Fallout Wasteland Warfare – Junk Barricade done!

Sometimes you have to take the rough with the smooth. Last week was yet another awful week to live in the US and this week is already shaping up to be more of the same. To my surprise, work has not been too crazy though and so I’m thankful for that. I continued work on the third and final junk barricade which was tough sledding. I got bored of working on it after I got the most interesting pieces on the front done. Everything else was stuff I’ve done before and was pretty rote, I guess you could say. That got me thinking about a number of things which I will discuss later on.

This barricade has a lot of nooks in it which are easy to miss with a brush. I stupidly primed this in white a while back and if I had done it in black, I’m sure I would have had a much easier time. I do wish that whoever designed/sculpted the barricade gave us one more visually interesting object that wasn’t grey. In the end, it is a little dour looking but I suppose that makes it different from the other two barricades I painted. To help with the dourness, I took a little creative license and painted the metal barrel green, instead of following the in-game art which is a drab gray color, like everything else in the barricade, really.

On the back, my focus was on the pieces of wood, especially the lumber as I wanted to improve upon what I have done in the past. I think I just about got it right this time, thankfully.

That is one thing I will say about this barricade versus the previous two. I’m happy with how everything turned out and I think I did my best painting and showed my growth on this final one which is what you hope for but don’t always get so I can certainly be proud of that.

I wanted to take a picture comparing the three so you can see the improvement, but I don’t have any photo backgrounds wide enough for that. So instead, I’ll share the video I took for Instagram so you can see all three in about 35 seconds. I’m actually impressed by how my phone camera did here. I was worried it wouldn’t do the painting justice but I think the video looks pretty nice. Perhaps a background is what was missing in the past as that does seem to help cameras big and small. You also get to listen to one of the better rap-rock songs ever made (that was a fad or trend in the late 90’s and early 2000’s) so consider yourself lucky!

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When I wasn’t painting, I did one thing of note and that was watch Superman. Its actually the first Superman movie or TV show I’ve ever watched, if you can believe it. I am a fan of James Gunn’s superhero work so watching Superman was a no brainer. He seems to have a great grasp of how to mix humor, superhero action, and emotion in his movies which is probably why he’s one of the best at them. Superman is an interesting movie because Gunn wore his heart on his sleeve in this one. Lex Luthor truly is the supervillain that modern life deserves. He reminds me of the arrogant and out of touch tech bros who keep hawking AI these days. You know, comments from Jeff Bezos like, “Don’t worry if you can’t get a job right now kids, you’ll be living and working in space in ten years!”. There is also some very obvious criticisms of anti-immigration which MAGA holds dearly. Superman really is the antithesis of that thinking and so naturally, I really enjoyed that, even if it was unsubtle. There was even discussion of Superman embodying punk ethos which I thought was surprising, heavy-handed, and something I’m not sure many people who went to see Superman care about but that didn’t stop James Gunn! All in all, I’d rather a creative endeavor wear its heart on its sleeve than try to cleverly obfuscate it so I was willing to let these things slide.

The visuals of the movie are outstanding from top-to-bottom. And no, I’m not just talking about Nathan Fillion’s glorious bowl-cut either! I remember when the Avengers movies exceeded our expectations for what can be done in a movie and Superman seems to continue that trend. Perhaps best of all, my hometown, Cincinnati, made a shocking and entertaining appearance. The science museum which is most commonly known as Union Terminal because it was originally built as a train station. They not only had the exterior looking beautiful, but they somehow emptied out the interior enough so that the “Justice Gang” could use it as a base too. As cynical as many things can make us, there’s no doubt that life frequently has a way of surprising us too and this was a pleasant one for me. And of course, if you saw the movie, I’d be happy to hear your thoughts on it as well.

And finally, I referenced it earlier but I struggled with motivation on the junk barricade. I really should have painted half of it, done something else the next week, and then come back to it, but alas I did not. Whenever I’m tired of working on something or my motivation is flagging, I start thinking like: “Wouldn’t X project or mini be cool to paint?” I often start looking at miniatures online to see if there’s something out there that I don’t own that I might want. More often than not, I snap out of it and get back to business as usual and painting what I have but not always!

That is also one of the challenges I have with painting for gaming. I thrive off variety in all things in life and painting is no different. I struggle with squad and army painting because new miniatures with different sculpts, poses, and color schemes present new and interesting challenges. That’s a big reason why I don’t dabble in army painting. I don’t know that I could get an army in either Warhammer done these days and don’t even mention Warhammer Fantasy/The Old World! I’m pretty sure I’d get bored well before I hit the halfway point.

And yet, like all of you, I have plenty of interests that I could pursue in our hobby. I like Roman history, I find Ancient Greece and Egypt visually appealing. I love samurai, Japanese woodblock prints, and their architecture during that period. And yet, I don’t get a chance to paint any of these. Part of that is because display painting, Fallout, and Hellboy do keep me busy and I don’t have the ability to game in one of those settings even if I want to. Part of it is storage limitations, part of it is that I don’t know if I can find the time to paint up enough miniatures and terrain for a skirmish game without waiting patiently for a year or two at least. And that’s not something I want to add on my already sizable workload.

At the same time, one of the things I find most inspiring about our hobby is when you see a complete scene whether it is terrain or a diorama. That is an area I’d love to do more, if I can. I’ve thought about doing this in some of these other settings and I somehow I end up not doing it. I have a plan for how I might solve this.

Scene created by HVM Workbench. Check them out of Facebook or Instagram for me.

I’m thinking that I’ll try and buy the odd miniature from a setting that I like and see if I can’t transform it into a vignette or display base. The reason I think this might work is that these models tend to not be as complicated as Games Workshop which means they take a lot less time. Its really difficult to take a Warhammer miniature and paint it to a display standard in less than 2-3 months and that may not include the time needed for the display base, for example. I need something quicker than that because I already have a lot on my plate as previously mentioned. In a way, this is kind of mental or philosophical change for me. I tend to look a miniature and say is it good enough to be in a display painting project? That usually means certain things like does it have surfaces that are hard to paint and will look impressive when done? In gaming scales, you’re talking GW and Infinity miniatures mostly which are time consuming to paint up. The miniatures I’m thinking of won’t be as visually impressive but they will add variety to my hobby queue. I also tend to feel that if I don’t start working on these projects now, when am I ever going to do it? I don’t want to be in my 60’s or 70’s and wish that I had done something cool in the Roman period, for example.

This is a long winded way of saying that I’m going to try and paint some seemingly random miniatures in the future. My idea is that I buy the miniature and paint it. If I like it, then I can use it in a little display project. If I don’t like it, I can get rid of it somehow or another. This lets me try miniatures out to see if I like the results without committing tons of time which is a problem a lot of my ideas have. Almost every diorama or display project idea I have is a several month long commitment and quite frankly, for that amount of time, I should probably be using the best and most impressive miniatures that I can. My new plan will hopefully be a workaround and still lead to interesting results. Fortunately, there are some cheap gaming minis that could be used in this way so I don’t think it will be cost prohibitive to pick up the odd miniature either. It might provide a few more surprises in what I paint from week to week which is a nice bonus as well.

So we’ll see if this experiment can work or not. I’m hoping it does as I’d love to explore some other interests and try to improve my skills further but not be bogged down from doing the things I already enjoy. We’ll see how I get on, especially once I figure out what it is I want to buy first which is proving to be the hardest part so far!