Time to make some scenery

So I thought I would begin making some scenery for the future games I hope to host at home with my shiny new table. The first part was obtaining some square bits of styrofoam with some recent packaging of a toy box for my daughters. Shown below is the square box by itself and another with my hand for scale. (this is the second box hence the white spray paint on my hands which will be explained later)

 

 Shiny Square Styrofoam

 Hand for scale

After I had my square piece I knew that it would of course look somewhat foolish as a rocky outcrop being perfectly square and all that. So I had to do something about that. I know that certain materials like to melt the foam, things like superglue, but using that in quantity seemed foolish, so I tried out some white spray paint, which was rather successful. I didn't take a picture of it as I had to move fast from that point. the next picture is the cardboard box and the hole I rather hastily carved out to use as a base for the terrain.

 Queue the free promo for Kmart Australia

Next I quickly attached the square bottom part which I had not sprayed onto the cardboard with copious amounts of poly vinyl adhesive. I then quickly brushed the pva all around the base and some on top of the now very melty foam, and following that added a whole heap of sand. 

Now, here is the first lesson for myself in terrain making. 

Don't use sand in copious amounts inside the house.

I know what you might be thinking, "Well Duh!", but I was rushing this at the time and the lights outside don't work properly at the moment, a few broken bulbs to replace. So, after vacuuming the excess sand I snapped a couple of shots from both sides. Right now it looks like crap, but it's supposed to because it hasn't been painted yet.

Tomorrow I'll spray on an undercoat and a few layers and then begin to add some frosting through drybrush and maybe some ice parts using the new crackle medium I have. I think that using snow flock on a large terrain piece will be a waste of the small amount of flock that I have.

So, as per usual, I appreciate your thoughts and suggestions. I'm worried slightly about the cardboard warping as the pva dries, and I'm also not sure on the best choice of colours for a rocky outcrop of a wintery landscape. Given that I live in Queensland, what is often referred to as "The Sunshine State" where we have fire warnings that look like this. I don't really get to see wintery landscapes and have to work off pictures.

The Slightly Flamboyant Daemon Prince

So, with my shiny new toy I decided to test out my colour blending on the old metal daemon prince model. This is another second hand that I bought off a friend, my entire CSM army is in fact second hand even if some was new on the sprue still.

I wanted to keep the red world eaters theme that I'm going for whilst putting in an element of daemonic essence bursting through the seems.

The concept was to have a bright blue at the central demon parts and blend it up to the red of the army colour scheme.

Again, I was slack and used my phone instead of my camera for these pictures, but here is the mostly finished product. I might add some more highlights and obviously the base needs to be done, but the main point here is the colour blending attempt.

I tried to do a similar colour blend on his sword and then highlight the runes, it works fairly well when you see it in person but doesn't translate well through the crappy camera phone. Still though, i might look at redoing it at a later date. First I have a lot of other models to assemble and basecoat.

But, as for this guy, I'd love your thoughts.

Shiny New Toys

So I finally landed myself an air compressor that I can use inside, it's quiet, runs with no oil, and provides more than enough juice for painting the man dollies.

Here she is:

I've named her Vera, currently my most prized possession.

In my first quick test run I undercoated a demon prince in about 2 minutes, 1 minute and 40 seconds of that was set up and pack up. It took literally around 20 seconds to spray coat that guy nice and clean. I'll be doing a second post shortly with the further work I did on that guy.

I'll wrap up this post though with a follow up on my previous desires of modelling projects and the successful completion of one of them. In a recent purchase of some off loaded models I landed two unused sprues of CSM raptors/warp talons. I also had a box of unopened Khorne Berzerkers and had planned on making some khorne warp talons. This job has now been successfully completed.


A squad of 10 Khorne Warp Talons:

Sorry for the poor pictures in this one, after a few hours of filing parts, slowly gluing bits together I wasn't in the mood to set up the camera so I just used the phone.

I do have a close up though of the first test model:
     

 I want to use the jetpacks from the kit to make raptors, so I pinched the blade vane bits to add to the backpacks to make them look sort of jetpackish, it works well on some and looks a tad foolish on others.

Learning some new tricks

When I first go into this hobby it was with a collection of friends who all played. Eventually most of us drifted apart in distance and we all stopped playing. I always wanted to get back into it and that's what prompted me to start the gaming club mentioned in previous posts.

