tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-267731172024-03-15T13:02:56.481+00:00Legatus' Wargames Armies legatus hedliushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17078980742683576345noreply@blogger.comBlogger746125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26773117.post-24880582851588136772023-04-22T18:27:00.001+01:002023-04-22T18:27:32.363+01:00A slightly disappointing vist to Salute...<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div style="text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="2679" data-original-width="2448" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXXH9egLweLoYRGgr0oluNpLVRWz13Wx0s-Q2v-77C09-IdljYv6-LykpLx5HzJN_S7Du1WVirlqIrmnL5hycxFokBZjkH4ZSfBRE48pfGaFaRzLx8HHPN5CbYGwXq9LsSc110Zm2qKdYX5Qw7bUIinM-tKoGxGFsIhnMijkoV9mScHrI/w586-h640/20230422_122538.jpg" width="586" /></div><span style="color: black;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="color: black;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I was very excited to go to Salute again today as the last one I attended was, thanks to the Chinese, four years ago. I hadn't even been on the London Underground for three years so that was stressful as I am still one of those people who wears a mask on public transport given I am in the 'vulnerable' categoty altough less vulnerable than I was. For those who don't know, dear readers, I had some cardiac problems back in 2019 which resulted in me having to have a triple heart bypass almost a year ago. Since then, however, I have felt much better and all my key medical indicators are the best thay have been for 15 years. This tedious medical history is pertinent in that it has effected my general outlook and my view on wargaming in particular.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">After my operation on May 4th last year (the Force was, indeed, with me) I had no less than nine holes in me which I hadn't had before. The worst wetre the two in my leg where Mr Yap at Barts removed an artery. This area was painful for three months afterwards. "Oh yes they never tell you that is the worst," said my father-in-law a former eminent cardiac surgeon himself who facilitated mt getting to a top hospital. It meant that I could not sit comfortably at my desk for months which meant no painting so I contented myself with reading a lot (which I hadn;t done for ages) and watching old films on TV. The second most painful part was my breastbone which had been sawn in half so they could spread my ribs open and then stapled back together (you can feel the staples under my skin; they don't come out). Sneezing was not something you wanted to do after this for three months. Now, I am not the most sensitive soul but the pain caused by these precision incisions was very bad for many weeks and it just got me thinking about what a bullet wound must feel like. The thought of this still makes me queasy and is something I had never considered in my all too infrequent games of war. In American TV shows, where they spend most of the time shooting each other, if the good guy (or lady) gets shot then they are portrayed happily sitting up in hospital with a small dressing on and then a week later are bounding around as normal. This, of course, is nonsense. One of my scars (in my wrist) is still sore and the scar down the centre of my chest (I have used it to horrify my young neices) itches and I am consious of it all the time. The upshot of this is that I am now very conscious of the real impact of battle wounds on soldiers. It won't stop me wargaming or painting soldiers but I do think about what the real thing must have been like, especially in hospitals with no anaesthetic and no lovely young nurses to look after you (goodness, the ladies in Barts were lovely - well as far as I could tell from their eyes but as I know from trips to the Middle East and the early months of the Chinese Virus most women look lovely when all you can see is their eyes).</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_AnubBQAov1dsQFS76lp59fNhZk7T3LgL860SLjTbiKIussnTVPdDDJBy9bpiOwhuQbWqlJU6aNvwhGU1_zfWL_sczSgayHTbaRTSxr7zFku7p2GnTMRAo_cqtSYr9hr_Tsm1_hiAb00oubi0DGBOXc8fppQFVC7A4b-VXUPcIAg2J4I/s2924/20230422_162245.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2924" data-original-width="2228" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_AnubBQAov1dsQFS76lp59fNhZk7T3LgL860SLjTbiKIussnTVPdDDJBy9bpiOwhuQbWqlJU6aNvwhGU1_zfWL_sczSgayHTbaRTSxr7zFku7p2GnTMRAo_cqtSYr9hr_Tsm1_hiAb00oubi0DGBOXc8fppQFVC7A4b-VXUPcIAg2J4I/w488-h640/20230422_162245.jpg" width="488" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The other effect of my surgery was for me to consider my finite future. My cardiologist at East Surrey Hosital (excellent in every way) told me my surgery would give me an extra 25 years. Unfortunately, Mr Yap, having seem my heart ("when did you have your heart attack? - I had no idead!) told me that I should get another <i>ten </i>years (one of which I have already had). So as I wandered around Salute today thinking about, as I had beforehand, getting some Oathmark dwarves I stopped myself and thought that I already have far more figures to paint than I can do in my remaining lifetime (frankly even with the twenty-five years originally promised I would not be able to paint all my figures). So I walked away from the Osprey Games stand and just came back with two boxes of the new Perry Miniatures Franco-Prussin War French which were released today. I will post seperately on all the figures I <i>nearly</i> bought over the last more than three years I have spent away from my blog; this post being a way to reactivate it and see if there is any interest in it.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgptjPqadcuIXs8sPCpbcUuu12S7vaE1GCzzr6GFQ10SUhNkB1Y96QRjRE-uApCIuKkY19jPp02s4OqQJEPlxx41fTjvKoAYk3JU6EEZVd5RMcaGUHmf9vmoSedaDh4HJMMYEaanK31MpSPdnEARLie1RXy666IwVU-_O0hJwhaQvDwUKE/s3264/20230422_120424.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3264" data-original-width="2448" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgptjPqadcuIXs8sPCpbcUuu12S7vaE1GCzzr6GFQ10SUhNkB1Y96QRjRE-uApCIuKkY19jPp02s4OqQJEPlxx41fTjvKoAYk3JU6EEZVd5RMcaGUHmf9vmoSedaDh4HJMMYEaanK31MpSPdnEARLie1RXy666IwVU-_O0hJwhaQvDwUKE/w480-h640/20230422_120424.jpg" width="480" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So, I felt rather disappointed walking around Salute today.<i> Ennui</i> might be a better term. So many figures I will never paint. So many games I will never play. So many rules I will be unable to comprehend. Yes, the French term is most apposite, especially now that Guy has acquired a sparky French girlfriend who lives with us from time to time. The lighting was worse than I remembered (or is it my eyes) which menat that I couldn't even really see most of the games in progress without standing about ten inches from them which you either couldn't becuas eof crowds (Big Red Bat's spledid Ipsus game) or didn't want to in case you are pounced upon by keen people trying to recruit players (I don't want to play games with people I don't know). </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7H18VZHJZCEOw2SuUY4fLGPWw1U_AoC8QbBTyCOt3_0XSX1dPZ-amGNqubQ1atoWhIYHXHFQzTEXlBpNBHQivgxV0xyBvn447JvxS_M06kdOENqL-sDpHf-y5RfYnoWM-1fEe72BdO9zzAJ6h_FJUWVazp4WMgfBgstYFbFSfH7lXjx0/s3264/20230422_120728.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2448" data-original-width="3264" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7H18VZHJZCEOw2SuUY4fLGPWw1U_AoC8QbBTyCOt3_0XSX1dPZ-amGNqubQ1atoWhIYHXHFQzTEXlBpNBHQivgxV0xyBvn447JvxS_M06kdOENqL-sDpHf-y5RfYnoWM-1fEe72BdO9zzAJ6h_FJUWVazp4WMgfBgstYFbFSfH7lXjx0/w640-h480/20230422_120728.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This was even more the case for trade stands but this was partly because I felt that there were a lot of people there (not surpisingly considering the interregnum) but a lot less trade stands. In the past all the outside walls of the hall had stands against them, but not this year. A lot of firms I expected to be there, like Victrix, were not. There seemd to be more big firms with big stands many of whom were SF and fantasy games I had never heard of. There were a lot less (other than laser cut MDF) scenic makers. Resin scenery seems to have all but disappeared (compounded, no doubt, by the disappearnce of the much missed Grand Manner) and where were the usual foliage (or follidge) stands? It struck me as a very stripped back show. This may be because ExCel's fees are now so high that only bigger firms can afford it. It will be interesting to see if these scenic firms appear at Warfare or Colours this year. Of course it may all be because I couldn't see any of the stands!</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirfMCZLL2yA40cPzqOexmn0plJId4iVAzE5XCIOirTZy-8Nbh37lj8QFzkv9n4PdDk-faCdVXKkDjkCRqfV5pSZAnv0_t8pyfOIhptkIqz-zXpDjkC6Zkp9IhEMK9Acqf9GiJ3_Grl4ls7b5-aCiZuksDPFCjTDVCcwYKz7Zo8C-LKKUQ/s2660/20230422_114335.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2660" data-original-width="2448" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirfMCZLL2yA40cPzqOexmn0plJId4iVAzE5XCIOirTZy-8Nbh37lj8QFzkv9n4PdDk-faCdVXKkDjkCRqfV5pSZAnv0_t8pyfOIhptkIqz-zXpDjkC6Zkp9IhEMK9Acqf9GiJ3_Grl4ls7b5-aCiZuksDPFCjTDVCcwYKz7Zo8C-LKKUQ/w588-h640/20230422_114335.jpg" width="588" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I suppose I spent about an hour and a half there, very much my shortest trip. There were no ta lot of real showstopping games but I did like thie Never Mind the Billhooks set up. I was pleased with my Perry French (although they are going to be a right fiddle to paint) and it was a delight to run into Eric the Shed who has kindly invited me to view his new shed in the next week or so. Will I go again next year? I'm not sure. I've always preferred Colours not least as I can drive there and don't have to use public transport. It was the fiftieth anniversary show, however, so I felt I should go (I did go to the last one held in Kensington Town Hall so that must have been several decades ago).</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">After what sounds like aratoer negative post I did sit down when I returned and dis some work on my Repblican ROmans, however, so maybe just attending will kick start my painting for the yeat (although I am still waiting for some decent light!)</div></span></span></div>legatus hedliushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17078980742683576345noreply@blogger.com39tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26773117.post-69491023517032498922020-12-06T16:25:00.001+00:002020-12-06T17:34:42.658+00:00Paint Table Sunday: Jazz Age Imperialism<div class="separator"><p style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4KgD_Slj47qih3enCbEuH9PMYAFY4UI2Iy95H_JAxPZUtoenvrlAKaF952PUvrqp5fO62WoSpn8cyi9aKqFyDksu0VTMx5khf2ZBUWAcnkYxZAjxbcS8cRNP3qYdpIZOsLlY/s1235/20201206_144223.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1102" data-original-width="1235" height="572" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4KgD_Slj47qih3enCbEuH9PMYAFY4UI2Iy95H_JAxPZUtoenvrlAKaF952PUvrqp5fO62WoSpn8cyi9aKqFyDksu0VTMx5khf2ZBUWAcnkYxZAjxbcS8cRNP3qYdpIZOsLlY/w640-h572/20201206_144223.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><p style="font-size: large; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I haven't done any hobby stuff for months for a number of reasons but the principal one is that I was just not inspired by anything on my workbench. So, what to do? Start an entirely new period, of course! I have recently taken delivery of a bunch of Empress Miniatures new Jazz Age Imperialism British. This is a range I looked at when it first came out and regularly ever since but I didn't jump in subsequently as it had begun to look like one of those abandoned ranges some manufacturers have (although Empress have now told me they have plans for new figures, including cavalry).. Also, the only British army figures they offered were highlanders which I am allergic to. So, the new British have pushed me over the edge. These are lovely figures, as you would expect from Empress, although I am going to have to do quite lot of research on equipment colours, in particular. </span><p></p><p style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT0coC_1nn08ltJ4OPkSeLWrBg5RnTA6I2EsgbQCPtJs847mN0cvgk-XXlqhXec6XHJ4Rka0EymcYZrO2kTL4ZHquKMNUmib6qMa0jhvGYqmx2aA5ScVloJ6hq5br5E7Yevmk/s2403/20201206_144319.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="886" data-original-width="2403" height="236" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT0coC_1nn08ltJ4OPkSeLWrBg5RnTA6I2EsgbQCPtJs847mN0cvgk-XXlqhXec6XHJ4Rka0EymcYZrO2kTL4ZHquKMNUmib6qMa0jhvGYqmx2aA5ScVloJ6hq5br5E7Yevmk/w640-h236/20201206_144319.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><p></p><p style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">So far, despite the terrible light, I have got the uniform base colours down and done some work on the hands and faces. I don't usually work on so many figures at once so it is going to take me some time!</span></p><p style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">I nearly had a nasty moment when I saw that one of the figures had a bipod for the Lewis gun attached to the top of the gun for separating and gluing underneath. I then realised that I had cut the bipod off the other gun and thrown it away, as I thought it was just moulding flash. After going through my bin, unsuccessfully, I considered making one and realised that that would be quite beyond my modelling skills. Fortunately, as I lay the remaining bipod on my desk there was the other one which had fallen onto it earlier. I quickly put them both in a bag after realising that attaching them was going to be a pig. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">So these figures are going to be for the Waziri War from 1919-1921 and this chimes very well with my Back of Beyond and Afghan War interest (as well as the film <i>High Road to China</i>). I have learned that there were no Highlanders deployed in this conflict, thankfully! Empress claim you can use the figures for German East Africa and the Arab revolt but, in fact, they are wearing long trousers and tunics not shorts and shirts so they are for cold weather Afghanistan but then so are the accompanying Afghans, on the whole, who are more in winter dress too. I think that this might make a good Christmas project, especially as, hopefully, most of Christmas will be cancelled! </span></p><p style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p></div><div class="separator"><p style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLpycs-PQfYeLmxBhqJGXAUVTh3tj-FOq2Jx3rabWzDZfmD30t5Tke79nmoi7LqMv2GRCwcJlPVtcr0Z4IVAoTWuCrP8t3LDgpH4zXg8Kv_5I4esE13_OCABw8JIiuCN3hKRs/s1371/room.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1028" data-original-width="1371" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLpycs-PQfYeLmxBhqJGXAUVTh3tj-FOq2Jx3rabWzDZfmD30t5Tke79nmoi7LqMv2GRCwcJlPVtcr0Z4IVAoTWuCrP8t3LDgpH4zXg8Kv_5I4esE13_OCABw8JIiuCN3hKRs/w640-h480/room.jpg" width="640" /></a></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><p style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; text-align: left;">My computer packed up the other week (nothing serious, it just needed a new power unit) but in the day and a half I was without it I decided to start tidying my study. This picture is actually after I had already done an hour on it! The first stage was to extract all the books I have bought over the last two years and get them off the (largely collapsed) piles they were in on the floor. Then I sorted them out and completely rearranged the shelves on one wall so they could all be integrated by subject and/or author. In doing this I found a lot of paperbacks that I realise that I will never read or, in the case of those I have read, will never read again. Unfortunately, the local hospice book shop in Weybridge has closed down. This was a very good shop which only sells books. Most charity shops won't accept books any more or, at least, the ones around here won't. So I am left with lots of books I don't know what to do with. It's usually not worth eBaying them as the price they fetch is usually less than the postage costs. I just don't know what to do with them as even the municipal dump shop is closed now but I can't bear to throw them out. </span></p><p style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></p><p style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvXWbQscWZk6qhRXljDJDXWgkZrOOEfYLRw3bToJvBSAw_jLky7zp1HN6Agq7UvyWpCiDxzGrT5eFJThI03_AGpH7mMqeDd5foKRSzFkFd6OCs-CxrA6pTApF0a_CFbKefp-4/s2048/shelves.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvXWbQscWZk6qhRXljDJDXWgkZrOOEfYLRw3bToJvBSAw_jLky7zp1HN6Agq7UvyWpCiDxzGrT5eFJThI03_AGpH7mMqeDd5foKRSzFkFd6OCs-CxrA6pTApF0a_CFbKefp-4/w640-h480/shelves.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><span style="text-align: left;"><p style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span><br /></span></span></p><div style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>The Old Bat thinks they should all go, of course. I am reminded of the line from Porridge: 'I read a book once. Green it was.' I don't actually remember the Old Bat ever </span><i>reading</i><span> a book. She has </span><i>looked </i><span>at them, usually to find out how to do things like make complicated pleats on curtains but a book without pictures? No. Anyway, I am very happy with having sorted my books out (military and art books are on other shelves, on the whole). </span></span></div><div style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span><br /></span></span></div><h4 style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3WuY2GrM8RgTtVxVxe_mUgyo1WT9kTYncpQOZo55AStVHWpw15oFFJrlJrk5znTHZ6oVueVNhyphenhyphenm5JU9g0lPznzFPqEpDaWofhoY_W8NPkxrSqJ0z6Rxeg_vtNSzhHj0Oe3nY/s2048/20201019_091321.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3WuY2GrM8RgTtVxVxe_mUgyo1WT9kTYncpQOZo55AStVHWpw15oFFJrlJrk5znTHZ6oVueVNhyphenhyphenm5JU9g0lPznzFPqEpDaWofhoY_W8NPkxrSqJ0z6Rxeg_vtNSzhHj0Oe3nY/w640-h480/20201019_091321.jpg" width="640" /></a></div></h4><h4 style="text-align: justify;"><br /></h4><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Another reason for the sort out was to give the plumber access to the radiator to see if he could get the long dead radiator in my room going again. Alas, he reckons we will need to replace every radiator in the house and do a flush through (or something). This would mean we had no heating or hot water for a week so not to be done at this time of year, I think. Still my far wall looks the neatest it's been for years (only because you can't see all the displaced mess. </span><span style="font-weight: normal;">Next I sorted out the remainder of my DVDs into albums which freed up a lot more shelf space for paperbacks.</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"> </span></span></div></span><p style="text-align: left;"></p></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpr2fWHddxFwcoivfz4trT7NZSfy9E6fXb4OrpEIsBG3ZZtEJbvwb-65U8s3iGF4WEZhWlkW4J487FBlBPQR0CCC6V62KB37pBKG58_XQGzHaLG4YqFd9ZAmGWH1CIBwF8l_o/s850/IS.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="771" data-original-width="850" height="580" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpr2fWHddxFwcoivfz4trT7NZSfy9E6fXb4OrpEIsBG3ZZtEJbvwb-65U8s3iGF4WEZhWlkW4J487FBlBPQR0CCC6V62KB37pBKG58_XQGzHaLG4YqFd9ZAmGWH1CIBwF8l_o/w640-h580/IS.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="text-align: left;">I've been missing meeting up with my yarious ladies but have got back in contact with one I was particularly close to in the eighties, before the Old Bat (well there might have been <i>some </i>overlap). She also lives in Surrey so after things have got back to normal (at least a year, I suspect) we are going to meet up again. I haven't seen her since 1992! Glad I have lost so much weight. In fact none of my trousers fit any more as they are all to big around the waist. Speaking of ladies, a friend (well. more of an acquaintance) re</span><span style="text-align: left;">cently sent me this picture. "Isn't she the daughter of that girl you had a thing with in the early eighties?' he asked. After further research it proved to be the case that, yes, the lady, a German fitness model, is indeed the daughter of someone I worked with and got very friendly with at the office Christmas party, causing me to wake up the next day with a terrible headache in a dubious part of South London (actually anywhere in South London is dubious by definition). She does not have the (very) voluptuous form of her mother but the top half of her face bears a spooky resemblance to my glamorous former colleague. </span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEeVIn4FAWHR7e9hM4WjNs2iEJUdyqM35AI67-VWBNCdPt3yJMOkg0vRsc_Yo9Cj9MeXNY0ii-LLEJvB5_gAF_ZanfLwPmCXNu6l5s2eJ8fI8TyrFkuuhKN3fRN4uxnJdW9d4/s878/anna.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="878" data-original-width="810" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEeVIn4FAWHR7e9hM4WjNs2iEJUdyqM35AI67-VWBNCdPt3yJMOkg0vRsc_Yo9Cj9MeXNY0ii-LLEJvB5_gAF_ZanfLwPmCXNu6l5s2eJ8fI8TyrFkuuhKN3fRN4uxnJdW9d4/w590-h640/anna.jpg" width="590" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><br /></div><span style="font-size: medium; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;">Another daughter of someone I used to know, when at the same firm, is the lovely Anna Popplewell who starred in <i>The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe</i> in 2005. I travelled with her father, then a very junior barrister, when I was a very junior trainee solicitor, up to Shrewsbury for our first court hearing, about which I can remember absolutely nothing. I don't think he was even married then but what a world class beauty his daughter is, here in Mary Queen of Scots TV drama<i> Reign</i>. Such a long time ago!</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqutt9hsre5fskG1Y0YxXqDwmItDSVv27R0gG9rnsAdvcf1MVgdpCXZM4JJNSYqcQTNoWKUomN7CJPg2gTUAq57V3-3TZBPLZD9-nwupufuqNTxRXB8di43JjO5coYDu_K-h8/s2048/Carl_Larsson_Model_writing_postcards_1906.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1359" data-original-width="2048" height="424" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqutt9hsre5fskG1Y0YxXqDwmItDSVv27R0gG9rnsAdvcf1MVgdpCXZM4JJNSYqcQTNoWKUomN7CJPg2gTUAq57V3-3TZBPLZD9-nwupufuqNTxRXB8di43JjO5coYDu_K-h8/w640-h424/Carl_Larsson_Model_writing_postcards_1906.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;">Today's wallpaper, <i>model writing postcards</i> (1906) is by the Swedish artist Carl Larsson (1853-1919). Born into a very poor family his talent for drawing was such that it was recognised at the poor school and he was sent to the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts at the age of thirteen. His first work was as an illustrator and despite studying in Paris in the eighteen seventies he rejected impressionism and retained his crisp, clear style. His wife, Karin was also an artist and designer and between the two of them they developed what, even today, is known as Swedish Style; a cool minimalist approach to interior design and an embracing of the English Arts and Crafts movement.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRO0fuY8m65UZYLK3ShgcwoUZDnxj6_-kceCN-lkXPrQFxxIYa5ZdtvfORDH39k_CigNMThbPK1BCNpDxs4NkTpH_3-J3hnqfoQdMPsZlGlOMYD6h-DT_5gN8GpyaLgX7eo58/s600/elgar.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="586" data-original-width="600" height="626" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRO0fuY8m65UZYLK3ShgcwoUZDnxj6_-kceCN-lkXPrQFxxIYa5ZdtvfORDH39k_CigNMThbPK1BCNpDxs4NkTpH_3-J3hnqfoQdMPsZlGlOMYD6h-DT_5gN8GpyaLgX7eo58/w640-h626/elgar.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;">Today's music is ideal for listening to when painting colonial British soldiers; Elgar orchestral pieces. The best piece for this, of course is the triumphal march from Caractacus which I remember as the theme from the BBC series <i>The Regiment </i>in 1972 and 1973, Following a British army unit from Britain to South Africa in the Boer war and on to an early twentieth century posting to India. I remember it as rather cheap and studio bound (apart from some location shooting in Cyprus, standing in for India) and Elgar's music was very much the best thing about it.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;">More wargaming stuff next time. I apologise if the layout of this post is a bit wayward but Blogger have introduced a new 'improved' layout which, of course, doesn't work as well as the old one.</span></div></span>legatus hedliushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17078980742683576345noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26773117.post-16631967324952784792020-09-13T18:09:00.004+01:002020-09-13T18:09:37.796+01:00Paint Table Sunday: Back from a break, reading a wargames magazine over lunch, new temptations and devil dogs<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I haven't been painting for around two months now, largely because the Old Bat has taken a turn for the worse with her Long Covid and Charlotte has been unwell too, so I have spent a lot of time running around after them, going to pick up prescriptions, take the Bat for blood tests, doing domestic stuff, gardening (ugh) and cooking with some work fitted around all that. Latterly it has been the Tour de France on TV as well. Really, however, I have just not felt like it. We had that very hot weather which made painting impossible and then it got very grey and dark and I really need good light to paint as I cannot manage it under artificial light at all. Mainly, however, I was in that situation where the figures I had started on my workbench (to use an inappropriately artisanal term which makes it sounds like I could actually make something) were really only just started. I find nothing more demotivating than having a load of figures which are a long, long way from being finished.<br />
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Today, however, I actually sat down and did an hour's painting. It was all base coat stuff and I was struggling with my eyesight again but I will try to do a bit every day; as I have done in the past. I have Lucid Eye Atlanteans, Crooked Dice V aliens and some of the new Wargames Atlantic Afghans on the go. Now, since I got the latter, Perry have announced their own plastic Afghans as well but I will just get those too. With Afghans you need as many different figures as possible. More interestingly, Wargames Atlantic have announced plastic mounted Afghans which I will need for my The Men Who Would be Kings force (as I have actually painted my British starter force). I suspect the Afghans will be quicker to paint than the others.<br />
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In the past, my far from eagerly awaited pieces, Reading Wargames Magazines Over Lunch, have described a succession of meals in London, usually in what would otherwise be non productive gaps in my work schedule between meetings. No such luxury these days, as I haven't been to London since 28th February, so it was a rather unexciting tuna salad (the only fish I eat, along with smoked salmon) in the garden as I am on yet another gentle fitness programme. </div>
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<i>A long time ago as photographed by Sophie...</i></div>
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This one is working quite well, mainly because I do not have the Old Bat bullying me into running which I can no longer do, due to bad knee and hip joints (caused by doing too much road running in my twenties and thirties). Instead, I spotted something on Facebook called the Conqueror Challenge where someone (in New Zealand, where there is little to do) organises set walk routes which you do virtually. So you choose your target walk (I chose the ninety mile Hadrian's Wall) and you go out and walk (or run or cycle) whenever you want and put the total down (I've worked out how to do this on my phone or, rather Charlotte did). You pay £28 per challenge and then have a homepage you can plot your progress on. The Old Bat thinks that paying someone else so you can walk is insanity but it is working and I have been doing it for three months now. I completed Hadrian's Wall and am now doing the 280 mile Grand Canyon (as I have visited there). You can even see where you have got to, virtually, on Streetview. The Streetview views of the Canyon are not very interesting. It's a rocky canyon with a river at the bottom. That's it. Even Up North looks more interesting than that.</div>
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They even send you a very blingy medal when you finish so you <i>do</i> get something for your money. When I started, in June, I struggled to walk a mile and a half and was puffed and had chest pains but a month ago I walked six and a half miles home from Epsom hospital after my latest eye injection. You aren't allowed to drive after the injection and the Old Bat is still too ill to drive me, so the fact I could walk that far (in thirty four degree heat) shows how far I have come. No more breathlessness and no chest pains! I have to admit that accompanying wine and food for the Tour may have had a somewhat retrograde effect in the last two weeks, though, so I did another six and a half mile walk today.</div>
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Wargames Illustrated have been giving away a lot of Warlord Games figures. I can't bear to throw them away but I don't want most (any?) of them. There must be lots of wargamers with piles of these things. It's like accumulating Salute figures or free plastic rubbish from cereal packets in the sixties. The idea, of course, is that you look at your freebie and then go out and buy more. The opposite has been true of me, I am afraid. I looked at a set of Warlord Napoleonic cavalry and was so unimpressed by the poor sculpting and lack of crispness in moulding I vowed never to buy any Warlord plastics again. Victrix they are not. Anyway, last month the give away was a set of rules for Warlord's new French bread pizza naval wargame, Victory at Sea, which I have no interest in, having seen the ridiculous bases the models are on. Maybe it's not selling very well. Despite being interested in warships and having built many an Airfix ship model in the past I have no interest in naval wargaming. I just see an article in a wargames magazine on naval wargaming and my brain goes into power-saving mode. Yawn. So I didn't bother reading the rules showcase on the rules or another article about eighteenth century naval wargaming. I don't scan over the articles in Miniature Wargaming because the type is now so small I struggle to read it even with my reading glasses. I have to <i>really</i> want to read it to strain my eyes that much. Surely most wargamers are old like me and have eyesight that has deteriorated? Perhaps not. My father in law is 92 and doesn't use glasses for anything.</div>
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There was quite an interesting article on how wargames manufacturers are coping with the Chinese Virus but I was surprised, given Baccus employ seven staff, to discover, according to the article, that Warlord employ 103 people. One thing that occurred to me, regarding all the lockdown stuff, was how many rules writers were producing new solo versions of their games. I think I wouldn't buy a set now if it didn't have some solo rules as, realistically, I am not going to be able to organise my own games for multiple players. None of my close friends are interested in wargaming (possibly because most of them are women). I am still too nervous about the Chinese Virus, seeing what it has done to the Old Bat, to venture over to the <a href="http://shedwars.blogspot.com/">Shed</a>, despite Eric's kind invitations. Will things return to normal and solo players be forgotten again or will the Chinese keep churning out deadly viruses every year in their bat infested labs until they have achieved the crushing economic dominance they are seeking in their, no doubt, forty year plan?</div>
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<i>Starlux 54mm (cicra 1970)</i></div>
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I always look at the figure reviews in magazines and in the August issue I discovered that the new Plastic Soldier Company 15mm ancients figures are made of that new plastic resin which gives them bendy spears, No thanks. I had enough of that with my Airfix figures. Presumably, if they used hard plastic the spears would all break off, which demonstrates, once more, how inferior 15 mm is as a scale for model soldiers because the material you make them from seriously distorts the look of the figures (metal ones have fat spear syndrome, of course). Also, in the review section were the new Victrix French Imperial Guard lancers, How lovely are these? I would love a box of them! My father bought me a Starlux, painted 54 mm figure of a Dutch lancer (sorry, it's a better uniform than the Polish ones) when we went to Paris when I was small (I still have it).<br />
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But I saw an early painted example (above) of the Vixtrix models which just made me realise that I can't paint Napoleonics any more. Does unattainable quality painting of this level actually put people off from buying? It did me. I couldn't even begin to approach this level of painting. Just trying would stress me out. Thinking about the stress I have experienced here in Chez Sick over the last months I realise that one of the reasons I haven't been painting is that I often find painting figures stressful, not relaxing, when things don't go the way I want them too.</div>
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The theme of much of the magazine was command and control which writers all seem to think isn't considered very much in wargames magazines but actually seems to come up quite regularly. This is of great import to the gamer (rather than painter, like me) end of the hobby who love to bang on about it all the time. I remember many tedious discussions about it when I went to Guildford Wargames Club (an old school sort of club) which I no longer go to, partly because of the stress of driving down the A3 on a Monday night in an eighty mile an hour traffic jam. I didn't read any of these command and control articles as they are probably designed for all those people who used to write orders on paper or have courier models to deliver orders. They tend to not care if their wargames table are covered in <i>counters </i>(which I <i>hate</i>). </div>
