The fabulous, amazing 2020 year end recap!

 Hi All,

Here is the obligatory year end recap post where I try to recall what all I did in the past year.

I realize that a lot of times my posts come across as a "What I did last Summer" essay so I'll try to be less dogmatic in my approach.

What I actually did

As per usual, we make plans we accomplish some and random things catch our attention.

3D Printed terrain

With the start of the pandemic I found myself the time to really start printing my 3D terrain. I apologize for no real glamor shots of this stuff, but another casualty of trying to contain my hobby so that my wife can use the home office, is that I have struggled to find a good place to set up for photography.

Fat Dragon Dungeon tiles.

Corvus Sector Corvus Prime War Layer style building.

Fat Dragon Village Streets tiles.

Corvus Isolation Protocol Building.

Bouncing back and forth between Fantasy and Sci Fi, I also have a few modern day things printed up for Zombie gaming, but nothing painted. The printer has been cold for the last few months as I got busy with other things. I hope to get back to it in the new year.

Scale Creep Group projects

To help each other with motivation, a bunch of us got together and did some projects on a theme. They were a lot of fun and a way to sort of plow ahead without having to thin to much.

The "Paint some kind of killer robot" challenge.

The "RTB01" challenge.

Whoops, not actually a Scale Creep Challenge, but I did challenge myself to get these painted so that we could have a dungeon crawl on my birthday. I did succeed at that.

The "Warzone" Challenge.

The "Mordheim" challenge.

The "Demon" challenge 1 of 2.

The "Demon" challenge 2 of 2.

The "Frostgrave Wizard and Apprentice" challenge.

The "Spooky Halloween" challenge.

The "Chaos Champion" challenge.

So these were a lot of fun and got me to paint way more than I would have as the ups and downs of the pandemic really made it hard for me to focus.

Local Group Projects

We ended up actually gaming a few times here locally before and after the peaks in the pandemic. We tried our best to still follow safe practices and so far seem to have been ok.

Isenguard Uruk Hai Scouts

Isenguard Uruk Hai Warriors.

We've played a few different games, but the latest has been Middle Earth Strategy Battle: Battle Companies. I think I've worked out the recipe for painting these guys. I just need to be a little more precise in the application.

Digital Art

While I did keep up with some Comic book battle reports, I'm a little behind on writing up some of the games I played this year.

But I did do this image representing a battle we had in our WFRP game.

It's a composite of about 5 different images that I then turned into a comic. The scene was my character, an Amber Wizard, had turned into a Raven to follow some cultists that had stolen something from the party while the rest of the party was bogged down in a battle. He ended up being harassed by a flock of pigeons while being shot out of the sky by another pigeon that was the familiar of a vampire.

I'd like to do more of this in the coming year, but I don't always get such clear ideas.

What I didn't get to

This year was the year of the rat, so I had intended to paint up my Skaven. To be honest I just wasn't feeling it when I started with a unit of Skaven Slaves.

I also got part way into some 15mm WW2 Soviets, but didn't finish them and moved on to other things.

My zombie gaming and Gaslands stuff didn't get very far. Oh well.

Here's to 2021!

Update for September through December

 Hi All,

Whoa! I'm sorry for not blogging for so long. I've been in a weird headspace, to be honest, and blogging just wasn't doing it for me. I think part of the problem was that I was getting a lot of spam from old blog conversations and it was making me question the Blogger platform. 

Anyway, I'll try to just keep on doing my thing and sharing what I can. Here's a few things I painted.

Sector Corvus Prime Warlayer style building with Warzone figure for scale.

Some of the Thingiverse freebies of the Isolation Protocol buildings. I backed the kickstarter and was printing files, but I had a bit of a snag changing filament brands and I have a couple of things I need to figure out for my plan of my Sci Fi table.

Good old Reaper Vampire Matthias the Twisted.

I painted these Isengard Uruk Hai Scouts for local games of Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game: Battle Companies. (Boy that's a mouthful.) I moved my photography space around and can't quite seem to get my shots right.

