Time for some Blog Necromancy

 I´ve been neglecting this blog again... time to attempt to raise it from the dead again.

The lure of social media has been strong and so I´ve been posting a lot of stuff on platforms like Facebook and Instagram as that seems to be the place were most people are located these days.  

And yet I am not a friend of these platforms with their endless feeds of content, with little option to filter for special fields of interest.  So after some consideration, I´ll be trying to give this blog another chance. 

Don´t expect many updates or a regular schedule... 

Here are some new sculpts I have been working on:

These will supplement my Australians for Vietnam, which were released last year and are already available in the shop:

As well as the Vietcong Sets armed with a variety of different weapons:

And to not make this just an advertising show, here are some more Work-In-Progress Afghan Captives. 

These guys popped up as a side project as I worked on more Taliban (pics coming soon). I had some reference pics with captives / hostages in my collection and after looking at them for hours I felt they deserved their own miniatures. 

These minis are also different in that I am using polymer clay here. 1 or 2 years back I bought myself some BeesPutty and tried working with Oven-hardening clay. It´s a bit different from working with epoxy putties, can be challenging especially when modelling the arms - but it is very rewarding in its own way and perfect to sculpt minis that have their arms close to their bodies such as these captives... 

or this Tank commander that I was commissioned to sculpt: 

New African & Bush War Releases

New Models are now available - two new Sets for your African Conflicts.


Generic African Riflemen with FN FAL:

Portuguese Riflemen with G3 Rifles:

New Bush War Releases and Work in Progress

Hi all,

 

as promised, I´m starting with the updates on what I´ve been up to in the last few months.

I want to start by introducing some new models I sculpted not too long ago.

Brand New Sets

 

 

African Riflemen

 

 

 African Tribal Warriors

 

 

Released a while ago, but not presented here before: 

 

 African Insurgents with Support Weapons 

African Insurgenst with AK Skirmishing

You can get these new sets at my homepage here

 

Or click on the banner: 

 

 

Work in Progress for the next batch of Releases: 

 

 

Portuguese G3 Firing

 

 

 

African Army - MachineGunners

More is in the pipeline, but you´ll have to wait a little longer for more pictures ;)

There is no silver bullet

It has been 8 years since my return into the hobby, and along the way back I found myself repeatedly confronted with the urge to buy this or that product that would transform my painting results magically.

But there is no silver bullet.

No single product can magically take you from beginner to awesome painter. No matter how much advertised or praised (I´m looking at you #ContrastPaints and #Airbrush), no product can spare you the frustration of failed attempts and abortive painting sessions, where you give up after trying in vain to reproduce the results of highly experienced painters (most often professionals) with your newly acquired product.


If you never bought a hobby product because someone was praising it, if you have never been at least a bit disappointed in a purchase, you can stop reading here - this article is not for you.


But if you are like me, did that and find it hard to tread the line between hoarding products you´ll never use, follow me into the discussion of why there cannot be a singular magic product, why every tool you acquire will require you to learn and improve again and how that can be a good thing after all.

So let´s dive into it!

Code Red - English Release

After a long time of preparation and translation, the full ruleset for Code Red is now available in english.

You can download it at my website at https://www.enfilade-figures.com/Codered



Code Red is a standalone ruleset for modern wargaming designed to recreate real and hypothetical conflicts after 1945.

These rules have started out as a set of Houserules for a popular Modern Wargaming ruleset to address some of its shortcomings, but have evolved into a unique and distinct set of rules

The core rules are fully playable. It is designated as a "Beta" release as the rules for scenario generation and list building are not yet complete and far from balanced.
I have to admit that my original scope was a bit too ambitious.

However, if you like designing your own scenarios, you will have great fun with these rules - they have been tested and refined to a point where I am very satisfied with the result.


If you want to learn more about Code Red and its design, check out the Dev Diaries on this blog.



Enjoy and please let me know what you think!


-------------
For my German Readers:

Die Deutsche Version von Code Red ist bereits seit einiger Zeit unter eigenem Link hier zu finden: https://www.enfilade-figures.com/code-red-de

Blog Necromancy

Is it dead?
Well, it almost was...

Time to resurrect it with the power of necromancy!
 
Seems like I neglected my blog pretty badly throughout the last year and a half. Time to fix this. 
I haven´t been idle in 2019 and early 2020 - in fact, I painted and sculpted a lot of new stuff, just did not post it anywhere.

I´ve been very focused on improving my productivity, so much so that I did not take the time to document the results online. But I like the ability to look back on my blog and see what I´ve done and how my skills develop over time. Looking back is a healthy reminder that everything starts small and develops over time into what you see these days.

For 2019 I made a pledge to paint more miniatures. Long story short: 
I showed my best friend in 2018 that new years resolutions do indeed work if you make them specific and measurable - and he achieved and exceeded what he planned to do.
On New years eve, as it was time to find new resolutions and goals for 2019, he asked me what my resolution for the new year was, and so I commited to painting more minis and watching less videos on streaming platforms.

And so I painted or sculpted 401 miniatures (20mm+) or bases (15mm or smaller) that I did not present to you.On some of them I cut corners, some of them I painted to a very high standard.

I´ll try to update you on these achievements over the coming weeks.
Stay tuned!

Enfilade Figures - 4th Anniversary - 30% off

Hard to believe, but four years ago I opened the webshop and started selling my figures to a wider audience.

Since the, the ranges and available sets have grown manifold, thanks to the continued support of everyone who bought miniatures, sent ideas or supported me in any other way.