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There was one article I actually bought the magazine for. I recently picked up Dragon Rampant, as it was reduced, and this article by Daniel Mersey, the rules' author, included all the statistics for the Copplestone Barbarica range of 18mm fantasy figures. Well, the name Barbarica is fairly recent, they weren't called that when they first came out (18mm Fantasy was the catchy name Mr Copplestone devised) and I bought a lot of them. Having been rude about 15/18mm figures in my last (and this) post I am quite excited now about organising some armies for these rules, as they require small forces. I painted some of these about nine years ago (above) and have some others underway (if I can still manage to paint them!). They are <i>very</i> small.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioKeZ2hYhJ4_9pUtGhg1sFfRC_od2DGl8xwap0Mmhf5wH2S32w1CVeB2qT9Z0dU77RVki5sRCrSCv0BvZedyqErbl5RO8eIqjqh7UcPkQihvbv-i0N8cljb0H-Xrd4v9MXIJA/s1600/3a339510accb5ce0fbbb6d3a683220ec_original.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="740" data-original-width="367" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioKeZ2hYhJ4_9pUtGhg1sFfRC_od2DGl8xwap0Mmhf5wH2S32w1CVeB2qT9Z0dU77RVki5sRCrSCv0BvZedyqErbl5RO8eIqjqh7UcPkQihvbv-i0N8cljb0H-Xrd4v9MXIJA/s400/3a339510accb5ce0fbbb6d3a683220ec_original.png" width="197" /></a></div>
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Now, of course, I shouldn't buy any more figures but I did buy into the Kickstarter for Hot and Dangerous figures which are, essentially, 28mm models of attractive ladies in historical uniforms (what can be their appeal?). They are reasonably historical and not too pin-up like, compared with some I have seen, perhaps because, they have a lady designer. They are a Polish firm, I believe. Certainly some will go on eBay but I just hope I can paint them to the standard they deserve.<br />
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A major temptation are the Perry brothers announcement of plastic Franco-Prussian War figures. Will this mean metal ones as well? I bought some Franco Prussian figures from Eagles of Empire some time ago but they were, perhaps, a little too idiosyncratic in style for me.<br />
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However, this week Eagle of Empires announced a new range of First Schleswig War figures. Now some years ago Matt Golding, of Waterloo to Mons, started to produce his own range of (25mm) figures for this but the range went into limbo, so I might be very interested in these, depending on what the figures look like. Early examples look good.<br />
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Good news is that North Star have put their 1864 range back up on their website so I will order some more Danes to finish my first unit.<br />
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Two rants this week. One wargames related and one not.<br />
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Now, last time I derided the people who hijack new products launches with demands for information on forthcoming pet projects or different scales. This time I have recently seen examples of ridiculously inappropriate ranges in plastic. Some time ago Victrix launched a page on the internet where people could make requests as to what they would like the firm to do next. As ever, some of the answers amazed me. Now I see Victrix as what I would call a rank and file supplier. You buy lots of boxes of core troops in plastic from them and then fill out the more unusual items with metals. Making plastic figures is expensive so you need to be on to a sure seller to make money hence, no doubt, their focus on Napoleonics and Ancients/Dark Ages. Some of the suggestions are very sensible such as Biblical or Bronze Age figures where, rather like the Dark Ages, the number of different troop types needed is quite limited. It didn't take long for the first request for Dynastic Chinese to come in, then Renaissance Poles, fourteenth century Koreans, War of 1812, Bannockburn period, Spanish Civil War etc. Then there was a suggestion for Ancient civilians. And how much diversity will plastic enable you to do on these? Think, man, think. Then there were the people who said 'I know such and such a company already make them in plastic but yours would be better' (ACW and WW2). Then, of course, you had people suggesting plastic forts and dice. One woman suggested female figures including such future best sellers as RAF female supply pilots. Really? A plastic sprue of these? Calm down dear. Wargames Atlantic, who are even more a rank and file supplier, have also just launched a similar poll to equally inappropriate answers.<br />
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<i>This is how I see all dogs.</i></div>
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Speaking of which, one of Wargames Atlantic's recent sets was of Dark Age Irish, which would be quite useful for Vikings in Ireland type games. However they include no less than six warhounds in the set. I have noticed a plethora of doggy models coming out recently. Were war dogs really that common? I have to confess (and I know some of my readers really like them) that I <i>hate</i> dogs. Not just dislike but hate the stinking, filthy, barking, biting, disease carrying, aggressive carnivores. I cannot for the life of me understand how people can bear to have them in their homes. It's just medieval! Would you keep a sheep or a pig in your house? Ugh! No doubt this is all made worse by recent encounters on my walks by these bounding, yapping creatures jumping up at me when I am trying to walk, quietly. "Oh he is just being friendly' cry the owners, who are totally unable to keep them under control. No he isn't. He is a dog. He is seeing if he wants to eat me. Last year more than 3000 people in Britain needed surgery after dog attacks, Another 5000 had to go to hospital but didn't need surgery. Imagine if wargamers were injuring this many people. Wargaming would soon be banned as inciting violence. Before Lockdown, my lovely former girlfriend <i>K</i> suggested she drive over to see me. That would be splendid, I thought. "Oh I'll be bringing our dog. He is very friendly!" Sorry <i>K</i>, you can't come, I replied. When someone says friendly dog I just have visions of them licking your face. Just disgusting! You make friends with people, not dogs. Grr! I shall now see how many friends on Facebook I lose.<br />
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Today's music is Rick Wakeman's new album (as it is Rick Wakeman you can no doubt still call it an album) <i>The Red Planet.</i> This is very much in his <i>The Six Wives of Henry VIII </i>and <i>Criminal Record </i> (my favourite) mode, although perhaps there is a <i>little</i> too much guitar for me. The first non classical record I bought (or rather John Palmer at school bought it for me as he worked in Our Price in Kingston and got a staff discount) was Wakeman's <i>White Rock</i> which I then spent ages seeking out on CD as it wasn't released in the UK until comparatively recently, so I had to buy a Japanese import at great expense.<br />
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Today's wallpaper is William-Adolphe Bougereau's Biblis (1884). During his lifetime (1825-1905) Bougereau was considered one of the world's greatest painters but he fell out of favour at the beginning of the twentieth century, along with most other classicist painters, and was not really rediscovered until the nineteen eighties. Biblis (or Byblis), the legendary daughter of Miletus of Crete, is here depicted in despair, as her twin brother had just fled her amorous advances. Naughty!<br />
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legatus hedliushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17078980742683576345noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26773117.post-90727195898347449482020-07-18T22:03:00.000+01:002020-07-31T09:24:29.093+01:00Paint Table Saturday: Danes and an off the wall SF project<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I haven't posted for six weeks or so as I hadn't painted anything but this has changed this week when I finished my 1864 2nd Schleswig War Danish infantry, so I can have another Paint Table Saturday post today. </div>
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Not surprisingly, given my glacial painting rate, I started these twelve figures in October 2015 but had real trouble finding uniform information about them. I started off painting them dark blue until a helpful Danish reader pointed out that actually only the jackets were blue and they were all wearing greatcoats which were almost black. I took this to mean very, very dark blue but, in fact, the coats were very, very dark grey. Having painted them all blue I gave up on them for a bit and only sporadically went back to them. Over the last few months they have had much more attention and I finished them on Tuesday. The backdrop, which enhances them considerably, is a painting by the nineteenth century Danish painter LA Ring, who painted some wonderful Danish landscapes.<br />
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<i>The Little Hornblowerr in Hans Christian Andersen Boulevard, Copenhagen</i></div>
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These are a set of figures that I bought when they first came out,<i> before</i> I had seen the TV series <i>1864</i>, which inspired them, of course. There is rather more information about the uniforms now, so that I could even do an accurate company flag. Unfortunately, North Star have temporarily taken the range off their website while they are running at a reduced staff level but I hope they get some more soon. They are even promising more figures for the range and I do have some Danish dragoons started. I used to travel to Copenhagen quite regularly (to the extent that I acquired a lady friend from the Danish Treasury) and remember a statue of a soldier in this uniform near to the Tivoli Gardens and Dansk Industri, where I was working at the time.<br />
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I also had a distant member of the family's Swedish branch, Lieutenant Johann Frederik Nielsen (1831-1886), who was in the Danish army at the time of the 1864 war. One think I vacillated over for years was how to paint the bases. The beginning of the war took place in cold, snowy weather but by the end of the war the weather was unseasonably bright and sunny. Having read lots of depressing stuff about all the ways doing snowy bases didn't work. I abandoned my plans to have snow bases (which would meant a snow board too, of course) and went for mud with the sort of yellow grass you get after the snow has melted and a semi-frosty effect on the earth.<br />
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So what are my current three projects, now? Well I have put the Romans on the back burner again as they are going to take forever. Doing the black undercoat for the metal armour on the figures will take an age but every time I use some black I will paint one. So the next ones I work on will be the Lucid Eye Savage Core Atlanteans. </div>
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I had started the seven figures they do but then spotted a new one I hand't got. I added some more character figures frm the range which were relatively new so then had a group of five extra on order. These are lovely figures to paint so I will keep them to hand. I have now based the extra Atlantean so need to get him to the same initial stage as the other figures and then I can do all eight together.<br />
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In the second row are five figures I said I wouldn't get because they are made in China (it looks like the poor Old Bat may not fully recover from the Chinese Virus, according to her doctors). Unfortunately, I caved in and am delighted I did, as the new Wargames Atlantic Afghans are lovely. It still took me over an hour to construct five, however, although they fit together very nicely. Somewhere I have some Perry metal Aghan figures I have undercoated so I will move these along together.<br />
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<i>I had several girlfriends who were reptiloids underneath</i></div>
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The third group of figures is one of those insane impulse purchases I sometimes go in for. I am on the 7TV Facebook group (for some reason) even though I don't play the game (I may have the rules, somewhere) and someone showed some photos of some characters from the eighties TV miniseries <i>V.</i> Now, I remember watching this in the summer of 1984 when ITV ran it against the opening of the Los Angeles Olympics, which the BBC had exclusive rights to. Lo and behold, there it was on Amazon prime. I watched it again and quite enjoyed it. I noted a number of things. The special effects were pretty poor (but probably good for a TV show at the time). The accuracy of the aliens' blasters make Galactic Stormtroopers look like Stalingrad snipers (you would have to make it throw a one to hit). At this time, American actors had normal coloured teeth and not fluorescent white ones. Despite being resistance fighters, living in a series of secret bolt holes, they all had access to hairdressers able to blow dry their hair (even the men). Michael Ironside played a character appropriately called Ham. The best thing about it, of course, was Jane Badler in a cardboard scenery chewing performance as Diana; one of the best female SF villains ever (up there with Jacqueline Pearce's Servalan in <i>Blakes Seven</i>). So to find I could get a little model of her was enough for me to order all eight figures Crooked Dice make. They are promising more fairly shortly. More on this bizarre project as it develops but my initial main concern is finding the right shade of burnt orange! I am now watching the 2009 reboot but it is rather dreary so far, despite the presence of the luminous Morena Baccarin and, frankly, the special effects hadn't come on as much as they should have. At least the hair was more under control.<br />
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So, what has been making me grumpy? Well, everything in the news, so I won't talk about that (several more people unfriended on Facebook in the last six weeks or so). Mainly, though, lack of social distancing in supermarkets. Rules vary, so Tesco are very strict (move in one direction, no overtaking and one queue for checkouts). If the person in front takes five minutes to decide what soup to buy <i>everyone</i> has to stop moving. Get a move on! Pea and ham or Lentil and bacon. That's it! Move! Move! Move! Don't stop! Cattle prods!<br />
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In Waitrose, however, it is almost a free for all, with people taking no notice of the distance rules and shopping in couples or families. Why does it take two people to do the shopping? You both write a list and then <i>one </i>person does it. It's not a social activity, unless you are very, very sad. If you see an unmissable offer on Brain's faggots then ring up your wife (who is probably called Vera or Mavis) and ask how many packs you need to stock up on. Well, you won't see them in Waitrose as they don't sell them, of course. Iceland, Asda or Budgens, probably. Actually I'm surprised the perpetually offended haven't objected to the name yet. Also.keep to the edge of the aisle so people can pass you (if allowed) if your brain is so small that you cannot decide what soup to buy. Do not block the centre of the aisle!<br />
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<i>Victrix 12mm WW2</i></div>
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My wargaming related grump relates to Mr Non Sequitur. They appear in every manufacturer's model release thread. Proud wargames company with excellent new product says 'here are our lovely new 12mm WW2 tanks'. They want them to be admired. They want people to talk about what other 12mm WW2 will be coming out. No. Mr Non Sequitur says "What about the Persians?" or "Why don't you make Samurai?" No! That is not what we are talking about! Or. proud manufacturer with new 28mm range they have spent ages developing says 'Here are our lovely new 28 mm figures'. Mr Non Sequitur. 'Can you do them in 15mm?' No! No! No! 15 mm is for people who eat Brain's faggots and have wives called Mavis. They are for people with no appreciation of the proportions of the human body! They are, with very few exceptions (Copplestone Barbarica range) aesthetically offensive. Do not even get me onto 10mm and 6mm. Hello, we have made figures where their heads are the equivalent of two feet tall. I expressed an interest in the 12mm figures on the Victrix Facebook page and all these people appeared saying 'wish they had been 15mm'. No, they are not, so Victrix can sell more figures and tanks not supplement already existing collections. Then all these people popped up saying 'buy these lovely metal 15mm equivalents instead.' Guess what? They all had really weird proportions like most 15mm metals.<br />
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Another rant, about plastics companies asking customers for what they want released, will be in the next post.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-3VoMTuuf2SpoBDEgk6gm8gqH9E64dSjSC0DZ4askt_e4LLELRTSYqvhgXog1UEu789V6tuakPil1Zk-RsgPjSKsL6N5dTeqVL9XDHxf8sRNeAvKDSZLNH7rOuRFSkxrZWm8/s1600/eyJidWNrZXQiOiJwcmVzdG8tY292ZXItaW1hZ2VzIiwia2V5IjoiNzkzNzI0Ny4xLmpwZyIsImVkaXRzIjp7InJlc2l6ZSI6eyJ3aWR0aCI6OTAwfSwianBlZyI6eyJxdWFsaXR5Ijo2NX0sInRvRm9ybWF0IjoianBlZyJ9LCJ0aW1lc3RhbXAiO.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="896" data-original-width="900" height="636" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-3VoMTuuf2SpoBDEgk6gm8gqH9E64dSjSC0DZ4askt_e4LLELRTSYqvhgXog1UEu789V6tuakPil1Zk-RsgPjSKsL6N5dTeqVL9XDHxf8sRNeAvKDSZLNH7rOuRFSkxrZWm8/s640/eyJidWNrZXQiOiJwcmVzdG8tY292ZXItaW1hZ2VzIiwia2V5IjoiNzkzNzI0Ny4xLmpwZyIsImVkaXRzIjp7InJlc2l6ZSI6eyJ3aWR0aCI6OTAwfSwianBlZyI6eyJxdWFsaXR5Ijo2NX0sInRvRm9ybWF0IjoianBlZyJ9LCJ0aW1lc3RhbXAiO.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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Keeping it Baltic, today's music is Swedish Composer Lars-Erik Larsson's (1908-1986) enjoyable symphonies one (1927) and two (1936). Larsson is little listened to outside of Sweden, which is a shame as he wrote some fine, melodic music.</div>
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Today's wallpaper is <i>Erigone: daughter of Icarius</i> by the French painter Georges-Marie-Julien Giradot (1856-1914). He quite often employed this tight framing on his subjects rather than a more distant full figure view. Apart from his mythological studies he produced many paintings of village life. In a complex plot, even by Greek mythological standards, Erigone ends up being deceived by Dionysus who seduced her after disguising himself as a bunch of grapes. Hmm. Anyway Erigone is Virgo of the Zodiac.</div>
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legatus hedliushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17078980742683576345noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26773117.post-84359452332001592432020-05-31T18:38:00.003+01:002020-06-07T10:16:49.353+01:00Paint Table Sunday: Jaguar Tribe and back to Romans!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I finished another seven figures yesterday (that's twenty-nine in May!) in the shape of the Lucid Eye Jaguar Tribe for Savage Core. I stupidly decided to paint central American style art jaguars on their shields and really wish I hadn't. The good thing about the Savage Core rules, though, is that this is all you need for a force (plus the two jaguars).<br />
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I have already got the Atlanteans under way but, even though I have a few more Savage Core forces to paint, I will not start another one of those for a bit. Instead I will progress my 1864 Danes as they are rather more straightforward figures. I did a bit on them today and I might even get them finished next weekend, especially as my Nigerian work seems to have finished for a bit so I can do some in the early mornings if it stays sunny.<br />
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<i>Current projects</i></div>
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I was reading a piece in <i>Variety</i> about the twentieth anniversary of the film <i>Gladiator</i> (2000, naturally) which is this year. While interesting, in a behind the scenes way (I met Ridley Scott a number of times and disliked him immensely), it contained two extraordinary statements. Firstly, the otherwise estimable actor, Djimon Hounsou was quoted as saying that there were no slaves in Roman times (obviously slaves were only owned by American plantation owners who were sold them by the dastardly British). Secondly, Richard Harris said that Romans didn't wash, hence Connie Nielsen's herb fan in the film. I know he was Irish not British but had he never heard of the city of Bath? Perhaps he thought it was named after the biscuit. This just adds to my utter bemusement as to why people (they are probably the ones who refer to themselves as 'folk') would take any notice of <i>anything </i>an actor might say and treat it as if it were worthwhile, correct or important. Most actors are an ill-educated bunch who fall into acting because they are too stupid to get a proper job and messed around at school doing impressions and being the 'class clown'. I really hope, in a post viral world, that people realise what a worthless bunch most of them are.</div>
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<i>Very happy to be assimilated</i></div>
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That brings me to <i>Star Trek: Picard </i>which I realised I can watch on Amazon Prime. I am quite enjoying it, even though I found the Picard character rather annoying in <i>Star Trek: The Next Generation.</i> In fact, most of<i> The Next Generation </i>cast were annoying, other than Michael Dorn's Worf. I hadn't realised <i>Star Trek</i> had jumped into the random swear words pool as I've not seen <i>Star Trek: Discovery.</i> But Stewart is an Ac-Tor who also thinks that people should take notice of what he says because he cam memorise a few lines and employ a portentous voice. In fact, I was surprised how frail Stewart's voice was in <i>Picard</i> (I hadn't realised that he will be eighty in July). I was surprised to see a Star Trek TV show with state of the art modern digita1 effects. I was also surprised to see how good Jeri Ryan looked at 52 (Borg implants, eh? - she claims not). She was, of course, the only reason to watch <i>Star Trek Voyage</i>r and, indeed, her appearance in that show pushed the ratings up 60%. There have been some complaints about some nasty violence but, of course, the actors in the bedroom scene (in <i>Star Trek</i>? I thought they all went to bed and had a cup of replicated cocoa) keep there underwear on so God doesn't get upset (or, rather, her peculiar self-appointed representatives on earth don't get upset). </div>
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<i>McGregor: characterful</i></div>
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It is much better than two of the other Sy Fy shows I am watching, <i>Pandora</i> (shot in Bulgaria, so you can imagine the budget and, indeed, all the sets look like, well, modern Bulgaria - I even recognised some of the buildings) and <i>Vagrant Queen </i>(shot, more interestingly, in South Africa on an even smaller budget). The latter is saved for the Legatus, in a Jeri Ryan sort of way, by South African actress Alex McGregor who has an interesting nose (I do like a lady with a characterful nose - see also Claudia Black from <i>Farscape</i>). It does generate a slight urge to think about some dusty SF backwater type gaming. I wondered what Rogue Stars might be like but saw some reviews of it which put me right off.<br />
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<i>Would you like mayonnaise with your fish and chips</i></div>
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The third Sy Fy channel series I am watching is<i> Siren</i> which is a quite good fantasy (not Fantasy) series about feral mermaids set in a fishing town in modern Washington State and filmed, inevitably, in and around Vancouver. One of the main locations is Horseshoe Bay and I stopped there for lunch once, with my particular friend Sophie, on the way up to Whistler and an insurance brokers' conference which, I am afraid, we largely ignored when we got there in favour of invigorating outdoor activities. The mermaids, when not walking around naked (no, nothing is shown as that would be too <i>rude </i>for Americans) when in human form eat a lot of raw fish and those scenes, for a fishaphobic like me, are <i>really </i>offensive.<i> </i> Although the lead actress is quite cute (despite being <i>Belgian</i>) the male actors are almost unbelievably ugly. I know they are supposed to be in a fishing village but some of the beards make me feel ill. You really need that blurring effect to be deployed that puritan TV shows use if anyone is naked. The following programme contains offensive beards. Ugh. At least <i>Siren</i> has survived for three series, I suspect <i>Pandora</i> and <i>Vagrant Queen </i>will not be so lucky.<br />
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<i>Perhaps being a bit ambitious here, although Eric the Shed would have them painted in an afternoon.</i></div>
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Anyway, this is all an extraordinarily roundabout way of saying that my next figure painting project, now the Jaguar Tribe are done, is going to be...Romans. Not Early Imperial Romans, even though I have a bag (my daughter tells me that the boxes are much more eco-friendly and I should boycott firms who put figures in plastic packaging) of Victrix EIR which do look lovely. No, thinking about <i>Gladiator </i>got me seeking out the unit of Aventine Praetorians I started years ago for the Macromannic Wars (as depicted at the beginning of <i>Gladiator</i>). I found them quickly enough but then I couldn't remember where I had put their shields and pila but eventually located those too. Disappointingly, I thought I had painted a bit more of them than I had and they are not going to be quick to do but am happy to get going on them again after an (ahem) seven year break.<br />
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Completely, contrary to my intention I bought into The Drowned Earth Ulaya Chronicles Kickstarter during one of their live chats this week. Two things changed my mind: firstly, the dinosaur I painted last week came out quite well and secondly, we won another contract for the Nigerians (no, fortunately it is not the Oil Minister's daughter)and we get paid by the UK). Actually, another reason is that creator James Baldwin says some interesting things about creating games and figures and sends every backer a personal thank you note. It won't be out for a year, though so no pressure on the painting!<br />
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Today's music is Oscar nominated American composer Marco Beltrami's score for <i>1864.</i> I also own his score for <i>Gods of Egypt </i>(2015)<i> </i>which I have played when painting some of my Dark Fable Egyptians.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj20daZgfSi2JPZQZ0PY3_O2B-HUiUlDs0M-OGtmcO8fqnt01KyZGMhsB8_LWt6OSSkVRlYQX8BGdhz4s7tO5PoFGgplqaXUyHOT4wimW0p2NBC9ylc3AaIJo2BS2eouGws6wo/s1600/ondine.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="974" data-original-width="1259" height="494" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj20daZgfSi2JPZQZ0PY3_O2B-HUiUlDs0M-OGtmcO8fqnt01KyZGMhsB8_LWt6OSSkVRlYQX8BGdhz4s7tO5PoFGgplqaXUyHOT4wimW0p2NBC9ylc3AaIJo2BS2eouGws6wo/s640/ondine.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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Today's wallpaper is another illustration by an artist who worked for <i>La Vie Parisienne</i> in the nineteen twenties and, appropriately, features Ondine, the sea nymph who falls in love with a mortal (yes, <i>The Little Mermaid</i> is based on the same story), The French in the twenties were not worried about their mermaids being naked. This is the work of French artist Léo Fontan (1884-1965), He also designed posters for the Folies Bergère and worked on the interiors of some French ocean liners in the thirties. Some of his book illustrations were very graphic, in more ways than one.</div>
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legatus hedliushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17078980742683576345noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26773117.post-14020953535762509402020-05-24T16:40:00.000+01:002020-05-24T16:40:37.743+01:00Paint Table Sunday: Roger, Roger and more on dinosaurs!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I have had a couple of good weekend's painting, Last Sunday I had a bit of a frustrating day as I wanted to finish my Lucid Eye Jaguar Tribe figures as I had painted and varnished them, however I couldn't find my superglue to attach their shields. I opened a new one about two weeks ago so know it is in my room somewhere but where exactly I couldn't fathom. Rather than wasting any more time on looking for it I decided to have a go at painting my <i>Star Wars </i>droids instead.</div>
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I undercoated five of them them last Saturday, so took a deep breath and painted them using a method I saw on You Tube using Citadel's contrast paint; the first time I had really used it. Given that one coat of this was enough, followed by a few silver bits and painting the blasters black, they are unique for me in that they are almost entirely painted in acrylics, The other unique thing was that they took less time to paint than they took to assemble! I did the last four this weekend. Anyway, here they are. I didn't like the very thick plastic bases they came on so, in another first, I mounted them on transparent bases so I can use them for number of different scenarios. Now I want the core boxed game for the Clone Wars but fortunately it is out of stock everywhere!</div>
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So here are my current projects as of today. At he front re the Savage Core Jaguar Tribe and I have to just finish then varnish their shields and add static grass. Next I have got out the 1864 Danes again as they are well on their way and not too fiddly. A new lady pirate (see below) has found her way in there too. Behind are the next group of Savage Core figures but they still have a long way to go.</div>
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I have been humming and hahing about The Drowned Earth solo Kickstarter but it is quite expensive and we have just had to buy a new cooker. The Lockdown is seeing people work on more solo adaptions of rules, which is a good thing for me as solo play is really all I am going to be able to do, going forward. Also, I won't get frustrated with myself because I don't understand the rules and won't ruin everyone else's game by being slow and useless! My doctor says that my dyspraxia does contribute to my inability to play games, interestingly. Maybe Savage Core is enough. Perhaps I will just buy their Baryonyx model, as it is the local dinosaur! </div>
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The Drowned Earth Kickstarter is going tremendously well (they don't <i>need</i> my money) and they are now planning to include a big herbivore. They were having a poll to choose between a ceratopsian (not a real one; an imagined one) and an ankylosaur and the ceratopsian has won, Why no love for ankylosaurs? There are plenty of toy triceratops' and styracosaurus' on the market but I have never seen an ankylosaurus. When I was little it was a very popular dinosaur.<br />
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Ankylosaurus seems to have fallen out of fashion, sadly. I am not up to date on the surprisingly fast moving world of fossil classification to know if it has gone the way of brontosaurus and been removed from prehistory. Or maybe it is too hard to mould? I had one of these model kits when I was little. I took the cover illustration rather literally and painted it a lovely glossy chocolate brown with a nice silver top.<br />
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Of course I have also bought into the Jurassic World Kickstarter, so that will be enough dinosaurs for a while. I had this small Copplestone Castings nanotyrannosaurus on my desk and on Saturday I painted it start to finish. Good dino practice! It's about 9 cm from nose to tail so would also work as a bigger beast for my 18mm fantasy figures. Maybe the Antediluvian retrosaurus next!<br />
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I have had another Kickstarter arrive in the form of some figures for Pirates of the Dread sea. I didn't bother with the rules but just went for the human and skeleton pirate figures as I still harbour (so to speak) a desire to do some Pirates of the Caribbean the Online Game type, skirmishes. As usual I will saw off most of the slot so I can mount the figures on washers like my other pirates. They are big figures compared with my Foundry ones but match very well with the Black Scorpion ones I have. The Contrast Paint I used on the droids should work well on the skeleton pirates.<br />
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<i>Where I used to work. The Old Bat asked architect Richard Rogers where she could get a model of it for our wedding cake so he got his studio to build one: one of only four architetcts' models of the Lloyd's Building in the world.</i></div>
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I am now officially a pensioner, as I got my first monthly payment from Lloyd's of London this week. It certainly helps towards the household bills, which I need with three non-contributing parasites living here (well, alright, the Bag for Life contributes a bit). The Old Bat has been off work for so long that she no longer gets sick pay and isn't entitled to statutory sick pay. Never mind, we won another contract on the back of the one we are working on at the moment, which is something. Guy, at least, has got his contract for his first job in September, which is better than some of his other friends who have had their offers withdrawn due to the Chinese wrecking the economy.<br />
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I am working my way through the trashily enjoyable <i>Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World on </i>Amazon Prime and I really must get some Lost World tribe of the week games worked out. All the sets look like theey are made of MDF anyway, Although Jennifer O'Dell's, jungle girl Veronica is the obvious sex symbol, I find myself strangely drawn to the Rachel Blakely character (perhaps because she is a better actress). She certainly contributed to my colour choices for the Lucid Eye female explorer I painted a few years ago.<br />
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<i>Jennifer O'Dell and Rachel Blakely, Splendid!</i></div>
