(Painting) An Astral Searcher and Stuffed Fable Mongrels

With August complete, and the horde of #RPGaDay and #ZineQuest posts complete, it's time to finish out the year on more traditional notes.

Don't tell my wife this, but I finally got out of my home office... and went downstairs to the painting bench. 

First off is an Astral Searcher from the Hackmaster line of minis, currently being carried by Iron Wind Metals.  

Astral Searcher

This is one of the random minis I got from the Historicon flea market.  I figured it would be smart to part up these minis in between the block painting for multiple projects, less they just get dumped into the lead pile. 

I'm not sure what I was looking at to inspire the odd color choices, but the astral plane has always been uninspiring to me, with it's wispy, air-inspired description.  It is such a departure that  I was almost tempted to add some cotton to the base.

The other items I knocked out were four mongrels from the Stuffed Fables board game.

I got the game for Christmas years ago, and just never got around to playing it, but the figures are definitely worth it. 

First time working with Huge Miniatures Weathering Powders and the results are a bit underwhelming, although I'm putting 95% of that on the painting (Holy crap there's a tutorial video!).   I did not want the mass oxidation effect, rather a patchy, localized rust, and things still were a bit light.  I change things up for the next attempt, but they also sell a Weather Powder Fixer for more controlled applications or to build upon layers. 

I will also mention here that Huge Miniatures Solar Yellow is as good as advertised.  I've been fiddling around with it, and it's safe to say it's the first yellow that not only will I not need to use 3-4 layers, but there are instances when I would ponder watering it down significantly.  Coverage is NOT an issue, and I'm tempting to break out more Space Marines for a lost group of Imperial Fists for Planet 28.  

Next: Flea Market Individual Figures, German Gnomes, and Zulus are dominating my bench, with Maja and Millie's zombie and sci-fi gangs filling up every other square inch.

Project 350: I always attach my Project 350 update with a Friday painting post, and with #RPGaDay's daily posts (written early and scheduled) and spreading out the #ZineQuest posts takes up most of August it's time to review that again.  

I use my blog as a repository of ideas, big and small, and a great place to store all the cool stuff I want to steal from other bloggers.  I've accumulated so much "stuff" in drafts behind the scenes, and have so  many "holiday gaming" posts for Christmas, Easter, etc, scheduled that I set up Project 350.  The goal?  To work on those behind the scenes projects to get them posted for the world to see, and get around a completely arbitrary 350 combined blog drafts and scheduled drafts.  

With the August themes, I'm further behind than normal, saving "normal" posts into September, plus a host of far future holiday posts.  Historically, work is insane for October, so I to fill in a few days of posts, pics, and articles around then.   I'll also point out that I'm finally caught up with the backlog from the Star Wars d6 Campaign.    

This scheduled backlog jumps the number up to 464 (296 blog drafts and 168 scheduled posts) from 443 (293/150) in July.  As always, getting a few games in, working on the Pulp Season 4 project, and watching Buckaroo Banzai will help lower these numbers (That last part will make sense sometime in the future.)