OCTOBER 28, 2018
This week I had a limited amount of time at the workbench due to having cataract surgery on Monday. Nonetheless, I did get a number of the Blue Moon Chinese passive civilians painted though, because of the eye issues, I didn’t spray them with Dullcote or put the base cover on them. Nonetheless, I’m making progress on the Boxer Rebellion project, and I got great news from Wargames Illustrated indicating that my 28mm Post Apoc and 15mm French and Indian War collections would be featured in the December 2018 issue.
OCTOBER 21, 2018
The first workbench project of the week was the painting of the repaired Egyptian statue begun a couple of weeks back. I’d picked up a couple of statues that I thought would work well with a Stargate project I was planning. Once of the statues was missing the top of whatever the statue had once held in its left hand. I decided to replace it with a piece of jewelry in the form of an ankh. All that remained was providing a matching paint job for the ankh and its handle. It came out pretty good.
Next on the agenda was adding wing guns to an X-wing fighter I found that Saturday at the swap meet. Fortunately, I had the replacement guns, again found at the swap meet some time before. These guns came off an X-wing that was slightly larger than the ones I will be including in my collection. The replacement guns required some minor modification, but worked out well.
Once those two projects were done, I returned to the Boxer Rebellion. I began by painting the rickshaws I had scratch-built more than a month ago. I added repainted Preiser passengers to complete the four rickshaws. With the rickshaws finished, I turned to painting figures from the Blue Moon passive Chinese civilians pack. I have three packs of those figures (30 figures per pack) so I still have quite a few to paint before they are done, but when they are painted, it will be time to turn my attention to painting terrain for this project. Next week may not see much accomplished at the workbench because on October 22 I go in for my second cataract surgery… this time the left eye.
OCTOBER 14, 2018
The workbench this past week has been focused on non-fighting Great Power figures for my Boxer Rebellion. I began the week painting the Blue Moon civilians and ended it painting the ones I bought years ago from Preiser. I should add a little note here about why I have so many Preiser Victorian figures in this collection. The answer is simple. I began putting the collection together years before Blue Moon introduced its Boxer Rebellion line of figures in 15mm/18mm. I wanted civilian figures for my legations and Preiser was all I could find that served that purpose. They come pre-painted and are expensive, but they do have some interesting options… the cyclists and the artist are good examples. Even though they come pre-painted, they don’t really match my painting look so they got some paint as well. I’ll be starting on the Chinese civilians next.
OCTOBER 7, 2018
The workbench began the week focused on putting together the last two Revel Republic Attack Shuttles. I’d learned a lot putting together the first of the three. Mostly I learned that the directions were terrible, there was no “easy” in the EasyKit name that came with the models, and the female openings that attached with the posts to hold the model together were poorly designed and required the enlarging of the openings and the sanding down of the posts in order to make the model come together properly… and glue was definitely required! Anyway I was happy with the way they all look, and I count myself lucky to have found three of them since they are no longer in production.
Among the projects I am currently collecting items for is Stargate. With that in mind I keep my eyes open at the swap meet for interesting Egyptian-style statues and a few weeks ago I found a couple great statues. Both were broken. One had a broken staff that was still attached but needed to be glued… easy. The other was missing whatever had been in his left hand. I replaced the missing whatever with a piece of jewelry my wife found for me in the form of an ankh. I gave it a small staff or handle made from Evergreen plastic. Needs some paint, but looks pretty good. With those Star Wars and Stargate pieces completed, I turned once again to my principal focus which is the Boxer Rebellion. I completed the painting of several Great Power civilian 15mm figures and the “International Gun.”
On Saturday, the last day of this workbench week, I came upon two X-Wing fighters at the swap meet. They are a rather cheap version of the X-Wings I am using with my collection, but they had three things going for them: very inexpensive ($1 each), the same size as the quality X-Wings in my collection, and they had the wing-tip guns that two of my better quality ships were missing. On the cheaper versions the guns are actually cast as part of the wings so they had to be cut off and then attached/glued to the X-Wings for which I was lacking guns. They still need to be painted to match the painted X-Wings to which they are now attached. The end result is not perfection, but good enough. The last picture has nothing to do with the workbench, but I decided to put it in because I think it is a great swap meet find. It’s a full size Clone Trooper helmet. The miniature Clone Trooper is one of the 28mm figures from the Wizards of the Coast Star Wars range of miniatures.