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The two actresses posed for this particularly effective picture back in the show's heyday (if, indeed, it ever had one). Which reminds me, my second collection of Facebook Lockdown Lovelies is on my Legatus' Wargames Armies blog <a href="https://legatuswargamesladies.blogspot.com/2020/05/lockdown-ladies-from-my-facebook-posts.html?zx=705e35d8475bacd1">here</a>. I am running a long way behind because these posts take ages to do! Rather than posting pictures of actresses from the past, as I have been doing, many are doing things like putting up pictures of their ten most influential albums, I realise how poor my comprehension is of pop (and especially rock) music when I see these. In most of the ones I have seen so far I don't even know the artists let alone having heard of the albums. Maybe one day I'll put mine on here. Not that I can ever choose ten of anything in these type of things and they would vary from month to month, of course.<br />
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First random annoyance of the week is...people who describe other people as 'folk'. Folk? <i>Really</i>? I just find it a very odd and old fashioned term. It just engenders a vision of people dancing around maypoles in some yokel part of Britain wearing big hats and chewing straw. No doubt the whole folk music and Morris dancers thing interpolates itself into it. The term seems more popular in America and, perhaps, up North (I do not study Northern culture if it can be avoided). It's like using 'personages'. It's also like the way American call drinks 'beverages'. I have no rational explanation as to why these annoy me but they do!<br />
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Second annoyance of this week are people who write LOL after a supposedly amusing comment they have made on Facebook. Almost without exception the comment is<i> not</i> amusing but people feel that they have to be funny even if, like me, they have no sense of humour. LOL, appalling netspeak though it is, should be used as a<i> reaction</i> to s<i>omeone else</i>'s comment, not your own. It's like those tragic celebrities who clap themselves on TV shows or people who laugh at their own supposed witticisms, like Eurosport's annoying cycling commentator Carlton Kirby. Oh, he does think he is amusing. but he is just annoying. Grrr!<br />
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Anyway. today's album is <i>His Dark Materials</i> by Scottish composer Lorne Balfe, one of the Hans Zimmer school. I really enjoyed the TV series although I have no knowledge of the books and haven't seen the film <i>The Golden Compass</i> (2007), which covers the same story, even though my old college appeared in it. Interestingly the music was written before the TV series and is more in the way of a stylistic dry run for the actual soundtrack which I then had to acquire too. Atmospheric stuff but more suitable for painting steampunk figures to, I think.<br />
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<i>Dakota Blue Richards: Little girls get bigger every day</i></div>
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In the feature film, the young heroine, Lyra was played by Dakota Blue Richards, who I only remember from the Oxford-set detective series, <i>Endeavour.</i> She is the type of actress who reprehensible Fleet Street photographers always seem to want to pose in profile. <br />
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Today's wallpaper is an illustration by Maurice Milliere (1871-1946), Born in Le Havre, he received most of his artistic education in Paris, where he became a top illustrator for magazines like <i>La Vie Parisienne</i> and <i>Le Sourire</i>. He, essentially, developed the genre of what would become pin-up art, with his saucy, under-dressed, young. modern ladies about town and was a great influence on pin-up master Albert Vargas.</div>
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legatus hedliushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17078980742683576345noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26773117.post-85141631410232686242020-05-10T18:44:00.001+01:002020-05-10T18:44:39.329+01:00Paint Table Sunday: Warriors of Rohan<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I'm carrying on with my three projects at a time approach, so my current work is some Savage Core Jaguar Tribe and Atlanteans and some Star Wars Battle Droids. The Jaguar tribe are coming along and I did a bit on them today but they have fiddly shields to do so they will not be done this week, I think.</div>
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Yesterday I finished twelve warriors of Rohan from the Fields of Pelennor boxed set. I had to find the shields which were in the box and was depressed at how many figures there are still to paint, considering I did army of the dead and orcs a year and a half ago! I had more varnish problems with these. Some time ago I switched to Vallelo polyurethane matt varnish as the Humbrol was drying and leaving white patches. However this time the Vallejo didn't not dry matt on some paints I had used a Citadel shade on. Frustrated I stirred some Humbrol for twelve minutes and put it over the shiny bits. Seemed to be OK but was still leaving the odd white patches which I had to paint over. I wish there was a matt varnish that actually worked reliably!<br />
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I need to start thinking about what should come in next. Ideally, I want something that is not just started but well on the way so I can get them done reasonably quickly, as I find figures with a lot of work still to do on them rather depressing. I keep some of my most recent (i.e. the last seven years or so) figures in little plastic tubs behind my chair on one of my bookshelves. I need to look at what is in here and see what I could push along. At present I am thinking of my 1864 Danes as there are only a few (nine?) of them and they have a quite simple uniform. At least none of these need preparing as they are all based and undercoated at least. However Charlotte wants me to do some riders of Rohan. I did start six some years ago but they are in a box somewhere and I don't know which box. </div>
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The redoubtable Mike Siggins commented on Facebook this week that he hadn't worn a watch for thirty years but was now thinking of getting one. I find this very peculiar. I have worn a watch every day since I started senior school at eleven. I really cannot understand people who say that they have the time on their mobile phones. So, when they want to see the time they have to get their phone out of their pocket and look at it (and maybe even unlock it first), as opposed to just a quick flick of the wrist and there it is. Also what if the sun is out? Then you can't see anything on a mobile phone screen. Do people then have to find a tree to stand under? Also I cannot see the numbers on my phone as they are so small, so then I would have to get my glasses out too. Hence why my everyday watch is this one, as it is so clear. I went to a meeting once at a big architects firm and they were all wearing this watch (based on the clocks at Swiss railway stations) as it is a design classic! One more thing, of course, I don't usually carry my mobile phone on me as I don't want it microwaving my brain every hour of the day. Mostly I forget to charge it up too. </div>
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This weeks annoyance is people drinking beer out of bottles. Again, just why? I have been watching several US TV series lately and I'm sorry but I think men drinking from silly little beer bottles looks childish or even, he said, not worrying about being politically incorrect, effeminate. They look like they have baby's beakers as they sip, sip, sip ineffectually. The worst example, oddly, is the otherwise estimable Perdita Weeks in <i>Magnum. </i>When she does it, obviously to look like one of the boys, she looks very uncomfortable doing so. She purses her lips and tries to sip, sip sip, a tiny amount of beer. Glasses is what you need for beer. Big glasses so you can get a proper mouthful not a baby beaker serving. Cognac is for sipping. Beer is for quaffing! And as for that idiotic idea of sticking citrus fruit into the neck of the bottle to restrict the flow even more and make the beer taste like washing up liquid. Really. That is why you live in a Third World country, Mexicans! I absolutely refuse to drink beer out of bottle!</div>
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Today's music is the soundtrack to <i>Prehistoric Park</i> by Daniel Pemberton, who went to the same school as I did. It goes very well as background music when painting<i> </i>Lost World type tribesmen. Speaking of which, I have discovered I can get Amazon Prime on my TV. This has been available for years for me but I didn't know how to do it but Charlotte set it up so she could watch S<i>haun the Sheep: Farmageddon</i> for her birthday. The Old Bat watched it too but as she walked out of Star Wars and has never seen another science fiction film in her life all the in jokes were totally lost on her. I have always wanted to watch the <i>Man in the High Castle</i> but instead I am watching <i>Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World.</i> Excellent! Dodgy CGI dinosaurs, the same location as <i>I'm a Celebrity Get me Out of Here, </i>lots of Australians with equally dodgy English accents<i> </i>and<i> </i>tribe of the week (no more than twenty of them) in a forty foot across set.. And, of course, Jennifer O'Dell in her little leather outfit and Rachel Blakely looking lovely too. I wonder what Conan Doyle would have thought of it? I wonder what he would have thought of his estate taking the money and running, as well? </div>
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Oh, alright here is a picture of O'Dell as Veronica (a name which holds a lot of resonance for the Legatus). She designed this outfit herself so was not exploited by the costume department as you might think. As the credits say, ' befriended by an untamed beauty'. Apart from her hair, that is, which is always tamed to within an inch of her prehistoric curling tongs.</div>
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Today's wallpaper is this lovely breakfast time study by William Breakspeare (1856-1914) from Birmingham. Not a very well known painter but he exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer exhibition eight times and studied in Paris for a time.</div>
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legatus hedliushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17078980742683576345noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26773117.post-73041024642206060862020-05-03T17:20:00.000+01:002020-05-03T17:21:20.872+01:00Paint Table Sunday: Locate and cement<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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No doubt quite a lot of you remember the days when Airfix kits had written instructions, before the days when pandering to Johnny Foreigner saw the end of the phrase 'locate and cement' in favour of pictorial instructions, as these ignorant foreigners didn't understand English (although, in reality, they almost certainly did). Apparently, Airfix are doing very well during the lockdown with sales beating even the pre-Christmas period and they were even mentioned in the <i>Times</i> a week or so ago. While I would love to have a go at an Airfix kit (or finish that 1/48th Spitfire I have actually done quite a bit of) sadly the pressures of my current work for the government means I do not have all the spare time others do. I have to say the Airfix PR team are playing a blinder in pushing their product as a boredom reliever through social media (shudders, even as I type the words) and I am pleased they are doing well, as they have been through several rocky periods in the past and they are a real part of my childhood.</div>
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That's not to say I have eschewed the heady smell of polystyrene cement altogether, as I am working on two sets of plastic figures at present. Admittedly, there is not much gluing to be done on the Games Workshop Warriors of Rohan, other than sticking on a few shields. I had a good day on them yesterday; now that I am happily (mostly) embracing my blotchy painting style. I did make one mistake on them, though. One of the many problems with my eyesight is a loss of colour sensitivity, so I have, for example, difficulty in distinguishing some blues from greens. I did one of those online colour blindness tests recently and only scored two out of twenty, although, apparently, colour blindness is much more common in men. Oddly, the problem is worse in bright sunlight. This has become an issue when painting the Rohan figures, Stupidly I painted all the slightly different greens on the base colours first and then decided to shade them some time later. Usually, I paint the base colour and then shade it straight away. As a result I could not tell which paint I had used on parts of them and ended up shading them with the wrong greens. I am not going back to re-do them but will remember this when I start the Rohan warriors on horses later in the year. As the Old Bat's very Scottish grandmother used to say: 'No-one running for their life will notice'. </div>
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A very different plastic prospect are the Star Wars Legion battle droids that are Project 4 for 2020 and will shortly become Project 3 as the Rohan warriors are nearly done (or maybe I should just keep adding numbers rather than just having three numbered projects). Incidentally, I had a conference call with someone this week and she insisted on pronouncing it 'proe (rhymes with Edgar Allan) -ject' not 'prodge-ect'. It drove me mad. Short 'o'! Short 'o'! Being Irish is no excuse! Goodness me these droids are a fiddle, though. As you can see from the above they come in lots of teeny-tiny pieces with teeny tiny instruction which you have to locate, cut off, sand and then cement. I thought I had made four, sometime last year but, disappointingly, I discovered I had only put together two of them, I put together another two yesterday and it took over an hour. Far too stressful to be relaxing. I thought Victrix Napoleonics were bad but they are as simple as Duplo compared with these.<br />
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<i>They're all called Roger...</i></div>
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Having got these under way (they do look good when constructed) I idly considered getting them some opponents. Clone Troopers, perhaps. This is when I discovered that the Star Wars Legion stuff is almost impossible to obtain. Is this just a UK problem? Is it because they are made in China? What is the point of launching a big game from an enormously well known franchise if you can't get any of the product? Poor management and distribution. I was ready to spend some of my new pension money on it but can't! Maybe I'll buy a Rohan house instead. Except you can't.</div>
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I have been looking, inevitably, at a load of other wargames stuff which I shouldn't be thinking about and two are from the Plastic Soldier Company, a firm I have never bought anything from (yes, there are some). Firstly, I watched a You Tube video (embarrassingly, as I always feel if I do this my IQ will drop twenty points, I'll start calling it 'follidge', slurping tea noisily, having a disgusting beard and all the other things that put me right off YouTube hobby videos) on PSC's Mortem et Glorium rules. Please can we have no more Latin names for wargames rules? It just reminds me of Latin at school and cursed Caecilius, his ugly family and nasty dog. This video effectively put me right off the rules as they were one of those sets where vast proportions of units can be knocked out in one turn. I had decided to look at them because of their new 15mm plastic figure, which I saw previewed in <i>Wargames Illustrated.</i> These are made of some sort of bendy plastic (or resin); perhaps like the John Carter figures. The figures are quite nice (not <i>very </i>nice) although they suffer from cricket bat sword syndrome. The video was quite well done but I couldn't follow the rules for the life of me and <i>don't wear a hat indoors</i>! Such are the things that loses the Legatus as a customer. I think I'll stick to metals for this scale (not that I have really painted any 15mm metals yet). Possibly this will be Proect Five or Six this year.<br />
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Also coming out soon from PSC is a new range of 10mm tanks and figures for an imagined WW3 game set in 1983 called Battlegroup Northag (ugly name; it sound like a witch from Yorkshire). The tanks look very nice but the figures are squat and horrid. They are all in the new bendy plastic so I can see a lot of flaking gun barrels like the old Airfix polyurethene tanks. Maybe this is why the complete barrel is not shown on the box as it has gone bendy! Now I have, in the past, flirted with the idea of wargaming this imaginary alternative history, mainly because I enjoyed a book by Harold Coyle called Team Yankee many years ago. This featured a Soviet nuclear strike on Birmingham, which seems like an excellent concept. In fact, my sister, who knows about such things, once told me that in the event of a conventional war in Europe the Russian;s first tactical nuclear target was actually Staines, where I am from, because Heathrow Airport would have been a major staging point for US aircraft.<br />
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Of course Team Yankee is already another, 15mm, game by Flames of War but, again, I am not impressed by the figures nor the Warhammer 40,000 style point blank tank conflict. If the PSC ones had had US opponents instead of British I might have been in trouble. Worryingly Victrix's promised 12mm figures for WW2 look really nice but I am safe on those for a while. Anyway. as I am struggling to paint 28mm figures, 12mm is surely lunacy. But...<br />
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One game which is real science fiction but I have always been interested in is The Drowned Earth. I like the setting and I really like the figures and, like Savage Core, it utilisse small forces. I had a chat with the friendly chaps behind it at Salute about three years ago and, sadly, they said it was not possible to play it solo. However they are launching a solo version next week, pitting your forces against dinosaurs. One of which is Baryonyx, Surrey's very own dinosaur, the first skeleton of which was found only ten miles from where I live. Hmm...<br />
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While assembling my droids I listened to the extended version of John Williams music for <i>Star Wars The Phantom Menace</i>. In retrospect this is, I think, the fourth best of his nine Star Wars Scores (<i>The Empire Strikes Back</i> is the best, of course and the loss of Herbert Spencer as orchestrator was felt in the later scores). I like it more and more. As the Old Bat is still mostly in bed I then watched the film again in the evening, purely to research the droids, of course. I don't suppose the Star Wars Legion people will ever release a Gungan army, sadly, as who wouldn't want to squash Jar Jar Binks with a hover tank?</div>
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Today's naked lady comes form the brush of French artist Yves Diey (1892-1985). This picture, which dates from the early fifties, was sold at Christies eight years ago for £2,750. Bargain!</div>
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legatus hedliushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17078980742683576345noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26773117.post-10924974301970334002020-04-25T17:40:00.000+01:002020-04-25T17:40:00.176+01:00Paint Table Saturday: Three projects<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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It's paint table Sunday and I have realised that it is counter-productive to write blog posts when I could be painting so I am doing this, retrospectively, now that the good light has gone. I get bored painting, very quickly, and given my eye issues I no longer find it relaxing and can only manage about forty five minutes at a time, now. To stop myself getting too bored, therefore, I usually have around three active projects on the go at the same time.</div>
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I began these warriors of Rohan, for Lord of the Rings, back early last year but have pulled them out again. I have now located their shields and today I finished the base coats of them, So for the next few weeks it will be onto shading.</div>
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<i>First completed figures of 2020</i></div>
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This week I finished the Lucid Eye Red Simians and as the factions for this game are only seven figures I dug out another unit I had started. In fact all I had done on these was the flesh base coat. Why do I hate the word 'flesh'? It gives me the shivers and I never use it in spoken English. It's like the American 'panties' or 'tights' or 'offal'. Just nasty, creepy words that make my brain recoil.</div>
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Next up, therefore are the Jaguar Tribe who are based, I believe, on some Aztec period Central American people. I haven't looked up how they should look as the historical name of the people is too complicated for me to remember. It was like yesterday when my father in law asked me what antibiotics the Old Bat was on and I couldn't for the life of me remember or pronounce their names. The Bat had a relapse last week and the doctor sent her to Epsom Hospital. They actually put her in a bed in the Covid-19 ward (interestingly, only four people in it) while they did tests. Oddly, they didn't test for the Chinese Virus as they were sure that she had had it. They put her chest pains down to Gastroesophageal reflux and presecribed some pills, They let her out of the hospital and the next day she felt worse. By Friday she couldn't breathe but, fortunately, the local doctor rang up to check on her. She prescribed some antibiotics and I just managed to get them before the pharmacy closed. Just as well as by eight in the evening she couldn't breath or speak (that's how you know the Old Bat is <i>really</i> ill). However the antibiotics kicked in and this morning she is tired but much better. The doctor had rightly diagnosed pneumonia (which a lot of Chinese Virus patients seem to be getting afterwards). So, anyway I moved the Jaguar tribe along yesterday between running errands for the Bat.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-L0ZZ_zqvFEvDVv5VLFbYgyertEqboPbklSf7NS6okUNGMy9piAnsgXx9Cf81zkNDbI8weVTgkJ5WZfHcQUYLHY5De5lLMxWujlW2bLdBJwQii2RxkuzmCpNHBOZca7fGem8/s1600/20200425_145945.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="701" data-original-width="1409" height="318" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-L0ZZ_zqvFEvDVv5VLFbYgyertEqboPbklSf7NS6okUNGMy9piAnsgXx9Cf81zkNDbI8weVTgkJ5WZfHcQUYLHY5De5lLMxWujlW2bLdBJwQii2RxkuzmCpNHBOZca7fGem8/s640/20200425_145945.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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Also, as part of the Jaguar faction, there are a couple of, well, Jaguars. I will paint one as black and try to paint the other in its spotted form, although that may be a bit ambitious.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhK4Do1043SghtTlE06kUPqW7G9HdDK0nIk-42jKT_23Mi-P3rpt4POPmqyuLkpflv6e_PuKA4XktQQadMvkRlEYS-JUckonqieIvGCshYk3AcFuPI5Bu0QltBk7S61HB-k0C4/s1600/20200425_145738.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="684" data-original-width="1600" height="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhK4Do1043SghtTlE06kUPqW7G9HdDK0nIk-42jKT_23Mi-P3rpt4POPmqyuLkpflv6e_PuKA4XktQQadMvkRlEYS-JUckonqieIvGCshYk3AcFuPI5Bu0QltBk7S61HB-k0C4/s640/20200425_145738.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifSxD_iboGolTOr0FnN1PhYJjFj-wtrICElGyZC-GKPaX3IV4rCjxXJ9fFStRvzP5Vuqho9ak_-KfDRUs0iW3SqvSlRUtc4wcLkzctzEY1SSJzui7cD_IyXVqtJUhc6Vm8-Yg/s1600/verus+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="485" data-original-width="443" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifSxD_iboGolTOr0FnN1PhYJjFj-wtrICElGyZC-GKPaX3IV4rCjxXJ9fFStRvzP5Vuqho9ak_-KfDRUs0iW3SqvSlRUtc4wcLkzctzEY1SSJzui7cD_IyXVqtJUhc6Vm8-Yg/s400/verus+2.jpg" width="365" /></a></div>
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Finally, my third unit under way is another Lucid Eye Savage Core unit, the Atlanteans, who I based and undercoated on today. They are are, basically, Ancient Greeks. I have painted quite a lot of Greeks so should be able to manage these. I need to decide on a colour scheme for them. As they are not historical I can go wild so I think I am going to use the colour scheme I used for Lucius Verus who, in turn, I based on a costume from <i>Cleopatra</i> (1963).<br />
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So, these three projects should keep my busy, although I am flat out at work at the moment writing a very long report so can't paint during the day. Maybe I can get a bit done some mornings but the weather is not going to be so bright next week.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgn3SvkrLHz-Tb8Rv4NII-86Z8_7k3rEN1yUxskFZ2k9urKW1xZsU9TbfMfWmx6JsM8MCtURBzb8KI1j06knKjJb-FatPHqmsbZ7PEgXy-Jul2uAU9tH-CpQNqZgELnPEZ8hJ0/s1600/92250728_2540197956297041_6756724060509437952_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1311" data-original-width="1216" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgn3SvkrLHz-Tb8Rv4NII-86Z8_7k3rEN1yUxskFZ2k9urKW1xZsU9TbfMfWmx6JsM8MCtURBzb8KI1j06knKjJb-FatPHqmsbZ7PEgXy-Jul2uAU9tH-CpQNqZgELnPEZ8hJ0/s640/92250728_2540197956297041_6756724060509437952_o.jpg" width="592" /></a></div>
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I usually drink Lifeboat Tea but have nearly run out so have not opened the last two boxes I have (because if you finish your last boxes you will get the Chinese Virus and die) so am currently drinking Fortnum & Mason's Queen Anne tea which is loose leaf. Now, I used to be a terrible tea snob at university and we all only drank leaf tea. It's years since I have had it at home but it is a bit of a revelation, not least as regards price per mug. The box I have (which was part of a hamper my parents in law were given at Christmas) is £12.95 a tin. But twenty-five teabags of the same stuff is £5.95. This makes the loose tea much, much better value. I started the tin three weeks ago and have over a third left. twenty-five tea bags, costing nearly half the price of a tin, would have lasted me about three days. I think it was my slinky lady friend <i>K</i>, at Oxford, who used to drink this. It is certainly fragrant, elegant, warming and, indeed, familiar. There is a Fortnum & Mason shop in the Royal Exchange in the City, so when I can next go to London I might get some more or try Royal Blend, which is the one I used to have.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVKFtQNmjRn80T0R8Yu1WHSrfsxeXK6pWOPp5bJv8Cyvaiqlb9lwsy_lP2J13wo5oDDdjSv9aSwUD0D48fFSrjB4bFgtI8oIiOg-nGIeS40A2gEpNDnHrqAivaCpCDfvxznyU/s1600/742411050-Victory-at-Sea-Yamato2_1200x1200.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="471" data-original-width="1200" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVKFtQNmjRn80T0R8Yu1WHSrfsxeXK6pWOPp5bJv8Cyvaiqlb9lwsy_lP2J13wo5oDDdjSv9aSwUD0D48fFSrjB4bFgtI8oIiOg-nGIeS40A2gEpNDnHrqAivaCpCDfvxznyU/s640/742411050-Victory-at-Sea-Yamato2_1200x1200.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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So, finally, what are my annoyances this week? One wargaming and one not. A really major annoyance is that on my new computer keyboard the insert key is next to the backspace key, something I don't remember from my old keyboard. So when I hit the backspace key (which I do a lot) I more often than not hit the insert key. This turns my cursor into a blue block which starts gobbling up text until I notice. It is not good for my blood pressure! Argh! It's just done it again while writing this paragraph. The second annoyance is bases on wargames ships. Now, I have ranted on before as to my inability to comprehend why people put bases on AFV models (they aren't going to fall over!) but the new Warlord Games WW2 ship game (which I might have been interested in) come with the most ludicrous bases I have ever seen on a ship model. They are all stuck on something that looks like a French bread pizza base. Talk about an instant no sale. The models for their Cruel Seas weren't like this! Anyway, these naval games seem to require huge amounts of on board (to coin a phrase) clutter and I don't like tokens and cards next to units.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4ymLrAUSIpMNfM0drpacCvzA_9bVZ9icu3m02qaIsj22b5x3FMT1D6q0PuxiT1nvgr47ZyqnCqYFAeWRtQuexXb79MPTGHyR8UAb232FISV8XqROH52uvrmFPAS1FrYvs8eQ/s1600/a2549724221_10.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1200" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4ymLrAUSIpMNfM0drpacCvzA_9bVZ9icu3m02qaIsj22b5x3FMT1D6q0PuxiT1nvgr47ZyqnCqYFAeWRtQuexXb79MPTGHyR8UAb232FISV8XqROH52uvrmFPAS1FrYvs8eQ/s640/a2549724221_10.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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To go with my Savage Core painting, I am listening to American ambient composer Michael Stearns' atmospheric 1995 album, <i>The Lost World.</i> It really is a perfect accompaniment!</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRh_OL6XYVQF1c01tWcKCuQiYTcJBJRODoyITmwYgXP3sfxZP2oMvrZzWeSgw_GrEh_xOILO6KU-qDIeeAWwxn08Fr-vtZfboKviBuPaJDpNNQr-5cno_vncDgBRc8Mky1tGM/s1600/Theo+van+Rysselbergh+1920bathers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="956" data-original-width="1237" height="494" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRh_OL6XYVQF1c01tWcKCuQiYTcJBJRODoyITmwYgXP3sfxZP2oMvrZzWeSgw_GrEh_xOILO6KU-qDIeeAWwxn08Fr-vtZfboKviBuPaJDpNNQr-5cno_vncDgBRc8Mky1tGM/s640/Theo+van+Rysselbergh+1920bathers.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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Today's wallpaper is the accurate if unimaginatively named 'bathers' (1920) by the Belgian painter Théo van Rysselberghe (1862-1926). It was painted toward the end of his life, in the South of France, like most of his nude groups.</div>
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legatus hedliushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17078980742683576345noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26773117.post-46948535652569495892020-04-18T18:44:00.000+01:002020-04-18T18:44:57.758+01:00It's not Salute!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHMVGpfu1jg08UsDRW9ik6BPfcXUfYguauL_YnOVGcHNYNt4-KtLIWVtduxgH_ZtDEa6Owk-YCR0ltkBanA6XDOe3bC1yLjU4WX5sRNZUxGQvinimNfx8UfkysK-3GYnaMh6A/s1600/20200418_130112.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1229" data-original-width="1399" height="562" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHMVGpfu1jg08UsDRW9ik6BPfcXUfYguauL_YnOVGcHNYNt4-KtLIWVtduxgH_ZtDEa6Owk-YCR0ltkBanA6XDOe3bC1yLjU4WX5sRNZUxGQvinimNfx8UfkysK-3GYnaMh6A/s640/20200418_130112.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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Today is not Salute! Well, well, hardly any of you (except <a href="http://shedwars.blogspot.com/">Eric the Shed</a>) have wondered what has happened to the Legatus blog. It is just over a year since I last posted; easily the longest interval since I began this blog back in April 2006. So why did I stop? There are two reasons, really. Firstly, I am now using Facebook to keep up to date with the hobby more than blogger (Facebook posts can be so much shorter to write or, rather, they are with me) but, secondly, I haven't really been painting anything. I had a good start to 2019 with some Byzantines and Indian Mutiny figures but then I stopped. I did finish one figure since I stopped blogging: a Modiphius John Carter Great White Ape which I finished in August. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihM5-HfDqS96MQBu46-cH8k-32V22EvGvlmg6MXYJfepzbsWutL3I6tQSgO4huS379_3EcGqFEKNM-AifLNu6VSIRuVISm2_XkWX90MQQPX4HJqKNql6iDC4h5er-VxNRgBTQ/s1600/20190804_150752.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="977" data-original-width="1110" height="562" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihM5-HfDqS96MQBu46-cH8k-32V22EvGvlmg6MXYJfepzbsWutL3I6tQSgO4huS379_3EcGqFEKNM-AifLNu6VSIRuVISm2_XkWX90MQQPX4HJqKNql6iDC4h5er-VxNRgBTQ/s640/20190804_150752.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i>My most recently completed figure (August 2019)</i></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ2CwsWSOSe45h7xYQc833IMN8BLvs4lte9fHyr8hfCZvlj8C8KQVEnGNSY5rxpRtymQ6Vi-ChY09wxsk7HJqN0KBrfF6hC2x4CcOdfHaadJRLXdgsDU7qdRUbfNcWQ60O8oA/s1600/7707220918_f1ff7c0735_k.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="961" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ2CwsWSOSe45h7xYQc833IMN8BLvs4lte9fHyr8hfCZvlj8C8KQVEnGNSY5rxpRtymQ6Vi-ChY09wxsk7HJqN0KBrfF6hC2x4CcOdfHaadJRLXdgsDU7qdRUbfNcWQ60O8oA/s640/7707220918_f1ff7c0735_k.jpg" width="384" /></a></div>
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I based the colour scheme on the cover of the Edgar Rice Burroughs paperback I had when I first read the John Carter stories back in the seventies. I meant to get straight on and paint some more of these very nice figures (not so nice to cut off their sprues and assemble - this figure took me an hour to construct). I really enjoyed painting it but when I went back to some 28mm ones (John Carter himself was supposed to be next) I struggled with the small size and my fluctuating eyesight. Now my eye consultant is pleased (and I am pleased to have such a slinky eye consultant) with the progress on my eyes following laser treatment and eye injections but I realise that I will never be able to paint like I could ten years ago. Gradually I am coming to terms with this but this is where Facebook is a nightmare because many people on it do the most amazing work (why are so many superb painters Spanish - is it the light?). I just cannot comprehend how they can paint the way they do. I wouldn't mind if I could paint quickly like Eric the Shed but I can't do that either!<br />
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One thing that annoys me with the Facebook groups I am on is when someone posts something obviously utterly brilliant (a Victrix Roman I saw today) and they ask people what they think. Talk about fishing for compliments. Hideous. Even worse is when people post things and other people comment negatively in a 'it should be a darker blue' sort of way. Of course these people are inevitably <i>foreign</i>. They do not realise that the way to do it in Britain is to quietly deride something you don't like <i>without saying anything</i>! It is very bad form and very vulgar to say what you actually think. In our second year at university, a Canadian Rhodes Scholar joined our legal year group. After about a week he grabbed one of us and asked: 'why does nobody talk to me, come and visit me (being North American he probably said the annoying "come visit me") or sit with me at lunch?" We all smiled and were non-committal. The answer, of course, was that he was five feet tall, had a voice that made him sound exactly like Mickey Mouse and he kept telling everyone he already had five degrees. "<i>Canadian</i> degrees?, asked one of our year, now a QC. We should have said you are short, squeaky, Canadian, too pushy and a show off. But we didn't. We just sneered at him behind his back. The proper British way.<br />
