip that will eventually become a paved road set, boxes of 1/48 scale city building models to put together, and on and on and on...

So... my idea to focus came to me as a game board set. I figured I had most of the parts to set up a farm house and surrounding area.
I had made some wood fences .
http://confessionsofaminiaturemodeler.blogspot.com/2013/10/making-fences.html
I had bunch of trees and I had made the fields already.
The silo was painted.
http://confessionsofaminiaturemodeler.blogspot.com/2013/10/thrift-score.html
I had my Machine Shed.
http://confessionsofaminiaturemodeler.blogspot.com/2014/04/ertl-farm-country.html

And I found an Ertl farm house (which I had started working on how to add some interiors to). Most of my grass boards were in pretty good shape and I felt like this was my best shot at getting something done. There is a TON of stuff to do to it still but it's coming together.