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!

Land Office open for business

Whoopee! I got my first building for Thorncreek finished today.

I'd been dithering (how unlike me!) over how to paint the wood, and had done two rather labour intensive (multiple layers and washes) test pieces which I was fairly pleased with, but knew would be mind-numbing for a whole building or town:


So when I was out yesterday picking up some Master's Brush Cleaner (very highly recommended for bringing even nasty old splayed brushes back to life, btw) from the art shop in town, I also picked up two pots of craft paint (Chocolate and Coffee - I guess I was getting peckish!):


Some heavy drybrushing (more like wetbrushing, really) later, and taadaa! A finished building:

The Thorncreek Patrol, ever vigilant...

Quick and dirty pictures, as usual, but it keeps the impetus of blogging going and boosts my feeling of accomplishment if I post straight away I finish something. All the usual excuses about flash washing out layers, funny business from Photoshop when auto-levelling the contrast, but I'm pretty chuffed with how this turned out. The best bit is, the most time-consuming part of painting it was the couple of layers of blue on the windows!

Hope you like it,
Rab

A bloodbowling diversion

The new league season having started (see last post), a little bit of Bloodbowl has snuck in to interrupt my LotOW preparations. Because it usually takes a fair bit of organising to get us together for a day's gaming, we have a fairly relaxed approach to fielding unpainted miniatures. This also means we can use new teams on a whim, but can detract from the visual appeal of the game. I was too ashamed, therefore, to photograph my two games (results in a moment) as I had decided on fairly short notice to use a new team (Chaos Pact) and they had to face their opponents clad only in a film of black spray undercoat [buries head in shame].

For those not au fait with the miniatures from the Chaos Pact team, my understanding is that they were originally a team converted by one of the old GW sculptors and painted by Phil Lewis back in the day for a spread in the White Dwarf magazine. They were then used as masters for a limited production run given as prizes at the Chaos Cup tournament over the years in the USA. Tom Anders ("Galak") was able to do a 500 figure run of each one as part of some highly complex deal with GW which seems to have been a victim of the latest round of C&D letters from the GW attack-lawyers. I'm not privy to any of the details, and I'm so fed up with GW's approach (see earlier posts) that I've no interest in finding out more. Anyway, I got a set of the figs when Tom was selling them, before the onslaught. This is what they looked like in the old magazine article:


After the games (one draw, one loss), I had a quick go at painting up the minotaur:

I went for a brighter and more lurid version of the original paint scheme - in homage, but without slavishly copying.

Anyway - the games. First game was up against Chris with his Slann (think psychotic humanoid frogs). They have the Leap skill across the whole team allowing them to bound over defensive lines and into cages around the ball-carrier. With Chris' positional play abilities I knew this was going to be a challenge. A bit of luck at the beginning of the second half (I pulled off the classic 'throw the goblin with the ball and hope' score - haha!) allowed me to draw level and the game finished 2-2, although he inflicted more casualties on me leaving me a player down for the following game with a permanent reduction in his Armour Value. Boo hiss!

The second game was against Mike and his Orc team. Mike plays a fairly... aggressive... game so I was expecting to lose many many players. As it turned out neither of us managed to inflict a single casualty, but the weather result (Blazing Heat) meant that after each touchdown a whole slew of players would troop off exhausted. It seemed to affect us each in turn, so one of us would be two or three players down at least. This led to a good-natured but unequal contest between us. It turned out 3-1 to him (as opposed to 2-2 which might have been expected) as I couldn't stop him turning me over on the deciding drive.

The other games were such that Chris was crowned the day's victor, but not by so much that the league look unbalanced for future league fixtures.

Phew - a long post! Back to school tomorrow...

Blighty BB day coming :)

We (that's the Blighty Crusaders, which has sort of become our club name, after the team name we took for the Bloodbowl Worldcup in Nottingham in 2008) are getting off to a good start in our league for 2010. Our second gaming day will be next Friday - half term and teaching is luvverly :)



The rest of them have already played their first set of games, so my team may be a little underdedveloped in comparison. I'm taking a new team to me, Chaos Pact, which is a little temperamental with THREE Big Guys who may go 'stupid' and ruin my masterplan. On the other hand, they may cause absolute carnage. I have played two practice games total with them so far scoring a draw and a loss, so we shall see...

Wish me luck.

Can't see the wood for the trees

Almost no painting undertaken this week, except to finish off another outlaw for my bad guy posse:


Mostly, I've been doing a little rooting through a box of trees I inherited, picking out the ones that are still serviceable and mounting them on washers:


A couple of pieces of street furniture to shelter behind:


And finally, the three-shops-in-one is nearly done. I'm just waiting on some model railway sheet tiling for the third roof and it'll be all ready to base up:


The purple-looking roof is some corrugated modeling card I found in a cheapo shop; far quicker than preparing the cat-food-box as I described in an earlier post - life is too short! The right-hand roof is overlapped strips of masking tape that I hope will paint up like tar-paper. We shall see.

Happy geeking,
Rab

State of play (ing with toy soldiers)

Before I get stuck in, I thought I'd give you a quick tour of the workbench as it is now, and please forgive the hurried snaps.

