INLG terrain boards: Cheap, DIY, and you're done in an hour.

My favorite wargaming blog is Irrational Number Line Games. They're funny, out-of-the-box, and their games are ridiculous.

In the midst of a hobby that beckons only fat wallets, INLG teaches how to make scifi terrain  from candy boxes; Cyclops monsters from discount action figures; and hordes of Cthulhoid monsters from plastic dinosaurs and Model Magic clay.

In addition to being low cost, their tutorials are also quick -- a couple of hours and you're done. There's nothing quite like getting minis or terrain ready in a single afternoon: its satisfaction without any of the dread of tedium.

The studio was closed for a week for the Sri Lankan New Year, and I used this time to get back to some neglected projects and start some new ones. INLG had just come out with an awesome tutorial on making a lava board, so I decided I'd start there.

Terrain has always been a challenge for me, and it's the same questions we all face:

- Where do I store all this?
- How do I store it safely?
- Can this not take up so much freaking space?

The INLG tutorial is for a small, stackable, terrain square, which addresses these three questions. What really impressed me though, was that it suggested how to quickly bang out lots of low cost, easy to stamp out, easily varied, terrain boards.

First, I cut out a 12x12 inch board. You can't get cork out here, instead you need to buy either plywood or plastic sheets from hardware stores. The materials are cheap, but they insist you buy them in 4x8 foot boards. Customer service being what it is in Sri Lanka, they will not cut these for you either, you'll have to lug them around on your own. I should have got a picture of the sheet we strapped down to the tuk tuk, and very nearly sailed off every time the driver accelerated.

Please forgive the Blackberry-quality photos for most of this:

Next, I needed to create the lava effect. For this I got hold of a couple of cans of spray paint, just some yellow and red.

I sprayed the whole sheet in red, then gave it a varied dusting of the yellow. The nice thing about using spray paints is that it gives you a nice, almost airbrush sort of look and feel. It's also ridiculously quick and easy to work with. 

Next, I needed the little islands of hardened lava. I mixed regular wood glue with some unsifted construction sand, and a bit of black paint. 

Foul-looking, isn't it?

I applied the glue-dirt, and left it to dry in the sun.

I rather liked it. In a later hobby article, I'll talk about how I did some boulders to go along with the board (not much of a wargaming board if there are no obstructions to lines of sight).

The board does demand some minis matched to it. I might use some left over Everblight monsters painted up to match the look and feel, or some bloodletters if we have any lying around. With some 15mm cultist minis and some more terrain pieces (altars, ancient ruins), I've got a cursed city that some plucky investigators or greedy tomb raiders will visit.

As mentioned before, the INLG tutorial suggested a pattern that I could use to make other types of board. I went ahead and then made a beach / sea sort of board to go with the 15mm pirates and ninjas we did earlier.

Another 12x12 inch board, this time with some dark and some light blue spray paint. 

Paint sprayed. Always put the darker color down first, and apply the lighter color sparingly. This creates a natural-looking highlight. 

For the terrain I went for a beach sand look. On execution, I think a dark, rich, jungle earth look would have worked better (no beach on Earth looks like the one I built. But, to be fair, no other beach on Earth is a battleground between pirates and ninjas).

Drybrush in a color one or two tones lighter, and you're done.

Cheers, 

Navin Paintedfigs.Com

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Ninjas Vs. Pirates! 15mm Rebel Minis

We just finished these!

These are the 15mm Rebel Minis we mentioned a couple of posts ago. This is all part of are scheme to offer box sets of painted Ninjas and Pirates.

The pirates are fine for 15mm, though I think Rebel Minis should resculpt the Ninjas as their proportions are a bit weird. But here it is: proof of concept of what painted pirates and ninjas are going to look like.

Now we just need to come up with some game rules. A fun, pick up and play, wargame that:

- Works with as few as 7 minis per side. 

- Has a game length of 15-45 minutes. 

- Is compatible with other minis (there's a LOT Rebel minis offers). 

- Can fit on a single page 

I'm sure it's already been done before. Anyone have any ideas or suggestions for systems that might work?

I'd like to get a few sets and some games ready in time for Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Cheers, 

Navin Weeraratne, Paintedfigs.com 

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The Great Geek Retreat

Last weekend, we went off to a small bungalow in the jungle for a geek retreat, or as we called it, The Great Geek Retreat.

