Genoese Galleys

Hi again,

easter holidays are over and here´s some cool new stuff! 
I got inspired by a fellow german wargamer when looking over his project log over on another forum I frequently visit. He had been scratch-building galleys out of thin air and achieved some very decent results...

Being a long time fan of renaissance galleys and only lacking the right models (most are too big for my taste, and almost all too expensive for a sideproject) to give serious consideration to starting a small fleet, his work fell on fertile ground.

As I returned home yesterday, I decided to give this method a try, did some very quick and rought research and calculated how large my ships should be to suit my taste. I ended up with a scale of 1:1000, which turns a historical ship of about 40-50m  into a nice and tiny 4-5cm Ship.

Then, I got my sheet of plasticard and started cutting the pieces then gluing them together and created my first two ships within about 2-3 hours next to doing some other things.

 

The raw ships where then primed an painted - all the details and textures I tried to add are brushwork

 In the end, I held two Genoese Galleys in my hands, and I´m definitely going to build more ships using the same techniques!

 

I already got the raw body of a smaller Galiot on my desk to add some scouting and screening capabilities to my small task force.  Then I need to decide which enemy would be suitable.  Ottoman are the obvious choice, but I consider doing some berber ships, maybe from Algeria or Tunisia instead.  Nothing is settled yet.

And don´t ask me why I chose Genoa. The flag appealed to me...

 

Space Marine Sergeant

After watching a few more painting tutorials and how-to´s on youtube, I felt like painting a Space Marine from my stash of 28mm minis to practice advanced painting techniques.
After three days of painting this guy (I think I spent about 5-6 hours on him in total, including assembly), he is finally ready to be presented:

Note how I managed to remove all skulls from this model - I still don´t get how Games Workshop forces their sculptors to put skulls all over the model. There´s just no other possible explanation - it´s rather hard to find models that don´t have skulls somewhere, there must be a corporate order to maintain a skull-per-miniature ratio of at least X  over their entire range...

Anyway, I carved away the skull on his helmet and sculpted a gem into the centre of the wings of his chestplate - I also managed to find shoulder plates without skulls to fit onto the model.

Then I went with classic blue scheme with some yellow and red here and there.
I attempted to paint some non-metallic metal on his belt, eagle wings, knife and gun.

All in all, I´m pretty happy with the result. There are some learning points I´ll take with me for future reference and I still have to work on improving the precision brushwork to create very fine lines, but I am very happy how this mini turned out.

...even if it´s a Space Marine :P

"They´re in the bush!" - Portugese Rifleman

And number two for the Portugese squad, another plain old rifleman.