Andy's Painting Bureau: buddha

MASSIVE GIVEAWAY

(if you're only 1 inch tall)

I am absolutely astounded that I have reached the blogging milestone of 10,000 page visits, though without the weird Russian thing a while back I think I'd only really be at about 9k but I'm going to take it.

The numbers were slowly building despite my efforts to take many months between posts but there has been a real rush of late all thanks to your love of Pound shops, this has been my most popular post by a very long way with more than double the number of visits compared to anything else I've done, and it's nearly hit a thousand views on its own.

By way of celebrating this achievement and as a thank you I've decided to do a little give away. You to could be the owner of a golden Buddha statue from the pound shop. "Ooooooo" I hear you all cry. All you need to do is comment on this post with something complimentary, or even constructive criticism, by midnight (GMT) on Saturday September 30th and I will randomly pick from the comments and then be in touch with the lucky winner to arrange getting it to you.

This could be yours, or one very like it anyway

Good Luck & Thanks for stopping by

We all have them, be them £1 shops, $1 Stores or €1 markets, and they are a fantastic source of bits of rubbish for our gaming minds, a positive gold mine of crap.

Well the one good side of my office move (will I ever stop moaning about it) is that I now have very good access to not one but two of the different British £1 chains, PoundLand and PoundWorld, as well as that other fantastic source of gaming junk - Wilkos, in fact the only one missing is the slightly undercutting 99p Store. So I was perusing the aisles the other day to get a sieve and some plastic boxes (more of that later) when I stumbled upon everyone's favourite South East Asian god like statue - Buddha.

Now I've been looking for a Thai style Buddha that would scale as a large statue with 1/72 for quite some time and not wanting to spend more than perhaps £5, in fact I nearly bought one whilst on holiday for about €4 (which these days is pretty much the same as £4 - thanks Brexit) but it was a bit on the small side and I would have had to explain it to SWMBO and I really couldn't be arsed with that so didn't bother. Now these £1 finds are a good size standing at about 5" and came in four poses, but only two really fitted my minds eye image.

The plan is to build a kind of temple which will be draped with vines and vegetation to look like some lost jungle shrine in Burma or the like. I might even gently break one of them to make it seem like the ravages of time have done their worst.

First job, hit them with a blast of undercoat and think about how I'll finish them off to look like old stone.

Looking more stone like already

Now I wonder if this stuff would work and give me the effect I want. But considering this is a bit of a budget project shelling out £7.99 on a can of spray which may well be a disaster seems a stretch.

It may well take me several years to get around to doing this, god knows it's taken more than a few to actually buy the bloody statues, but at least I've made a start.

So with these clasped in my sweaty little mitts it was off to the kitchen zone to pick up a sieve and some of those plastic take away boxes, all for just a pound a piece (apart from the take away boxes where you get 8 for your £1).

I know this seems a bit of an odd purchase, especially the smaller tea strainer sieve (which actually had to come from Amazon as an add-on order), but I have a large bag of sharp sand from a building project some time ago and it's quite good for sprinkling on the bases of my desert buildings I discovered the other week. but some of it is a bit course for the effect I want. So...

Sieve the stuff into different grades and store it ready for use. Should make my life a little easier.

And on a related note to that, one of the stops on our holidays this year was a visit to the volcanic island of La Palma in the Canary Islands which has black sand beaches.