It was less of a geek retreat as a geek trade show: there are very few gamer geeks in Sri Lanka (table top gamer that is). So me, Sootch, and Johann decided to bring in a bunch of non-gamers, and expose them to:

- RPGs

- Board games

- War games 

- Card games

We also figured while we were at, we'd have a hell of a barbecue and hit them with a lot of booze.

When we got to the bungalow, we set up a viewing area and put Monty Python and the Holy Grail up for them while Sootch and I prepped the barbecue and Johann ran around town looking for last minute supplies. The Holy Grail is particularly special geek movie to me, not just because its such a key piece of gamer canon, but also because it was the first movie I ever watched in the US.

We ran two Call of Cthulhu games after dinner -- it was their first time role playing, and none of them had any idea of what to expect. What started out as pretty mundane investigations, quickly ended up -- in horror!

The next morning we switched out to some Z-Man card games, Swashbucklers of the Spanish Main was a big hit. We had planned on Last Night on Earth and Battlestar Galactica, but people were too tired and braindead from the night before so instead we pulled out an old GW game -- Brewhouse Bash!

Sootch got a lovely print of this done on a plastic sheet. Brewhouse Bash is a pretty relaxed, silly game, but it teaches tactics and strategy very quickly. It also teaches rules lawyering and arguments very quickly, but this is of course more of a genre-wide problem...

After that, we headed on back. People seemed pretty pleased with the event, and most were interested in role playing.

The stage is set. I just need to get off my butt and run a game now. 

Cheers,

Navin

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Paintedfigs.com - Rebel Minis Ninjas vs Pirates

Rebel minis if you haven't heard of them, together with Khurasan Miniatures, made 15mm cool for non historical folks. It's as simple as that. They've done 15mm zombies, insurgents, Cthulhu cultists, you name it.

A few years ago they came out with some 15mm ninjas:

and I have been waiting patiently ever since for their latest release -- 15mm pirates.

They've got jaunty pirate command sorts too; sea witches; red-coat pirate hunters; undead pirates; and even a mermaid. Outside of the immediate awesomeness, one must consider the potential for low cost, 15mm, pirates vs ninja conflict.

We had tried to do a pirates versus ninja set before, but the costing in 28mm was prohibitive. With these, I think we can do set of 7 ninjas and 7 pirates, pre-painted and with shipping globally, for $35. Not cheap, but if I can throw in a simple rules booklet and maybe a couple of terrain pieces, it becomes a good offer.

So we ordered some ninjas and pirates, they're in the studio now. If I can get them ready and take some nice photos of them in time, Ninja vs Pirates the Wargame will make the next newsletter!

Cheers,

Navin, Paintedfigs.com  

Paintedfigs.com - Our Own Little Youtube Channel

We've set up a Youtube channel, thanks to the power of Windows Movie Maker (thanks Bill!).

Suraj's insane camera angles, while not always what works best for review photos, are perfect for video it turns out. Here is some Dreadfleet we did, you can see how his mad touch works.

Here's our Youtube Channel:

http://www.youtube.com/user/Paintedfigs/videos

Only a few up so far, but we're adding more.  If you've read this far, then you deserve to see this travesty. It's me and my friend Sootch doing our version of "Haben sie Gehort das Deutsche Band," from the Mel Brook musical comedy adaptation of "The Producers."

Enjoy.

Guess the Dipped Goblins - And win a fully painted Battle for Skull Pass

A small contest: can you guess which, and how many, of these six minis have been dipped, and which haven't? Guess right and there's something in it for you (see end of article).

As you may have just realized, we're now offering dipped miniature painting, which come in at half the cost of our standard painting rates. Painting starts as low as 99 cents per figure. You can check out our dipped pricing here on our prices page: http://www.paintedfigs.com/prices.html

One of our clients asked us to look into dipping as a way of offering painted Wargames Factory historicals at low rates. Assemble, basecoat, dip in Army Painter or Minwax, treat with matte varnish, and voila. In our search for the 99 cent Roman, we found first that we could do night goblins, gretchin and gnoblars for 99 cents, and most other infantry for $1.65.  

