Baby Edmund

Taa-daa! Baby Edmund was born on Friday night, 7lb exactly. Everyone is well, and we're all rather delighted.

Tartan in 28mm

So, like I've been moaning about for a while now, I basically have no geek time. In true Rab style, therefore, I've decided to start a side-project (an elfball team so that I can enter Chris' tournament in June) and, in addition, try my hand at tartan for the first time, too. I am a sensible planner of my time, NOT!

Anyway, here you go:



The green around the base indicates that this player is a Defender, and the narrow line shows the rear facing. Facing is a vital tactical aspect in the game, which is by Impact Miniatures and is rather groovy.

Thanks for reading,
Rab

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!

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.