Loot

After a glorious holiday, in which no modelling took place because I forgot my pin vise, I returned home to a couple of nice little packages and with a surprising little purchase from a post office in tiny, remote Cornish fishing village, Newlyn.

First, the WYBBL dice I sorted out the logo for. These are the ultra-limited pearl versíon. Snazzy! Also, I had the undead ogre sculpt by Justin Coutange through the Oldhammer FB group. In fact, I liked it so much I got two. I think the second may be offered as a prize for Deadcember at the end of this year.

There was also an apropos nothing gift from an old fencing and re-enacting friend, something which I'd never seen before. It's a beautifully illustrated Steve Jackson 'Fantasy questbook' called 'The tears of Tantalon'. I think I'm going to enjoy solving it, as well as looking over the artwork. Thanks, Phil!

And my post office purchase? Two oldish GW washes (Baal red and the blue one, no Devlan Mud sadly) and a Hawk Turquoise (I have trouble mixing turquoise) all from a £1 grab bin. I only got them thanks to Mrs Rab spotting "some of your monsters" in the shop window and suggesting I check inside. Bless her!

Now, to put all these treasures to good use.
Rab

Progress! But no pictures...

I've been painting, which is nice, and I'm not too disappointed by the outcome, which is even nicer.

The problem is that I'm being tempted to compete in the Lead Painter's League Season 6 (LPL6) over on the Lead Adventure Forum. The idea behind it is fabulous for someone like me in that it gives a structure and deadlines for reducing the mound of unpainted lead. There are ten rounds and each round requires  a coherent team of five painted figures. At least the first three must be 'new' teams, and there are bonus rounds as well:

Round 1 - Pre-1991 figures
Round 5 - Tolkein
Round 10 - nautical

I was delighted when I saw the bonus rounds as Rnd1 would be served by my old terminators that I wanted to paint anyway for Space Hulk, rnd5 gave me an excuse to buy the Mark Copplestone hobbits halflings (OOP, but I sent him an email and some paypal and I now have a warband's worth of the little chaps for Song of Blades and Heroes) and rnd10 goes perfectly with the VSF sailors I'm well underway with.

So, I have to have 15 figures painted by 27th Feb if I want to enter, then five a week from mid-March. And I can't post them here (or anywhere) until they've had their debut on LAF in the LPL. If I can get the first three rounds sorted then I'll enter, if not I'll have several pictures to share on here as I've got a reasonable head of steam up.

Oh, and I've 'printed' off the deck for my first aether-flyer on the laser printer at school. 'tis cool!

Happy new year

It seems traditional to begin the new year with an outline of the plans ahead, and for geek blogs this is no different. Not being one to break from tradition, here goes, although the list is somewhat aspirational:

Ongoing Projects

Quest

• Finish Bestiary and get some play-testing in
• Paint up knights, dogs, brigands, trolls, giant, gryphon, demons, human guardsmen...

Bloodbowl

• Paint the rest of my Chaos Pact team for the NAF Cup in Nottingham at the end of May  
• Completed 14/5/2012

Elfball

• Finish rebasing and touching up my valkyrie team  (low priority, more of an optional extra)
  

New Projects

VSF
How awesome is Victorian Science Fiction, eh? Now I've gone and bought the GASLIGHT rules and a few packs of figures to get stuck in...

• Finish naval landing party unit
• Design and build a 28mm scale aeronef (or two!)
• Paint a unit of redcoats
• Paint Her Imperial Majesty Queen Victoria (Gawd bless 'er) and other civilians
• Paint some period policemen
• Convert and paint three mechanised walkers

Space Hulk 

• Paint marines
• Paint genestealers and broodlord

Now, that's a heck of a lot for me, especially considering my low output last year. However, my overall resolution is to paint at least one figure per week on average, ie have 52 figures painted by 31/12/12. Wish me luck...

Hanging on in here

Hello reader(s). I haven't abandoned either geeking, or this blog, but with baby number two due, well, now, I've been somewhat distracted. I've been doing some bits and bobs, but in such tiny snatches of time it's not really been worth sharing. As soon as baby is here and all is well then I'll get back on with things. Hope you all had/are having a happy Easter.

Rab

My new favourite comic

For those of you not familiar with Sydney Padua's amazing webcomic about an alternative history steampunk version of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace (first computer designer and first programmer), do yourself a favour and check it out on 2dgoggles.com. This had me snorting with geeky in-joke-satiated hilarity. Man, I'm a nerd!

Into the Hulk

Yup, I gave in. I bought a set off ebay that was without the miniatures, which was fine as it was a [i]lot[/i] cheaper that way and it means I can use the luvverly Rogue Trader terminators I snagged as a bargain recently. I also got some 1st ed genestealers so the Emperor's finest have someone to righteously smite. Cool :)

What is less cool is that I still haven't picked up a brush - total painting block :(

Excuses, excuses....

Ooooo-kay, first off - the admission: I haven't picked up a brush since my last post.

Now - the excuses: family holidays, friends coming to stay, drinking more at supper so I don't want to start painting and screw it up, more holidays.

So what's next? I'm carrying on with my Impetus painting, but I'm going to intersperse that with some larger scale stuff again, particularly some Bloodbowl star players (skaven ones for an exciting and quick-play variant that Chris has come up with), and I fancy trying a cowboy or two having caught the second half of Once Upon a Time in the West on telly the other day.