I don't know that they really stand up to close ups, but they're done and I got in two games with them.

We did another Scale Creep thing where we did Chaos Champions. He's only a Renegade, but his Mom thinks he's a Champion.

There are also some unfinished 15mm Soviets and I think I also completed my Cobblestone street layout for my Mordheim table. But both of those are not really worth showing at the moment.

So, I hope you and your families are all well and that you are getting in as much hobby as you can to take some of the edge off of these trying times. Stay well.

Countdown to BOYL: 44 days

Hi All,

Is it time to be terrified yet?

I'm wrapping up the OWAC2 but also madly trying to prepare a bunch of figures for BOYL in August. My timeline is a few days shorter than until the actual event because I have so much travel time to get there. Something like an 11 hour flight, followed by a 2.5 hour drive. Ugh.

Any way, here's some stuff. (Sorry for the bad pictures.)

9 Humans. I realize now that they had the extra arms attribute. Whoops. I'll pretend they have baby T-Rex arms under their jackets. I also really need to dust.

The grave guard, or whatever, that I'm using as Grim Reapers for OWAC2.

The Renegade, Orks (Extra Joints), Beastmen (Irrational Fear [color]), Assassin (I like the way he came painted, just trying to fix him and texture his base.) Two candidates for the Terminator Game/ Strontium Dogs if I can weasel my way in. And some skellies mixed in. Also the Zombie plague cart that needs to be built. Not shown are the Ash Waste Racer, Great Gargant and Space Marine Terminators that have yet to be built. Right now I'm also thinking I will assemble my adventurers for the Temple of Rigg from already painted Fantasy stuff.

So I think I should be worried.

Banners by numbers - The tutorial no one asked for

Hi All,

No rest for the wicked, so hobby time has had to take the back burner again this month. I did promise I'd share how I did my latest banner, so here goes.

If you are like me and have lots of ideas but not the talent to execute them, making banners can be a frustrating task. As I was learning to use GIMP I realized that I was pretty good at cutting and pasting in the software and that I could build my banners from the elements that Games Workshop gave us to make banners in the Army books or White Dwarf Articles.

So I picked a banner from the Undead Army book.

You probably recognize this as one of the Skeleton banners presented in the Undead Army book p32

I did a lot of this first in Photoshop, I couldn't get it to look right, so I returned to GIMP. Turns out it was the final stages printing it out that were the issue, not Photoshop. So the main thing I did was get rid of the design, I just wanted the banner shape. I made a copy of the banner then erased the design and then painted in white to get a blank canvas. You could probably just skip straight to painting over the design in white.

I added a banner scroll that I belive I got from openclipart.org, as its own layer.

Then I added a trace of some artwork for the main banner graphic. In both of these cases I could have used elements from the other line drawings from that banner page in the Undead army book. I just had other plans.

So here's where you may not want to copy me. I latched onto the idea of doing a "Tarman" inspired banner. If you haven't watched Return of the Living Dead, stop everything and do this immediatley. Anyway, I found a T-Shirt and ran a filter on it in Photoshop to alter and simplify it a bit.

This is the original image. I forget what the filter was, but I think it was watercolor.

I then ran a greyscale filter on it because I was more interested in tones than actual color.

Then I selected areas with the magic wand and stroked the selection with a 1px black line on its own layer to give me my outline. I tried to figure out a simpler way to do this but ended up with this method. It just took a lot of time.

The final problem was that, no matter what I tried, the banner would print out in weird dimensions and very pixilated straight from either GIMP or Photoshop. So I pasted it into Open Office Writer, Set my ruler to mm, and scaled it there before printing out.

I then just painted in between the lines and used a tiny technical pen to write "more brains." As you can see the varnish smeared the lettering slightly.

Thanks for looking.

Gamecraft Painting Station

Hi All,

Just before heading off to Denver for JO Regionals; I received my Gamecraft Painting Station, Drawer Add-On and LED Light Add-On. You can see them here.

