My Britsh

After a little less than a month the first batch of my Napoleonic British Peninsular War infantry is nearly ready. I have continued my now usual practice of painting them on their sprues. But this time I have tried a number of new techneques. In the old days I just used to slap on the enamel paints rather in the "paint by numbers" style. The end result was fine but it didn't create much of a contrast in colours. The new style is to base the figures in an acrylic black and then do a top wash in an acrylic red. My first experiments revealed that the an acrylic paint is faily wimpy compared to my usual enamel but it does get into the folds of the figures better. This meant that I was able to brush the enamel over the top of the acrylic to achieve a better caontrast for the jackets. On the rest of the figures I reverted to my old style so they don't look too different frpm my usual efforts. Overall though these figures are looking pretty goos (from a distance) so they should grace a tabletop with honour and glory!

The Big Holiday Update

The weather in East Otago has been FANTATIC! I can't remember a better Christmas holidays than this one we are currently having.  We have packed buckets of fun stuff in so here goes with the update.
The notable experiences have been...
The yearly trip from Kemp's Road to Palmerston.
We started off pretty early in the morning about 8.30 and knocked off the trip in a couple of hours. Josie's bike had good tyres this year and she was able to zoom ahead of her dear old dad with ease (at least until the big hill doen to Palmerston.  We stopped in Palmy and got picked up by my bro and his whanau who are down from Singapore for the holidays.
There are some vids of the trip plus others from the new namelessblog channel that I created after I forgot the password for my old channel.

The Trip from Wainakarua (Mill House turn-off) to Oamaru with BOTH girls.

Video here
Fishing at Moeraki
Fishing for Crabs at the Hampden beach
The walk up Pukitapu
Bike riding to the Mileflat Road and seeing kids (of the goat variety)
 vid here

Painting my Penninsular War British Infantry
Having 6 BBQs over a 2 week period!!
Josie turning 13 and Mari turning 4? (rhyming with tree)

more coming soon...

Police hard at work in Santa's grotto

With the last murder in Dunedin about 3 years ago (from memory) and crime dropping by 6% last year our police in Dunedin are really finding themselves with a little bit of free time on their hands. Time to hit the malls to stop the rampant crime from occuring there. All fun aside though it is cool to see cops on the beat around the shoppping area. The kids love to see police cruisin around and waving and smiling

This patrol needed three (for safety) anfter all who knows how many tots in the Meridian Mall may go berserk with their lollipops.

The Annual Walk to Port Chalmers

After a week of complete crap weather we (Josie, Vic and I) managed to make our annual pilgrimage to Port Chalmers. THe weather started off pretty overcast but as as the walk continued it got better. Vis manged to make it the whole way this year without complaining or having to be piggybacked.  The girls clained to be really tired but it hasn't stopped them from playing ever since we got back from the excursion. All up it was 15.9 Kms. I wouldn't have wanted a longer walk though - it was just enough to be a pleasant jaunt but not enough to be too taxing.

A slightly bumped pic? I think the iPhone 4's camera isn't that hot really.

Answer to Kevin

for some reason I can't post a reply so you get your own whole blog entry! 
Yeah the weather has been getting noticeably hotter. In fact on Sunday it reached a staggering 23 degrees. One of the problems about being on an island on this latitude is that you get all of the crap weather that the antarctic weather gods decide to vomit our way. The weather can change from hot to snow in the space of hours -literally. We can have really settled great weather all really settled shit. In the South Island you should pack for winter but hope for summer if you go camping. For a human from the northern latitudes it must seem a little incongruous to see a winter santa being celebrated in a southern summer. For us however we receive our iconography with little critical thinking.  Besides it is cooler to see a winter Santa than a Santa in a tee-shirt and jandals (worth looking that last word up)

Its that time again,,,

The girls decorated the tree this time themselves. I think they overcooked the baubles a bit but otherwise it was a pretty good job.

Santa

Santa has to source my boxes of soldiers from England. They were put on the reindeer 2 days ago so I hope they make it before Christmas.