JULY 29, 2018
This was another very successful painting week with 90 Boxers completed.That makes the total number of 15mm Boxers painted as of this date 321. Because this workbench took no detours and was devoted completely to painting 15mm Boxers, I’ve decided to add a little additional flavor by also showing the die cast Texaco Keystone-Loening Commuter “The Duck.” A couple weeks ago at the swap meet I picked up the die cast Texaco Grumman “Goose.”Both are perfect for use with 28mm figures and as planes of the 1930s they are great Pulp Era aircraft.Next to the picture of my Duck I have set a 28mm figure of Han Solo (it was handy when I took the picture) from the Wizards of the Coast line of Star Wars figures
JULY 22, 2018
This was a milestone week for the workbench. In the more than 40 years I have been painting miniatures, I have never painted 81 figures in any scale in a single week. This week I finished 81 15mm Boxers and cleaned and prepped another 12. Sometimes you simply find the groove. That once happened to me many years ago playing tennis with a buddy who was a much better player than I was… probably college level. I played the set of my life… nothing existed but the court and the ball. All of my first serves were in. All my returns were perfect, and then the set was over. I had cleaned his clock. He was in disbelief, but in that perfect moment of victory I returned to the world, and my moment of absolute concentration was done. On a less dramatic level that was this week’s painting… everything just came together perfectly. I used so much Milliput building my pre-siege legation walls that this week I got a big resupply. I can’t imagine doing my projects without it.
JULY 15, 2018
Once again the Weekly Workbench focused primarily on painting 15mm Boxers. I finished an additional 54 Boxer figures and put the base color on 9 more. When I began this write-up I thought I was at the end of my non-Blue Moon Boxers, but when I went out to the shed to stock up on Blue Moon Boxers for my next workbench week, I discovered that I still had about a hundred more non-Blue Moon Boxers left to paint… not bad news; the more the merrier.
Though the week’s Workbench focused primarily on painting 15mm Boxers, I did take one detour on Saturday after I returned from the swap meet with some small pieces needed for the modification of my newly arrived Playskool Millennium Falcon… an entirely unrelated 28mm project. I used a modified version of the Playskool Falcon in my 28mm Spaceport collection and really like the toy. It is not as sleek as the actual Falcon, but I like the ship’s body detail/outer skin; it’s sturdy, looks good with 28mm figures, has a great entrance ramp, and doesn’t take up an excessive amount of space on one of my 5 ft. x 7 ft. tables. In my opinion, its one flaw is that its gun mount is vastly too big… huge, so that needed to be replaced. You can see the original huge gun mount off to the right side in one of the Falcon pictures attached here. As I so often do, I turned to the swap meet as my source for parts. Because the original Playskool gun will not be used, a large, undetailed area of plastic surface was left which has to be filled with something that resembles the skin of the ship… see the grey-green area on the upper surface of the Falcon. That grey-green area is the plastic detail I found Saturday and added to the original gun mount area. Once that gun mount area had been resurfaced, I added a smaller replacement gun mount to that space.
JULY 8, 2018
It was another week of painting Boxers. I now have 87 painted and based… 51 complete this week. As I write this, the next 9 Boxers for the coming week have been prepped.
JULY 1, 2018
No scratch building at all this past week. The Weekly Workbench was focused on painting some Old Glory 15s Boxers. I have been painting miniatures for more than 40 years, but each time I shift to a new project in a different scale I find myself having doubts as to whether I will remember how to paint figures in the scale I am about to begin. That was the case this week… nervous. It has been about 2 years since I did any painting of 15mm/18mm figures. During that two-year gap I have painted two 28mm collections (my Spaceport and my Post Apoc). Once I overcame the initial doubts things went pretty well. I managed to paint 36 15mm Boxers, and I’m happy with the way they came out. I didn’t have time to apply the Scenic Effects ground cover, but I should be able to get that done today.