Compare and Contrast: Dipped gobbos vs. Standard gobbos

You can see the results of our dipping tests here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/paintedfigs/NightGoblinsComparedDippedVsStandardQuality#

This is a gallery of night goblins comparing dipped (no grass on their bases) with standard paint job night goblins (grass on their bases). Here are some standard quality chaps:

Now here are some dipped night goblins:

Now here is a close up. This shows two dipped goblins on the left, and two standard quality goblins on the right:

Once we add grass to them, I will not be able to tell them apart without checking quite closely, which works fine for me. Now please note, these are just night goblins. Results are going to vary based on the figures and the paint jobs, but we can safely say that while they won't have the polish or standard or showcase quality work, they'll still come together quite nicely as far as dipping results go. 

Tac Marines for just over Retail: A Games Workshop Example

When you combine this with buying miniatures through us at wholesale rates, this can make for quite the saving. A box of ten tactical marines that retails for $35, we can buy, custom assemble, and dip paint, ALL for $39.25 . That's an extra $4.25, plus shipping. 

Metal Minis: Fully Painted and Cheaper than Retail

It gets more insane when you look at miniatures by companies that do mostly metal. Warcaster Dawnlord Vyros from the new Retribution line for Warmachine, costs $14.99 at retail. At standard painting rates we can offer him, model and paint job combined, for $15.20. With dipping, we can offer him painted for $11.35 -- cheaper than retail.  

There's a lot we'd like to do with dipping (prepainted historicals, shopping cart convenience for stock painting scheme warmachine orders), but we're starting just with extending it as a normal, commission-based painting service for Warhammer 40k and Warhammer Fantasy first. 

Have you guessed exactly which (and how many) minis in the first picture are dipped and which are undipped? If you've figured it out, email me at navin@paintedfigs.com, and put "Skull Pass Dipped Challenge" in the email title. One correct winner, selected at random, will receive the goblin part of the Battle for Skull Pass, fully painted and in his mail box. 

The reaction from our clients who were informed about it last week has been quite positive, and we're proud to be able to offer this highly affordable solution to the community. 

Navin

Visit from the Sunday Times to Paintedfigs.com

I've always felt Paintedfigs.com made for a good human interest feature story, especially in Sri Lanka where there is so little exposure to the larger world of gaming, let alone miniatures (they do video and PC, but everything else is unheard of except for Risk which everyone owns but no one ever plays). It has all the hallmarks: oddity, quirkiness, pretty visuals, human interest. I even pitched the story to one magazine, but they didn't seem to think it was something worth writing about (they also went out of business a couple of years ago, so look who's laughing now, eh? EH?). 

The Sunday Times of Sri Lanka is quite an old paper out here, and has a strong leisure and human interest following. My friend Smriti Daniel (who got me to do some writing for a children's zine she edits) it turned out also writes for the Times, and she set up an interview with us over the weekend. 


What is wargaming? Why did you pick it? How long have you been a gamer for? Where do your staff come from? Had they ever seen anything like this before? Who buys these? She asked a good range of questions, perhaps with a slant towards doing a story focused on a person (me!) rather than miniature painting or the industry of miniature painting in general (not that I'm complaining). 


The end of the interview caught me off guard: Pushpa the photographer took a great many pictures of me with miniatures -- I guess I know a playboy model feels - just with minis. And pants. They also insisted I couldn't make ridiculous faces, and its hard for me to make a normal face when a picture is being taken (check me out on facebook -- there's almost no images where I'm not trying to look like a five year old).  


 I think there is good scope for a general story of Asian miniature painting, from Sri Lanka to Hong Kong, where it's a very real business creating full time employment. You've got Sanath Fernando only half an hours' drive from me who started full time professional miniature painting in the first place (last I heard he had 80 painters), newer companies like Reinforcements by Post (Bangladesh) and DJD Minis (Thailand), and then late entrants like us specializing in fantasy. 


Us being covered in the local media doesn't really touch a lot of people interested in miniatures or painting, but it is nice for the staff to be able to show the article to friends and such and be asked about it at parties. Further, it might help build interest in our fledgling gaming community out here. 


You can see more pictures of their visit on our facebook page here. We'll be updating this gallery with the pics of the article and link to it online. 