After I started the club, I contacted some of my old gaming buddies to see if they still wanted their armies, and one of them did not so I purchased it. It contained an older metal Great Unclean One which I had planned on using in my Chaos Space Marine army, but when the new codex dropped it was discovered that we were no longer able to use greater daemons. So I now had a redundant model and a desire to further my painting skills.

So, here we have Old Papa Nurgle, all painted up, using some techniques I had not yet tried. With the idea being that if it was good enough I would attempt to sell it off.

So here we have the front and rear model views, I went with the darker green style in order to provide a stronger contrast of the bone colour, and the pustules.

I'd like to say, that this is truly a disgusting model and I hope I did it justice, but I'll let you be the judge of that.

Front

Rear

And here we have some close ups of the protruding bone of the rear spine and the elbow. The blood effect was done by using the Tamiya Clear Red paint. The trick was to get some of the paint out of the pot and let it sit on the palette for a few minutes for it to get nice and sticky and then apply it with an old messy brush.

The Rear Spine

The Protruding Elbow

All in all, I was quite proud of my work on this model, I am very much a novice painter even though I have been in this hobby for many years. I'm hoping to further improve on my skills over the next few years with the spare time I have after having returned to full time study.


I have to thank the very helpful commission painter from The Sound of Machines for the tips on using the Clear Red to provide the blood effects.

The Return of the Waaagh!

Our had club numbers dwindled after a move to a new hall. Which was disappointing as we were starting to get some solid numbers of attending players. There's no doubt multiple factors for the dwindling, but at the core I believe that the main group was simply a bit bored of the whole scene. A decision was made to put the club on hiatus for a few months while we all had a break. Recently, I decided to restart the club, at our old location and under the same style as when we began.

So far, so good. We've had one meeting and a healthy enough showing, our next meeting is scheduled for next week for some Fantasy based games, ranging from Warhammer through to Malifaux.

I'm trying to get my Malifaux warband ready for next week, and as such I hope to post some photos of the finished job of them before next Friday.

Painting pre assembled drop pods are annoying

Seriously, remind me never to buy one of these second hand again hehe. Some pics will come later when i think i've finished it enough to be content.

Planned Projects and the lack of time to do them

Well, any of you who have been reading have seen the creation of my Terminator Librarian, which is now mostly complete, the final basing stages and a few highlights are all that is left.

So now i'm thinking of my next projects I'd like to do. I of course have several armies to paint, but I do tend to obtain more enjoyment out of making a conversion piece, so with that in mind I have two major projects I plan on working on over the coming months.

The first is a creation of a Mortis Contemptor Dreadnought for my Dark Angels army. To make this conversion I will use the regular dread legs, of which I have many spare, and the torso from a Warmachine Menoth Warjack. The weapon loadout will be kheres assault cannons and a cyclone missile launcher, the plan for it being that of an anti vehicle/flyer machine. I have some assault cannons spare, and a CML leftover from my deathwing knights kit, so I just need to obtain the warjack parts and get to work. I do believe the three hurdles of this project will be the adaptation of the legs to the torso, the creation of armatures to hold the weapons, and the extra armour to be added to the dread legs to resemble a proper forgeworld style model.

The second project is the creation of some Khorne Warp Talons. I know that usefulness wise using raptors over the warp talons is probably 95% of the time a better idea, but where's the fun in that. Now, I think the standard warp talon models are ok, but don't really fit a khorne theme for me. So my plan of attack for these guys is to use a spare box of khorne berserkers i have yet to open, obtain 10 of the winged backpacks from the possessed kit and obtain the lightning claw arms from the warp talon kit. I have checked into the costing of this from several bits websites and it's actually not that bad. My primary concern with this idea is that all the wings will be the same, and for some demonic style wings, uniformity is not so great, but in this case cost will unfortunately outweight the desire for a better look as it would be too expensive to obtain different wing styles and adapt them to the backpacks. The second problem is that many of the default berserker poses are designed for running or standing still rather than flight, but i plan to overcome this using some moulds I have obtained to make raised bases, in such a way that they should look like they are landing on rocky peaks etc.

