After a fairly aggravating and exhausting week with work and life, I’m happy to have something positive to share to end February. You may recall a while back that I bought some Kromlech terrain for Hellboy that was pretty exciting to find. Not too long ago, we got a day of nearly 60 degrees in February, no less, and the one thing I wanted to prime more than than anything is the Kromlech furniture which I need to get painted so I can use it with Hellboy. So I primed it and this dresser jumped to the front of the hobby line as I was pretty curious what I could do with one of them.
At first, the answer was: not much. My original idea was to paint the wood similar to how you’d paint lumber. This was very much the wrong approach. I often forget to snap a picture when I mess something up but this time I didn’t. So here’s what the initial idea looked like.
Unintentionally, it looks very cartoonish and not like most furniture. Realizing my mistake, I did some photo-referencing and changed my approach. I focused on making the wood looked stained (because it is on most wooden furniture) and had much better results, thankfully.
My paint job isn’t perfect quality, truthfully and the camera picks up flaws that are barely noticeable in-hand, surprisingly, but the second effort is much improved overall. I’m impressed with the quality of this miniature as well. The wood grains felt pretty shallow and I feared that it would be hard to get them to show in the finished piece and I’m happy to say that I’m wrong. Kromlech makes some good stuff over in Poland and kudos to the sculptor as well. I may try to fix a few of the mistakes I made on this one before varnishing it or I may try to take what I’ve learned and apply it to the second copy so that I can get one that is “diorama”/scenic photo quality. That was a big motivation in replacing stuff that is already done so we’ll see how I get on with the other dresser at some point down the line.
Of course, the real question is does this dresser look better than something similar that I painted from Mantic’s Terrain Crate? I’ll let you be the judge based on the photo below!
Other than that, I have been dealing with a real first world problem, if I’ve ever heard of one. A couple of months ago, I subscribed to DC Universe Infinite to read Batman comics, which has been mostly a lot of fun, but I started reading an event called No Man’s Land and I truly did not grasp how big it is or how much time and effort it would take to finish. I’m pretty sure its over 2,000 pages and its taken quite a bit of determination to finish it. The issues I’ve read have been pretty darn good. No Man’s Land is basically Batman meets Escape from New York and the Warriors. Its hard not to like that! At the same time, 2,000 pages is a very long story indeed.
The real problem is that I keep buying comics each week as they come out so that I can keep up with the series I’ve been reading but I don’t have time to actually read them, because I’m subscribing to “infinite” digital comics and I want to get my money’s worth. If I had finished No Man’s Land in time, I would have cancelled my subscription so I can catch up on the nearly foot tall stack of comics I have but alas, it wasn’t to be and it will be another month until that happens.
I’ve recently hatched another plan for 2026 reading goals (in addition to reading lots of Batman) which is simply to read as much Conan as I can and get gaming ideas for the future. This means I will read the Robert E. Howard stories, comics, and the any of the pastiche stories that are good. I think doing this will be really beneficial for the wargaming project as I really have no idea where to start with Conan in terms of terrain and miniatures. There are tons of different possibilities out there and I want to pick stuff that is versatile and has variety since my storage space is limited. As you can imagine, my desire to start exploring Hyboria is pretty high, but I simply don’t have enough hours in the day currently to get after it. In fact, it is going to be a month or so, at least, before it happens, because I’ve still got about that much time with DC Universe Infinite. Its a great problem to have but at the same time, it is testing my patience just a bit as well.
And before I forget, and I nearly did forget, I did receive a Cimmerian miniature recently. It is none other than a metal Barbarian by Avatars of War which have almost completely disappeared from the US market. I will probably pick up a 3D printed Barbarian or two from Avatars of War eventually because you can’t have enough Conan and it will be interesting to compare the overall quality of the two. I haven’t primed this one yet (let’s hope the weather warms up enough for that soon!) which is a shame because its hard to tell how good the quality of it is. I can confirm the details are pretty darn tiny which is going to be a blast to try to paint NMM. And yes, that’s a bit of dry humor there!
And here is a painted example from Avatars of War which looks very nice.
So there you have it. A tiny step forward into Hyboria!
Kuribo's Painting 