Navin

Paintedfigs.com Army Scores 38/40 for Appearance in AWC Approved Tournament Tracker event

Matt Baugh, proud owner of the very first space marine army we painted, received 38/40 at last weekend's AWC Approved Tournament Tracker tournament. This was not a joint second place as reported earlier, but a joint sixth place.

"I was very pleased to score 38 out of 40 for appearance," said Matt to me later. "At a painting cost of $2.50 per space marine, 38 out of 40 is something I would never have dreamed of when I sent those off to you for painting."

This made me happy to no end -- the first reported, impartial assessement of one of our armies in a tournament setting. This wasn't a tournament series I was familiar with, so I asked my partner Luke what the scale of this event was, and how much our score really meant.

"Let me put it this way," he began bluntly, "we're in the same league as Brian Carlson, who won six Best Appearances and Players Choice Awards in the last year. We were just two points behind the winner, Tom Ortman, who won the 2005 Tracker Season overall. "

"This event was significant Navin," he continued. "Half of the participants were either Adepticon award winners of some sort or arganizers and judges at Adepticon."

We since learned from the tourney organizers and participants that even though the raw scores would suggest this, given that so many people tied for first place it is a little meaningless to try draw any kind of assessment on painting quality based on the 38/40.

So has our painting come a long way? I think it has (just take a look at our more recent work like our 100+ model dwarf slayer army) , but high appearance scores may not be indicative of quality (we got an A+ on test -- but since so many others did it doesn't have any real value).

Still, rocognition is recognition, and its good to know that our very first, table top quality, space marine army was quite tournament worthy. It's been an achievement not just for my painters, but also for our clients who have been loyally spreading the word about us to their friends, our quality, and our low pricing.

From myself and the painters, thank you for everything.

Navin

Painted Anime - Paintedfigs does Singapore

I went to Singapore last week, officially to kick back and relax for a change. I did too, it was the first time in nine months that I didn't check email.

Singapore is an awesome city -- and yes, it is one big city state. It's clean, modern, prosperous, and full of high end electronics that are fantastically cheap since they're manufactured there :) . Singaporeans are great people, interesting, hard working, and highly motivated.



Sadly, Singapore is a pretty awful if you're Singaporean. You are likely paid less for the same work than expats with the same qualifications (a problem in Sri Lanka as well). Demonstrating gets you jailed for 25 years. There is no secret ballot, and the media is censored.

But Singaporeans carry on. Many understand that though they don't care for it, the quasi-totalitarian regime of Lee Kuan Yew has done a lot to create their success. Others simply cross their fingers and wait for Lee to die of old age.


Of Robin Low and Jacob Pang
Robin is a good friend of mine from Boston. We were at Harvard together, and I help him with PR for his own company, Greenyarn.com, a nanotech startup that sells self-deodorizing and anti-bacterial clothing.

Jacob, originally from Hong Kong, is one of Robin's lads and pretty cool guy. He has his own shipping company Dartwin.com, and he's been doing sales for Greenyarn in China and Singapore for a while now. Jacob used to sell transformer kits, and he's familiar with the anime market.


The Anime Model Market
It was while shopping for GW supplies that we noticed the possibilities of the anime market. We found shop after shop selling plastic anime chicks, gundam model kits, and geshaphon. Jacob and Robin saw the potential well before I did, and did a good job of convincing me.

The next day we started laying down the ground work. Jacob is sending us some Gundam model kits soon so we can assemble and paint them as samples. Once we have something presentable, we'll put some in stores in Singapore and see how they move.

Then?

Then we cross our fingers. If all goes well, we sit down and figure out how to flood the market.


Meeting Up With Stephen Sing Stephen Sing has been one of our earliest clients. He came us to back when were just me and two painters -- and now that we've more than tripled in size, he's STILL drumming his fingers waiting for us to get him his poor minis...

I didn't get to spend as much time meeting with him as I'd like to have -- what should have been a casual hang out became, as usual, a business meeting. First I talked briefly with some of the guys at Paradigm Infinitum, Stephen's game store, and the I hung out with his friend Edward who gave me a lot of useful information on everything from drybrushes to stripping paint with Dettol.









Overall
Overall it was a great trip. You might say it was too short, but if I stayed any longer it would have hurt work in the studio. Its interesting -- if not for the abundant public holidays in Sri Lanka that mean we have to shut the studio, I'd never take any breaks at all!

