Mayday! Mayday! - Middlehammer monthly painting theme

Hi all,

In a perfect follow up to my last entry this post is about the Middlehammer group's monthly painting theme for May 2016, and it is a cracker!

The trick with a theme like this is for it to be focussed enough to give it meaning but also broad enough to allow enough people to get involved. Mark Evans has been fiendishly clever in hitting that balance perfectly, whilst combining all the things I love about painting themes (see my last post if you're interested) with this months' theme of Mayday! Mayday!

The idea is to rescue a long forgotten (neglected) project or maybe a previous botched paint job - something that is badly in need of some TLC - blow off the dust and cob webs (this can literally be true in the case of some things in my lead pile, I was picking wood lice husks out of a box of random pre-slottas earlier on today... yuck) and get it finished by the end of the month.

There have already been some early starters, with Mark himself embarking on a project to finish some Shining Spear Eldar Aspect Warriors, fellow Middlehammerer Grant resurrecting a 15 year old paint job on a fearsome looking Ork Boss, and Craig from Sinders Miniature Painters posting some pics of a beautifuly painted Squat in Exo Armour with aims of completing the rest of the accompanying squad - can't wait for more of those Craig!

I'm going to try and rescue some later edition (not sure which?) plastic Goblin Wolfriders that I bought as a bit of a junk lot from e-bay ages ago. Lots of repairs needed here (broken banner pole, missing tails on a couple of wolves, broken and missing lower arm on one of the goblins etc...) and paint job is more like damage (no undercoat before slapping on paint to thickly in places, and then just brown glaze on naked plastic in other places), but I'm not going to bother stripping them, just try and renovate to basic table top standard. That was always going to be the plan with these. We've already used them in our WHFB4 campaign Crisis in Caledor and they were frankly letting the side down in their current state. This was in keeping with their disappointing performance on field, being some of the only casualties in the greenskins near total victory in Battle #2. So, they need to be given a bit of a make over to restore their morale apart from anything else.

The first task is to try and match the basing material that has been applied to three of the ten models, so I've been out in the garage to start that off. No time to waste!

Here you can see the three that came with weird granules already attached. I'm guessing it's immiation sand/gravel, for people who can't be bothered drying out builders sand in their oven, and having to remind their wives that it is not a batch of garlic breadcrumbs and no she shouldn't put some on the lasagne...

Luckily I had done exactly all of those things earlier today, so I had plenty of sand available to try and match the basing material for the other seven.

And in a really blurry mobile phone picture you can only just about really obviously still tell the difference... never mind. I'll slap some green paint on and that should hide a multitude of sins.