This sale is my way to say thank you to all of you who like my figures - get them now for a much reduced price while our stock lasts.



And by the way - a lot of new figures are in the pipeline...

Possessed by Wrath

 A few weeks ago I painted this chap to fill my saturday afternoon.

I didn´t want to use the typical red Khorne color scheme, but for the longest time didn´t have an idea. 

In the end I decided to use the faces on the armor to make things more interesting and give the miniature a theme: A human possessed by demons bound to the suit of armor he wears.

As such, the demon faces on the armor needed to look like they come alive while still appearing as part of the suit.

All in all, an interesting and fun challenge to paint this figure!

 

Lots of painted Taliban

Interested?  Get some at  www.enfilade.de/catalog/Taliban

Portugese Colonial Infantry - Now Painted

This Portugese Infantry unit was waiting on my workbench for a long time.
After more than 1,5 years I picked them up yesterday and painted them to a finish this morning.

If you want your own, they are available in my webshop - just hit one of the pictures, they are linked to the right spot.

Muscovite Reinforcements - Hidden Progress 2

Over at Crisis, I also grabbed some more Infantry - Field Dragoons.

Again, I mixed these with some converted Totentanz Miniatures and miniatures I sculpted myself. The result is nice, you can hardly tell which is which: 

Muscovite Reinforcements - The Hidden Progress 1

Back in November it seems like it stopped taking photos...

A lot of progress has been made on my Muskovites that I haven´t bothered posting - it is now high time to get back on track with these photos.

The first major step forward was the discovery of Fighting 15s  Medieval Tannenberg Range. As I spotted the Lithuanian Boyars, I knew I could use them as Russians with almost no conversion effort. Here they are, dressed up as my Skirmish Sotnia: 

In November, I went to Crisis and had my first eye to eye contact with the original Fire and Sword miniatures.  I always hated them from the pictures I had seen online, but on personal inspection, they didn´t look that bad after all.  Wargamer.pl  needs to amp up their product presentation on these, the pictures online are horrible compared to the real deal.  While they are not amazing - certainly not as good as Totentanz miniatures - they are good enough and certainly better than expected.

I mixed them up with the Fighting 15s Boyars and created a few more bases of regular Boyars.
I also ended up mounting most of the Wargamer miniatures on  AB horses, which are way better than the original pieces. 

By Cannon and Musket

Throughout the last few weeks I have been  painting and preparing  some more Units for my Fire and sword armies:

After a devastating game using a Swedish Regimental Gun  (proxied during the game by some half-painted and scratch-built Russian piece) in a village defense scenario - in which the regimental gun devastated three units all on its own -  I decided that Artillery pieces would certainly see more action in the future and painted up all three bases I had got for christmas.

These are the By Fire and Sword (Wargamer.pl) originals.

 

During the same game, the Swedes had to hire some Russian Mercenary musketeers as they were unable to field enough bases on their own.  So, another base was made and as I was short on musketeers and didn´t want to order a whole batch just for another base, I sculpted two of my own.

I also made some swedish casualties - I had a lot of Russian casualties, but none of Swedish variety

 

Next in lin are another base of swedish reiters, two bases of Dragoons and Cossacks, all primed and waiting for paint.

 Then yesterday, I realized by browsing through the internet that I had no Forage Supplies marker - and as it was a rainy and depressing day, I started to build my own. This is the Work in Progress pic from today:

New Enfilade Figures - January 2018

New Enfilade Figures are available - right in time to still count as January-Releases ;)


For our African Wargamers, we now have Machete wielding African Insurgents, up to nothing good...

In Afghanistan, heavy fighting has taken its toll, so we need some casualties to display this bitter reality on your wargaming table...

And - maybe a bit untimely regarding current events - a new Set of Women Militia is available. This new set features support weapons:

The shop has also been properly re-stocked with other sets - however, due to a wrongly labeled mould our Portugese with AR10 set will not be available for a little while. We found the mistake, corrected it, but now they still need to be produced and sent here :)


As usual, hit the Picture below to go right to the webshop:

On the Workbench - January 2018

This blog has gone silent again, hasn´t it?
Well, as usual when this happens, things have been going on behind the scenes but I didn´t feel much of an urge to take pictures, process them and put them online.

Still not feeling much like it, but at least I managed to take some shots of the various projects I have been or am working on right now.

Last week I finished these river pieces. I´ve long wanted to add some rivers to my terrain selection and finally pushed the project through after gathering some motivation and inspiration over the christmas holidays

I also worked quite a bit on Code Red (my Modern Warfare Ruleset) in the first two weeks of January. One addition to the Rules was stats for MRAPs for the Americans and Brits. 

During the work on the rules I felt the urge to add an MRAP to my collection.  There are some kits out there, and I might get one at some point, but I didn´t feel like spending money.  In the spur of the moment I remembered how other people achieve great results by scratchbuilding and started chipping away at some foam and plasticard.

  

After a few days, here we are with the scratchbuilt MRAP chassis. The CROWs is magnetized and can rotate. Right now I´m working on the wheels which are a bit of a challenge - too big, too small or too irregular and they start looking ugly.

 

On the sculpting front, I started another set of Special Forces -  these will be a Team in CQB-poses, one Pointman with a pistol (or out of ammo switching to his sidearm - you decide), a breacher with a Shotgun - and not yet started, an operator preparing a grenade or flashbang before the assault.

 

 Hope you enjoyed the small insight into my WIP stuff. 

I finished a lot more stuff in December that I did not take pictures of.  When my blogging motivation returns, I shall take some photos and put them up here. 

Until then, happy wargaming!