Half Price Books Score!

Hi All,

Although the Warhammer selection at my local Half Price Books is starting to get a little picked over, I came away with what I thought was a pretty big score on Sunday afternoon.

Ancient battles seemed like too good a deal to pass up. As you know I like the "Midhammer" army books for fluff and painting ideas. The Bretonnia book was a little worse for wear. I almost passed up the figures, a cursory look at ebay on my phone couldn't find these particular models, but $25 and $17 respectively didn't seem too bad. I bought them because I have passed things up too many times. Who knows, it's easy to have regrets either way.

I've been buying up a bunch of stuff and looking at ways to get into 4DKay, or should that be 4Decay? I found this list of non GW figure suppliers on Dakka Dakka. The Warzone Plastics at Prince August here look like a good way to get a lot of troops on the table. The Mad Puppet Scavengers here are a tad pricey, but look like they'd mesh well with the Oldhammer 2015 figure. And I got lost on the Pig Iron site. That's not including Reaper and Hassle Free. I think my head is going to explode.

I've been cleaning up and basing a  bunch of 20mm and few 28mm stuff. I'll try to put up some progress pics in the next few days, but may save it for Paint Table Saturday.

A quick look at the stats before writing showed a big spike in page views from Ukraine. Seems odd with the news coming from there today. Maybe people are trying to distract themselves with pictures of Princess Leia.

Farewell Leia and Maggie, welcome back Fran

Hi All,

Just wanted to draw your attention to a few things.  As you may have noticed I redid my banner to better reflect my painting output for the last year or so. I have finally graduated from being  just a wargames waffler to waffler and painter.

My wife texted me this to shame me. She should know, I have no shame.

One of the things that needed to go was Princess Leia in her "slave" costume from return of the Jedi. Apparently seeing it chapped my wife's ass.

You can revisit my posts about Leia here and here. Sadly, Leia's Metal Bikini is no longer with us, but you can find it archive.org.

I also removed Margaret Thatcher, or rather Meryl Streep dressed up like her to please Ray. Although, to be honest, she was only ever there to get a rise out of him in the first place.

Ray and Maggie do the forbidden Dance.

Okay, not my best photo shop, but you get the idea.

Switching gears I'd like to herald the return of The Angry Lurker Fran's excellent blog. He was one of Postie's Rejects and Ray's partner in crime. You may remember my re-imagining of their weekend in Nottingham for Blog-Con. It was entitled "Of Budgie Smugglers and Banana Hammocks"  (beware, you cannot unsee the images contained in this post). You may prefer the follow up "Salve for recovering from the last post" as many people to this day apparently do. (No nudity, but you may not want to look at this at work.)

I was going to make another Photoshop of "Frandoz", but since the last one was such a cock up I'll save it for another time.

The self imposed painting ban will end this weekend. I'll have some more stuff for you soon.

Cheers

Giving the blog a face lift

Hi All,

You may have noticed that the blog looks different today. I feel that it's been long overdue for a change up/ update.

In the coming days I'll be noodling around with things and trying to update the various pages with, hopefully, more useful information.

As I do these things I'll try to share them with you as a source of ideas for you, should you want to try them.

The changes today were from a simple template to an Awesome Inc one. I changed the widget display to a single column, and adjusted the width of the blog to 1000px to fit my 900px standard pictures.

I'll be working on the banner and a photo gallery next.

In other news, I joined the Oldhammer Forum, and noticed that A Tale of Several Gamers Blog is gone. I'm sad about the second thing, as I think that a collaborative project blog to inspire painting projects was a great idea. I feel like I'm responsible in part for its demise because I forgot to update it with my Oldhammer USA prep stuff.

I'm hoping to get more stuff painted for Oldhammer in the final part of the year and I'm thinking a lot about going to more cons or ways to play more Oldhammer.

I think it's time to revisit my mighty empires campaign and consider how to do some remote games in it.

Oldhammer USA Weekend - Remember the New Alamo - (Last one)

Hi All,

My fourth, and final I think, comic book report from Oldhammer USA Weekend. Although  I did not actually participate in this game, I checked in with it from time to time. My pictures were just quick snaps and many of them are a lot blurrier than I'd like. As it was there was enough interruption of game play for pictures as we all were trying to post to facebook or record for our blogs.