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Another thing that is annoying me about Facebook pages is people who show their finished figures by holding them in their fingers. Why? Do they not have a flat surface to put them on? I don't want to see your revolting, grimy, paint stained fingers. And the person who uses their hand as a palette! Good grief.<br />
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I have to thank <a href="https://wargaminggallimaufry.blogspot.com/">Alastair</a> for showing me how to stop my Facebook notifications being swamped by dozens of posts a day from the Star Wars Legion and Lord of the Rings groups. I now have turned opff notifications from all groups so I only see posts from friends )hopefully).<br />
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Brexit has seen me delete many Facebook 'friends'. I see lots of people say 'we can agree to disagree'. How feeble! If you disagree with me you are <i>wrong</i> and I don't want anything to do with you. I didn't speak to my best friend for six weeks following a 'discussion' about Brexit, so if you are an ephemeral Facebook friend you have no chance! I have also started getting friend requests from people who, when you look at their page, have no content on it. I am not interested in chasing friends for the sake of it. If you have no content I have no interest in you (exception to Eric the Shed as I appreciate his Facebook stance) and he is a proper acquaintance I know in real life.<br />
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The other reason that I haven't done any painting is that the Old Bat doesn't like it. One of my lady friends opined that I shouldn't keep calling her the Old Bat (even though her sister does) so sometimes I will refer to her as the <i>Bag for Life </i>instead. The Bat for Life has no hobbies. She does not do leisure time. Her entire life is an endless list of jobs to be done. She thinks I should be spending my time doing jobs too. It gets her really mad if I am painting because she says I should be mowing the lawn (a constant <i>cri de coeur), </i>or sweeping up leaves (a more pointless activity I cannot imagine) or fixing the tiles in the bathroom that have fallen off etc. The problem is that I have dyspraxia and I just can't do the more complex DIY tasks she requires (or even the easy ones - the number of time I have mown over the mower cord). I can't do them to her standard, anyway, If I try she berates me for being useless. So now I absolutely refuse to do anything if I know she can do a better job. Which she invariably can. I pay for your life, I say, so you can do domestic jobs. This was all well and good until several big contracts we had got delayed. All our work is for overseas governments and we are often tripped up by their budgeting cycle, so the work I was supposed to do in Botswana in the Autumn and Egypt in January and February has been delayed. These two jobs would have, essentially, paid for my life for a year but no contracts no money. "You should be finding a better job", cackles the Bat. So if I even looked like I was moving unpainted figures around I got barked at and told to get a job in Sainsburys, if I had that much spare time. I applied once, years ago and they turned me down. Then, of course, came the Chinese Virus and all of our work was postponed indefinitely (I am supposed to be in Cairo at present). Fortunately, a piece of work for the UK government in Nigeria has appeared and I can do that from home, so now I am allowed to paint again (a bit). I am certainly not like these people who have spent the last few weeks just painting while being paid by their employers. I manage the odd hour here and there if the light is good. I tried a bit yesterday but it was raining and hopeless even with two daylight bulbs on but today was better and I am enjoying it again.</div>
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Then, of course, it appeared that the Bat caught the virus. She had many of the symptoms (her sister is a former GP and was convinced she had it) and was bedridden for a week and I had to sleep downstairs on the floor (as Guy had been sent home early from Exeter University and filled the spare room with junk). I went to bed early as I was tired too but actually enjoyed reading in bed, which I can't when I am in with the Bag for Life. I am reading Sax Rohmer's T<i>he Insidious Dr Fu Manchu</i> which is all about the evil Chinese bringing a mysterious virus to London. Hmm. The poor virus didn't stand a chance when pitted against the Bat, however, and she was soon up and about and nagging again in no time. Charlotte and I rued the end of our quiet civilised time together, discussing dinosaurs, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and the Isle of Wight heritage Facebook page. All of us had some symptoms and all of us feel very fatigued but we could have had some other bug, for all we know. Given I have some high risk factors (underlying health issues is the trendy term) I have to be especially careful. "If you get it you will definitely die", said the Bat, delightedly. </div>
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So what other things have happened to the Legatus in the last twelve months? Don't worry there is not now going to be 24 paragraphs of tedium. In fact, one of the good things about it being a year is that I can justify not going into any great detail as it has been so long, so:<br />
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<i>Charlotte and the very Old Bat on the terrace of our hotel. Charlotte was allowed a Bellini but I had to have water.</i></div>
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<li>We all went to Venice for the Old Bat's sixtieth birthday (it was too hot). </li>
<li>Guy got his BA from Oxford Brookes and started a masters at Exeter University. This is costing a fortune, which hasn't helped the finances at all, as he doesn't get a student loan for the academic fees and we have to pay his third term's accommodation of £2500, even though he won't be going back. Grr!</li>
<li>Charlotte slept a lot and lately has been growing plants and re-learning the recorder. So she tootles away playing Cantina Band, Harry Potter and Jurassic Park.</li>
<li>I went to Warsaw (again) and Beirut (for the first time) (it was too hot). I really liked Beirut with nice food, superb wine and many lovely ladies, especially in and around the Parliament which is where I was based.</li>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKsusWKrWuu8bSkFcEnjqYDDR4lH1gHevdJll6qy9c7w3nOrSbRZ9zeapFPJbGpNSVywTdyQd247y2QGXKOlyoRD_1mgdE7MvHaAZhkix2elJaoK5nc0ep0stL-4FgDXmXV6g/s1600/thumbnail+%25284%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="843" data-original-width="628" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKsusWKrWuu8bSkFcEnjqYDDR4lH1gHevdJll6qy9c7w3nOrSbRZ9zeapFPJbGpNSVywTdyQd247y2QGXKOlyoRD_1mgdE7MvHaAZhkix2elJaoK5nc0ep0stL-4FgDXmXV6g/s640/thumbnail+%25284%2529.jpg" width="476" /></a></div>
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<i>What a hoot!</i></div>
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<li>I had an owl stuck in my study and we had to call animal rescue to rescue it. They filmed it all and wanted to put it on TV but the Old Bat had a sudden panic and rang them up to ask them not to show it as she had her old clothes on and hadn't tidied the house.</li>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhh_9772VI8HQ9CMVv9Zhndo7icKDltF4yUjj1sbwCgXWAQTgqGSEN-wIFKORoEFbCA0KfwmIqQxGjAmZMBf9hbSgTzvYk2YVWfJSCvdjH8_DUNNUqYwk2DUWUnpxGpkFxuEkk/s1600/Mark++Linda-Jane+021.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1143" data-original-width="1600" height="456" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhh_9772VI8HQ9CMVv9Zhndo7icKDltF4yUjj1sbwCgXWAQTgqGSEN-wIFKORoEFbCA0KfwmIqQxGjAmZMBf9hbSgTzvYk2YVWfJSCvdjH8_DUNNUqYwk2DUWUnpxGpkFxuEkk/s640/Mark++Linda-Jane+021.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<li>My sister got married for the first time and I had to give her away. Her husband is an otherwise estimable chap so I am not sure why he wanted to take my sister on but he has transformed her into a happy, jolly person who is rather less frightening than she used to be. </li>
<li>I had my sixtieth birthday and the very next day, on my way down to Cowes, was called an OAP by the girl in the ferry ticket office. No party or presents though, due to the finances, having had to just pay £8000 towards Guys fees and accommodation..</li>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1ovYARevjOPp8eYbF1pk9qIWipS_Mzshp8NQ7mYj2aPfJrbMnVeOdcvACyusXryoWxAms2dXZF0yMwdtOK6YFvtnIK9owpNDf4Onki1DKoXovVkAzTJtfr-Dzirm5CSK9eyc/s1600/20200418_130121.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="581" data-original-width="1600" height="232" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1ovYARevjOPp8eYbF1pk9qIWipS_Mzshp8NQ7mYj2aPfJrbMnVeOdcvACyusXryoWxAms2dXZF0yMwdtOK6YFvtnIK9owpNDf4Onki1DKoXovVkAzTJtfr-Dzirm5CSK9eyc/s640/20200418_130121.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i>Warriors of Rohan are currently under way</i></div>
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So, (he said, to annoy John Treadaway who <i>hates </i>that) what about wargaming? It is a long, long time since I had a wargame at Eric the Shed's but I am still buying the magazines and looking greedily at all the lovely new figures. How many times have I said that I have to rationalise? But I really do. A lot of figures are going to have to go. The key issue is space in my room. I don't have any and have random boxes all over the floor. None of this has stopped me looking at more stuff, though. I keep looking at all these new dark ages style fantasy plastics but think they are pointless for me given how many LotR figures I have. I am intrigued by Victrix's 12mm WW2 but will wait until they do, perhaps, North Africa as a lot less scenery is needed than for NW Europe. One thing I might give another whirl is Frostgrave, as they have released some solo scenarios for it and I picked up that and the rule book for free as a download. The magic aspect might be too complex for my simple mind though. Solo has got to be the way forward for me from now on, I think, so I am also looking at Rangers of Shadow Deep which has a solo play option, especially if I can use some of my LotR figures for it.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRl-I7bjJx-jjJSv8ICayvZ4SnnpgWJz6EEFXKAupbAbwXeSaYFecV7BvcrVeaatopkrMg9faBzDvYftWt5pzVuIDd7pHMFCmXB6qMQfyjwEJEyliZUg8pQi1AB9_bWH-BXpM/s1600/56375725_2244244755892364_675001952207110144_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="527" data-original-width="1251" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRl-I7bjJx-jjJSv8ICayvZ4SnnpgWJz6EEFXKAupbAbwXeSaYFecV7BvcrVeaatopkrMg9faBzDvYftWt5pzVuIDd7pHMFCmXB6qMQfyjwEJEyliZUg8pQi1AB9_bWH-BXpM/s640/56375725_2244244755892364_675001952207110144_o.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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I bought into West Wind's War and Empire Dark Ages Kickstarter even though these are 15mm as I have started some tentative use of washes on my figures for the first time in fifty years of painting figures; notably on the Lord of the Rings figures I painted at the end of 2018, It's still cheating, though. I also used it a little on some Fireforge Byzantine archers which I had to finish before I went to Salute last year or I could not justify buying any more figures!</div>
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I have several Kickstartes still to arrive and at least one looks like it never will (Black Hallows townsfolk) but hope Jurassic World and Pirates of the Dread Sea will materialise. The worst one is Acheson creations Kongo Africa. I sent my survey in in December 2017 and haven't received a single thing. I will certainly never buy anything from them again. To me, now, they are the Chinese of the wargames world. I quite like some of the new plastic fauns and centaurs from Wargames Atlantic (to be fair they are not technically their figures) but they are made in China and I am now boycotting Chinese goods. </div>
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I think that is enough rambling for what should have been one of my most enjoyable days of the year (and yes, as you may gather, I do blame the Chinese). Having got this post out the way I hope to do some more increasingly blotchy painting and more blogging going forward.<br />
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As I am painting Lord of the Rings figures, today's music has to be Howard Shore's soundtrack music. My iTunes playlist of this is 21 hours and 35 minutes!</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjbj18_Vy9x7ixdlDconLfiPcKiz10HuBCnBXkI5Skhzo49OBkJcvSsL-tnuCqPMB5EhsJ3l1ILz4cTA24MyWGOFugkPA8vYRPA4TYknRJT7l4577L8k0J4u7YwD4aHupDvK4/s1600/Bare-Back-on-a-Bearskin-Delphin-Enjolras-Femme-Classic-Art-large.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1156" data-original-width="1600" height="462" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjbj18_Vy9x7ixdlDconLfiPcKiz10HuBCnBXkI5Skhzo49OBkJcvSsL-tnuCqPMB5EhsJ3l1ILz4cTA24MyWGOFugkPA8vYRPA4TYknRJT7l4577L8k0J4u7YwD4aHupDvK4/s640/Bare-Back-on-a-Bearskin-Delphin-Enjolras-Femme-Classic-Art-large.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i>Bare back on a bearskin </i></div>
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Today's wallpaper is by Delphin Enjolras (1857-1945) who originally started as a landscape painter before focussing almost exclusively on his favourite subject of women, usually depicted naked and lit in interesting ways. All of his work was done in pastel rather than paint.</div>
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legatus hedliushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17078980742683576345noreply@blogger.com36tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26773117.post-70246503460171944352019-04-21T16:41:00.003+01:002020-09-24T23:54:30.404+01:00Paint Table Sunday and a Martian<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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It's Paint Table Easter Sunday and, thankfully, the family have gone down to Hampshire for the usual family Easter Egg Hunt, leaving me in peace. I couldn't go this year as I had some work to do and there wasn't a seat for me in the car, for reasons too complex and tedious to go into. So, apart from the work, which I am having to spend hours on ever day of the holiday weekend because the World Bank have brought a report deadline forward, I have been getting some painting done. The original Paint Table Saturday was first a blog and then a Google+ group originally set up by a lady in Belgium. It really helped me focus on my painting for a while but now, with Google removing Google+, it has disappeared so I don't need to keep to a Paint Table Saturday and Sunday is actually a better day for this so it will be Paint Table Sunday from now on and I hope to post a bit more often.</div>
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Having finished a figure this week (see below) it was time to reassess my next unit and I decided to put the Napoleonic British aside for a while as it is a 25 man (and a horse) unit and so I got the 1864 Danes out again as there are only 12 of them, Hopefully, I can move these along a bit over the next ten days and get them finished for the end of April which will bring me back to a unit a month this year.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZT1UOdyiExkRKN9Dy5qkToeC1mC9msCLN8kF9gVV29bprRqgr3jV-atWaP9JGDexnepsMPEzIPrQ9WuTdXUvox_tXm2-mJucKf9UD34LHqnXTrL1Bhb0A4eEkqo_oX5S07Tg/s1600/20190421_132628.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1224" data-original-width="1600" height="488" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZT1UOdyiExkRKN9Dy5qkToeC1mC9msCLN8kF9gVV29bprRqgr3jV-atWaP9JGDexnepsMPEzIPrQ9WuTdXUvox_tXm2-mJucKf9UD34LHqnXTrL1Bhb0A4eEkqo_oX5S07Tg/s640/20190421_132628.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0DYAXUXJirDzL99jCtUWAAjXhVz5Y-Sqf5BxCR8SY_OuYX-g6YjahpH9vezkFo5O5LzXHBU1Xfs2K5YbCA2NJz1mp6xfRTIVA8-iKpE8b256QJWYEhnOZoPlQU9qTZyh1l2Y/s1600/20190421_132640%25280%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1194" data-original-width="1600" height="476" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0DYAXUXJirDzL99jCtUWAAjXhVz5Y-Sqf5BxCR8SY_OuYX-g6YjahpH9vezkFo5O5LzXHBU1Xfs2K5YbCA2NJz1mp6xfRTIVA8-iKpE8b256QJWYEhnOZoPlQU9qTZyh1l2Y/s640/20190421_132640%25280%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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The one figure I finished this weekend was this Modiphius John Carter Thark. This has taken a long time to do as I wasn't quite sure how to handle it but it turned out OK, helped by the fact that it is a nice big figure. I need to have another look at the rules but they are very much a Role Playing Game which will need other players and a games master so I may try and adapt some other rules for it. Lord of the Rings might work, I think, Next up will be the Giant White Ape and, if I am brave, Dejah Thoris. Plenty to be getting on with anyway, helped a lot by the lighter evenings.</div>
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Now what I should be doing is getting rid of surplus figures but instead I have bought quite a lot lately, including some more Star Wars figures at 25% off and the Lord of the Rings made to order deal. With this you have a week to place an order and they will then cast (in metal) just the number that are ordered. I ordered the whole lot on the basis that I can always sell on any I don't want (or, maybe, already have!). I can sort of justify this because I have at least painted a lot of LoTR figures in the last few months.</div>
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This weekend I have been on Facebook four years. If you had asked me I would probably have said two years but time flies by when you are plummeting towards death and everything in life happened 40% longer ago than you think. Although you wouldn't guess it from the number of pictures of food and Martinis I post, I did it solely for wargames purposes, as I found that manufacturers were posting news of new releases on Facebook long before they appeared on websites. I have around 250 'friends' and some I have even met in real life (if there is such a thing). I do cull those who bang on about politics and try only to link up with those who post wargames material too. I also have ditched people who post too often. There was nice lady who did fantasy maps but she was posting about ten times a day and it clogged up my feed so, however interesting, it was stopping me seeing the hobby posts I wanted to see. She was like the dreaded Tango01 from The Miniature Page! Other things annoy me on Facebook but then that is no different from everything else in this so called life. The worst, however; even worse than people who bang on about politics, even worse than people who post brilliant painting and then fish for compliments, even worse than people who post pictures of Minions, even worse than people who post cute homilies (all Americans), even worse than people who write in that big colour background sign style (how do they do that?), even worse than people who say 'hey guys' or call themselves 'a noob', the absolute worse and the thing that sends my blood boiling are people who post gifs of faces reacting to things. It's far, far worse than emojis, which are, at least small. Presumably there must be websites of these horrors somewhere. I was going to find one to illustrate the point but when I searched for gifs in my windows explorer all I got were a few pictures of naked ladies running along the beach (thanks Sophie) which would not be appropriate, however delightful.</div>
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Anyway, speaking of naked ladies, today's wallpaper is this superbly tactile painting by Earl Moran, which I found in my pin-up section of my PC when looking for a suitable Easter picture for my Facebook page yesterday. Moran (1893-1984) discovered a young lady named Norma Jean Dougherty and she modelled for him for four years from 1949. They remained friends even after she became Marilyn Monroe. Already an established pin-up artist, he had been doing calendars for Brown & Bigelow since 1932 and a 1940 <i>Life </i>feature on him made him a huge star. In those days, in a calendar of 12 pictures, the publishers would allow the artist to include onc nude a year and Moran's were more sensual than any others. Later in his life he concentrated solely on nudes and this one comes from that period, dating from around 1970. Nearly all of his work was in pastels, amazingly.</div>
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Having been working my way through Martian themed music, today's music is the expanded soundtrack to <i>Total Recall </i>(1990) by Jerry Goldsmith which has some striking 'alien' sounding cues and is one of his best scores, with an excellent blend of orchestral and electronic music.</div>
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The Old Bat was out at a friend's 60th birthday party last night, so I watched <i>Diamonds are Forever</i> (1971) hence we have Jill St John on Legatus 'Wargames Ladies <a href="https://legatuswargamesladies.blogspot.com/2019/04/jill-st-john-for-playmen-march-1968.html">here</a>.</div>
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legatus hedliushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17078980742683576345noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26773117.post-28957745859245812022019-04-14T19:24:00.000+01:002019-04-14T19:24:26.054+01:00Paint Table Sunday: Back to Napoleonics and on to US Infantry<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Even though I didn't think it was a classic Salute this year it has got me energised about my painting again. Having finished the Byzantine archers just before I left for Excel last Saturday it was time to get going on another unit. So far this year I have completed three units. Not quite one a month, partly because I was in Botswana for ten days, so I should really have picked some figures for April which I could get on quickly with. </div>
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So last week I decided to get started on assembling some of the new Perry Miniatures WW2 American infantry. These have a pretty simple colour scheme so I thought maybe I could get some done, start to finish, in a couple of weeks. Oh dear. Now I often read about wargamers who refuse to do plastic figures because they don't like assembling them and I have some bad memories of some Victrix Napoleonic French from years ago. I have always found the Perry figures easy to do, however. Not these! To cement six pairs of arms to the bodies took me 38 minutes. Argh, I thought. as yet another arm fell off as I tried to position it. The real problem is the arm poses that require two arms holding a rifle. The left hand is attached to the rifle so there are three gluing points: the two shoulders and the wrist of the left hand. As soon as you get one arm in place and try to attach the other you end up pushing the first arm out of place When you try and get the wrists in the right place for the hand on the rifle, one or other of the shoulders (or both) go out of place. All the time you are trying to manoeuvre the parts into place the glue is drying. The whole process is really, really stressful and not part of what should be a relaxing hobby! Some of them still aren't quite right and the shoulder joints will require some filling. Also, the Perries themselves say that not all arms will fit on every body but there is no information in the instructions to show which ones go with which, Very much the least enjoyable half an hour with model soldiers I have had for many years. I was going to build and paint a section of 12 men but don't think I can bear to build the next six for a while!<br />
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Before I could even build them I had another crisis as I was about to build the first figures but found that I couldn't get any glue out of all three of my tubes of Revell cement. It seems to be like Games Workshop liquid Greenstuff; you open it to use it once but the next time you want to use it it has all set. Fortunately, the people of the Painting, modelling and gaming Facebook group came to the rescue. After well meaning suggestions such as use a lighter to heat the metal tube, use a gas cooker lighter and use a guitar string (?) someone said any flame would do, given I didn't have any of the three things suggested. I actually didn't have any matches, either, so had to go to Tesco but using a candle flame soon had them unblocked, miraculously. I would have just gone out and bought another tube of glue but couldn't as it was ten o'clock at night. I am just hopelessly impractical!<br />
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<i> One figure missing, which I found after I took the picture, thank goodness</i></div>
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Instead, inspired by the three-ups of the Perry French Napoleonic infantry I saw at Salute I got my British 87th Foot out to work on. I put these to one side as I had a nasty attack of strap phobia but yesterday confined myself to shading the flesh and the trousers. This is a big unit, for me, of 24 foot and a mounted officer so they will take some time to finish. Now, too, of course, I realise that I have the stress of the arms to do, as I am painting them without arms so I can access the front of the uniform. Looking at the arms on the sprue I can't work out which arms will give which pose so that is more stress to worry about. Good job the doctor has just doubled the dose of my blood pressure pills.</div>
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<i>2016 - 22</i></div>
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<i>2017 - 17</i></div>
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<i>2018 - 13</i></div>
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<i>2019 - 12</i></div>
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I have enjoyed reading everyone else's Salute posts and looking at the pictures of all the games I missed. When I went round I thought that there was less, WW2, Napoleonic and ACW games than usual but it my be I just missed them. Other people have said that the Blogger meet up was smaller this year (it was an hour earlier than usual) so I have decided to apply some science by digging out pictures from the last four years. Now, of course, people come and go ,so this is a only a point in time sample. The trend is down, however. I don't post on my blog as often as I used to, so perhaps if there was a wargames Facebook meet up there might be more people but who knows?</div>
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<i>My forces overrun the kraal and send the British scarpering</i></div>
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One thing I posted on my Facebook page but haven't mentioned here was another enjoyable Zulu ward game at Eric the Shed's. This was a recreation of the Battle of Khambula held just a few days shy of the 140th anniversary. We had five players: two for the British and three for the Zulus. I took control of the Zulu right wing and was immediately in trouble because I couldn't remember anything about the Black Powder rules; in particular how to activate my forces, so spent the first two moves immobile, waiting to see what everyone else did. In the end the game was something of a draw but miraculously I didn't lose a unit, unlike everyone else.<br />
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Eric's table was simple but effective and the battlefield layout was instantly recognisable from the central fortified British position on the hill. Eric's account and some excellent pictures is <a href="http://shedwars.blogspot.com/2019/03/battle-of-khambula.html">here</a>. What I really need to do is read up on the rules before I play a game so I have at least a vague idea of what is likely to be going on. Unfortunately, I play so rarely (this was my first game for a year) that I always forget the rules completely.<br />
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Another issue is that,all of my wargames rules are trapped behind a giant pile in my study consisting of cardboard boxes (mainly used to send Charlotte things to Edinburgh which she has forgotten), seven file boxes of unpainted figures and almost the entire output of <i>Penthouse </i>magazine from the nineteen eighties. All need to be relocated so I can actually read my rules before a game!</div>
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I went off to MG day at Brooklands with Guy today, as his grandfather wants to buy him an MG (the Old Bat is resisting of course but then she resists <i>anything </i>which isn't <i>her</i> idea). There were hundreds of MG's of every sort there but I really liked this one!<br />
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Back home for lunch and the light was quite good. I meant to get on with the Peninsular British but caught the end of <i>John Carter </i>(2012) on TV last night so did a couple of hours on this Modiphius Thark. There is still a lot to do on him but he is probably more than half finished now.. It's so nice to paint such a large figure. Maybe I should get some Victrix 54mm Napoleonics!</div>
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Last week I went to the Bonnard exhibition with my particular friend <i>K</i>, who used to model for me at Oxford, Not in the bath, though, as you would need hot water to keep the lady comfortable but the steam wouldn't be good for the paper. Also, I remember the BBC drama on the Pre-Raphaelites where poor Lizzie Siddell had to spend days in the bath while Millais painted her for his Ophelia, As a result of being in the cold water she got very ill and her father, fifty medical bills later, demanded that Millais pay up for her treatment, which he did, fortunately. Interestingly, the landscape part of Millais' picture was painted from the Hogsmill River in Ewell, not that far from where I live. No such worries for Bonnard, who largely painted in the South of France, so his naked ladies (usually his wife and the occasional mistress) would not have been too cold, hopefully. This one,<i> Nu dans le bain, </i>was quite a late one, painted in 1936. I first learned about Bonnard from an art book in our school library and I had several postcards of his paintings on my wall at college. </div>
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Today's music is the soundtrack from <i>Jo</i><i>hn Carter</i> (2012) by Michael Giacchino, which I had to buy, at great expense, off eBay not long ago as it is no loner available. I've played it a couple of times now and it's definitely growing on me, with some strong themes although some of it is quite remiscent of Howard Shore's <i>Lord of the Rings</i> and David Arnold's <i>Stargate</i> scores but that is a good thing!</div>
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<i>Anna Gaël, the latest addition to Legatus' Wargmes Ladies</i></div>
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Finally, some of you (quite a few by the number of hits!) have noticed a few posts on <i>Legatus Wargames Ladies</i> this last week from Italy's <i>Playmen </i>magazine. It was designed as an Italian copy of<i> Playboy</i> from a time (1967) when <i>Playboy </i>was banned in Italy, Unlike Hugh Hefner at <i>Playboy</i>, Bob Guccione at <i>Penthouse,</i> Larry Flynt at<i> Hustler</i> and Paul Raymond at <i>Men Only </i>and <i>Club, Playmen </i>was very much the brainchild of a woman, Adelino Tattilo, who ran the magazine for over thirty years; choosing the centrefolds, cover pictures and championed its left wing, reforming written content. The effect that <i>Playmen</i> had on the social attitudes, fashions and culture of Italy cannot be underestimated. Tattilo was very interested in the cinema and there were regular pictorials from the sets of films being shot and virtually every young Continental actress happily stripped off for its pages, thankfully. We will be featuring some of these on <i><a href="https://legatuswargamesladies.blogspot.com/?zx=fe34a565abda8acf">Legatus Wargames Ladies</a></i> over the next few months, as we have shamefully neglected it!</div>
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legatus hedliushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17078980742683576345noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26773117.post-64114018623674309762019-04-06T16:52:00.001+01:002019-04-06T16:52:20.360+01:00A very short visit to Salute<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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So (I have to start my post with 'so' beacuse John Treadhead hates it), it was something of a lightning visit to Salute this year and I was there for just under two hours, although my feet feel like I have been there all day. I arrived at about 11.20 and there was no queue, unlike tat he craft show opposite. I nearly had a nasty moment when the Old Bat discovered that this was on, as she was seriously contemplating coming along. It is important to keep different parts of your life separate I think; particularly mine at present. </div>
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Anyway, thankfully Batless, the show did seem as busy and the light as bad when I got inside. I haven't even looked at the free figure (actually I think there were two this year) because it is some post apocalypse thing. This, along with zombies (are they subsets of each other?) are just two genres I am not interested in but there were plenty of such games on display today, it seemed. Not so much World War 2 and very little Napoleonic or ACW too, I think.</div>
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Right inside the main entrance was Big Red Bat's splendid Romans versus Celts game and I had a look at the new plastic Celts on the Victrix stand but was good and didn't buy any. Unlike Eric the Shed, who bought a year's worth of Romans and Celts for this year's project. I am looking forward to seeing these but I will be interested to see how he gets on speed painting Celts! Stripes! Plaid! Check! Chariots! Argh!</div>
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The next game I liked the look of was of the Wiliamite Wars in Ireland from a period I am just starting to get interested in. This recreation of the Battle of Aughrim (1691) had a very nice look to it.</div>