I had dry fit them together before flying out and had an opportunity to watch the assembly videos here. For some reason I could not find any masking tape around the house or at the grocery store, but we still had some painters tape and that did the trick. The nozzle on my wood glue was a little unwieldy at certain points, but I made sure I had a damp paper towel to wipe up the glue overage. I probably made things more difficult for myself by assembling it on my lap while sitting on the couch watching a movie with the family.

So here it is all assembled and stacked on top of each other. I just have to put the drawer knobs on. This is the 26mm Vallejo bottle version, since I mostly paint with Reaper paints. You can get one that has all 32mm slots for GW pots or a mixture of the two sizes even. The only thing I noticed I didn't do 100% right is the back of the paint tray is not fully flush on there, totally my oversight. Fairly straight forward to assemble and looks like it will help me a lot in keeping projects self contained and easier to transition to different places or speed up set up for things like my WFRP sessions, which I usually do seated at my paint desk.

I bought the three together off Amazon, but I don't see why you couldn't just buy it off the site. I'm very satisfied with the product and service thus far.

Anyway, hope to be painting on it later today. Thanks for looking and commenting.

Fighting Burnout and getting a handle on the collection

Hi All,

As I blunder forward in the hobby I come across things that speak to concepts that gnaw at the back of my mind. Occasionally they come to the fore, only to subside as some other idea bubbles up. This past week two ideas came back up.

Fighting Burnout, restoring Mojo

Someone, I think it was Curis, posted a link to a blog I was not familiar with. The top article was about fighting burnout. The blog is called When Cannons Fade, the said post is here. In it the author develops the concept of having small groupings of miniatures and making a d20 table to keep it sufficiently random to keep your interest up. I like this idea as you can put stalled projects on the list. But I digress. The other part was a link to a youtube video talking about our tendency to be hoarders. I, for one, really need to stop buying the new shiny and/or the too good to pass up deals. I'm starting to buy things I already have and inadvertently getting a lot of doubles.

This leads into the next thought.

Getting a handle on the Collection

I have zero idea of how many models I have in total. I have vague recollections of things, but no precise idea of where they are in my shoddy storage system. I'm pretty sure I have doubles of a ton of stuff. I'm also pretty sure that over 75% of what I own is unpainted. In comes the concept of 100% painted. Now the idea of a general accounting of models painted versus bought/ in the leadpile is nothing new. Anthony, over at the Lead Collector, introduced me to the idea of focusing on trying to bring the ratio of unpainted down by posting about the 100% painted challenge. I think this also ties in a little bit with the "no unpainted models" thing. I need to hold my feet to the fire about painting, rather than buying so much stuff.

So, what's the plan?

Well, my hobbying is a little bit dictated by finishing the Old World Army Challenge and getting ready for Kublacon on Memorial Day weekend. So I think it looks like this.

1. Finish April OWAC submission
2. Finish terrain, extras for final OWAC Army shot.
3. Help my son get his Orlock gang ready for Kublacon
4. Paint up a Mordheim Witchhunter band?
5. Unit cards/ sheets for Genestealer/ Abdul gangs
6. Space Apes (Jokaero)?
7. Squats?

Anyway, you get the idea. Somewhere amongst all that hobbying is taking the time to catalog the collection an get painted unpainted ratios. If you have thought on how to organize a database I'd be glad to hear them. I'm thinking Excel type thing and adding linked sheets based on categories. I was thinking of starting with 40K as I have less of that.

More Painting Guides - Bretonnia

Hi All,

Lots to report, but I keep on reacting to the next thing. I was starting to think about banners and heraldry for my Bretonnians when I stumbled upon this post from Jaeckel Alone.

You can get the images from him but these two examples jumped out at me.

The articles have a few line art banners, but I couldn't seem to find any big banners like I had imagined. I think many of the ones you see around on the internet are from 4th or 5th edition  army books. For Bretonnians I only found something that was labelled 5th edition. No banners, but some good tips for painting those plastic Knights of the Realm.

This sheet looks like it will be helpful in planning.

I'll follow up with this.

Thanks for looking.