Category Archives: Photos

Barnraising

I’ve been sitting on a Black Site Studios European barn terrain kit since the end of 2023. In my defense, there was a cross-country move, six months of living in a rental house, another move, and several shuffles and reorganizations of stuff. But the lag time in building it was much more a me problem than a circumstances problem.

This is my fourth (I think) building kit from Black Site, and I’m consistently pleased their stuff so far. Modeling and painting terrain is kind of intimidating, so prepainted MDF ensures that I get something on the table that actually looks like it sorta belongs there. The level of detail is on par with what I strive for in my miniatures – not intricate, but good enough for three-foot observation during play.

This is the largest kit of theirs I’ve build so far. 28mm Empress and Spectre figures for scale.

I left the awning, ramps, and steps unglued so I can stash them inside the barn for storage.

Splintered

Twenty or so years ago, when Clan War was a going concern in the Lexington gaming community, I bought a bunch of 1″ square adhesive-backed magnets and some thin steel sheets to use for unit movement trays. They worked well enough for the purpose: keeping a bunch of little samurai in line while marching across the table.

Fast-forward to today, and the magnetic base thing has come ’round again. Apparently, while I wasn’t doing any wargaming, the wargamers adopted steel storage trays and rare earth magnets as a means of transporting figures. It’s a sidegrade (if not an upgrade) from foam, or maybe it’s just clever marketing, but I was intrigued. The guy who runs BLKOUT demos in this corner of Appalachia made me aware of Tabletop Stronghold. I’m strangely okay with supporting some dude’s localish (based out of West Virginia) garage entrepreneurship, so I picked up his smaller magnetic case. I haven’t used it for travel yet, but assembly was a breeze (and glue-free) and everything seems to work as advertised.

Not wanting it to be confused with other Tabletop Stronghold cases at the local stores, I decided to experiment. I’ve always found the Swedish M90 splinter camouflage pattern to be aesthetically pleasing, so I broke out the painter’s tape and rattlecans and commenced to defiling.

Prototype for comparison (swiped from Camopedia):

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Szabla

Another BLKOUT unit at good-enough-for-table-use completion. This one is Szabla, a PMC offshoot of a Polish heavy industrial corporation’s security arm. Two riflemen, a marksman, and a jammer specialist who makes every model within 12″ immune to data attacks:

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Harlow Kinetic Solutions

I won’t say that the most recent painting drought has broken, but I spent a fair amount of time at the bench the past couple of weekends, getting my recent BLKOUT purchases into usable shape. The photos aren’t my best – I would swear iOS 26 lost some camera control capability. The paint isn’t my best either, but I think it’s good enough for use on the table.

For my initial force, I’ve chosen to go with Harlow Kinetic Solutions. In-universe, they’re a PMC of South African origin. On the colony world of Abol, they’re largely under contract to the Authority, a somewhat mustache-twirlingly evil offshoot of the remnant United Nations that is ostensibly the planetary governing body.

Mechanically, Harlow’s things are mobility and some of the better combat drills (limited-use maneuvers) in the game. In theory, this design supports aggressively going after objective points on the board over getting bogged down in fights.

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Clearing the Photo Backlog

I set up the light booth last Saturday and captured a bunch of the miniatures that have been sitting beside my workbench for weeks (or months, in some cases). The link’s in the page header. Most of it’s the batch of Battletech figures I’ve been failing to work on on over the past couple of years, but there’s one ultramodern and a couple of fantasy figures in there too.

I have a bunch more ultramoderns and related figures, but I’m gonna want to set up the Battlesystems modular terrain and do some more detailed background/terrain work.

The backdrops on this batch all came out of Jon Hodgon’s Backdrops and Sci-Fi Backdrops collections, available from Handiwork Games. I was a Kickstarter backer for these and this was the first time I’d deployed them. I’m quite taken with the results.

WIP X

Working on a second set of Spectre’s SAS Counterterrorism Response Squad figures. Back rank is the first set in desert colors; front rank is the second WIP set in more traditional green. For both sets, I went for a “dropped what we were doing and threw on the armor when we got the callout” look, hence the total lack of uniformity in shirts and pants.

Preparing for Winter

I’m hoping to have the motivation to continue grinding away at the Pile of Shame over the winter. With temperatures and winds here being what they are, the days between November and May that I can safely spray primer outdoors are rather limited. In expectation of that, I’m assembling and priming a large number of minis so I’ll have a decent selection ready to paint when the mood strikes me.

(Once they’re complete, they’ll probably have to hang out in the project trays until spraying season comes ’round again and I can hit them with a coat of matte sealant, but that’s not the hard part.)

WIP IX

On the workbench this week: a batch of samurai from the Clan War starter box (anyone else remember AEG’s twenty-plus-years-ago attempt at a wargame?). These guys and their friends are getting done up as a collection of scruffy ronin for a friend’s Legend of the Five Rings tabletop campaign:

Once again, Army Painter Speedpaints FTW. Despite rattling around in a box for a couple of decades, the sculpts are still crisp enough that the texture on the armor really pops when the self-shading compounds do their thing.

I’m trying to decide if I want to try to do eyes and risk fucking up the whole face.

Black Site, Light Box

Over the summer, I picked up an LED light box from B&H. This coincided with a major slowdown in painting and photographing my Pile of Shame, so I hadn’t actually used it for much yet. Around the same time, I also picked up a trio of building kits from Black Site Studios, whose specialty is pre-painted MDF – just glue and deploy.

Recently, I’ve had the free time to sit down and work on a few of my neglected projects. I went ahead and knocked these out. For what they are, and for the money and time invested, I’m pretty pleased with the results (and the light box works pretty well, too, even if these pieces are threatening to overflow it):

A few more photos and some notes on what’s what are over on my Flickr gaming photostream.