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Next up was a striking recreation of Moonbase from Gerry Anderson's <i>UFO, </i>although I didn't see any ladies with purple wigs, sadly. I have no idea about the actual game but then I am more interested in the look of the thing. Not far away was a game of Warlord's new Cruel Seas but it is one of those games where the table is covered in counters and worse (printed cards by the look of it, under each model) which completely detracts from the effort you might have put into painting ships.</div>
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Another of my 'one day if I ever retire' periods is the Thirty Years War and there was a good looking game of the battle of Lutzen, I always like a game which had windmills in it!, This had a very natural coloured base and some properly in-scale trees, as most wargames table trees seem to be about twenty feet high.</div>
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These, however, were pretty much the only games I appreciated. I didn't think there was a showstopper this year and I think stunning scenery was less in evidence too. The far end of the hall seemed emptier this year with a whole bank of former trade stands not there with just the stalls around the far wall in the concrete wasteland.</div>
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I certainly bought the least ever at Salute, with no metal figures at all and just the box of the plastic US WW2 infantry from the Perries. I also bought an M10 tank destroyer from Rubicon one of my favourite WW2 AFVs. The other impulse buy was these four hills as I looked at them and immediately thought 'Barsoom'!</div>
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I had intended to get some more Iron Duke Indian Mutiny figures from Empress but it was one of those stands that you just couldn't get near tom so I didn't bother. I don't do waiting or queuing!</div>
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The three up preview plastics on the Perry miniatures stand were for Napoleonic French Infantry 1807-1814. These I will get when I get back to my Peninsula War British.</div>
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I turned up at the Bloggers meet but there were less people this year, I think, but did chat to <a href="https://wargaminggallimaufry.blogspot.com/">Alastair</a> and <a href="http://shedwars.blogspot.com/">Eric the Shed</a> for some time and <a href="http://www.blmablog.com/">Big Lee</a>, <a href="https://wargaminggirl.blogspot.com/">Tamsin</a>, Postie and <a href="https://onelover-ray.blogspot.com/">Ray</a> briefly. Also it was nice to see <a href="http://lairoftheubergeek.blogspot.com/">Miles</a> again, across from America at his first Salute, and hopefully we can meet up on his next trip in May (if I am not in St Petersburg, which I might be).. He had bought US WW2 infantry as well!</div>
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So I didn't think it was a classic Salute this year and two hours was about right for me. I didn't actually buy enough to make the postage saving worthwhile, unlike some years. It has got me enthused again about painting, though, and having finished my Byzantine archers this morning (I had told myself I wasn't allowed to buy anything if they weren't painted) I have to decide on the next unit to work on.</div>
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legatus hedliushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17078980742683576345noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26773117.post-11831900898849699982019-04-05T18:17:00.001+01:002019-04-05T18:17:25.269+01:00Salute Eve<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Well, it's Salute Eve and I am looking forward to going up to London for it but I mustn't forget my ticket which is still on the printer shelf! I actually have no plans to buy anything this year because for all of the many projects I am working on I have plenty of stuff to paint. What I may keep my eyes open for is the odd scenic item, particularly for the North West frontier, as I am assembling a lot of buildings for that from various different manufacturers.</div>
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I am very tempted by one new plastic box, however. I saw the three ups at Salute last year and my exact quote about them was, having eventually found the Perry stand: 'There were two sets of three-ups for new sets: Agincourt mounted knights and US WW 2 infantry, neither of which I am interested in, fortunately'. So why do I keep looking at the adverts for the US infantry in this month's wargames magazines? I am not really sure. When I was at school we played a lot of WW2 games with Airfix figures and tanks but these were all post D-Day Europe or North Africa. Although I have been tempted by North Africa for many years (it was where my father was in WW2) it really doesn't lend itself to wargaming except, perhaps, with micro-tanks or a very big Eric the Shed sized board. The War in the East has never interested me either and was often similarly sweeping in scale. I still have some interest in early war skirmishing, perhaps, but the part of the conflict in Europe I have been most interested in is Italy. It was a mid-period part of the war with lots of towns, villages and countryside to fight through.</div>
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<i>James Coburn follows Giovanna Ralli. Well you would, wouldn't you?</i></div>
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When I was small I always remember lots of American WW2 films set in Italy and usually filmed there in the sixties. The key one I remember was actually a comedy and was Blake Edwards' <i>What did you do in the war, daddy? </i>(1966). Ironically, this was filmed in California (albeit using a splendid but budget busting set of a Sicilian village) as Edwards didn't want to be away from home at that point due to marital issues. I remember seeing it on TV at school in the early seventies and being impressed by the village itself, Henry Mancini's jovial soundtrack and, in particular, Giovanna Ralli in her first Hollywood film. She did a tasteful pictorial for<i> Playboy </i>Italia ten years later, at the age of 41, and you can see a shot from it on<i> Legatus' Wargames Ladies</i> <a href="https://legatuswargamesladies.blogspot.com/2019/04/giovanna-ralli.html">here.</a></div>
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But I can't buy anything at Salute unless I finish my unit of Byzantines for Lion Rampant as I said I wouldn't purchase anything unless these were done (they should have been finished last month but an unexpected ten days in Botswana put paid to that). So, it's just the varnish, then the metal work and then the static grass to do. It's going to be close!</div>
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The Blogger's meet up is an hour earlier this year, at 12.00, to avoid a clash with the Lead Adventures Forum meet. I intend to get there just after eleven to avoid the queues. Last year I didn't get the free figure but I'm not bothered about this year's so don't mind if I miss it. No doubt I will do a post when I get back tomorrow, moaning about my feet and the poor light.</div>
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It took me many decades to track down the soundtrack of <i>What did you do in the war, daddy?</i> but I eventually got it as part of a Henry Mancini boxed set. It's much more a comedy than WW2 soundtrack, although the Swing March theme tune is unbelievably catchy. Apart from bouncy faux Italian music it also has an anachronistic sounding Mancini ballad which is tragically dated.</div>
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legatus hedliushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17078980742683576345noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26773117.post-61715370043474344362019-03-02T12:47:00.000+00:002019-08-04T22:26:27.586+01:00Paint Table Saturday: Byzantines, Dutch, Indian Mutiny, some Kickstarters and back to school.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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It's a very long time since I have written a Paint Table Saturday post but I am indeed, doing some painting, thanks to the ongoing Sculpting Painting and Gaming Facebook Group (although the lack of a comma in the title continues to annoy me). In theory, you are supposed to paint for 30 minutes a day but what with the bad light and four proposals to get done for work since January my output has dropped a bit. I am not managing 30 minutes a day but I have now painted for at least 30 minutes a week for 16 weeks in a row. Some weeks I am close to, or even over, the required 210 minutes.</div>
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So far in 2019 I have completed 29 figures which is not a bad start for me, given that my bad eyesight makes it hard for me to paint for very long. Last month I finished a unit of twenty figures depicting the 64th Foot from the Indian Mutiny (Iron Duke Miniatures). I will get some more of these soon as I have actually painted all of the ones I own, shockingly. As usual with wargaming flags, for some reason, the standards are rather oversize making it difficult, given I gave them the correct length (scale 9' 10") poles. I wish flag manufacturers would say that there flags are oversized. 'Oh they look better on the table' say idiots on TMP. Not to me they don't. It's like those people in the past who used 54mm figures on the table to depict their generals. Also, the standard bearer figures' hands are in just the wrong position to easily hold the flagpoles. It took me a very frustrating hour to get them attached, Immediately afterwards I had to go to the doctor and he was concerned about my 'alarmingly high 'blood pressure. I had to explain what had caused it.<br />
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My current projects include a unit of Fireforge Byzantine archers and three Byzantine command to go with the nine rank and file I finished in January. I have all the base colours down on these now so hope to push on with them this weekend, In addition, I am working on a couple of individual figures for when L get bored with production line painting. One is a pulp Turk/Egyptian and the other is a Harry Potter figure for my daughter, really just to see if I can do it justice and thereby justify buying the game which my daughter would then play with me, at least.<br />
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These six figures are a purchase from this week; six North Star 1672 Dutch. I ordered these at lunchtime on Tuesday and they arrived Thursday morning, which is nearly as good as Amazon. This purchase was inspired by a new book on the Dutch army of the period which came out this week. I bought some of these Copplestone sculpted figures ten years ago when they first came out and even painted a couple but finding information on the Dutch army of the time proved impossible so I gave up on the period. Hopefullym I will now be able to produce something for use with The Pikeman's Lament. Compared with the plastics I have been painting lately these big chunky metals are going to be easier to deal with I think. I just need the book to arrive so I can get properly started.</div>
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A big box of a Kickstarter I backed some time ago arrived this week: The John Carter role playing game. I couldn't even remember if I had backed this or cancelled it but here it is. Now what on earth do I do with it? Lots of delicate looking resin figures. Oh dear! Thirty four figures and a 238 page rule book!<br />
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I first read the Edgar Rice Burroughs books in the early seventies when I was enticed by the covers of the New English Library paperback issues which largely featured under dressed ladies, much to the delight of my twelve year old self. The key painting issue with these is going to be devising an appropriate flesh tone for the Red Martians.<br />
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The problem is that the more I paint the more figures I want. When I wasn't painting much I didn't buy many figures. I really, really must sell some I am never going to do!</div>
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So absolutely no reason to back another Kickstarter this week, of course. But that is exactly what I did with Paul Hicks' <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/brigadegames/28mm-american-war-of-independence-miniatures-range?ref=user_menu">American War of Independence figures for Brigade Games</a> (it's funded with 26 days to go). As usual I am influenced by the sculpts not the wargaming potential but this is a period I have literally toyed with for many years, ever since my Airfix days. I bought a lot of the Perry Foundry figures but although Perry Miniatures comprehensive range is very fine the older Foundry sculpts look rather old fashioned (and small) now, Rebels and Patriots will be the set of rules for those and I will resist the temptation to do a historical battle (always my downfall) in favour of some skirmishing. The only issue will be, I suspect the massive customs duty and shipping charges for the 20 packs I have committed to.</div>
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I was actually supposed to have a game Sunday week at <a href="http://shedwars.blogspot.com/">Eric the Shed</a>'s. He is doing one of his big weekend games and this one will be Hastings; a battle I have always wanted to game. Sadly, I discovered yesterday that I have to return to Botswana next Saturday so will miss it. This will be my third visit in thirteen weeks. Never mind it will provide some money to buy more soldiers I will never paint! Also lurking about is another Kickstarter I bought into: West Wind's War & Empire Dark Ages figures. Maybe I can do 15mm Hastings instead!<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuw7PmeXajnjz2dUr7JN8Q0OCxpv5Kz8Z5MifX59ZM96AkDhb_GwykHDKpFZnX7Nb7W2FlMk3sBh1aegBq-Ax06-eO1tqyxtZQSfJSTrUEu__-tBRlmt1WVr9nw82LtmcE7Ys/s1600/Untitled.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="379" data-original-width="1195" height="202" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuw7PmeXajnjz2dUr7JN8Q0OCxpv5Kz8Z5MifX59ZM96AkDhb_GwykHDKpFZnX7Nb7W2FlMk3sBh1aegBq-Ax06-eO1tqyxtZQSfJSTrUEu__-tBRlmt1WVr9nw82LtmcE7Ys/s640/Untitled.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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Other than lots and lots of work (although it would be nice if some of our government clients actually paid their bills - not mentioning any names, effendi) not much else has been going on. The most bizarre day was being invited back to my school to talk to some pupils about working internationally). One thing I hated when I was young were all the 'Back to School' adverts in shops at the end of the summer. Not something I wanted to be reminded of when i was on holiday.<br />
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I really enjoyed the tour of my old school they gave me, although I hadn't really been back properly for forty years. They now have twice the number of pupils we did and the buildings are three times the size. The first thing I saw when I walked through the main door (we weren't allowed to do that when I was there) was a group of willowy teenage girls from the school next door (where my daughter and, indeed, the Old Bat, went). They have a number of joint lessons with the boys from my school now. This would have actually caused a riot in my day. We weren't allowed within 22 yards of the fence between the two schools in order to prevent any fraternisation at all. There was, however, a small area behind the CCF glider hut where you could engage with conversation with the young ladies without being seen from either school building. So I was told.<br />
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The school had copies of the School magazine out from when I was art editor and we looked at the pictures I had done for several issues. Mostly of young ladies. I was notorious for being the first person to submit drawings of women to the school magazine. The food choice at lunch was amazing (whatever happened to beef/lamb burgettes and the spaghetti bolognese that looked like worms in a cow pat) and I was surprised to learn that fifty percent of the staff were now women. We had one lady German teacher and that was it.<br />
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Although a lot of the fabric of the school I attended was still there it has been extended and changed so as to be almost unrecognisable. In particular replacing the parquet floor has changed the whole nature of the place. Walls which were external are now internal with additional atria added putting what was outside inside, like parts of Las Vegas. Occasionally there would be an unchanged part, like the school hall and it would take me right back. I told them that my Uncle went to the school and they found his entry details from 1932. They emailed this to me, I sent it to his sister and she sent it to his children and as a result I have reconnected with my cousins who I haven't seen since 1975.<br />
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"What one piece of key advice do you have for the boys?" I was asked. "Don't have anything to do with the girls from the school next door!" I replied. It wasn't just the Old Bat. There had been other stressful interactions with these girls. As my friend Dibbles told me at the time: "you are better off with the girls from Surbiton High, they are prettier, sluttier and less stressful." I wore my old school tie and they wanted it for their museum display case. I felt like a museum piece myself after I left.</div>
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In memory of Andre Previn, one of my favourite conductors, I am listening to his recording of Prokofiev's atmospheric Cinderella. It's not as well known, or as melodic, as Romeo and Juliet and takes a bit of time to get into but the more I listen to it the more I like it. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEichDO2ZyNRIGftlxjNnh5xxoNgUBeFgoa3mV8Bj3nBly5iyhCS-4Dk5KmHHtgWD1AES1jFFH7ZwjJmBSWWGdQO-IrDYUIRhqOqi_Le5FibHVfIEYkBHUCaGEzqwAFCPmFzFm8/s1600/Female+Nude+in+a+Landscape.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="694" data-original-width="832" height="532" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEichDO2ZyNRIGftlxjNnh5xxoNgUBeFgoa3mV8Bj3nBly5iyhCS-4Dk5KmHHtgWD1AES1jFFH7ZwjJmBSWWGdQO-IrDYUIRhqOqi_Le5FibHVfIEYkBHUCaGEzqwAFCPmFzFm8/s640/Female+Nude+in+a+Landscape.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i>William Etty Female nude in a landscape circa 1825</i></div>
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Today's wallpaper is by the English painter William Etty (1787-1849).. He was the first major painter of the nude in England but scandalised parts of the artistic establishment by continuing to paint from life well after his student days and scandalised parts of the rest of society by including ladies' pubic hair in some of his paintings. Out of fashion for a hundred and fifty years after his death, he has recently come back into favour again, particularly after a large retrospective of his work in his home town of York in 2011</div>
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legatus hedliushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17078980742683576345noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26773117.post-73924421905489721742019-01-03T18:15:00.003+00:002019-01-04T23:37:30.702+00:00Wargames Review of the Year 2018<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>Victrix Carthaginian war elephants. A good start to the year.</i></div>
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Determined not to issue my wargames review of the year when the crocuses are coming out I have decided to start it before Christmas. In fact, 2018 saw very little wargaming but an otherwise disastrous hobby year was saved by a late flurry of painting.<br />
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<b>Figures Painted</b><br />
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<i>The Army of the Dead from the Lord of the Rings Painted in just five weeks!</i></div>
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I began the year full of good intentions and a nice project of the lovely Victrix war elephants but having finished the pachyderms I had a failure of nerve as regards shield transfers on curved surfaces so haven't quite completed them. I have just four crew to complete so will try to get them done in January. I counted each rider and elephant as two figures so I had completed just four figures come October. I did do some odd bits on my Fireforge Byzantines and started some Napoleonic British but was stymied by continued struggles with my eyesight and can now only paint in bright daylight. I have had a series of injections into my left eye and it has really improved my vision in that eye, which was my weaker one but is now the stronger. Today, the hospital has recommended that I get my right eye done too over the next six months.<br />
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My painting year was saved, however by the Sculpting Painting and Gaming Facebook Group. Someone had the brilliant idea of having a 'paint 30 minutes a day' challenge. I set to work to do some more figures for the Lord of the Rings and although I haven't managed to paint quite every day I have painted the most for about four years. So my completed totals are:<br />
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Lord of the Rings: 89<br />
Punic Wars: 4<br />
Total:93<br />
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Ninety-three figures in a year is my best total since 2014. I have also finished another nine Byzantines in the first couple of days of January. I tried using washes for the first time (hit and miss) and acrylics (definitely a miss) and I am slowly coming to terms with the fact that I just can't see to paint as well as I could even two years ago. Figures with shield transfers, even though they are a pig to put on, make my figures look much better than they are.<br />
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<b>Wargames played </b></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW5oFRFCyRfTGq0NT1KKBHG54j16fsc7Bo-ryQEL_E6yRn2u3UjM5t8xxvwCGqaJFnDGwlMh83oQy0R9oiT9_f4FSVG9R9d_dn6EHcNckHSBflyaPnh6IJFq3FMmWmgC5NZqE/s1600/sharpe+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="959" data-original-width="1600" height="382" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW5oFRFCyRfTGq0NT1KKBHG54j16fsc7Bo-ryQEL_E6yRn2u3UjM5t8xxvwCGqaJFnDGwlMh83oQy0R9oiT9_f4FSVG9R9d_dn6EHcNckHSBflyaPnh6IJFq3FMmWmgC5NZqE/s640/sharpe+1.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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Just one wargame, again, in 2018 with a Napoleonic game for Richard Sharpe and associates at <a href="http://shedwars.blogspot.com/">Eric the Shed's.</a> Epic scenery, of course, and an entertaining large skirmish which also incorporated offshore naval; bombardment. Sadly, that was my last visit to the Shed as I am too unreliable an invitee because of evening conference calls as well as my total inability to remember or understand rules. Although I have now discovered the reason for this, as it turns out that I am dyspraxic. This explains many things about me; such as the fact that I didn't learn to tie my shoelaces until I was about fourteen, still struggle with tying ties and cannot do knots for sailing. It also explains my total inability to play ball games such as football, tennis or golf or play computer games. This may also be why I can't use tools, do DIY, constantly drop things, trip over all the time, can't parallel park and have difficulty reversing the car (I cannot comprehend how people can reverse into a parking place at a supermarket and always choose those slots with an empty space on each side). I basically cannot envisage stuff in three dimensions and my brain just freezes. Difficulty in interpreting rules of games is part of this, it seems, which may explain why I can read them but cannot imagine how they work out in practice. I'm too stupid for wargaming, basically, as I have long suspected.<br />
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So it will be solo gaming going forward, if any, where I don't feel pressured to think quickly, so I am going to focus for next year on rules that allow for this (like <i>The Men who would be Kings </i>and the new<i> Sons of Mars</i> gladiatorial set).<br />
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<b>Scenics</b><br />
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<b><br /></b>I started a number of scenic projects in 2017 but haven't progressed any of them at all in 2018, apart from some undercoating. Several projects have got stuck because I started painting them and now can't remember what colours I used on them. I did buy some more stuff from Grand Manner before they went to only selling painted items, principally a Zulu village and some Sudan type houses. I really hope to move some of this along this year. I have been buying the occasional piece of aquarium terrain, and plastic plants though, for my Lost Word/Savage Core project.<br />
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<i>Sixth from the left</i></div>
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I did get to <a href="https://legatuswargamesarmies.blogspot.com/2018/04/a-quick-visit-to-salute-2018.html">Salute</a> this year and it was, as ever, nice to catch up with other bloggers but that was my only show as I didn't get to either Warfare (I hate driving into Reading) or Colours, due to having to collect Guy from Oxford for the end of term. Anyway, I really do not need any more hobby stuff!<br />
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<b>Lead (plastic and resin) Pile </b><br />
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I stopped recording my purchases this year so have no idea how the lead pile increase went but I bought a lot, mainly in the second half of the year. I bought the Red Book of the Elf King figures but may sell these on as I can't do them justice in paint, especially now that I am painting Middle Earth again. I also bought the Star Wars Legion boxed set but I have seen so many exceptionally well-painted figures for this it has put me off painting them, even though I have wanted such figures since 1977. I have bought quite a few plastics (Victrix Republican Romans, Perry Zulus, Lord of the Rings Pelennor boxed set and Fireforge Byzantines) and some metal figures too, such as more North West Frontier, Stronghold female Vikings and even some English Civil War. I also bought some more resin Raging Heroes figures although assembling them looks to be a nightmare!<br />
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I did buy into a number of Kickstarters. I couldn't resist the <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1267315341/bunny-girls-28mm-miniatures">28mm Bunny Girls</a> from Dark Fable miniatures even though I have no idea what I will do with them but I did create this Osprey cover for them! Not that I would need an Osprey as I know pretty much everything about the evolution of the uniform! At least these have arrived, as has another load of A<a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1267315341/the-return-of-cleopatra-28mm-egyptian-miniatures">ncient Egyptian ladies,</a> also from Dark Fable. Other ones I backed and am still waiting for are the <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/modiphius/john-carter-of-mars-the-roleplaying-game">John Carter of Mars</a> roleplaying game figures, the <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/147900702/black-hallows-townsfolk">Black Hallows townsfolk</a> and the <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/832150598/war-and-empire-iii-dark-ages">War and Empire Dark Ages </a>figures. I am still also waiting for anything from <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/244627251/kongo-afrika">Kongo Acheson Creations</a> African scenery which I supported back in 2017. In February, nearly four years after I ordered then, my Wargods of Olympus figures arrived. I am not planning to play the game but use the figures for Jason and the Argonauts.<br />
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<b>Wargames Rules</b><br />
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I didn't get many sets of rules this year, which is just as well as I never use them! The new consolidated Middle Earth rules were in the battle of Pellenor Fields set. I also got some Back of Beyond scenarios. The main rules were the Red Book of the Elf King ones and the Sons of Mars gladiatorial rules which are supposed to work for solo play.<br />
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<b>Wargames Blogs and Facebook</b><br />
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I only posted twenty times on my main blog (this one) in 2018, which is the least ever. Mainly this is because, of course, I didn't really paint anything until the last quarter of the year. I also only posted on four of my other blogs. The most popular of these, with nearly 200,000 visits, is my <a href="https://sudan1883.blogspot.com/">Sudan War</a> one and I haven't posted on that since 2012, although it still gets around 2000 visits a month. I passed 750,000 vies on this blog this year and the most popular post, with 2025 views, was my <a href="https://legatuswargamesarmies.blogspot.com/2018/04/a-quick-visit-to-salute-2018.html">Salute</a> post.<br />
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I am posting more on Facebook, hence the lack of blog posts and in the last few months there have even been some wargaming posts! This time last year I had 151 friends and today I have 246, although I have deleted a lot due to political posts. The real positive aspect of Facebook for me is the groups and I have joined a lot of these this year. The most influential was the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/sculptingpaintingandgaming/">Sculpting Painting and Gaming</a> group as someone came up with the idea of a paint for thirty minutes a day challenge and this has re-energised my painting. In the last 9 weeks, since the challenge began at the beginning of November, I have averaged four hours forty two minutes painting a week. I hope to keep this going!<br />
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<b>Plans for this Year</b><br />
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I want to keep my painting momentum going but need to finish a few odds and ends including the War elephant and the Byzantine spear unit. I have the first unit of Byzantine archers ready for painting now (undercoated today). I also want to dig some figures out of my 'under way' pile which I can complete fairly quickly. I'd like to do some more ACW, some more North West Frontier and also some more on the 1864 Danes. If I am brave I will go back to my British Napoleonics too, although I am stymied on those by not being able to work out which arms I need to fit for which pose and I don't want to paint them all and find I don't need half of them! . It's the dyspraxia again! I have also, at last, found the painting reference I have been looking for for my Franco-Prussian War figures so they might get some attention this year too.<br />
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Another Facebook group I joined was the Mediocre modellers group on the basis that I might have to move onto making model kits if I couldn't paint figures any more. The name proved to be a total misnomer, however. with people posting the most amazing things. any of these (and on some of the figure groups too) have the poster saying something like "Hey, guys, this came out OK, I suppose, what do you guys think". They then show some incredible example of construction/painting. One day I am going to tell them not to fish for compliments because it is vulgar, desperate and arrogant. The false humility does not fool me. These are my most hated hobby group of people of the year (even more than the 'we shouldn't paint small figures of objectified women' types. Sorry, I will continue to appreciate women as beautiful objects (as long as you don't <i>treat</i> them like objects) and that includes tiny sculptures of them. You are girly men (like Chris Boardman banging on about abolishing podium girls at cycling races).<br />
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Anyway, I bought a Tamiya Sherman to have a go at in the a dark evenings when I can't paint.<br />
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<b>Musical Accompaniment</b><br />
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While writing this post I listened to John Williams' soundtracks for the first three <i>Harry Potter </i>films although I am not really a fan of the films and certainly haven't read the books. I have just ordered the limited edition seven CD extended soundtracks for the first three films. Charlotte has been trying to persuade me to get the new Harry Potter miniatures game but I have heard bad things about the quality control of the set: broken and missing parts, mainly. The real issue is that I just wouldn't be able to paint them properly!<br />
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Next time it will be my non-wargaming review of the year.</div>
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legatus hedliushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17078980742683576345noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26773117.post-91068740868640815462018-11-11T08:47:00.001+00:002018-11-11T08:47:29.010+00:00Commemorating 100 years since the end of the Great War by La Vie Parisienne<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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There are many serious commemorations of the end of the Great War happening at present so, instead, I will present this rather lighter tribute from the French magazine <i>La Vie Parisienne.</i> This issue appeared on November 10th 1918; the day before the Armistice was signed. The ‘elite troop’ type illustrated is a grenadier, in this picture by Georges Léonnec (1881-1940). She is holding a pomegranate (<i>grenade</i> in French) which, of course, engendered the name of the hand held explosive device due to its shape. In addition, split pomegranates are symbols of suffering and rebirth, as well as being fertility symbols.<br />
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It is typical of an illustration from <i>La Vie Parisienne</i> that it gets all this symbolism into what otherwise looks like a pin up (American troops were banned from buying the magazine in case paintings of ladies in a state of <i>déshabillé</i> overcame their moral sense). France lost over 4% of its population in the war, mainly young men, of course, and the magazine seems to be saying that the ‘elite troop’ ladies of France would have to help repopulate the country to contribute to its rebirth.