Comic Life 3 was particularly buggy during this one and crashed multiple times. I did learn how to modify things in pre-made templates using the Inspector feature. It allowed me to use Urbana template but ditch the image filter. I also got a chance to re-acquaint myself with editing panel shapes.

(Right click and open in New Tab/Window to view in more huger size)

I also tried to add more comic booky elements such as price, comic code authority badge and logo to it. I figures if Airborne was Oldhammmer Comics, then I would be Chaos Steed Comics.

It looks to me that the logo gets a little lost when it is smaller on the comic. The text is definitely too small. I spent way too much time on it last night. It still needs some work, but I'll let it rest for now.

As always, thanks for looking.

Oldhammer USA Weekend - Battle at the Tower of Ytsur

Hi All,

My final battle of the weekend saw my orcs fielded once again with Dustin as my co-general against VT Chris's smartly painted Bretonnians.

Once again we decided to forego Magic except for magic items. We tried to use formations and had a very relaxed conversation about various rules as we played. It was a really great way to continue relearning this game.

For the report I used the Blue - Orange template in Comic Life 3. The program is still saving in a weird place but I'm able to save the jpegs where I can find them.

If you have trouble seeing the individual panels, try right clicking on the images and opening them in a new window/tab. I try to make them as big as I can, but the page and the light box are only so big. I need to overhaul the blog's design, perhaps how it displays images should be a priority.

Thanks for looking.

Oldhammer USA - The Battle of Rusty's Farm

Hi All,

This was the first Warhammer 3rd Ed. battle that I had fought in about 24 years. I tried to make an army list, but all I had was infantry and no real clue what I was doing. A big thank you to my co-general Richard "Orc Lord" for putting up with my wonky deployment and organizational choices, and our opponents Andrew, Dustin and PA Chris for helping me muddle through a game.

For the following Comic I used Comic Life 3 (as per usual) but without a template. I learned how to texture the page in the program and played round with the formatting of the panels. Lettering (the sound effects things) are still a challenge, let me know if I went too heavy handed.

I chose not to do filters on the images, except for the first one. I find that most filters make the images impossible to make out.

Enjoy.

Next up, my orcs scrap with VT Chris's Bretonnian's

Paint Table Saturday - Week 33 - Aug. 15th 2015

Hi All,

Nothing on the paint desk for the last two weeks as I went to Oldhammer USA Weekend last week. I am taking a break from the painting desk to work on various household/ home improvement projects.

In the meantime, here is a picture of the figures that placed in the retro figure category. The idea was a figure that you either painted during the "Oldhammer Era", was from that era but perhaps painted more recently, or captured "the spirit of Oldhammer". (My memory may be faulty. Read Airbornegrove26's coverage of the event here.)

1st: Citadel Gnome Jester (Lissanne Lake); 2nd: Grenadier Dwarf (Fredrick Kober); 3rd: Citadel Orc (yours truly)

I remember being quite pleased with myself when I finished painting the unit this guy was in. Part of the problem I had then, and still have, is that I paint every figure to the utmost of my ability and level of detail. I don't seem to have a speed painting or rank and file approach. I'm not saying that my level is great, I'm just saying I spend way too much time per model. I think that the more I paint, the better results I can achieve in less time.

Not sure where I'm going with that? I guess just to say that I'm still trying to evolve as a painter. I feel like I've finally painted enough that I've gotten the basics back and have started to develop my painting style 2.0.

Thanks for looking and happy painting.

Oldhammer USA Weekend - Frog Hunt

Continuing on with the games from Oldhammer USA Weekend, here is Brian's Frog Hunt scenario.

Lisanne (Lisanne Du Lac) came in from the Northwest, PA Chris (Christophe De La Foret) from the Southwest, Tom - then Jeff & Hannah - (Thomas Geoffroy D'Hannah) from the Northeast, and myself (Hugues Du Gros Baton) from the Southeast.

We used cards from the Triumph and Treachery set, but I forgot to play mine and it cost me the game. Oh well.

I used Comic Life 3, Super Retro template. It has only one style for the image filters so I set the filter level to it's lowest to keep the images from blowing out. Let me know what you think.