On the standard painting side of things, I will be entering a doubles tournament in almost exactly one month and I would like my force to be painted for it. I'll be bring dwarfs and the army at the moment consists mainly of a large block of hammerers with two warmachines and some thunderers and rangers, all in all around 55 models. My typical painting speed is incredibly slow so I'm using the limited time to attempt to challenge myself to improve.

As always, feedback is welcome.

A minor progress update on the librarian

So I finally decided to sit down and do some more painting, which means i thought it was time to update this guy again.

This will be a short and sweet post, just with some updated pictures of my librarian, Thecarius.

I have also been painting old papa nurgle (great unclean one) which I plan on selling once complete, so I've been putting some effort into it. I don't plan to release any pictures of that guy though until it is all finished.

So, here's some quick snaps on my phone of the librarian so far. I couldn't put him on his base as I just added the water effects to his base tonight and that takes about 24 hours to properly set and cure it seems.

As you can see, I've added some metallics to the mix, touched up the bone and green colours somewhat, I just need to finish off the finer detail parts and add some shading to the blue armour (not sure how to do that well with blue just yet).





As always, some feedback would be great.

The IRL stuff of The Gaming Yeti

So my Grand Master Librarian Thecarius has been sitting dormant for some time now due to other circumstances interfering. Namely that of the surgery of my child.

It was only a simple procedure, tonsils and adenoids out and grommets put in, but the pent up stress about the matter has been weighing on me even stronger than I realised.

It wasn't until she was done and was showing a superb recovery that I began to relax and understand how much I had worked myself up over it.

Here's a picture of her on the hospital bed stealing some of my garlic bread. She was keen to get eating and drinking straight away, I had to slow her down in case she got sick from it heh.

So after a week or so, once the kids are all settled down again and I have my uni work under control, expect some return posts of the Reclusiarchy Dark Angels force. As I may have mentioned, I do so love the idea of the Chaplains and will always have my forces being led by them.

And here's the little me snuggled up watching some cartoons after she got out of hospital. She made me retake the photo twice to ensure all of her toys had their faces shown properly.

So for a few weeks I shall be incommunicado but then expect to see some paint jobs and hopefully the beginnings of my conversion work of an Interrogator Chaplain on a Ravenwing Bike, wielding the mighty Mace of Redemption.

The Rise of the WAAAGH!

So this is the story all about how my life got flipped, turned upside down. I found myself suddenly living on the Sunshine Coast with a lot more spare time on my hands and a strong desire to return to the hobby I had forsaken for many years, so I did what any stereotypical nerd would do, I went searching on the internet.

I recalled a gaming site of old called Warseer and put up a few posts on there and was eventually directed to an Australian based gaming site called WargamerAU. It was there that I found a collection of forums dedicated to local gaming clubs and much to my satisfaction i located one not all that far from me. So I loaded my gear into my trusty steed (a run down ford falcon) and off I went.

Much to my dismay I was not greeted with warm welcome by all. Sure, there were people there and they were indeed playing the tabletop games that I wanted to play, but there was a definitive feeling of being an outsider. And to top it off, it was raining. What I found instead was basically a closed group, although they most probably did not even realise it. Nobody was rude, nobody was rejecting, but neither was anyone welcoming, and this I fear led to that club's eventual demise. The positive side of that day was that I did eventually meet a few people and had a game and had some fun.

The entire experience however, left me feeling like this was not the place for me. It was a group of people who've known each other for a long time and who most likely fit in that introvertive personality trait that many other gamers and geeks and nerds belong to. It's not to say they were bad people, far from it, many in fact are quite nice and awesome people, and since that day I've had many a game with them. It was, though, a negative environment to newcomers.

So in order to remedy my situation of a lack of gaming partners, I went and started my own club, only not with the blackjack and hookers. I put up some tentative posts and had a few responses.

What surprised me though was the turnout, whilst initially it was just a trickle, it turned into a flood. And after 3 months, the fortnightly meets turned into weekly, and after 6 months the stress of running it all led me to realise I wasn't having fun anymore so I essentially 'went public' and got a group together to decide on a leadership team to keep the club running so I could go back to having fun and playing games.

Fast forward a year and we've since moved to a larger hall to accommodate the more people we were receiving as our initial hall was quite tiny. Now we have the room to handle many more people and I hope we can continue to grow.