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legatus hedliushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17078980742683576345noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26773117.post-27951229407043953492018-11-10T18:10:00.000+00:002018-11-20T10:14:47.044+00:00Paint Table Saturday: Back to Middle Earth, a painting challenge, time at Brooklands and an unexpected trip to Mordor<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The Legatus hasn't being posting on his blogs much of late for the shocking reason that he has actually been painting some wargames figures! So what has engendered this return to painting after a very poor year? It was actually prompted by two new ranges of plastic fantasy figures: the imminent Fireforge Forgotten World Kickstarter and the expansion of the North Star Oathmark figures.<br />
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I was very tempted by both these ranges but put off by the Fireforge ones as one of the first two planned armies was for undead. Now I don't get the whole zombie/undead thing at all; it is just a genre I have no interest in. My particular friend, Angela, vaguely remembered some Games Workshop issue last year with politically correct people from PETA objecting to fur on their figures and GW pointed out that their figures represented fictional races. Was, she posited, (having studied philosophy) having undead opponents to your armies more ethically acceptable to some people as you weren't depicting conflict between humans? Did this, also, make them happier to watch horribly violent TV and films as the battles were with creatures not people (former people, perhaps). Was it, she continued, like people who watch soft core sex scenes but claim that they don't like hard core sex scenes; a moral cop-out? If you are going to watch people having sex, watch people really having sex not some, literally. emasculated version. I said I think that most wargamers just buy the nicest looking figures they can. Well, I do anyway. This discussion, however, coincided with the release by Games workshop of their Battle of Pellenor Field boxed set.<br />
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<i>Carefully selected still of Ms Brook with a lovely pair of jugs</i></div>
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I had a fantasy revelation (which didn't feature Kelly Brook for once - goodness me she was looking ripe on <i>Celebrity Antiques Road Trip</i> last week). I have hundreds of GW Lord of the Rings figures and have even painted a lot of them. Why mess around with other similar medieval fantasy worlds when I had already got figures for Middle Earth? I managed to find the box on sale online for about £62; a considerable saving on the £80 asking price. It is a big box with lots of plastic figures and a complete new version of the rule book. My daughter was enthusiastic and we have played LotR games before. I decided to get going and paint some of the figures immediately, callously abandoning the Peninsula British and the Byzantines. Bizarrely, given what I have said earlier, I started on the Army of the Dead and soon had the twenty figures in the box built. I actually thought that they were such nice figures I wish I could have painted them in full colour but they have to be ghostly so I went down to Games Workshop in Epsom and bought some paint.<br />
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<i>Under way with metal and plastic extra recruits</i></div>
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Oh. dear. this is where it all went wrong. I decided to use Citadel acrylics so that I could get the right colours. Then I realised that I had no idea how to paint using acrylics. Did you use them straight out of the pot? Did you have to mix them with water? After undercoating them black and looking at other people's attempts online I saw that most people dry brushed them in pale grey. How on earth do you dry brush with thick, gloopy acrylics? If you thin them then they are too wet to dry brush! I was getting very frustrated. I found the paint filling all the recesses. It was horrible. Then I tried to over-paint in a colour I thought was the right shade of ghostly green. This paint was even worse and had gritty lumps in it. I went into another Games Workshop and the man told me that you had to mix it with something called medium, not water. What? It seems Citadel paints are all different types now, not just generic paint. This man saved me and provided me with the right type of paint (I had bought one called 'dry' - I have no idea what it is for) which was no use. It seems you need A-level chemistry to use Citadel paints now. He also recommended I paint over them first with a dark green wash to recover all the recesses. Miraculously, it worked (I have never used a wash before). I carefully picked out details with the proper paint and highlighted the metal bits with a metallic silver and they look...well, OK at best.<br />
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<i>Nearly done</i></div>
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I decided that twenty figures didn't look much like an army so bought ten more plastic (you only get ten figures in a box now!) and ten metal ones from eBay (I didn't even know that they had issued the Army of the Dead in plastic which is why I didn't have any in my collection). Games Workshop were out of stock of the King of the Dead but I had one in my collection from the old Battle Games in Middle Earth magazine.<br />
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Here they all are completed. I painted forty-one figures in just under six weeks which is not bad considering I had only painted four for the whole year before that. At this point a new Facebook group I have joined, <i><a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/sculptingpaintingandgaming/">Sculpting Painting and Gaming</a>, </i>decided to launch a painting challenge for November; suggesting people paint for half an hour a day. Inspired by my recent painting progress I decided to launch into the 36 orcs in the Pellenor boxed set.<br />
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<i>Orcs!</i></div>
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Progress is going quite well on these too but having doubled the number of Army of the Dead figures I had to order some more orcs too. These are being painted in good old Humbrol enamels! The first seven days of November I did manage at least 30 minutes a day but on Thursday I was at the Burne-Jones exhibition at the Tate Gallery and Friday and today I was in Oxford for a dinner of Alumni from my school who attended Oxford. It is not like me to attend a men only event but it turned out to be great fun even if there was no-one from my year there. There was someone from two years below me who remembered me as the 'boy who used to draw pictures of naked women' (surely not).<br />
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I stayed at the relentlessly trendy Malmaison Hotel, which used to be Oxford Prison until 1996. I have stayed at a Malmaison before (in Manchester - yes, I went there once) and the chain suffers from a overly precious self-aggrandisement and really terrible levels of lighting. I kept crashing into objects as I couldn't see. Still, it was nice enough and the breakfast was very good.</div>
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<i>2 Litre LC Supercharged Lagonda (1931)</i></div>
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Other than Lord of the Rings painting (I had to give up today as it went black this afternoon and poured with rain so I only managed four minites - hence this post) I have spent quite a bit of time visiting the nearby Brooklands museum. Guy and I joined the Brooklands Trust in August, as it means you get in for free and we have already saved the cost of membership in just a few months. It means we have access to the members' bar and balcony overlooking the site. Brooklands was the world's first purpose built motor racing circuit and was, for many years, the site of the Hawker aviation factory. Over a third of all Hawker Hurricanes were built there.<br />
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There aren't many famous things that come from my home town of Staines, where I lived until I was in my twenties and where my sister still lives. Linoleum was invented there and I remember a huge lino factory in the town when I was younger. The actress Gabrielle Anwar was from Staines (or rather Laleham, the posh end, where I lived) and went to the same junior school as I did. As a sixteen year old she appeared in the <i>Staines and Egham News</i> in this picture, saying how she was going to be an actress. I remember thinking at the time that you have no hope of becoming an actress and you are only in the newspaper because you look nice in a dance leotard. I couldn't believe it when I next heard of her and she was starring in a film (<i>Scent of a Woman</i> (1992) ) with Al Pacino. Other than that, the band Hard-fi, and comedian Bobby Davro (whose daughter was in my son's class at his (posh) school) complete a short and motley list.<br />
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The most famous thing, therefore, to come out of Staines (or Staines-upon-Thames, as it pretentiously renamed itself in 2012) was the Lagonda motor car. Guy and I were at Brooklands in September and they had a beautiful example there, complete with its radiator badge proudly proclaiming its town of manufacture. My uncle Len worked at the factory (now the site of Staines' Sainsbury's) and my father-in-law owned two Lagondas in the past. Most famously, Captain Hastings, in the ITV <i>Poirot </i>series<i> </i>(I am currently working my way through all of them), drove a 1932 two litre low chassis tourer, like the one we saw at Brooklands.<br />
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<i>Vickers Viking replica (twin wing floats under the nose with wings against the wall on the left)</i></div>
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We had another look around the aircraft display hangars and found something I remembered from the days when all the aircraft were jammed into an old corrugated iron shed, before the recent museum expansion. It was so jammed in before you couldn't photograph it and although they have removed the wings for display, it is now possible to get a shot of the replica Vickers Viking amphibian. </div>
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The replica was built for the film <i>The People That Time Forgot</i> (1977) and featured on the poster. In the film it was piloted by a character played by Shane Rimmer, who was the voice of Scott Tracy in <i>Thunderbirds!</i></div>
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<i>Awk! Awk! Awk!</i></div>
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In the film, the amphibian, as they call it, is attacked by pterodactyls and while our heroes set off to try and find Doug McClure, Rimmer's character sits with the plane (which he manages to land on an impossibly boulder strewn landscape), taking pot shots at the flying reptiles.</div>
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<i>Unable to refrain from making comment about twin floats</i><br />
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I didn't see this film when it first came out, so only caught it some years later on, no doubt, Sunday afternoon TV, where my appreciation of the Vickers Viking was overshadowed somewhat (as were her feet) by the magnificent Dana Gillespie, as just the sort of cavegirl you want to discover in a lost world. </div>
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<i>Royal Canadian Air Force Vickers Viking IV</i></div>
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Only 34 of these aircraft were built and the Brooklands replica is the only full sized one of its type that exists today (there is a 7/8th sized replica in Canada which was also built for a film). The prototype crashed in 1919, killing its pilot Sir John Alcock, who worked for Vickers, who had made the first successful non-stop crossing of the Atlantic (with Sir Arthur Brown) six months earlier.<br />
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There is also a full sized, flying replica of Alcock and Brown's trans-Atlantic Vickers Vimy at Brooklands museum today, too and at the recent First World War commemoration day they got it out of the hangar and ran the engines, which certainly generated an impressive sound. Next weekend its militaria day so I will probably go along again, even though it means missing Warfare (I really don't need any more figures!)<br />
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<i>The only sight in Iceland I expected to see</i></div>
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I did have an unexpected work trip in September when I had to go to a country I had never been to before, Iceland, (my seventy-first country). The weather was supposed to be cold and wet so I wasn't expecting to see much of the place other than the hotel and football stadium (they are trying to finance a new one, hence my presence) where my meetings were. I had a meeting with the Icelandic Football Association about this and met the current chairman. Now what I know about football could be written on the back of a very small postcard ('it's a game for primitive thugs' as my father told me just before I went to one of the only two matches I have attended: the 1970 Schoolboy International against (West) Germany (we won 3-0, shockingly). I had no idea, therefore, that the bright lawyer who is now chairman of the Icelandic FA, Guðni Bergsson was a well known footballer in the nineties for Tottenham and Bolton Wanderers. 'That must have been great,' said someone I met in London afterwards. Er...<br />
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Fortunately, I met a very nice lady architect at the accompanying conference who didn't seem to mind that I had been chatting up her daughter and the next day we had a trip to the Snæfellsjökull where I was very excited by the sight of the volcano from <i>Journey to the Centre of the Earth</i>! I actually expressed the opinion that I had no desire to ever visit Iceland, given it looks like Mordor, in one of my blog posts a few years ago but I grudgingly admit to being rather impressed by its stark landscape.<br />
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Things were also helped immeasurably by the fact that the weather was unexpectedly (and atypically for the time of year) very good and that the lady architect and the Icelandic chamber paid for most of my meals and drinks (Icelandic beer is very good which it should be at £10 a glass).<br />
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It was certainly nice on a business trip to be driven around and see some of the sights, something I rarely get to do as I am usually stuck in some ministry or other. Iceland does feel like the edge of the world, however. There is a small possibility of another overseas trip before Christmas but this would be back to Botswana. My passport has actually expired so I am going to have to run around next week and get a new one sorted out.<br />
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<i>Sleeping Beauty (1910)</i></div>
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Today's wallpaper distraction is <i>Sleeping Beauty </i>by Bernard Hall (1859-1935). Hall was born in Liverpool but spent much of his life in Australia, where this picture was painted, and was the director of the National Gallery of Melbourne for forty one years. His works are traditional; nudes, interiors and still life and he had no time for modern art at all. He died in London during a rare working trip back to England.<br />
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Today's music is Canteloube's <i>Sons of the Auvergne, </i>music inspired by a very different volcanic landscape. <i> </i>I have the Victoria de los Angeles version and although I don't like her voice as much as Netania Davrath, the de los Angeles version has wonderful orchestral accompaniment by the Orchestre des Concerts Lamoureaux which just tips it. I first heard the famous <i>Baïlèro </i>when it was used for a Dubonnet TV advert back in the seventies (which featured Richard Stilgoe playing some Bohemian artist in a bucolic landscape). I wonder what happened to him? He is one of those professional smart alecs (like the equally annoying Stephen Fry) which only Cambridge University could produce.</div>
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legatus hedliushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17078980742683576345noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26773117.post-26781578792430622892018-10-16T17:57:00.000+01:002018-10-16T17:57:05.346+01:00Three quarters of a million visits...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Some time on Sunday this blog passed 750,000 visits and so I apologise to all of you whose time has been wasted by reading my drivel. It really was supposed to be about wargaming but over the years has morphed into something very much less focussed: rather like my life as a whole, I suppose. But, look, I have stuff on the painting table and hope to finish some more figures before the end of the year. </div>
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At least I have managed to avoid going to Saudi this weekend by cleverly letting my passport expire, although I have been informed that I need to get a new one rapidly!</div>
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legatus hedliushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17078980742683576345noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26773117.post-39912647135390722012018-10-13T10:09:00.000+01:002018-10-14T09:03:29.582+01:00Miniature Wargaming The Movie: a review<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: large; line-height: 115%;">When I saw the Kickstartee for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Miniature Wargaming The</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Movie</i>
at the end of 2015 I decided to back it purely because it was unlikely that
anyone else would be making a documentary about wargaming anytime soon. I had
no great expectations about it and, as the months of production turned into
years I mentally pretty much wrote it off, especially when they had to launch
another Kickstarter to get extra funding.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It was taking nearly as long to make as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cleopatra</i> and some of the things filmmaker (presumably he saw it as
a showreel for his future projects) Joseph Piddington had issues with, such as
the cost of stock footage, baffled me. Why, I wondered, did you need to buy
expensive footage of wars? It should be about war <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">gaming</i> not war. It was starting to look like one of those
Kickstarters that were a litany of delays and excuses. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: large; line-height: 115%;">I was surprised, therefore, when the DVD dropped
through my letterbox last week. Yesterday my computer decided to have one of
its periodic issues when it struggles to install updates and while it sorted
itself out I sat down to play a bit of the film at lunchtime. Much to my
surprise it was good enough that I sat through all 105 minutes of it. I nearly
didn’t bother as it starts slowly with a group of modern re-enactors in a
wood.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Re-enacting has nothing to do with
wargaming, I thought (discuss). Then we had the first of what seemed like
endless aerial drone shots of market towns (far, far too much of this) placing
each of the chosen people, who were to be the principal subjects, in their
environment. I soon came across the second problem that I had.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There were a number of onscreen captions
which popped up from time to time offering further snippets of information.
However, some of these disappeared before I could read them and all of them
were really difficult to read.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am 58
years old and only have 70% eyesight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Even on a reasonably sized widescreen TV I couldn’t read these as the
font used a very fine line and it was too small.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I did manage to read one which told me that
the world’s first wargames club was set up in Oxford University in 1874, which
I appreciated, as a former member of the Oxford University Dungeons and Dragons
Society from 1979.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: large; line-height: 115%;">Sensibly, the director realised that to give the
film wider appeal it needed some personal interest stories; people whose wargaming
projects we could follow during the programme, although of these only two were
wargamers only, planning to attend an international tournament in Norway.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The others were manufacturers and I think the
main fundamental issue I have with the film is that it was much more about
manufacturers not players.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although we
were offered glimpses of bigger players, like Warlord, the focus, perhaps
accurately, was on garage style one man (or one man and a long suffering
partner) operations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These threads, like
much of the film, proved to be rather downbeat and told you more about the
trials and tribulations of running a small business rather than wargaming
itself. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: large; line-height: 115%;">With these chosen protagonists I did have another
problem in that I couldn’t hear much of what they were saying. Partly this may
have been down to recording but also, to a certain extent, it was the subjects
not enunciating as clearly as they might.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I have done quite a bit of TV and a lot of speeches and presentations
and you do have to make a conscious effort to speak more clearly when being
recorded, as I was told in my media training.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Or maybe, like my eyesight, my hearing is going too.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: large; line-height: 115%;">Thank goodness, then, for Henry Hyde, whose section
on the history of wargaming was excellent and was more like what I was
expecting the whole film to be like.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
have to say that I liked the animated graphics too; it should be said that
there was nothing about the production that looked low budget. When the two
wargamers went off to their Norwegian tournament the camera went along too. It
was not the filmmaker’s fault that the big international tournament turned out
to be a dozen blokes in a Norwegian wood shed (sjed?) but it was another slightly
downbeat thread.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Still, they did film
Salute and follow the progress of one man and his scenery stand there. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: large; line-height: 115%;">This was another<span style="color: black; mso-themecolor: text1;"> fundamental</span><span style="color: red;"> </span>issue with the film; in
that this character, an ex-soldier, not surprisingly traumatised by his
experiences in Kosovo, had used wargaming as a way to fight depression. It was
interesting to see that he took this up at the Combat Stress rehabilitation
centre, Tyrwhitt House, which is less than a mile from where I live. This is a
good story but, obviously recognising documentary gold, the director dwelt for
far too long on it and it unbalances the film, particularly the last third.