First up, the boss of my Outlaws for Legends of the Old West (just finished, I thought, but I've obviously missed putting a wash on that bit on his right sleeve):


Next, the rest of the boys, in various states of preparation:


There's also another shop, or rather three which I'm doing in one go to speed me along:


On a completely unrelated note, the gang are getting back into another fantasy football game, Elfball from the rather fabulous Impact miniatures. This is my ancient Eqyptian themed team in progress:


And finally, I couldn't resist putting together the first of the 135 (!) mostly plastic Napoleonic figures that Ma and Pa got me for Christmas. I shall paint them with the nice new brushes that sister number one got me. They've finally given in and decided that geeking stuff is a valid present :)

Write on

After a rather hectic six weeks or so (recurring bouts of family sickness, some serious, a funeral and pressures of work), I've not done much painting or western town building. Things seem back under control, however, so I should be back to a roughly weekly posting level by the beginning of February. I'm also doing a bit more fiction writing at the moment, so some free time will go on that.

Painting disaster

Last night I was daubing away (for the first time in a couple of weeks) on some half-finished 15mm Hobilars, finishing off their straps and saddle-work. For some reason I couldn't work out it wasn't going well. The paint texture seemed wrong and the paint was clumping slightly as it dried, but only when using my really fine detail brush. I gave up as being 'too tired' and came back to them tonight. Oh dear. I decided I'd strip and restart, but still couldn't work out why - the same paint and same brush were fine tonight on some Outlaws for LotOW.

Then I packed my stuff up tonight and worked out what the problem was - I have a couple of DIY brushes sitting in a jar beside my workbench. They are soaking in White Spirit. I had dipped my brush in the blasted stuff before starting last night and ruined seven cavalry that were almost done. My comment on that mistake was not very polite, but at least I'd rinsed my brushes carefully when I'd put them away last night so the small amount of white spirit had obviously come off and not ruined tonight's Outlaw painting.

Note to self - BE MORE CAREFUL. Sigh!

Et maintenant pour quelque chose complètement différente

Oui, c'est vrai, j'ai succombé à l'attrait du jeu napoléonien!

(Which my rusty memory, and a bit of help from Babelfish, assures me means I have succumbed to the lure of Napoleonic gaming!)

Yes, too much watching of Sharpe, reading of Aubrey/Maturin, and too many banner adverts from the Perrys and Victrix over on The Miniatures Pages, has led me inexorably to a New Venture, in which our Hero valiantly struggles against Tyranny, the Frenchies and the Corset Fastenings of Dusky Hispanic Maidens.

I had been instructed by the parents to give them a Christmas list, and I was having difficulty. I do need (!) some street furniture for Thorncreek's continued expansion (carts etc), but I rather fancy having a go at making some of it myself first. So I was idly trawling for a set of skirmish rules for Napoleonics in 28mm and discovered a company that was new to me - Too Fat Lardies. They produce a .pdf ruleset specifically for Sharpe-type gaming called Sharp Practice for the princely sum of Seven English Pounds.


They read like it's an absolute blast to play, so I've asked for a whole bunch of Victrix and Perry figures to allow me to do so.



I shall be tackling this project alongside my existing ones once I've got another 3 bases painted of HYW English for Impetus, my Outlaws are finished and I've constructed six buildings for Thorncreek. I've got two done so far:


Obviously this means other Unfinished Projects will suffer, but a couple of them have basically already been put in a box for a few months until enthusiasm for them returns.

Please note - this does not break the Pledge, as it's not my money.

Happy Advent Sunday, all.

How cats helped win the West

I hope you'll be pleased to know that I haven't been just been sitting sulking about GW for the last few days, I've also been beavering away on the first building for Thorncreek, which I think is in the southern part of Colorado. This should allow mountains, plains, and (at a stretch) the occasional gang of Mehican bandidos that are on the run from down south. Well, quite a big stretch...

In case any of you would like to see how I did it, I've laid out the in progress pictures below. The method is very heavily based on this set of articles over on Geektactica, and using Gungnir's sterling work as inspiration as well.

First off, I measured out some templates (sorry, can't find the picture, but it's not that exciting anyway) for the walls, cut them out of 5mm foamcore and glued them square. I then started cladding the walls with the splints/spills/little-bits-of-balsa-like-wood-for-lightning-bunsen-burners-with. This took quite a while!




The elastic band was to hold the end piece in place while the glue dried. Use lots of glue!


More cladding in place...


I realised I had to add a pointy roof bit on the back of the false front to support the roof - lesson learned for next time, when I'll just make two of the back end pieces and stick one on the back of the false front.


This is where the cats come in! The corrugated iron roofing is made from the box my cat's food pouches come in. I just peeled off the outer layer and was left with the beautifully even corrugations you can see :) It took a little while to find the best way of removing the little bits of 'outer' that stuck to the bits I wanted, but I found that a sculpting tool scraped down each corrugation allowed me to clear the stubborn bits off in about ten minutes. Free and reused - bonus!

The finished building! I trimmed the scrappy bits of foam core around the windows so that they were smooth and stuck bits of splint to form door/window frames. I stuck the whole lot onto some thick card, put a ridge-cap over the tin roof, backed the door/window holes with thin card and used some more of the base card to make a front door. I cut two pieces of thin card rectangle to make the sign, removing the central section from one and sticking it over the other to make a frame. The boardwalk was made by gluing a few modelling matchsticks (from a massive bag I picked up for a song) at right angles to the direction I laid the planks which were more splints. I'm pretty chuffed with it for a first attempt, and now that I've done it once I reckon I'll be much quicker next time.





What will I use it for? As I hope my future buildings will be less crude, this should really be the oldest Thorncreek building. The Land Office, perhaps? Suggestions on a postcard...

TTFN