New House... New Times... New Paint Collections...

Well I've been a little quiet lately, since my last Slovak 15mm post and that's because I've just bought a house and moved in...

... more on this later.

Proved to be somewhat more of a ball ache than I expected. I fell asleep at the wheel of a van and bounced off the central reservation on the motorway after picking up all of my stuff that has been in storage at my family home in Wales... luckily no harm was done to me but the van sadly couldn't say the same!

Then I had to pick Roxi and the cats up from London... and prowl around removal men that were intent on tipping my filing cabinets full of painted miniatures onto their sides to put them on their vans and then of course we had to race up to Dudley in the West Midlands (where said house is located) to collect keys and access our brand spanking new home!

Said house... which we in fact like to call 'The Tardis'

* cough cough *

By brand spanking new house of course I mean 'a giant pseudo derelict that was built when Queen Victoria still stood astride the mighty British Empire (or to be more precise when the dumpy little moose could barely shuffle out of her armchair)! Great in theory... the  reality has been somewhat more challenging!

The previous owner as it turns out wasn't quite as honest about things in the house as we had hoped. We immediately saw that she had broken the contract and hadn't removed all of the old furniture from the house... and despite repeated assurances that the damp problems with the house had been resolved it turned out not to be the case...

Now I'm sure you are sitting there saying to yourselves "what the hell has this got to do with toy soldiers?". Well don't worry... this is all relevant as you will shortly find out.

So... the caveat that I set to buying a house when discussing the options with Roxi was i) Its nowhere near London and ii) Whatever house is chosen it has one room of the size that I require for my hobby obsession... which this beast of a house does!

I said to Roxi that I was going to go and tidy up one of the two master bedrooms to prepare it for redecoration and populate it with competently painted pieces of metal and filing cabinets. It had one seriously horrendous carpet that smelled of piss... I ripped it all up along with its backing... and this is where the problems began.

You know what Mission Creep is? Well my taking the carpet up led to me removing wall paper (which really was gross!) which as it turns out was the only thing holding the plaster up against the wall... which of course all fell down... and then it turned out that the double glazed window was actually coming out of its emplacement with wall paper concealing massive cracks all the way around it and the plaster having gaping holes on the undersides allowing ingress of water to soak all of the plaster... which also started falling away...

Man Cave from the door...

Man Cave looking back towards the door...

My wargames room appeared to be slipping away.

I decided to investigate up in the loft and boy oh boy did I find issues.

There was a massive hole in the felt backing under a big patch of broken roof tiles and Carole's idea of having addressed all of the damp issues was to tape the broken roof tiles back together with gaffer tape and placing a bucket below the hole.. badly! The water had saturated the roof joists and had started to flood down the sides of chimney breasts

As it stands now we are having three of the houses four roofs completely replaced and new windows in both master bedrooms... which it now turns out is infested with damp problems as well...

Roxi attacking the walls in what will eventually transform into the  master bedroom

So its going to take a while to get all of this into shape but in the meantime we have had our fibre broadband connected so I can at least carry on with my posting (unlucky guys and gals!)... oh yeah and I can of course still receive post.

Looks what I just received:

A while ago I joined a Kickstarter put out by Scale 75 for a new type of paint covering all of the primes and secondary mixes with a few others. I obviously decided that I would opt for the 'I want it all' option and I am happy to report that I received the set yesterday.

Allow me to introduce you to the new addition to my painting tables (tbc):

OK so the whole kit comes in a nice wooden box. Its no Lignum Vitae only being MDF, but it is well presented and attractive, sporting an  attractive Lambda that Scale 75 have as their brand image and is large enough to contain the whole collection with add ons. The inner trays are all a type of moulded foam and if anything it is these trays which are the least attractive and arguably cheapest parts of the entire offering BUT they do the job so I guess that's all that's important.

A nice looking Lambda on a nice looking wooden box...

The complete and focal point of the whole collection is a set of brand spanking new 48 colours in metal tubes.

These are supposed to be all singing and all dancing types of paints with an extremely high pigment content with beautiful opacity and transparency under dilution because of the fact that the pigment is not supposed to dis-aggregate.

My complete collection...

The artistic pigments are combined with acrylic resins which are then tested against a triad of key performance indicators. Hiding power determines the ability of the paint to cover the layer below it. Lightfastness is the measure of how resistant to fading the paint is and the final metric is Fastness which is a measure of how resistant to deterioration the layer is.

Its important to note that these metrics are not things that have been invented by Scale 75 in-house but are scientific constants and out of a total of 144 measurements just over 70% were listed as high with the remaining being a mix of average and high-average.