The funny thing is, visiting Singapore felt like going home. A big, modern, multicultural city with all kinds of people - even the beer tasted right. For the first time, I found myself wondering whether I'd rather stay in Asia than go back to the US.

I talked to Robin about it, and he had the perfect answer, "the US is where my customers are, I have to be in the US."

If painted anime takes off -- who knows?

And its back to work....

I hope you've had a good Sri Lankan New Year / Easter. Between visiting relatives and stuffing my face with goodies, I did manage to get some work done though. The get-stuff-done prize though go es to Luke. Let me tell you what he's been up to...


Jungle Terrain
It struck us that there is probably a market out there for affordable jungle terrain. Not many fancy paying $50 for a bundle of aquarium plants -- but would they pay $20 for enough to cover the terrain needs for an 8x4 table? $20 for re-assembled and painted plants?

The idea is Luke's and he's talked to a couple of stores that are interested in seeing what we can offer. I managed to pick up a small forest of aquarium plants before all the shops closed for the holday week, and next week I hope to have some pics up of some "test" plants.

Can we actually manage all that for just $20 for a whole table? I dunno... $50 for a whole table might be a better figure -- but then agin, I don't know yet. We'll have to make some prototypes, see how long the process takes, and hope we can make this so affordable that its a real solution to jungle gaming needs.

You'd think I'd be all about catachans, nids, and lizardmen storming over a leafy table, but actually, I'd more keen to on the pulp wargame possibilities. Eureka minis makes some pretty goofy pygmies and Pulp Figures (http://www.pulpfigures.com) has everything from Geman zeppelin troopers to the US Rocket Corps - not to mention a fantastic (and free) rule system that is pretty much immune to the killjoy of over-competitive gaming (it recommends that players wear funny hats, cause no one can take a rules lawyer seriously if he's got a fez on).




Prepainted Minis?
There's buzz about this here and there. thewarstore.com is very keen on doing it, and I wish them luck. The problem though is that its unlikely that any patnership between a manufacturer and a painting service will be able to lead to 28mm, high quality, pre-painted miniatures, at pricing competitive with unpainted miniatures. Hero Clix is a step in the right direction, but its the casette tape stage of this product, when what we need is the re-writable DVD stage.






So here's the holy grail: Is is possible to manufacture and fully paint minis, and sell them to stores at prices low enough that they'll be competitive with unpainted minis, right there on the shelves? Can a company that can integrate both manufacturing and painting, manage this?

We put together a spreadsheet and ran some numbers. What we came up with was encouraging enough to results for me to say on this blog that we are now aiming:




- To manufacture and fully paint, "troop choice" infantry 28mm minis
- To have these minis match GW's sculpting quality
- Sell these to stores at the $3.50 a figure, at 40% off the retail price


As of all of Luke's networking efforts last week, we may very well be able to hit all three. In the long run, I think it not unreasonable to think that we could hit all three.

There are lot of directions we could go if we can manage that. Right now, a rather talented sculptor is working on some great coat infantry, complete with gas masks, spiked helmets, and long rifles. It seems a good market tester: GW Guard players may like some Steel Legion style variants to use as proxies, and pulp-players may quite like them.





Prepainted Bases
Not as earth shattering as prepainted minis, but an easy baby step. We're looking at selling them for $1 per base, and before we can go any further we need to test the market and see if people are interested in this product.

Generally
Things are looking up. I'm probably going to hire another painter next week -- I'm usually quite cautious about staffing levels, but we've got a staggering amount of work to get through and I'm adding 2-3 new clients a week now. One of the reasons I'm keen to work on our own terrain, minis, and bases is that it allows me to have higher staffing to do custom painting, and in quiet periods (of which we've had none) we can manufacture our own products.

Just recieved a shipment from Luke, which among other things, has a laser pointer in it. This will really help cut down on the arguments at games. The lads enjoy wargaming, but their sportsmanship scores could stand to rise...

Take care,

Navin

Happy New Year!

Greetings!

We will be on vacation from the the 11th to the 17th for the Sri Lankan New Year.

I'll be fairly available during this period though, to handle email correspondences.

Take care, and best wishes for the New Year,

Navin