My Favourite Hobby Podcast

During the UK Lockdown I've been listening to the Madaxeman Podcast which is part of Tim Porter's burgeoning media empire.  If you like Tim's madcap battle reports then this may be the wargaming podcast for you.

What's It All About?
There is a format, which has evolved somewhat over time, within which Tim & his six wargaming friends prattle on about all things wargaming.  My wife refers to it as "Wargames Wittering".

The podcast focuses on ancient, medieval and renaissance periods but covers all periods such as WWII and Napoleonics.  It is released weekly during Lockdown.

Mission Creep

This is quite a long post with only one picture.  It chronicles how a small rebasing and re-flagging project mushroomed into a major piece of work.  Many of you will have experience of similar projects and may recognise the "mistakes" I've made and issues I've tackled.

The Story So Far
In early January I began what I thought would be a small project: rebasing some of my Wars of the Roses archer command bases.  At first I had a few issues with removing figures from the bases but eventual settled on a simple enough method.

Fully aware that this sort of thing can get out of hand I finished six bases by the end of the month complete with new laser printed livery flags.

I limited myself to:

"In addition to rebasing I .. repainted [just] the faces and most of the legs and shoes as they were damaged during removal from the original bases.   Wherever possible I kept as much of the original paintwork as I could; it's over twenty years old after all."

A Step Too Far?
Next I decided to convert some of my (three to a base) levy archers to regular (four to a base) archers so more re-basing and touching up old paintwork.  The logic behind this was simple.  When done I would have three, easily distinguishable, types of late medieval archers: retinue (superior/elite), regular (ordinary), and levy (irregular).

This is when things started to go awry.

15 mm Flesh Pots

Painting the different shades of human flesh on 15 mm can be a trial. To make the figure "pop" it's important that there's enough contrast in the flesh to define muscles etc.

Single colours look flat and uninteresting but if you highlight the areas too much the effect is garish and looks false to me. In the end it's all about balance.

I've recently painted a some early Libyan, Bedouin, and Nubian warriors with lots of exposed flesh and have developed quite a few new recipes which I thought I'd record for myself and anyone else interested.

European
This is my basic recipe and I use it for most Eurasian skin types as it really brings out the faces.  However, it's not ideal for lots of bare skin as it's far too bright.

Base	Red Brown	Plaka 52
Shade	Tanned Flesh	Miniature Paints 72
Highlight	Shade plus Pale Flesh	Miniature Paints 71

What now follows is a set of three recipes from tanned through to African flesh illustrated with very unforgiving close ups of 15 mm figures. To see the overall effect click on each image.

How I Use Twitter

I've been considering writing this post for quite some time.  The main reason for my procrastination being I wasn't sure how useful it would be to anyone else.  It's a bit "techie" but not overly so.  After much thought I decided that if it's useful to just one other person then it'll have been worth it.

The first thing to note is that I'm essentially a desktop user of Twitter.  I do use a tablet but I don't have, or want, a smartphone.  This makes a big difference in how I use Twitter.  If you always use Twitter on your smartphone you can stop reading now.