All French terms in this report have been created using an internet translator and should be read aloud with an "outrageous accente!"

There you have it. It was a great introduction to the weekends gaming and Brian really helped those of us (ok, me) who hadn't played in a very long time.

Next up, my O&G army gets a game in for the first time since 1991.

And welcome to Whiskey Priest of The Leadpile. It's been awhile since I've checked in with his blog, but if memory serves he has some truly awesome Rogue Trader scenery and game write ups.

Oldhammer USA Weekend - Overview

Hi All,

Sorry for the delay in posting. I have been having bad shoulder problems since I got back from the event. I saw my chiropractor, who also does soft tissue work, yesterday and feel a lot better today.

Here is my comic report overview of the weekend.

I'd like to thank the organizers and all the other attendees for a really great weekend of game playing and shooting the shit about the hobby. Although the airfare is daunting, and my emergency flight reroute through Philly and Atlanta, notwithstanding, I'm really looking forward to next year.

I think this song by GWAR really sums it up:



Well maybe not really, but it was nice to know that there were some other GWAR fans in attendance.

I'd also like to welcome two new followers to the blog:

Robert Locklan who has many linked blogs but I can't figure out if he writes for all of them. My Followers widget is acting very wonky and I can't read everything or follow the link to his blogger profile. I'll try and sort that out.

Bulldoglopez of He of Three Names, an excellent painter and terrain builder among many other talents. And he has at least two more names ;).

More to follow  as I write up my WFB 3rd Battle reports.

Cheers

Arrgh! - I'm running out of time.

I leave for Oldhammer USA weekend tomorrow night and I'm still not done with what I was trying to finish, let alone know if I can even safely transport it.

Let's take a look at where I'm at.

These gobbos are mostly done. The flesh is really the last thing, apart from a few metal studs and random highlights.

The Army Standard Bearer is coming along. I did the checks and eye icon yesterday. Good for the most part. It would have been better to have the eye be larger and partly behind the skull, but my brain couldn't seem to figure out how to draw the image partially obscured ie I could figure out what not to draw.

These gobbos are in the same boat as the other five, although it looks like four of these haven't had the dry brushing on the ground work.

The Orc Shamen may not make it, they've had weird things like teeth and eyes done, but not much else.

After repairing their banner poles, and finishing the ground work on the one on the left, these two banner men have been hidden behind the dropper bottles. It blocks their accusatory glances. You can see evidence of the old banner paper and places where I chipped the paint trying to remove it.

I gave up on finishing these guys awhile ago. I was going to try and make molds of the two on the right to bring the unit up to 20 instead of using my dodgy conversions. But I've revised down and may only take the 16 or so that are finished.

Speaking of finished. I have those two banners to do for units that were "finished" 20+ years ago. This show the evolution of the banners. The one in the top middle is the one I did c.1991 and I hated it almost immediately. Flanking it, on the yellowed paper, are the designs I came up with at the time to replace it and make the one for the converted spear banner. Beneath it are the attempts I made in GIMP to cut and paste elements I found on the web into my banner designs. The one on the right I somehow made too big and both of them have the tabs too short to wrap around the banner poles. I printed them on regular paper and tissue paper taped to regular paper. For these I've decided to stick with regular paper, as I'm concerned that the tissue would be destroyed in transport.

A lot to do in the next day and a half. Wish me luck.

Paint Table Saturday

Hi All,

While I'm not really an official member of this Paint Table Saturday thing, I like the idea. I may start doing it more just to keep posting regularly and keep you up with what's going on.

You may have noticed, I'm sort of a stream of consciousness guy, and I can find connections in pretty random stuff.

Here's a couple of quick pics.

A quick look at what's on the table. I need to get it in gear to have everything finished and packed up by Thursday.

I still need to flock the command group, but they've got their shields and varnish on.

The Army Standard Bearer is coming along. Not Oldhammer but I think he stands out from the army, and that's the point I think. Only color blocking and the first highlight of Horn/tooth/bone. That's about four coats of red, and it's still pretty blotchy.

The second row of gobbos. These guys are awaiting the final skin highlight and some work on teeth and eyes. I'm having a little trouble with the shields as some of the attachment points were not meant to poke through. I may need to come up with a way to make shield bosses to stick on.

Thanks for looking.