I was looking at a few historical conflicts over the weekend, and thinkinging to myself 'Hey, they are crying out for a range of figures. I think I'll get my sculptor on the case...' And then I thought, 'Fuck it! We are already collectively snowed under with more ranges than we need.' Indeed we have more periods than a sorority house. And I really believe that. We have way, way too many 'periods' and ranges of figures, which the 'Big Boys' in the industry troll out as the 'next big thing we all  need  to play'. And, because we are, like it or not obsessive with I think a higher than average spread on the autism scale - myself included, before some young scamp does their usual 'hatchet job' - we collectively believe the hype and spend money without thinking about it, considering what scope there is and replayability.  Of course, the Big Boys, want us to get bored and start something else, that they will already have planned... And do ...

In 1984, I first really got an interest in wargaming the Renaissance. Some older friends in the 5 clubs I gamed with every week, were ECW re-enactors, By The Sword Divided had been on TV for a while, and I had fallen under the Mephistophelean, the Machiavellian, grasp of Lloyd Powell, whom I looked up to as one of several role models, who collectively shaped me into the misanthropic and opinionated ne'er-do-well I am today. But more importantly, Lloyd really got me interested in the Italian Wars and Wars Of Religion, and even today, over 4 decades later, when I need to check something about that wide period, I will still pick up the phone and call him at his repose in the Tower Of Doom overlooking the Rivelin Valley, from where he plans the reintroduction of the Feudal system and the arming of certain government agents with the longbow and shoot to kill instructions. But, I digress, as always... I love the colour and pageantry of the period and I have developed a acute aesthetic se...

 I was chatting with my better and less opinionated half this morning about how one of my clients had been quite guarded when they first came on board. It turned out, that they had previous issues with so-called professional painters in the past and were rightly wary of getting taken around the corner and having their financial (and metaphorical) trousers taken down. This really pisses me off, as someone who paints every day over 46 weeks of the year and who has done so for well over a decade and for 30+ years on an ad-hoc basis before that. As I have covered previously, there was a certain painter whose 'schtick' was the dead relative ruse, which when the same relative dies three times, becomes a bit of an obvious load of bollocks.  I tried to help him out and stopped him getting himself de-bagged, but he then went back to his bad ways and the rest as they say is history. When you do something for a living or purport to be 'professional' you should by instinct, treat y...