Obviously, my butterfly mind has alighted on a new (well, old but resurrected by the re-release) gaming idea:


I just missed out on this first time round (it had gone out of print before I realised what a great game it was), but have occasionally costed up getting the various bits off Ebay. Now, I can't justify ~£60 for a boardgame at the moment, and a limited edition means they'll likely be all gone before I put, say, a tenner a month aside and save up. My plan, therefore is to take it step-by-step:

First - get some 1989-edition metal terminators.
I snagged a job-lot off Ebay for under £2 each; they haven't arrived yet, but if they match up with the photos then a bit of paint-stripping and I reckon I've got a bargain :) Any spares will then be resold on Ebay or traded with James, whose son is Blood Angels mad.

Second - genestealers
Metal 'stealers are rarer than hen's teeth it would seem, but the plastic ones are not too pricey (by GW standards), and show up cheaper on ebay fairly regularly.

Third - the tiles
These are rather expensive on ebay, and I don't want to shell out so much for something that will probably be a little worn (at least with figures you can strip and repaint, or even greenstuff if necessary). My plan is to order the space corridor tile-sets from Litko. They even sent me .pdf templates of the tiles so that I can resize some Space Hulk-esque artwork I found on the net to fit. I'll then print them off onto stickers so that I can just cut, peel, and stick for instant board pieces.

Fourth - the counters
More Litko stuff, here. They do custom counters for a good price, and their quotes hold for 90 days so I can get these in a month or two's time.

Fifth - the rules
This is the tricky one. I can't see any legal way of getting the newest rules, but I know they're based on the 1st Edition very closely. These are available (or at least, until the new release) as a free download from the GW site and I do have a copy. I'll have to keep thinking on this one.

So, that's me, getting ready for school (back tomorrow ) and ready for a bit of escapism which will get me back into the painting groove, I reckon.

Who are you calling a chicken?

Um, the chickens, actually.

Don't worry, I'm not going all surreal on you, and this isn't going to become a farming blog, but we've finally got some chickens. Three, in fact. They are ISA Browns and came from a battery-farm rescue run on Saturday. It was all very cloak-and-dagger, with texts telling me where to meet and when (the Carphone Warehouse car park at 1pm, in case you're interested), and what car they'd be driving. When I got there, there were little huddles of vaguely do-gooder looking middle-class folks (me included, despite the new thug look - see photo later) who would glance at each other and mutter "Chickens?" before the groups would coalesce.

Got my three 'girls', all moth-eaten from the cages, and brought them home to their new and freshly finished palace. They settled in straight away and have given us our first two eggs. I'm a happy hen-keeper :)

The palace, inhabited at last, and all my own work

Me (newly and mistakenly shaven-headed) introducing son and heir to layers

The first egg; beautiful, isn't it?

Carcassone

I managed to get a full refund in vouchers for a duplicate copy of The Great Warbow by Robert Hardy that I got as a present, so today I snapped up a copy of the award-winning Carcassone. It's been like one of those films you know you must see, but never have: a game I've never played and always felt I should.

It looks really good. Lots of beautiful tiles, and on a first read-through it would appear to have fairly simple gameplay, but room for cunning thought.

Real life, plus a bit of geeking

Been quiet on here for several days for a whole raft of reasons: work, ebaying a bunch of stuff, my wife's birthday (lots of chef-ing gained me many brownie points), and some 1:1 scale construction -

The peaked frame you can see buried at the back of my landlord's untidy barn will soon be a palatial residence for some ex-battery hens that we're getting just after Easter. Eggs/Easter, it all seems pretty apt. I'd also be a smallholder if it were financially viable, so this is at least a step in that direction!

In amongst all that more important stuff, I've also managed to finish off Mike's Trollslayer miniature that he needs for the BloodBowl Grand Tournament in May. It's being held at GW's fascist looking headquarters (all those giant eagles!), and they're pretty unforgiving if you use any other company's miniatures, so I painted this up to fill the spiked 28mm boots of his usual, (gasp!) non-GW positional player.



I'm pretty pleased with him, and using the new lamp has given me plenty more light to take the photo with. I think it's an improvement, but my photos still aren't quite what I'm after; perhaps I will have to make a light-box after all. He's standing on the beginning of the other thing that's been getting in the way of my painting - the start of my town buildings for Legends of the Old West. I'm basically using the method shown at Gugnir's site, along with inspiration from Geektactica, and Imelda. I've got the first floor/base built and will be getting started on the walls as soon as I finish this post.

Love is a magnifier light

As alluded to at the end of a previous entry, I've got a new light:


It was my Valentine's Day present. None of your overpriced set-menus or cliched roses - a present with real affection, especially as now my dear lady will be in danger of becoming a painting widow again.

Hopefully it will also give me the eextra light needed to take some decent photos. I used it to snap some shots of the OOP early '90s warhammer dwarfs from my parents' attic to illustrate my ebay auctions. Why not check them out for a bargain. And to help me fund the Old West project that is taking shape?

Begin

I've found that the blogs of other gamers can be a source of great inspiration - painting, new games, reviews, modelling techniques. Really useful and interesting stuff.

I'll be posting the progress of various painting and gaming projects here to keep me on track, act as a personal record I can look back on and, hopefully, someone else will find it useful, too.