One of the paint tubes that I received... on top of lots of other paint tubes...

Its got a base drying time of 10 minutes and a curing time of 72 hours which means that there is plenty of work time with the paint straight out of the tube.

... but of course no paint set is complete without all of the added extras that you may be able to get alongside all of the flashy new paints... and with this set there were plenty!

Some as parts of the main collection, some as Kickstarter Stretch Goals and others as paid for extras. Lets take a look at them all now...

So first and foremost are the extra fluids that complement painting abilities. There are two that come with the collection, one of which I bought an extra of (I actually don't have a clue why though!). Firstly there is a bottle of Acrylic Thinner specially formulated to allow these paints to be used in an airbrush. Maybe I will go down this route but Im not considering it in the short term.

The Acrylic Thinner

The other fluid that I got, and to which I added another in the add ons of the Kickstarter was a 60ml bottle of Acrylic Retarder. This should retard the drying time by up to 15% and with smooth blending and a hand as subtle as a Hippo violating a mouse the extra drying time may, I believe, be a critical thing in getting the best out of these paints.

The Acrylic Retarder

The next thing worth looking at was the palette that came embedded into the lid foam layer of the box. Its a fold open palette with a separate wet palette which fits into the lid of the palette itself. 

The palette

The palette itself has a large central pool divided into two equal parts and a selection of 18 mini pools arranged around three sides of the central pools.

The open palette with the wet palette contained within the lid...

The wet palette is provided with a wet palette pack containing one layer of 'white absorbent material'

that is cut to the container size and is made of high capacity absorbent material which does not shrink when drying out and is resistant to mildew (apparently) and a separate pack of 50 sheets of moisturising paper which is also cut to the container size, each sheet is extra thin allowing for moisture transmission and allows for brushstrokes which makes mixing easy and avoiding deterioration.

The Wet Palette with the Wet Palette Pack

Quite a handy little colour wheel designed by Scale 75 is also provided which gives a key guide on how to arrive at each of the colour variations that you may want to get to.

The Colour Wheel side 1

The first side which carried the Scale 75 Lambda brand icon goes through brief explanations of the Primary, Secondary and Tertiary colours  as well as Warm and Cool colours and definitions of how colour is classified such as Hue, Value, Intensity,  Tint, Tone and Shades for example...

The Colour Wheel side 2

The second or reverse side goes into Colour theory giving brief theories on Mono-Chromatic, Analagous and Achromatic colours and further going into Complementary, Split Complementary and Diad, Triad and Tetrads. There is a geometric diagram in the middle of the wheel showing how each axis gives each colour type in the theory and of course a number of main colours with the variations as you head towards the centre pin.

The Scale 75 Brushes

The collection is provided with two Scale 75 branded paintbrushes. A size 0 and a size 1. I cant speak for the quality of the brushes because I haven't used them yet but I cant imagine a company like Scale 75 putting out appalling brushes with their flagship paints because it just wouldn't help you get the results that the reviews of the paints depends on. They are labelled on the handle as being Kolinsky Tajmyr and the bristles seem to be very well formed with the line of bristles between the heel above the collar down to the toe gradually curving in. Looks like they carry a decent reservoir and as we know Kolinsky is some of the highest quality bristles for capillary action.

The Watercolour Brush Pen

The next thing that I opted for was a Watercolour Brush Pen. I've never used one before but I thought it could be a bit of fun... watch this space I guess.

Paint Agitators

There is a bag of paint agitators. Sounds good but to be honest all it is is a bag of small ball bearings. You stick one in each of your paint pots that runs the risk of drying out. Whenever you shake the pot it will break apart any aggregation of pigment. Should add a bit of life to your dead pots.

Paint Tube Squeezer

There is a rather groovy little paint tube squeezer which looks like a Spartan shield on top of a tuning fork. I would imagine that this will be used very rarely but it is a nice little addition...

... and finally there are a few gimmicks. Not many but enough to satisfy even the most selfish and greedy beer swilling pretzel munching toad spawn out there... 

Stickers

There are two Scale 75 Lambda brand stickers and a bottle opener carrying the same design... which is quite handy as I plan on stocking my currently derelict man cave with a mini bar just as soon as I can squeeze one in!

Bottle Opener

This is one great collection that I cant wait to start using. It should be the perfect accompaniment to my Artist Opus brush collections.

... however as it will be almost two months (I think) before my man cave is ready for exploitation I think I should probably just concentrate on finishing off my Slovak blog posts so I can, with a clear conscience, move onto a new 15mm Flames of War army... which (and you heard it here first) will be a German Gebirgsjager army! :)

...Fix Bayonets Ladies!