Paint Table Saturday: Sikhs and Follidge!

My lack of free weekends has continued, to my frustration, as I really want to play with my hot glue gun again, having produced my one, very simple, piece of folliidge (as the annoying Terrain Tutor calls it). I have been scouring garden centres looking for aquarium plants (and a nice naked girly statue for the garden to go outside my room - I think I have found one) and have, over the last few weeks, collected a plastic crate of equally plastic plants.

These have come from a number of garden centres in the area but Chessington has much the biggest range, although their selection of girly statues is poor.  Added to the usual plethora of Buddhas (why?) is now a new fashion for dragons which I am sure is something to do with Game of Thrones.

Congo jungle

It has taken some time for me to get over worrying about what follidge would look authentic for different environments, as I study pictures of, for example, the Congo  I have been worrying about the different definitions of 'jungle' and 'rain forest' and whether or not they have palm trees in the jungle (someone said on one group that they only existed at the coast in Africa not along rivers).  Then I found pictures of them along rivers and worried that while they may have them today, perhaps they weren't growing in the nineteenth century.  I then realised that given my African project was likely to feature an Amazon tribe (not a tribe from the Amazon -that is an entirely different project) then perhaps I was over thinking it and I should just  get some scenic pieces made!

I have decided to use, initially, round bases which are large washers and CDs/DVDs, partly because they are nice and thin and avoid that 'step up' scenery issue you get with MDF.  Also, I have no tools and no ability to use them so cannot contemplate how you get nice rounded shaped bases (you use a dremmel (?) according the the Terrain Tutor but I have no idea what one is and certainly don't want to own one).  Anyway, having watched the Terrain Tutor's annoying but (I have to admit) helpful videos on making jungle bases I will be proceeding with some, over the next week or so.  

Like Surrey with elephants

I have several different projects for which I will need jungle: Congo, The Lost World,  Savage Core and (possibly) conquistadores in Brazil and Panama   My dormant Zambezi campaign will not really use jungle terrain because, having travelled to Zambia some years ago, the terrain isn't really jungly at all but looks rather like, well, Surrey, where I live.  Also I have based my figures using  a pinkiish beige colour for that part of Africa so will need different coloured scenic bases.  There is a real problem in finding model trees suitable for Africa; with tall trunks and high canopies or wide-spreading Acacia trees

Lost World Explorers

My initial plan for these new jungle bases was for Savage Core (as I really like the new rules) and I have painted my Neanderthals with the brown bases so I will do so for the other tribes.  Also, I don't have to worry about authentic plants and can use some of the red ones that I have got for this.  I can also use some of these for the Lost World and the Amazon too.   So I will carry on and make some more brown coloured base jungle pieces.

Savage Core explorer painted for The Lost World

At this point I am not going to do trees in this new jungle base style.  I actually have quite a few trees up in the loft and am not sure whether there should be any for Savage Core (how would trees grow underground, anyway).  I will do some separate tree bases later.  One thing, however, is that I find the whole land under earth so troubling, scientifically, that maybe my Savage Core world would be better in a plateau in the Amazon, in the manner of the TV series Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, with its tribe of the week.

Another tree problem has been resolved recently, however, in that I have found, at last, some suitable leafless trees for winter from the (expensive) railway scenery firm of Hoch.  I bought four of these and they seem to vary in price quite a lot, depending on where you get them from.  This, at last, gets me over my 1864 scenery problem and, given that North Star have released some more Danes recently, it puts them, if not at the front burner, then off the back burner.

Latterly, my eyesight, which has been deteriorating for some time, has taken a turn for the worse (especially my left eye) and I really thought that my figure painting days were over.  However, this week, with some bright light outside, I had a go at doing a bit more on my Sikh artillery for the North West Frontier.  I do have to squint a lot and am worried that I may end up looking like Lieutenant Columbo but I could just manage it.  Although I now know I won't be able to paint figures again to the standard of the ones further up this page, I can still paint to acceptable wargames standard, so that will just have to do.   But as my lady friend A says: "As you look at them from three feet higher than the table what does it matter?"   Maybe if I have nice follidge, people won't notice the blurry painting!

My niece (conducting!)

My musical niece is going to be staying with us, intermittently, over the next few weeks as she has been awarded a scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music and will find it easier to commute from here than her house, so we have had to clear out Guy's old bedroom as it was full of boxes of rubbish.  As a result we had to put stuff in the loft which meant getting rid of stuff up there.  The Old Bat keeps eyeing my wargames pile up there and saying that as I haven't touched it for years maybe I don't need it.  As a sop to her, I decided to get rid of a load of old model kits and am getting rid of a lot of SF film books too.  I do need to look at this wargames pile, though, as I have no idea what is in it!

Today's music is the opera-ballet Les Indes Galantes by Rameau, which was first staged in 1735.    Partly inspired by a visit to the court of Louis XV by a group of native Americans about ten years previously, the opening has Hebe, the goddess of youth presiding over dances by her followers. The happy revels are interrupted by Bellona (how we loved their vacuum formed scenery in the seventies), goddess of war who wants to take them off to fight, much to the disgust of Cupid who decides to seek a more love-friendly environment in the Indies (basically a series of exotic lands including the Peru of the Incas, the Ottoman Empire and North America - it is a loose definition of Indies).

I first saw this opera on Blu-ray at my friend A's house a couple of months ago, in a modern dress version produced in Bordeaux.  Well, I say modern dress but for most of the thirty minute prologue no one is dressed at all, apart from the splendid, part Berber, French-Algerian soprano Amel Brahim-Djelloulas as Hebe, who is wearing the most diaphanous of shifts.  Something of the flavour of this entertaining, if not entirely successful, production can be seen in this prologue here, complete with Mlle. Brahim-Delloulas in her shift and some rather sweet but silly naked dancing.  The Chrsitie conducted CD is musically superior, however.

Harem nude (c. 1910)

More orientalist inspiration in today's wallpaper of a harem nude by Georges Antoine Rochegrosse  (1859-1938), one of a number of harem style nudes he produced.  There is an Algerian link to Rochegrosse, as well, as he spent his winters there and utilised  source material from there for many of his paintings.

Rochegrosse also produced this wonderfully spirited painting called The Heroes of Marathon, which certainly makes up in energy what it lacks in accurate phalanx depiction.

Off to Colours today with Eric the Shed!  Haven't been there since 2013 and when I wrote up my report on the blog, then, I was contacted for the first time by...Eric the Shed!