More minis - Eureka 15mm Venturans

Since getting over the flu (or whatever the con crud I picked up at Gen Con was) I've been jumping back into painting minis. I'm trying to spend at least a couple hours a day painting and working on minis, hoping to clear some room on my painting table before Fanticide rolls out and takes over.

At the moment, I'm working through a huge pile of projects:

1. A few character figures and some zombies for a zombie game to play this fall.
2. Some vehicles to use for some Car Wars games.
3. The Saxons I got at Gen Con.
4. A couple of commissions - some characters for another 40K army and some Napoleonic museum-style toy soldiers.
5. A 10mm British World War I army.
6. A bunch of 1/72 cowboys and other figures for my dinosaurs and army men game, Chainmail, etc.
7. A couple dozen Necromunda gangers that have been hanging around my to do box since the early 90s.
Etc.

I'm trying to paint at least a couple hours a day now to try to make a dent in the piles. With so many projects to do, though, I often feel like I'm not making any headway at all. So I'm always happy when I finish a project, since it proves that I am actually making progress!

The most recent completed project is a set of 15mm sci-fi models from Eureka Miniatures. These guys are from their Sci-fi Venturans range. I got a couple of every pose and painted them as two forces that could either be opposing sides or separate squads in the same force.

Eureka 15mm Venturans

The models were very well-molded. Although a couple had some large patches of flash, they were easy to clean with a razor knife and some files. The only figures that required any assembly were the auto cannons. They consisted of the gun tripod, the auto cannon, and the gunner. They were a little fiddly to get together, but seem to be pretty sturdy. I mounted the individual figures on small metal bases, except the auto cannons, which were mounted on Games Workshop 25mm round bases.

This is one of the few times when I decided to use a black primer, as I didn't want to spend more than a couple hours painting the whole force. I primed them black and then drybrushed them with a couple shades of grey craft paint. I picked out the shoulder pads of the models in red and white to differentiate the squads. The bases were textured first with fine sand painted dark brown, drybrushed with white and then inked with thinned brown artist ink. I added small patches of Woodland Scenics Earth Blend Blended Turf to finish things off.

I'll be using these to playtest a couple different games and maybe as military pedestrians for Car Wars.

White Squad

Red Squad

Aside from the figs, I put together a set of counters to use for playtesting and fiddling with mechanics. They're two sets of fifty counters, numbered 0-9 five times each. I made them by gluing small squares of paper with the numbers to some tiny disks of wood and sealing them with matte spray. I'll use these for initiative mechanics, playing pieces, etc.