You can find our club forum here, BeerWaaagh!. If you're in the area, even if just temporarily, we're welcoming to all new comers and there's always someone fresh for a game.

Thecarius progress and my painting ADD

Unfortunately the weather on the sunshine coast has been non stop rain for quite a while now and my only airbrushing site is located outside and due to the share house nature and small children, is a set up and pack up in one go deal. Which makes it difficult to get in practice or time at all.

My plan was to mostly use the airbrush to get going on Thecarius but I got bored and began anyway. Also, as I've recently started using a thinner to my paints I find they take longer to dry between coats or colours, so in order to alleviate the boredom of waiting I began on other models as well.

So, here is the progress of Thecarius so far, I have basically undercoated him with a German Yellow Primer, my plan is to make him a much lighter blue than my previous power armour Librarian, not sure why yet fluffwise, I just want a lighter blue. I'll reason it out later, in the meantime here he is:

So while I waited for that coat to dry, and got bored and wandered off into my other projects I also started working on these guy guys, my Deathwing Knights Knight Master, and a chaos Chosen warrior that I'm converting into using as a possessed unit champ and as a kill team member with the daemonic USR.

The Knight also doesn't have much to show just yet, I was definitely far more interested today in Chaos.

The Chaos Chosen: The Warrior Balguun, has begun his daemonic transition with some warping of the flesh onto his lightning claws as well as his leg and shoulderpads. The painting is as yet unfinished, i opted for the bright blue as the beginning colour of the warped flesh as I felt it contrasted much better with the world eaters colour theme I'm aiming for. So, here's two pics of Balguun, front and side.

These pics were brought to you today by my crappy phone as my SLR camera is in a few pieces at the moment whilst I attempt to clean the fingermarks from my children off the lense. I promise to have some better quality pics next time, also I'll have the primary blue done on Thecarius.

I look forward to reading some comments, especially on the beginnings of the work on Balguun, the Chosen.

Painting Thecarius

I shall be documenting my painting of this guy as time goes by, I am waiting on the backorder of paints yet to come, when those guys arrive (as they include some of the new undercoats I want to test out) I shall begin painting Thecarius, he'll be a shining beacon of blueness as is fitting of a Librarian of the Imperium of Man, with some dark angels adornment of course.

Thecarius the Termiator Librarian

Ok, so here's a picture of the librarian in terminator armour i recently created. I unfortunately didn't document the process, but i'll give a brief rundown.

I was working with parts from the deathwing knights set and the dark angels bits sprue, i had some spare terminator legs from the DA sprue, and the front, head and gun arm from the knights sprue. But i had no proper terminator chest.

So i used the back end of a normal power armour pack, added the backpack to it and glued it to the front part of a terminator piece. This of course left large gaps and holes and looked all around quite silly.

To remedy this situation I added the cloak from the knights sprue, and built a greenstuff rear armour for the only visible parts. This was nice and easy to do as i knew that most would be hidden by the presence of the backpack and of course the arms.

I recently obtained some power swords and other items from Hoard 'O Bits and used one of those swords, some items from the DA bits sprue to flesh it out and added a nice book bit to his shoulderpad.

His base as you can see is in the process of being terraformed into an ice wasteland to suit that of the rest of the army (of which very little is painted still, but hey, that's life). I used some cork board that i picked up from spotlight, can also be obtained from bunnings apparently, and some sand that i've had stocked around for a long time.

I'll hope to put up a post of some of his painting in progress as i go. I'm still awaiting the rest of my paint order which is required.

Here he is in his current glory:

And so our story begins...

I wish I could say that it starts with a bang, but it's more like a flumph, the noise of me sitting on my chair.

I tend to enjoy telling stories and I thought it was time that I found myself an outlet to tell them. Now the focus of these stories will be around gaming, predominately tabletop, such as Warhammer, and various RPGs, but also occasionally computer games.

Sometimes they will be battle reports, other times I might wish to tell of how I came to create a model or a unit, or perhaps just an anecdote from the evening of my local gaming club.

Whatever the form, I will do my best to make it entertaining, or at least useful.

I imagine it will look rather plain to begin with, but as time goes by and I learn the tips and tricks I will fancy it up somewhat and we shall have a show on our hands then.

For now, fare thee well.