There was a war in Kosovo, OK, but we really didn’t need two long (and no doubt
expensive) clips of Bill Clinton making speeches about it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s like the director thought, oh damn, I am
stuck with funding for this silly wargames film but I really want to make a
BBC2 documentary about fighting depression. Wargaming was obviously pivotal to
this man’s recovery but the war story element and his subsequent breakdown
unbalanced the message somewhat. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: large; line-height: 115%;">No doubt because of the unexpected length of the
project, there was a chance to revisit some of the protagonists eighteen month
later which was interesting but not necessarily very uplifting.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: large; line-height: 115%;">In conclusion, I really enjoyed the professional
standard of the film with its excellent animation and good photography,
although we could have done with less drone shots. There was also one sequence
of a man walking down an avenue towards the camera and I thought, after several
long seconds, that we were going to get a re-enactment of Omar Sharif’s first
appearance in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lawrence of Arabia</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘Cut! Cut!’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I shouted at the screen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I also
had trouble with the unreadable captions and some of the sound.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I enjoyed the interviews and behind the
scenes looks at some of the bigger companies and figures in the hobby.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not ‘The Hobby’, they were conspicuously
absent, although much referred to by previous employees.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: large; line-height: 115%;">There were some things I expected but weren’t really
covered; such as a little on the mechanics of wargaming; skirmish versus big
battles, units, command, morale, shooting, melee, scenarios and campaigns.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No-one watching this would have any idea of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">how</i> wargames work. This, however,
finally begs the question: who is this film aimed at?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not much for the committed wargamer but
equally a little baffling for the complete newcomer.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: large; line-height: 115%;">A valiant effort, very professionally realised (the section
on YouTube videos on wargaming had me recalling quite how cringingly
unwatchable nearly all these amateur efforts are) with a few interesting things
I didn’t know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Slightly downbeat,
because of the particular personalities featured, so that the subliminal message
almost came across that if you are a socially inept, sad loser you might enjoy wargaming which
probably just confirms to the rest of the world what they thought about it anyway.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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legatus hedliushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17078980742683576345noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26773117.post-4335295014557607532018-08-04T18:49:00.001+01:002018-10-03T15:54:54.555+01:00Paint Table Saturday: Redcoats and what's been going on.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I haven't posted for over two months because I haven't managed any painting at all. There were a number of reasons for this: some major work crises, a member of the Old Bat's family being very ill, some problems with my PC which meant I was on a laptop for two weeks (my poor eyes) and the extreme heat not being conducive to painting. However, last weekend I actually had some time on Saturday, so I set to for an hour (the maximum time I can manage, now). I should be finishing my Byzantines (actually I did a bit on them yesterday) and my Carthaginian elephant crew but they all have shield transfers that need doing and I am putting that off until I feel braver.<br />
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Instead, I picked out a random box of part painted figures from my in-progress pile (now tidily sat on the shelf behind me) and this turned out to be some of Orinoco Miniatures British Legion for the Latin American Wars of Independence. This range coming out coincided with me having to travel to Colombia a lot and next year (August 7th) they are having a big celebration of 200 years since the key Battle of Boyacá, which saw the defeat of the Spanish and the subsequent creation of Gran Colombia. So far, the <a href="http://www.orinoco-miniatures.com/">Orinoco Miniatures</a> range isn't complete (they are lacking Spanish cavalry (<a href="https://orinoco-miniatures.blogspot.com/2016/10/some-ne-sculpts-on-way-bolivar-san.html?showComment=1532968514840#c4356185693792158652">although they have been sculpted</a>) but at the speed I paint that doesn't really matter. The key thing was to find some figures with no shields!<br />
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Now, you may think, what are those armless plastics lurking in the background? Not Napoleonics again? The period I have said I was going to abandon at least half a dozen times. Well, it was like this. I went up to London last Friday to meet someone who wanted some advice on something to do with work. I waited for the woman outside where we were supposed to meet, in the sun, in 30 degree heat and after half an hour I decided to forget it. As a man who I used to work with in Switzerland once said: "every minute you are late you are wasting one minute of the other person's life". Turn up on time! You're not Italian! Sweltering and angry (I am increasingly angry about everything and I wasn't exactly Mr happiness and light before) I realised that I wasn't that far from Orc's Nest so thought I could pick up August's wargames magazines. They had them and I went upstairs to see what plastic figures they had (less and less every time I go). I wondered what would cheer me up (it's like my friend Sophie and shoes - you don't need 147 pairs of shoes (yes, really) but if buying them makes you happy...). Well, I thought, my overheated brain operating on dehydrated logic (fuzzy logic), as I am painting British infantry from 1819 if I get British Napoleonic Infantry they will use the same colours. Congratulating myself on my brilliance, I happily skipped off back to Waterloo Station (ironically) with that warm feeling you get from knowing that you have a box of Perry Miniatures in your bag. It's not quite as good a feeling as knowing that you have a bottle of Cloudy Bay in your bag or Miss Vietnam waiting for you in your hotel room but it still cheered me up a lot, especially as I hadn't had to talk for two hours about developments in infrastructure finance in Latin America to some ungrateful and disorganised, sponging bint.<br />
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<i>Mostly armless</i></div>
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Back home, of course, reality dawned and I wondered what on earth happened to cause this state of affairs; like that time at the infrastructure conference in Dublin when, after a night drinking Bushmills with some insurance brokers and going to some Irish musical evening I woke up the next day to find a naked lady journalist in my bath. How did that happen?<br />
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The first question,with this set, of course, is whether to do Waterloo or the Peninsula. Now much of my early wargaming was Waterloo, with hundreds of Airfix plastics and scratchbuilt models of Hougomont (not by me, by my clever friend Bean Kid from some instructions in Military Modelling - I paid him £5, I think and a copy of <i>Penthouse</i>) and La Belle Alliance to go with my Airfix La Haye Sainte. But, as Mr Mike Siggins pointed out on my Facebook page this week, in doing Waterloo "you are digging a hole for yourself". Not so much a hole as the Grand Canyon. So, as you can see by the hats (I've always thought the Belgic shako was a bit silly, anyway) I have decided to go for the Peninsula. Now the eagle eyed among you will notice that my close up of the paint table figures does not match the one further up the page. Where, you almost certainly are not asking, is the British Legion; the spark that provoked the Napoleonic purchase in the first place? The answer is, that they are back in the 'in progress' box. This is because I have started on the British and have decided to drop everything else and concentrate. Hollow laugh.<br />
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I looked at the Peninsula folder on my computer and, in the May when Charlotte was born (1995) I had looked for a small battle in the Peninsular war to paint plastic figures for. I had settled on the Battle of Barossa, in 1811; this being, of course, the battle where Sergeant Patrick Masterson, of the 87th, captured Britain's first Eagle, from the French 8th Ligne. Sorry, Sharpie. I even had an order of battle against which I had marked how many figures I had completed. Now, given I don't like fictitious battles, this looks quite achievable in a decade or so. At 1:33 (which is the ratio I had chosen for my plastics) you would need 133 figures on the British side; mostly infantry with only a few cavalry (10 figures) and two guns. Oh and no Highlanders! So, time to start!<br />
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I am notorious for painting figures and not units, which may well be one of the issues in me rarely finishing a unit. When I do set out to paint a unit it usually goes better (tries to ignore his ACW project from last year). So what I needed was a British infantry unit to paint for the battle of Barossa. The biggest British unit at Barossa was the 87th Foot, The Prince of Wales Irish, with some 820 men which, at 1:33 equates to 25 figures. Not at all impossible. So the 87th it is and I even ordered the Victrix ensign for them, which arrived today. There were also 750 men of the 95th Rifles at Barossa too, so the four figures in the box will need boosting, so I sent off an order for Perry Miniatures for some metal Rifles reinforcements and some mounted Colonels too. I'm not even going to think about the French yet, as I am going to need 213 infantry but only 12 cavalry (dragoons - hooray!). Warlord (the Sky Team of wargaming) have an offer on their Early French foot at the moment but I don't know if their figures are any good as I have never bought any of their Napoleonics. I have read some iffy reviews of some of them.<br />
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I have made progress this week, basing and undercoating the whole unit (apart from waiting for the Colonel (actually Lt Colonel Hugh Gough, later Field Marshal, Sir Hugh, Viscount Gough) from Perry Miniatures). I am not able to paint at the speed of the peerless Eric the Shed but while eschewing the dip I have decided to go for a wargames standard and will take some shortcuts on these. I have started by (grits teeth) deciding not to paint the figures' eyes and also leaving the arms off, initially, so as to be better able to get at the straps. I will also paint the packs separately. Victrix do transfers for packs and canteens but I won't be getting those either (well maybe for the 28th as they had a plate on the back of their shakos). So by this afternoon I had got the faces painted and shaded and the first shade on the jackets (remembering to do the officers and sergeant in scarlet).<br />
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<i>Barossa (or Chiclana as the French call it) 5th March 1811 </i></div>
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This painting of the battle is by Louis-François Lejeune (1775-1848), who was a soldier (eventually becoming a général de brigade and Davout's chief-of-staff) and took his paints on campaign with him. Although this painting wasn't done until 1824 he was on active service in the Peninsular and made many sketches while on campaign, giving his depiction of troops an authenticity other artists lacked. He does not, for example, like a lot of contemporary artists, have the British in Belgic shakos. He left the army in 1813 after sustaining a number of wounds in battle and devoted his life to painting, also becoming the mayor of Toulouse in 1841.<br />
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So what else have I been up to since my previous post on May 19th? Not that you care but I am going to tell you anyway. Well, I spent valuable painting time washing up as our dishawasher packed up and despite three vists from the Dishwasher Doctor he couldn't save the machine (it was nine years old and sometimes we run it two or three times a day if the children are home, as we all eat completely different meals). It took two weeks before a new one arrived which was very character building for the Old Bat. Charlotte refused to help by washing the numerous pots and pans she gets dirty when making vegetarian sausage chilli. "<i>You're</i> the housewife," she said to the Old Bat. "<i>I'm</i> on holiday! What else do you do all day?" This did not go down too well. Now washing up by hand to the standards of the Old Bat is not a simple matter. You can't just swill them around in a washing up bowl of soapy water (I have only just learned that the UK's use of washing up bowls inside their kitchen sinks is unusual - you must get lots of broken crockery, Johnny Foreigner) and then rinse. Oh no. You have to use boiling water (and super industrial washing up gloves as a result) which needs constantly changing. Before we had the dishwasher the Old Bat would spend an hour and half every evening washing up but that was before she discovered<i> Love Island</i> (<i>really</i>?).<br />
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Back at home, the following week, I had a phone call early one morning. The Old Bat picked it up and said: "It's Gerry Embleton for you." Well, I was a bit shocked. I had ordered this picture (from an Osprey) from the Illustration Art Gallery a few weeks before and they said it would be delayed because it was in Switzerland. I wasn't expecting the artist to ring me up but it turns out he lives there. He was very apologetic and said that, unfortunately, he couldn't find the painting anywhere and he suspected someone had stolen it from one of his exhibitions. We had a long chat about painting, wargaming, painting military figures (which he used to do as well) and working for Osprey (which he no longer does). I actually didn't mind about the painting being lost (I did get a refund) as I had the opportunity to talk to one of my favourite illustrators, whose work I had appreciated since the pictures he did for <i>Look & Learn</i> back in the sixties and seventies. It quite made my day.<br />
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As the heatwave continued I found myself locked in my study working on a series of big reports and proposals in the gloom I have to experience when the sun is out, as I have to have a blackout blind drawn down and the desk light on or I can't see my computer screen. We had a whole series of deadlines to hit which made 12 hour days, seven days a week for over a month. I basically didn't leave the house, so when I did I was sort of shocked by how hot it had become in the heat of the day. The thermometer in my study was reading 32 degrees first thing in the morning.<br />
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I realised how hot it had got when we all went to the Goodwood Festival of Speed, which was part of Guy's 21st birthday present, held over from March. It was just baking and I started to feel quite odd, despite guzzling bottle after bottle of water. Guy has no patience with older people and so I wasn't allowed to sit down and have lunch at any of the appealing looking pop up restaurants. The Old Bat does not approve of eating out, which she thinks is a terrible waste of money. I am not a petrol head, have never owned a car and don't enjoy driving but I appreciate cars from an aesthetic standpoint, particularly the older ones. There were a lot of cars there and while I wasn't that impressed by all the supercars, as living where I do you see them all the time anyway, but I enjoyed seeing the historic cars, including one of the three Mustangs which they used to film the chase in <i>Bullitt </i>(1968).<br />
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Best thing about the day was Jet Pack man, though, especially when he flew <i>under</i> the bridge over the track. I really want one of these to get to the station! The old style Bell rocket pack they used in <i>Thunderball </i>(1965) and at the opening of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics could only run for about thirty seconds but this one can go for up to eight minutes. Invented by someone from Britain it is now being funded by the US Military.<br />
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I first came across the Napier-Railton in my Brooke Bond tea cards <i>History of the Motor Car </i>in the late sixties. I loved all the pipes and stiff emerging from its body. It's certainly like a Pulp vehicle; it looks like it should have Doc Savage at the wheel. The original car is in the Brooklands Museum, which is about seven miles from where we live and my Uncle Wally had a lot to do with setting up. <br />
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"They're going to be running it in the hill climb!" exclaimed Guy as we looked at the Goodwood programme. A replica surely? But no, more than eighty years after it was built, it was able to hammer up the hill in fine, gleaming, mid-thirties style, Not just a dusty museum exhibit, this.<br />
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The following weekend Guy and I went to the Brooklands Trust Classics day (we both joined as members which means we can get in for free and use the members bar, restaurant and verandah). We went to have another look at the Napier-Railton, now safely returned from Goodwood.<br />
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This is the Daily Herald trophy, awarded for the fastest lap of Brooklands (the world's first purpose built motor racing track) which is now held, in perpetuity (as the track has been chopped up to make way for shops and offices) by the Napier-Railton, driven by John Cobb at 144 mph in October 1935<br />
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This is a great shot of Cobb setting the record on 7th October 1935, all four wheels of the Napier-Railton off the ground on Brooklands famous banking.<br />
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<i> Morris</i></div>
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<i>Singer</i></div>
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There is still some of the banking left at Brooklands and they had some of the British classics parked up on it. The bridge in the background of the colour shot above is the same one as in the black and white picture. I was excited to see a Singer Gazelle and a Morris Oxford; two of my family's childhood cars. The condition of most of these cars was amazing. I don't think ours ever looked this good, even when they were new!<br />
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There was a large auto jumble at the event, where you could pick up bits of car, if you were so minded but having no interest in bits of cars I bought a naked girly statue instead, given I didn't think they would let me take the Daily Herald Trophy. Guy though that this was typical.<br />
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Next it was music, rather than vehicles and a trip up to the Guildhall School of Music where my niece had an opera performed. She has written a chamber opera before but this was the first one which has been staged with sets and costumes. Called <i>A Risk of Lobsters</i> the story is far too convoluted to explain but was set in outer space, under the sea and in the court of a ferret prince. She has now been taken on by the Guildhall as a fellow for next year and has done an interview and had her music played three times on Radio Three now.<br />
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Today's wallpaper is an appropriately Napoleonic period painting: Jean Auguste Dominic Ingres; <i>La Grande Odalisque</i>, which dates from 1814. It was commissioned by Joachim Murat's wife Caroline, Napoleon's younger sister. It was not well received at the time, with its deliberately distorted anatomy, but when I first saw it in the Louvre at the age of twelve I had to buy a print of it, along with a Renoir nude and Théodore Géricault's officer of the Chasseurs of the Guard. Soldiers and naked ladies being my two favourite things, even then.<br />
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Today's music also has a Napoleonic link (or perhaps an anti-Napoleonic link) in that it is my favourite Beethoven symphony; the 3rd, With Dvorak's New World this was the first classical record I owned when my aunt gave me her copy (as it was a duplicate) when she got married in 1968. I never get tired of it (unlike the 5th and 6th) and used to play it when setting up my Airfix Napoleonic wargames back in the early seventies so still resonates when painting British infantry (not that I ever painted any of my Airfix figures, except the British Hussars). This was the 1957 stereo recording produced by Walter Legge and it is still my favourite. My CD version has the advantage of no break part way through the second movement, either, like the LP did.
I will be away for a bit shortly, so my painting will stop for a few days but will hopefully resume soon.<br />
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legatus hedliushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17078980742683576345noreply@blogger.com30tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26773117.post-61594859489333829842018-05-19T08:27:00.000+01:002018-05-20T10:13:18.962+01:00Paint Table Saturday: Byzantines, tempting figures,models from the past and an art blog<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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So, it is another Royal Wedding today and, luckily, the Old Bat will be glued to the TV all day, enabling me to get a decent amount of painting done. The Old Bat doesn't even like the couple; Harry is a 'dim, bush mush' and Markle is an 'American trailer trash golddigger' who is 'making the Royal Family a laughing stock'. It won't stop her watching everything, though! Mainly so she can insult guests fashion choices.<br />
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I hope to get on with my Byzantine Infantry, which I have done a bit on this week. If I can get all the black and leather bits done this weekend I will be pleased. I have also got the shields started and have got some transfers for them, although I am already getting stressed about how to deal with these. I have bought some Micro Sol and some Micro Set but even with my glasses I can't read the instructions on the bottles. The key question is: do I still need to paint them with gloss paint or gloss varnish before I put them on? Also the transfers have no hole for the boss so I have no idea how I am going to deal with that. Stressful times ahead! As my particular friend <i>A</i> says. Isn't this supposed to be a <i>relaxing </i>hobby?</div>
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<i>Why come to Israel?</i></div>
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To relax I am enjoying watching the Giro d'Italia at present (although possibly the accompanying regional selection of Italian wines is helping in this) , although they haven't had the best of weather. It was even cloudy in Israel. Talking of Israel, during Eurosport's coverage we are getting the usual travel advertisements for Tel Aviv Jerusalem; two places I wouldn't dream of visiting, despite the (rather engagingly old fashioned) use of alluring girls in the commercials. </div>
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<i>Follow me! Oh, alright then</i></div>
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Last year's advert (only people who work in TV call them commercials) had top Israeli model, Shir Elmaliach, filmed in a point of view way, leading a lucky man through carefully selected highlights of the two cities. Linking them together as a destination is quite clever (the original advertisement won a lot of awards) given that Jerusalem is an interesting historic city and Tel-Aviv appears to be like Basingstoke on sea with added bus bombs. It was one of those adverts that I actually used to stop fast forwarding through the advert break for, so as to better appreciate Shir's pert posterior in a variety of clingy outfits.<br />
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This year, although they have bought back Shir (sadly, largely filmed from the front - it was like when FHM did a pictorial on Jennifr Lopez and only photographed <i>her </i>from the front) they have teamed her with British presenter Sian Welby (no I have never heard of her either - perhaps she is on the Shopping Channel or some such). The new advert dumps the disembodied man being led through the two cities' delights and just has the two girls taking selfies of each other and people taking selfies annoy me enormously. Instead of intimating at naughty fun in the sun for the male visitor, as in last year's advert, in this one the girls actually look like they would prefer naughty holiday fun with <i>each other. </i>Using two girls is not necessarily more effective than one! Sian is quite annoying, gurning her way through the film, and is not a patch on Shir, even though the latter looks like she has patently never ridden a bike in her life as she wobbles through the scenery. Epic fail, as my son would say. It is supposed to evoke an Instagram story, apparently,whatever that is.</div>
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It doesn't quite have the Marmite effect of another travel campaign, for Tui (originally <i>Preußische Bergwerks-und Hütten-Aktiengesellschaft</i>), shot in Turkey and featuring gap-toothed British model Bethany Slater. This advert carpet bombed our screens from last October and started to drive me mad with its stupid dancing crabs and annoying, gets into your head, synthesizer riff. The simpering singer, murdering the Rufus and Chaka Khan hit <i>Ain't nobody,</i> makes you think the girl miming in the advert is an insipid simpering girl herself; probably called Alison who probably lives in an unfashionable part of North London somewhere and works in HR. Sorry if you know someone called Alison but I once had a simpering, insipid girlfriend called Alison (very briefly) who lived in Belsize Park. She didn't work in HR but was a nurse which should have been more exciting than it was.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjILWOSkY_Lez_62y8Qu8T3z0QiUgPMFemYM7s_AaMBs7kgO2ApaU0a8awC1cfwwVqw_z7jEgyQPSDoi-fCptiN9NFCtVTG6jrcxN1VAeKccd43i4yimaryHXVxeuu2JnCpQp8/s1600/capture29.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="351" data-original-width="748" height="297" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjILWOSkY_Lez_62y8Qu8T3z0QiUgPMFemYM7s_AaMBs7kgO2ApaU0a8awC1cfwwVqw_z7jEgyQPSDoi-fCptiN9NFCtVTG6jrcxN1VAeKccd43i4yimaryHXVxeuu2JnCpQp8/s640/capture29.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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The advert has Bethany as a rather tragic singleton whose life is transformed by flying to a Tui resort in Turkey on a Tui airliner (they probably have their own Tui tank division as well, so at least they might be able to get you out of Turkey if there is another attempted coup), having her face painted green and dancing badly, to the extent that in the follow up advert she appears to have sex in the pool with some random man (hopefully she uses a Tui condom). Well, that's the way it looks to me. You too can have naughty fun on a cheap package holiday, although not as much fun as promised by Shir in Israel (I would imagine). One of my friends<i> loves </i>gap-toothed <i>B</i>ethany and watches it every time it comes on, although latterly Tui seem to be using other more normal looking people in their adverts now, disappointingly for my friend. Maybe the concept of Bethany being a tragic singleton is just too unrealistic, given her leggy charms.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHVXt8BZnPrqjcNWinq2GOo8D6lt6vPrsI39utRnkbySCJzd-hjKI72wRXtD9s7kxHVaFc3eVGWiMwssTITiRCJMc8qDrfIfI109cK9FhVdhRtvRoTkzcUIPKOWQ84WHbocNs/s1600/32381135_1243250259144199_2046847672286969856_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="698" data-original-width="960" height="464" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHVXt8BZnPrqjcNWinq2GOo8D6lt6vPrsI39utRnkbySCJzd-hjKI72wRXtD9s7kxHVaFc3eVGWiMwssTITiRCJMc8qDrfIfI109cK9FhVdhRtvRoTkzcUIPKOWQ84WHbocNs/s640/32381135_1243250259144199_2046847672286969856_n.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i>Plastic Victrix Vikings sketches</i></div>
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Anyway, these aren't the figures I was meant to be discussing. As is well known, I can'r resist a shiny new range of figures, so if I see thone I tend to make myself go away and calm down for a bit before ordering them. Kickstarters are particularly bad, as I get carried away by them and end up buying stuff I don't want (like Mars Attacks). One I saw recently was by eBor miniatures (who I get muddled up with eBob) for Seven Years War plastic French infantry, Oh, plastic people with tricornes I thought, excitedly. Shiny! But when I looked into them, despite the <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/eborminiatures/ebor-miniatures-28mm-seven-years-war-french-infant">Kickstarter having launched</a>, there is virtually no information about them and just a picture of one figure. Given they are asking for a rather eye-watering £40,000 and have only raised about £2000 I think this one I can give a miss. Maybe if they had started with <i>British </i>figures.... Likewise the new North Star and Fireforge fantasy ranges, while tempting at first, would seem pointless given the number of Games Workshop Lord of the Rings figures I have got. If you are going to have elves and dwarves at least have them sculpted by the Perry twins. Much more interesting is the recent announcement by Victrix of plastic Vikings (first), Normans and Saxons. The first Victrix figures I bought were their Napoleonics and I didn't like them at all but their recent ancients have been wonderful. I will definitely be getting these!</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgffHdmL_TLUzuaPPq_IATIV6ziQO_-_N48KpkRQO4C-MQcz1ZPD-G0Hsf7fFhk0Z9bPXv4-4LJs2mlDhI40xUyXzQi0hNQ079h2Bh5_9ScFYC2cJXnPoLlQYWOFWhAsQdzbGM/s1600/a04212v.1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="347" data-original-width="1396" height="158" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgffHdmL_TLUzuaPPq_IATIV6ziQO_-_N48KpkRQO4C-MQcz1ZPD-G0Hsf7fFhk0Z9bPXv4-4LJs2mlDhI40xUyXzQi0hNQ079h2Bh5_9ScFYC2cJXnPoLlQYWOFWhAsQdzbGM/s640/a04212v.1.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://fraxinus-victoryv.blogspot.co.uk/">Fraxinus</a> posted about the new <a href="https://www.airfix.com/uk-en/shop/airfix-vintage-classics.html">Airfix Vintage Classics</a> range, which they are bringing out shortly. These feature many of the models from my past. Plastic models, that is, not the walking up and down on a catwalk (sorry, <i>runway</i>) ones I used to know when I was younger, when hanging out in Milan during Fashion Week. It was no coincidence that Lloyd's Italian brokers day was organised at the same time as Milan Fashion Week. No coincidence as I organised it, with my Italian colleague. During one of these was the only time I literally saw grown women eating just lettuce for dinner, when I went to the birthday party of a Brazilian model and my Italian colleague entirely failed to chat up Carla Bruni. Should have aimed slightly lower down the model pecking order. Heh, heh.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7jv21JYNigHX4s0DdTvmjEbTrH4egsn5cg0_vC-0N3vBwBxvU3D9V5AAZk2pqLtJLVwjB-KYld28NS9ZYppQ6Mgp90TP6V4v3LALXlP7ASJNSyVdoKS7utF9tTKGJ8qBukN4/s1600/a02308v.1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="749" data-original-width="1372" height="348" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7jv21JYNigHX4s0DdTvmjEbTrH4egsn5cg0_vC-0N3vBwBxvU3D9V5AAZk2pqLtJLVwjB-KYld28NS9ZYppQ6Mgp90TP6V4v3LALXlP7ASJNSyVdoKS7utF9tTKGJ8qBukN4/s640/a02308v.1.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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The Vintage Classics line will use some of the old box art. Models will include the Bismark, the first model ship I built (it sadly ended its life in the garden being riddled with .177 pellets from my air rifle) and the Panzer IV, which I must have made a fair number of in the past (did anyone ever make it with the tragic short barrelled cannon?). The Panzer IV was my favourite tank kit and I might just get one to put on my shelf somewhere. I wonder whether you can get a 1/56 one? But then it would need some Perry Afrika Korps and that wouldn't go well. I was looking at the Airfix website recently and was amazed by the almost complete disappearance of their historic ships ranges but now, at least, some of these will return. I did build the Royal Sovereign model in the past and it sat in my mother's lounge for decades as I, amazingly, actually completed, painted and rigged it.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLmkQDCw8CQOztilqa7IMSRJxYlKeimNF6iHrpwn98Hr7XaIFAPdTO5Ashl9sfVDjeinLEDoak6-tfLF8t_WaEow6KjBqnOaK_0_yihyphenhyphenBLX3LjOT1zMMO4bPmzu8G9_JKHWOU/s1600/P1020048.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLmkQDCw8CQOztilqa7IMSRJxYlKeimNF6iHrpwn98Hr7XaIFAPdTO5Ashl9sfVDjeinLEDoak6-tfLF8t_WaEow6KjBqnOaK_0_yihyphenhyphenBLX3LjOT1zMMO4bPmzu8G9_JKHWOU/s640/P1020048.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i>Under the sea</i></div>
