Saruman’s Dirty Dozen

As promised a while back, I do have some MESBG content to share for the first time in a little while. I realized recently that I only had a couple of ruffians left to paint before I hit the magic number of 12 which is what you need for most Scouring of the Shire scenarios so I figured why not sprinkle those in to my painting queue so I can knock them out? While this picture isn’t quite as nice as they deserve, I mostly enjoyed painting this lot.

The Ruffians were fun to paint at least the first and second time. By the third time for some of them, it was less fun. Especially considering, the guy with the cleaver is by far the ugliest sculpt and you get the most of him. I was surprised when I took this picture (which is a bit washed out, I admit) that the skin tones I got on some of these guys leaves a little to be desired. I really have gotten better at skin and faces (or perhaps these old metal sculpts let me down a bit) since when I first started painting these guys. If you compare the only other picture with a human to this, you can see what I mean about painting faces. It makes me feel good to know I have improved as having a lifelike face is one of the best qualities a miniature can have. It is nice to have twelve Ruffians done and to know that I don’t have a lot of painting to get ready to play other Scouring of the Shire scenarios. I am going to try and sit down and figure out which scenario would be easiest to play next and start getting together what I need for that in the nearish future.

While I have a bunch of other things nearly done that just didn’t quite make the cut this week, I did get the humble piece of Fallout terrain above done which compliments the Sole Survivor and Dogmeat well as seen in the pictures below. I wanted to try making a piece of rocky terrain for Fallout because when you get out of downtown Boston in Fallout 4, it is a lot of dead trees, hills, and rocky terrain so I figured having some of that will work for a lot of scenarios. This piece is one of the smallest pieces of MDF I have so I didn’t have a lot of use for it so I figured why not use it as a piece of test terrain. What I am proud of is that I listened to friend of the site, Bret aka Mapper’s advice on keeping terrain playable as much as possible and I was strategic with where I placed tufts and rocks to keep it looking natural but decently playable as you can see below.

And that is all I have to show off this week though there are a couple of other things I wanted to mention before I finish up. I FINALLY got the resin kit from the UK I want to use to make some more Fallout terrain in the near future. It should be pretty cool so I look forward to working on that. I also ordered a Scibor dwarf which I’m excited to paint. I’ll talk more about why I got him and what my plans are in a future update. I recently realized that I’m in a place where I can paint what I want and even tackle a “display piece” where I really take my time and try to make it look nice. We’ll see how long I have the patience for that (I usually get tired of the slow pace about halfway through a project) but I’m excited to try and make something high quality. I’m working on mastering Non-Metallic Metal painting which is challenging but I think it might raise my level as a painter even higher so it is well worth the effort and its got me really excited about painting again too.

I also wanted to mention that Modiphius keeps releasing STL files each week for new Fallout terrain. This week, they teased a Sanctuary Hills house and last week they released a version of the Red Rocket gas station both in ruins and intact. Those are both iconic parts of Fallout 4 and while there are plenty of cool MDF kits for post-apocalyptic games, getting stuff straight out of the game and in resin form is really appealing. I can’t wait until they release these in “printed” form as I don’t have a printer and don’t plan on getting one anytime soon. It is also making me feel that if I’m patient with Fallout terrain, I should be able to get everything I could want from Modiphius which is really nice. I wish that GW did more plastic/resin terrain for MESBG as there are so many things they could release that would make the terrain aspect of the game less daunting. That is all from me for another week. I look forward to showing off more cool stuff next week 🙂