A stocking filler of an update (oh God, that's awful)

Dreadful post title aside, I've unexpectedly got a bit of free time tonight so here's an update on what I've been able to fit in amongst the drinking and terrified shopping that accompanies December.

As Kieron has mentioned at Cheaphammer, we're aiming to have a game of Very British Civil War, which as of last week neither of us had any models painted for, or any rules. Kieron's already done a sterling job whipping some rules up for us to try out, and in order to be ready to play on Thursday night I've basecoated a band of Local Defence Force chappies, the Handsworth Volunteers.

To be perfectly honest, the paint job here is extremely basic, doesn't do the models (a mix of Musketeer and Great War miniatures if memory serves, I actually bought these at Triples 2010) any justice whatsoever and will need more work doing to it for me to consider the models finished. But for the couple of hours I've spent on them, I'm pretty pleased, they'll certainly be usable for some playtesting this week. And this is after I painted the uniforms the wrong colour and started again!

In the first photo you might have spotted the back of a rooftop stairwell creeping into frame. This is a test piece for my next planned project (and one of my goals for the month, I've really wandered off track with that), the Sarissa Precision buildings. 

The extremely generous and helpful Andy (Loki of Loki's Great Hall and Terra Firma Studios fame) was kind enough not only to advise me what colours to use for painting brickwork, but also to go out and get some of the paint mixed up for me. I wanted to give this a try and the bricks on this piece seemed the ideal place to do it.

The results here are very nice, if I do say so myself. It was actually lucky that I got some advice here, because as I was warned, the paint looks too bright when it goes on, but dries to a nice realistic brick colour.

I'm now ready to tackle the buildings themselves, but there's a lot I want to do there and I want to have time to do it properly, so that's waiting until I'm away from work for Christmas (4 more sleeps!). Expect a post in detail about that when I get to it, which I'm looking forward to probably more than is healthy.

Because I wanted to work on the terrain but I'm not ready to do the buildings yet, I've got started on the furniture. I've got loads of this stuff (and I've just bought some more, it's a disease) and I've started most of it at once, but these bits are quite close to being ready:

That's a safe on the left, a photocopier on the right, and in the middle an office cupboard. What's worse, the fact that I took a photo of some furniture, or that you're now looking at it? 

For the cupboard, and the other wooden furniture, I'm trying to get a wood grain effect by deliberately drybrushing in a haphazard sort of way. It seems to have worked ok, we'll see how it looks when I have a lot of the stuff standing together.

Ideally, I'd have some thought to finish this post on, but since I don't know whether this will be my last post before Christmas I'm not ready for the well wishes yet....

... ah, let's go for it. Merry Christmas everybody!