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When I thought my eyesight had deteriorated too much to paint wargames figures I did think about going back to making model ships again but the question for me is where do ship modellers keep their finished models? You can't really hang them from the ceiling like aircraft. That said, I recall reading an AE Van Vogt short story, once, where an alien creature sat in a space craft under the sea but could not sense water, so passing ships appeared to be floating in the air above. Could you hang your ship models at exactly the same height so that they appeared to be floating in invisible water? Like the Grand Hyatt hotel in Dubai where I used to stay, sometimes. It would be worse than trying to get pictures to hang at the same height, though.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr_Z7K9gv6Z_G6owTHqWurcSlVpZGiexB5uVTX8Rjff_fKYpY2t7Me16UC__ufcfqk54tV-cuffgLcMjzdsaRRP7LUYVvbqvA9d2V2jhMLU894LmgK_W8iZEK2wwY6VBMitDA/s1600/61TtAnyqdGL._SL1000_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="250" data-original-width="1000" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr_Z7K9gv6Z_G6owTHqWurcSlVpZGiexB5uVTX8Rjff_fKYpY2t7Me16UC__ufcfqk54tV-cuffgLcMjzdsaRRP7LUYVvbqvA9d2V2jhMLU894LmgK_W8iZEK2wwY6VBMitDA/s640/61TtAnyqdGL._SL1000_.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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That said, I did dig my model of the RMS Mauretania out of the loft after visiting the ocean liners exhibition at the V&A, Maybe I'll take it to Cowes this year. I never made the HMS Belfast , either. and always wanted to, although back when I made model warships you didn't have to worry about the dazzle paint scheme! That would be a nightmare! Usually the biggest stress with ship models is getting the waterline stripe right. At least there would be more room on my workbench, now, for a ship under construction. These old Airfix models are very crude compared with modern ones but that is part of their charm, really, as no doubt Airfix hope. They are promising more than the initial release of 25 models (depending on how they sell, I suppose) but some are lost forever, the original moulds having being destroyed in the Second Iraq war (they had been sold by Heller to an Iraqi firm), supposedly).<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr_8Jb4p3RY4RPxsqNl_0A-qZSUB-clhkyRtFFLkCdBExVFezmWAOihyK9NdjUDdYu0TebTtdis6WCRAjnbZ_o1f5QkU8lp1_lrTY6FjljUyiAsar2sAhDU739HTf1b3ROx2_2kQ/s1600/Michetti-Francesco-Paolo-Odalisque.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="958" data-original-width="1200" height="510" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr_8Jb4p3RY4RPxsqNl_0A-qZSUB-clhkyRtFFLkCdBExVFezmWAOihyK9NdjUDdYu0TebTtdis6WCRAjnbZ_o1f5QkU8lp1_lrTY6FjljUyiAsar2sAhDU739HTf1b3ROx2_2kQ/s640/Michetti-Francesco-Paolo-Odalisque.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Odalisque (1873)</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Given it is the Giro I should have wallpaper by an Italian artist, so here is a Turkish-style odalisque (the
lowest grade of girl in the harem) by Francesco Paolo Michetti
(1851-1929). The orientalist subject matter is unusual for the artist who specialised in outdoor scenes. Michetti originated in the
Abruzzo region of Italy and after studying at the Academia in Naples moved to
Paris to continue his studies, exhibiting at the 1872 Paris Salon. </span> <span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">In 1883 he bought an old convent building,
back in Abruzzo, as his studio and home and took much of his inspiration from
the local people and landscape. He also
exhibited in Milan, Naples, Berlin and at the first Venice Bienalle. For the last twenty years of his life he
lived as a virtual recluse and stopped exhibiting.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWo0WtnplySyredzg86zbypWpKCakQQnE9IhVGzaTn3zgn2Edg_mlGX66PCSnaaV5jvxLmuHFSXgE7XKD3DjgeD186N0Mamh3ycdsuxJJjCdhHOH6Y5OBaad6tRIDVml1f1-c/s1600/lfa.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="645" data-original-width="1600" height="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWo0WtnplySyredzg86zbypWpKCakQQnE9IhVGzaTn3zgn2Edg_mlGX66PCSnaaV5jvxLmuHFSXgE7XKD3DjgeD186N0Mamh3ycdsuxJJjCdhHOH6Y5OBaad6tRIDVml1f1-c/s640/lfa.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Given I haven't started a new blog for ages I have decided to do one which just features art from my Paint Table Saturday wallpaper, Art Friday on my <a href="https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100009205857893">Facebook Page</a>, as well as a number of my other blogs. Initially I have collected (and in some cases expanded) the pieces I have posted before. You can find it <a href="https://legatusfavouriteart.blogspot.co.uk/">here</a>. Expect lots of naked ladies and the occasional military, maritime and Baltic landscape painting.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgz9ta0BdNpUSAE1ab4oFgXhtpnyJEeVFXkBL3Om6o-OLD8YVXWEFHGs8d9OBpnRZtBg5CoSSGL7N62i8vQQCObPguaaoKKB-NTiv7x6WwCDXug-MTM0q-GQf3X7lhloItIUHU/s1600/Giuseppe-Verdi-Nabucco-Giuseppe-Sinopoli-cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1366" data-original-width="1600" height="546" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgz9ta0BdNpUSAE1ab4oFgXhtpnyJEeVFXkBL3Om6o-OLD8YVXWEFHGs8d9OBpnRZtBg5CoSSGL7N62i8vQQCObPguaaoKKB-NTiv7x6WwCDXug-MTM0q-GQf3X7lhloItIUHU/s640/Giuseppe-Verdi-Nabucco-Giuseppe-Sinopoli-cover.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Italian music too, with Giuseppe Sinopoli's tremendous <i>Nabucco</i>. It's not my favourite Verdi Opera, that is <i>Aida</i>, but the first act charges along at a tremendous pace and is full of fantastic melodies. I bought my copy in the legendary Farringdon Records in Cheapside, from the legendary Tony. I got it when it came out in 1983, having bought the DG Aida the year before. It is excellent music to cook Spaghetti Bolognese to!</span></div>
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legatus hedliushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17078980742683576345noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26773117.post-79871132009294769762018-05-14T08:11:00.000+01:002018-05-14T08:11:02.806+01:00Fireforge Byzantines construction and a chicken recipe for the Giro<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg75AsO2HBUO-criTwxz6_kmzUvnzOAqVZVfyEv7TkROi2O9K9VcUK2QKPD0K9_J7oIoRddzs9MXPBVEPUhD51NPsFpec0kI1RiTAoi-mUGJ8hkKnt8GeaUNhGpfSkMjmHn1vo/s1600/36_189666.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="674" height="512" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg75AsO2HBUO-criTwxz6_kmzUvnzOAqVZVfyEv7TkROi2O9K9VcUK2QKPD0K9_J7oIoRddzs9MXPBVEPUhD51NPsFpec0kI1RiTAoi-mUGJ8hkKnt8GeaUNhGpfSkMjmHn1vo/s640/36_189666.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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I put two posts up on a couple of my other rather neglected blogs over the weekend.<br />
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Firstly, a look at building some of Fireforge's plastic Byzantine infantry which is <a href="http://byzantinewab.blogspot.co.uk/2018/05/fireforge-byzantines-part-1.html">here</a>.<br />
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Secondly, a chicken recipe to go with Stage 8 of the Giro d'Italia which is <a href="http://legatusfoodandwine.blogspot.co.uk/2018/05/giro-food-chicken-with-garlic-lemon-and.html">here</a>.<br />
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Hmm, I thought. I'll never get a picture that links Byzantines and chicken to illustrate this post with. Wrong. Isn't the internet wonderful?</div>
legatus hedliushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17078980742683576345noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26773117.post-81109151240653045292018-05-12T09:58:00.000+01:002018-05-14T22:19:21.127+01:00Paint Table Saturday: Byzantines, a tidy workbench and a trip to Cowes<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9Dh91BhvfgQjn-aK4lQtTxNqcnz2CwI-sQje_5Tz0SWzRlMhW6x0WS7YQcNC_MB3_PpRnY65xouwsSACsJkc1yTv_Ywir-JbifYvaLUbBASx5ZbbiZ8VvQRhSCPundWmGqxU/s1600/P1100491.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1237" data-original-width="1600" height="494" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9Dh91BhvfgQjn-aK4lQtTxNqcnz2CwI-sQje_5Tz0SWzRlMhW6x0WS7YQcNC_MB3_PpRnY65xouwsSACsJkc1yTv_Ywir-JbifYvaLUbBASx5ZbbiZ8VvQRhSCPundWmGqxU/s640/P1100491.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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Regular readers of my paint table Saturday posts may be surprised by the absence of paint in this picture. Previously there were dozens of pots of Humbrol enamel to the left, where my mug now resides in solitary splendour. Under the computer screen were piles of figures I was working on and to the right was a horrible pile of paints, unopened figures and paintbrushes. Chaotic does not even begin to describe it. Then I read about a storage system in a review in Wargames illustrated and in less than 48 hours was presented with a heavy box of nicely finished plywood pieces. Perhaps emboldened by my work in assembling my Victrix war elephants I charged straight in to <a href="http://legatuswargamesarmies.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/time-to-sort-out-workbench.html">start working on it</a>.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCI5X6aA8g8KzO7swb0ghJR83Kk3OnLb_J4-dKOCAObwyeT2wDiFwTXKSvsOFl-VSnDrW9TWAq6NdIlf72XjRsu4ZfRz5OdVjg_ZGFOSnPq7PuBFIUaYSQs-tpE8ENAVTffOg/s1600/P1100415.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1215" data-original-width="1600" height="486" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCI5X6aA8g8KzO7swb0ghJR83Kk3OnLb_J4-dKOCAObwyeT2wDiFwTXKSvsOFl-VSnDrW9TWAq6NdIlf72XjRsu4ZfRz5OdVjg_ZGFOSnPq7PuBFIUaYSQs-tpE8ENAVTffOg/s640/P1100415.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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I was so impressed with the unit and my skills in assembling it (er) that I sent off for two more units of drawers from the same manufacturer. These went together as easily, although were not quite so robust, being MDF, but once painted black fitted pretty well with the big unit. Together, the two were the same width as the large unit, although a little less deep from to back. They came with drawer dividers but I wasn't going to use them so chucked them out. No doubt Eric the Shed would have used the bits to make a Northwest Frontier fort!</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiU3Heg1kFT363P1aWfrzeHoS6SHE9YOpPqRT9xbcoQ_D0EczI3BL2ktveM9QFLtigrNZvNV_34ZAlXmG65MszC39S2JoGFIsyBQVo2m8PUfFbtHVQiprhCifd9Nu_C3B8jhU/s1600/P1100488.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1026" data-original-width="1600" height="410" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiU3Heg1kFT363P1aWfrzeHoS6SHE9YOpPqRT9xbcoQ_D0EczI3BL2ktveM9QFLtigrNZvNV_34ZAlXmG65MszC39S2JoGFIsyBQVo2m8PUfFbtHVQiprhCifd9Nu_C3B8jhU/s640/P1100488.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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So, here are the three units in situ. Glue, filler, files and glasses top left. Paints I am currently using underneath them. Below that three drawers which hold tall bottles of varnish and paint, taller figures in process (Byzantines with spears) and bases, The big drawer underneath that has all my Citadel paints and washes and the bottom draw has other figures in progress. In the centre there is a space for white spirit and matches for stirring paint. Top left there are special racks for paintbrushes and next to that are knives, my magnifying craft glasses and my water pot. In the big drawer below that are bits and transfers. The bottom two drawers are more Humbrol tinlets. It really is amazing how much I got into this thing!<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJYEn5l9bbVTeHm4kiCcLZTNglp0K0ohbw3Vygoe148NB_s5AnkLBSBSqI8GOHMrd_pS4BQLphfJDoorB_3mN2XAHcGmmpLtAzr111EfrLxmSuiTpJGeOQQsyBtinhaYf9nAM/s1600/P1100398.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="884" data-original-width="1600" height="352" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJYEn5l9bbVTeHm4kiCcLZTNglp0K0ohbw3Vygoe148NB_s5AnkLBSBSqI8GOHMrd_pS4BQLphfJDoorB_3mN2XAHcGmmpLtAzr111EfrLxmSuiTpJGeOQQsyBtinhaYf9nAM/s640/P1100398.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwvjyyAtGWwReCAX82AvtbyP6bHQnBn2ZTFFUDLhLvzSyPB_I_3Jk8r1-r41u8-jFffULOQ5HupdmRoG9Qli4GGZD9P-kgq4GMy8ab0aQboH6FCbmG6FJtyPs1ZX9dEE5j31I/s1600/P1100489.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1201" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwvjyyAtGWwReCAX82AvtbyP6bHQnBn2ZTFFUDLhLvzSyPB_I_3Jk8r1-r41u8-jFffULOQ5HupdmRoG9Qli4GGZD9P-kgq4GMy8ab0aQboH6FCbmG6FJtyPs1ZX9dEE5j31I/s640/P1100489.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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I couldn't quite get everything in. My pots of sand and gravel with some overflow paints have gon onto my old paint rack behind the computer screen but it is an amzing improvement on what was there before.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj41WuAXxKxP5bcTZn2b3XFxC2uTIUIcdrnktkEJnt2quzD46qApPi8gptmnVOIdIDCYvgtGUGR2GtyH5EovWXsraMW8OqUJewBZJuz6pyfnKRYW0v1GF0jwAdf2Hn2FeOtiFc/s1600/P1100397.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="969" data-original-width="1600" height="386" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj41WuAXxKxP5bcTZn2b3XFxC2uTIUIcdrnktkEJnt2quzD46qApPi8gptmnVOIdIDCYvgtGUGR2GtyH5EovWXsraMW8OqUJewBZJuz6pyfnKRYW0v1GF0jwAdf2Hn2FeOtiFc/s640/P1100397.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8ibzuixvnAjRxuE6x_5ezr0fcJg-8cNOOYkAbPr_Ks9h8HJbQMe1QozsqIQUJ_jKHI_11DqA2Ymqrlf9g5rLumvk7wfypwV2esm4C5ndY71L_R4kNcAPr79HHl9LlcEu3UVs/s1600/P1100493.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="989" data-original-width="1600" height="394" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8ibzuixvnAjRxuE6x_5ezr0fcJg-8cNOOYkAbPr_Ks9h8HJbQMe1QozsqIQUJ_jKHI_11DqA2Ymqrlf9g5rLumvk7wfypwV2esm4C5ndY71L_R4kNcAPr79HHl9LlcEu3UVs/s640/P1100493.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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This is just part of an ongoing tidy up of my study. There is still an awful lot to do but I now have one tidy corner at least. The next job is to file a load of DVD's into albums and free up some shelf space for books, Step by step!</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjf91ULsbKvU1iyXVjb-jDDugY08WkHtUdWB6l0q9c7I13SvTQFFDXz-I7ibtukuC5pa6ZrQaQoxxIDgYI3UZc_lvK1srewdDi9PgHyGJT0rSJQmnsoqlQWjXcAOZNx-k1RFgc/s1600/P1100490.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="957" data-original-width="1600" height="382" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjf91ULsbKvU1iyXVjb-jDDugY08WkHtUdWB6l0q9c7I13SvTQFFDXz-I7ibtukuC5pa6ZrQaQoxxIDgYI3UZc_lvK1srewdDi9PgHyGJT0rSJQmnsoqlQWjXcAOZNx-k1RFgc/s640/P1100490.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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So now that I have a less stressful working environment what is on today's workbench? I haven't forgotten about the Carthaginian elephant crew but I am waiting the arrival of some Micro-sol and Micro-set for the shield transfers. In the interim I have started the Byzantine infantry I got at Salute. These aren't as refined as Victrix plastics but are perfectly serviceable and do not suffer from gnomish big head syndrome like the Gripping Beast plastics I have seen (at least their Vikings). I bought the extra resin command and these are very nice indeed. Assembling the resin figures was a bit of a pig as even superglue takes ages to dry on them and you need to wait an hour after sticking on one arm, for example, before attempting to glue the next piece. This is the second batch for a unit of twelve for Lion Rampant. I have already started painting the first five but will leave them now until I get these up to the same stage.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4WPNYErOzWkXD7_401q-zJSu8zxIw9NW89aYOwcYrJhvMPE_cNO7xkoHgYzC5gtgymt-6DRAd7P085Ju0YcRo57z9OamsMmXGX1QT-KfJrA_AUH9_rYfyOUzZ9ySGgJRDfUk/s1600/P1100455.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1128" data-original-width="1600" height="450" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4WPNYErOzWkXD7_401q-zJSu8zxIw9NW89aYOwcYrJhvMPE_cNO7xkoHgYzC5gtgymt-6DRAd7P085Ju0YcRo57z9OamsMmXGX1QT-KfJrA_AUH9_rYfyOUzZ9ySGgJRDfUk/s640/P1100455.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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I didn't get any painting done last weekend as I was down in Cowes for my father in law's ninetieth birthday party at the Royal Yacht Squadron at the Castle. The Squadron are brilliant at this sort of thing and the weather was wonderful, which helped a lot as it meant that guests could wander out onto the lawn overlooking the Solent. Tea on the lawn (technically tea overlooking the lawn) being a popular activity during Cowes week. A couple of years ago I had a nice chat with Zara Tindall, Princess Anne's daughter, there. Princess Anne knows my parents-in-law and has been sailing on their boat a number of times. She is very nice too and was quite prepared to muck in on the boat, clean the decks, empty the bin etc. The Old Bat is not convinced about 'that trashy American' due to marry into the Royal family imminently. 'I wouldn't curtsey to <i>her</i>!' she maintains. "She just wants a title then she will dump Harry and will be back to America and hope to become Jackie Onassis for the rest of her life!" says the Bat. She'll still watch the wedding on TV, though, so she can be rude about all the women's outfits.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdwj6SeUIjLnstkL5fOYECEW6bUzKFkJxsbn7Ew1HLC7deS3xzdg_3DtqOPE9JcFCzJnByoYtSCbl2F04_VI8BisXLyxC2_8p3tQGUdSAsAz2mfYaL7VLyL8TLiphp9DAVBvk/s1600/P1100451.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1139" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdwj6SeUIjLnstkL5fOYECEW6bUzKFkJxsbn7Ew1HLC7deS3xzdg_3DtqOPE9JcFCzJnByoYtSCbl2F04_VI8BisXLyxC2_8p3tQGUdSAsAz2mfYaL7VLyL8TLiphp9DAVBvk/s640/P1100451.jpg" width="454" /></a></div>
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You are not really allowed to take pictures inside the Castle but I couldn't resist taking a shot of the Kaiser's racing ensign, from the Imperial yacht, just outside where the lunch was held (which isn't in the main building anyway). There were two types of guests: yachtsmen and supercharged medical people. All of them (and especially their wives) were snapping away inside on their mobile phones, disgracefully. My father-in-law asked me to look after a girl (the youngest person there by about forty years) from a boatyard on the Thames who had single-handedly restored a Dunkirk little ship. He was worried she might be a bit overpowered by the type of guests (three potential Nobel prize winners) but there were enough boaty people for her to feel at home. Last time I had seen her she was bending planks of wood to fit the hull of a boat. Talk about having all the skills I don't. She came on her motorbike and despite wearing a nice blue dress, her arms and thighs (it was a very short blue dress) were speckled in paint. Splendid, I thought, until I realised that I was old enough to be her <i>grandfather.</i> </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaRNh0O0GdoyHUDeOfCeOrA9k4QePCR_uwjW5Pj6gbB4eLCyXEKM-ymeL4n8uMJr2MZ39KNQp6yLMlCM-ykKplYTd3o0A6r9cK7n4YOniNzHuIjPAm7Xm7uWf3lUCE4SDbxRo/s1600/P1100456.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1035" data-original-width="1600" height="412" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaRNh0O0GdoyHUDeOfCeOrA9k4QePCR_uwjW5Pj6gbB4eLCyXEKM-ymeL4n8uMJr2MZ39KNQp6yLMlCM-ykKplYTd3o0A6r9cK7n4YOniNzHuIjPAm7Xm7uWf3lUCE4SDbxRo/s640/P1100456.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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Lunch was excellent and, as a bonus the Old Bat wasn't there as she had to work and she certainly wouldn't have liked the Bembridge lobster. 'What sort of person eats something like<i> that</i>?" she cries in utter incomprehension. Me, actually. Isle of Wight lobsters are some of the best in Britain and when Mary Berry did a TV programme on them it was to the Island that she came.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVue82avUPB1J33HpRdc0kBVj7a-U8cUwql42_K4ByqyhKQUSo9Cg4r5OEnHTKXuYMsCFNpKefj3Mk5NJFZttrSZhq9mn8T-bnT_SBcxDoVgWNffYJXLhVlabKKyNclAphsBU/s1600/P1100473.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1010" data-original-width="1600" height="404" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVue82avUPB1J33HpRdc0kBVj7a-U8cUwql42_K4ByqyhKQUSo9Cg4r5OEnHTKXuYMsCFNpKefj3Mk5NJFZttrSZhq9mn8T-bnT_SBcxDoVgWNffYJXLhVlabKKyNclAphsBU/s640/P1100473.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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The Squadron are very good at using local suppliers for their food and they had the full range of Isle of Wight cheese and even local crackers. Yum yum. It isn't that many years since the Isle of Wight was famous for being the only county in Britain without a single entry in the Good Food Guide but now it produces wonderful crustacea, lamb, tomatoes, garlic (especially), wine, beer and even gin. There is even a Michelin starred restaurant on the Island now but I have never been. The Old Bat would object to the price (she doesn't approve of going out to eat when you can 'buy the same food in a supermarket'), Guy only eats breaded chicken and pizza and Charlotte is a vegetarian. It's no wonder that I go out to eat regularly with ladies from my past!</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcLAJYwgycD6CFiQSPqBPZN9aGlHqAHHliqdUBNTYbSLxcPQO2aerqcV9YD1EsemWvcovi92mVF-2Wa8WCi9NyGe6SizKK9-YKIK8Cw1i_rXcVy7GddyMJbLl51_ECrVHjKDk/s1600/20180427_164921.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1055" data-original-width="1600" height="422" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcLAJYwgycD6CFiQSPqBPZN9aGlHqAHHliqdUBNTYbSLxcPQO2aerqcV9YD1EsemWvcovi92mVF-2Wa8WCi9NyGe6SizKK9-YKIK8Cw1i_rXcVy7GddyMJbLl51_ECrVHjKDk/s640/20180427_164921.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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I went to the Ocean Liners exhibition, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, with one of these ladies recently. This really is the best exhibition I have attended for some time and is highly recommended. I have always wanted to cross the Atlantic on a liner, although my father-in-law says it is often a rough experience. He lived and worked in the United States in the late fifties and returned home in the SS Saxonia. He had bought a new car in the US and provided it was over a year old he would avoid the import purchase tax of twice the value of the car that would be levied on arriving in Britain. He had calculated that he would avoid this by one day but the Saxonia was making such good speed that it was due to arrive a day early and he would be clobbered by the tax. Being my father-in-law, he asked the captain to slow the ship down! This he couldn't do but instead, took an unscheduled detour to Le Havre instead and saved my father-in-law hundreds of pounds.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhxSVA9OsbTOMHaM2yPmDSpTubCBp81FNjyv3x0SmPKgLRqzTggLb6ermI8yGP9HIUIx46WV4HZOLXOt-ny-GFiZjttkh6wuMajhAsgumzofx-XiyXD8D-fWPx3fKALAscCMA/s1600/img597.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1462" data-original-width="1600" height="584" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhxSVA9OsbTOMHaM2yPmDSpTubCBp81FNjyv3x0SmPKgLRqzTggLb6ermI8yGP9HIUIx46WV4HZOLXOt-ny-GFiZjttkh6wuMajhAsgumzofx-XiyXD8D-fWPx3fKALAscCMA/s640/img597.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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It is appropriate that today's music is the official CD of the Liners exhibition which is a great collection of twenties, thirties and forties music, which played inside the exhibition. I bought the book too. I really need to get my bookshelves sorted!</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyUgDCoAy6_0W0SHUOWska1U4zjl9QgEdWdo8phP06ouszE20QCoensvORUBa6st_NdWQeowBjiNdqH86r-vlZ5tq6PcuE9hJf-yQZKiRPQIP9xIKcX0q0mIMMMxHs7vbIK68/s1600/caillebotte.ajpg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1138" data-original-width="1454" height="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyUgDCoAy6_0W0SHUOWska1U4zjl9QgEdWdo8phP06ouszE20QCoensvORUBa6st_NdWQeowBjiNdqH86r-vlZ5tq6PcuE9hJf-yQZKiRPQIP9xIKcX0q0mIMMMxHs7vbIK68/s640/caillebotte.ajpg.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i>Nude lying on a couch (1873)</i></div>
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Today's wallpaper is by Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894). Caillebotte qualified as a lawyer and also an engineer but was drafted into the Garde Nationale Mobile de la Seine in the Franco-Prussian War. It was only afterwards that he began to study art seriously and he first exhibited in the second Impressionists exhibition in 1876. Although, as can be seen here, many of his paintings showed a tighter realism than his peers. Caillebotte's brother died at a young age and the artist (rightly) thought that he would not live into old age, so he wrote a detailed will leaving his collection of his and other impressionist paintings (Renoir was his executor) to the French State. Impressionism still wasn't really accepted in Paris by the authorities and they didn't want them balthough an exhibition of part of Caillbotte's collection, after his death at the age of 48, was the first show of impressionist paintings held in a public venue, at the Palais de Luxembourg. More than thirty years later, the French government, having changed their mind about impressionism, tried to grab the collection but the Caillebotte family saw them off and many of the paintings in the collection were bought by Albert Barnes and taken into his Barnes Collection in Philadelphia, where the Legatus went to see them a few years ago.</div>
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This is an uncompromisingly realistic nude for 1873 and has none of the usual themes that artists used to justify painting naked ladies at the time; such as bathers or classical subjects. As a result, it has a timeless quality which makes it look more modern than its 145 year old age.
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legatus hedliushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17078980742683576345noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26773117.post-82659227129901754642018-04-22T20:39:00.001+01:002018-04-22T20:39:55.284+01:00Time to sort out the workbench <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>Utter chaos!</i></div>
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While I really should be finishing my Carthaginian elephant crew I have come to the realisation that my workbench (which gives it a whole artisanal air neither my skills nor it deserves) really needs sorting out. Since before Christmas it has got encrusted with unopened packets of (oddly (or perhaps not) mainly female) figures which are burying my paintbrushes and other tools. Inspired by a review in <i>Miniature Wargames</i> this month, I bunged off an order to Hobbies Ltd for a <a href="https://www.alwayshobbies.com/brands/hobbyzone">Hohbyzone organiser</a>. Now, I actually have a paint organiser on my desk but it is so disorganised I hadn't seen it for two years. </div>
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A big heavy box turned up in well under 48 hours and I opened it up to find a quite terrifying number of pieces. Fortunately, I had ordered an extra, optional drawer, which was packed separately, so I set to on making that on Friday. The reviewer in <i>Miniature Wargames</i> said it was straightforward and he had assembled the whole thing in an hour. Well, it took me around half that time to assemble <i>one</i> drawer but I am a DIY manqué. It left me stressed and tense and the look of the completed drawer brought back horrific memories of woodwork at school, where we had to make a box. 'Cut the wood on the waste side' bellowed my woodwork teacher (the memory of whom is so terrible my mind has completely erased his name and face, unlike all my other teachers, I realise) as I messed it up yet again. In fact that is the only single thing I learned from a year of woodwork. In my school report that year I got D- for the subject. 'His work completely lacks any sense of care, accuracy or finish' wrote my woodwork teacher. I hadn't thought about woodwork classes for over forty years.<br />
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I had actually forgotten I had done them at all until I assembled this drawer. A terrifying, suppressed memory of that ghastly room has now flooded back. I am sure it has something to do with my complete hatred of undertaking any practical things to this day or, in the alternative, perhaps this skill is innate and I just don't have it. I, very unfashionably, believe that some things (maths, music, sport, languages and art) need innate skills. These cannot be learned, except to the most basic level. You can do them or you can't. Your brain works like that or it doesn't. No amount of tedious teaching can help, although, I suppose, I admit that I am very bad at learning things, as I am attempting to do with Spanish at present. Basically, I am not interested in spending time learning how to do things. Essentially, if I can't do something <i>instantly</i> (as I found I <i>could </i>with drawing) then I am not interested in learning it; as the fear is you waste endless hours on it and <i>still</i> find you can't do it. Best not to waste the time and just accept you can't do it, as I do with DIY and modelling skills.<br />
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<i>Crafty people love Gorilla glue. I do not.</i></div>
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Still, I was very impressed with the material of this. No smoked fish smelling, laser-cut flimsiness here. It is good, solid plywood which is very well finished (made in Poland). Fortunately, the Old Bat had some of the recommended Gorilla Glue (she has a lot of DIY stuff) to use on it, although I found the applicator totally baffling and ended up with it going on the floor, on my trousers and all over the bits of wood. I decided to assemble the rest of it in the kitchen today, as the Old Bat was out of the way, otherwise I would have got ' you don't want to do it like that' comments, and I have run out of blood pressure pills at present.<br />
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<i>On the move (on the move, we're on our way again - as the theme to an early Bob Hoskins TV show used to go)</i></div>
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The plan is to install this crosswise on my desk (fortunately, it is the exact right size) but to do this I have to move all the other stuff, principally my plastic boxes of figures in progress (to use the term loosely). I had a master plan for these in that they were going onto the shelves behind my chair where there were a lot of DVDs. These are, ultimately, going into a new DVD storage case. This whole operation is not so much juggling objects about but more a rather involved conveyancing chain but it will all contribute to the gradual tidying of my playroom, which is an utter tip at the moment.<br />
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So, this afternoon I found that the little Chinese take away boxes I keep my figures in fit perfectly on the shelf. The Force is definitely with me on this one! While moving them I also found a box of rocks which I had been looking for for weeks. Tidying is good!<br />
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The worst part of my work bench is what lurks behind my computer screen. What horrors lie behind it? My screen is like the wall on Skull Island. Out of side, out of mind. Just looking at this photo I can see more figures, more paint, a WW1 tank fascine, some sort of Games Workshop tank and a load of paintbrushes I had completely forgotten about. This will all have to come out but only after I had assembled the dreaded new storage unit. I am already thinking about getting a couple more to go underneath it.<br />
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It is Sunday today and there was no paint table Saturday yesterday as we went down to Hampshire for the Old Bat's sister's sixtieth birthday lunch, which was very enjoyable. although the Old Bat glared at me for having a pint of Itchen Valley Brewery Watercress Ale (which is brewed very close to the English Civil War battlefield of Cheriton). So I was able to put the thing together on the kitchen table. The man in Wargames Illustrated said it took him an hour but it took me an hour and forty five minutes. I have to say that the fit of the pieces was just perfect. I didn't have a soft headed hammer, as the instructions recommended (who has such a thing?) but a few good thumps with the side of my hand soon had everything in place, although I did resort to a hammer when attaching the base but only because my hand was becoming sore!<br />
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Finally, I gave it a coat of black spray paint so it matches with my other paint stand and my (nineties) desk. I have now cleared the growing lead pile from my desk so next I have to remove everything else temporarily before starting to re-install things.<br />
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So by this evening I think I have cleared around one sixth of my desk but at least my original paint storage unit is now visible. This is going to go behind my screen for storage purposes. </div>
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legatus hedliushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17078980742683576345noreply@blogger.com10