Finished Ogres and Rat from last Saturday

Hi All,

They are up on the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge VI here. As usual I am posting all the same pictures here on the blog.

In the main I like how these came out. I used the Reaper Golden skin tone set, but only the shade and mid colors, followed by a wash with the shade. Looks okay but I think it needed some dark lining for some of the transition areas. I didn't see it at the time.

I'm also not liking the yellow skirt with his skin color as much. The greens were a couple of new colors I bought at the craft store.

I really liked the faces on these two. I thought the picture was sharper than it is.

This giant rat was a fun sculpt. The various spaces between his legs and under his head were a little tricky to paint though.

I don't like how his fur came out but the flesh and boils are nice. This figure proved to be rather popular on the challenge.

So here are the four 20mm scale Ogres from Splintered Light and the 28mm scale Giant Rat from Reaper.

Here's a shot of how I'm trying to play with off camera flashes to get better lighting. I feel like all my shots are under exposed so I'm trying to figure out different ways to light them up. These shots still needed some level adjustments in GIMP, so they're not where I want them to be yet.

I'd like to welcome Kitrock aka Robert Kurcina to the blog. I don't see a blog link in your Google friend profile so let me know if you have one and I'll link it.

And on a final note I've started seeing a slow bleed off of followers over the last couple of days. About 7 so far. I'm wondering if this is what some of you were talking about. I have resisted G+ integration of comments and circles on the blog because they insist on forcing so much integration. I personally like to compartmentalize my life and am not particularly interested in bombarding my non hobby friends with pictures of little men. Call me weird.

Paint Table Saturday 116 - Ogres nearing completion

Hi All,

Nothing completed as of yet, here's what's on the table.

These four boys are very close to being finished and you can make out a bunch more 20mm fantasy in the background. I should be doing more Sci-Fi too. I'm taking an absolute beating in the side duel.

Not much else to report here, I survived the laser tag birthday party.

Zero points this week, and what's up with Blogger?

Hi All,

Well, after burning the midnight oil to get my Bonus theme entry in, I came up with a big goose egg this week.

As you can see, not only am I off my weekly goal of 77 points, I'm also failing at my secondary goal of no weeks with zero output. I'm close to finishing a couple of things but mostly I've just been flailing about starting new projects. So pretty much the usual around here.

If you haven't had a chance yet, do yourself a favor and go over to the bonus round blog. Make sure to vote for your favorites [mine, ;)] before 11:45pm Regina time on Saturday night Jan. 23rd.

Now that it's been confirmed that we won't be counting bonus points in the Sci-Fi duel I probably won't be doing too many more bonus rounds. Honestly I was trying to stay out of them altogether this year as it's an added layer of stress that I don't need.

I don't know if y'all have noticed, but my blog started looking wonky sometime around the time I posted up my Leman Russ and Squig Katapult crewman. The back ground went white so I changed it to this weird abstract one and some of the link text is now a a color that I can't see. I'm not sure what happened.

Maybe "Web Services" and "I am Psychiatry" paid me back? Probably not, but who doesn't like an internet conspiracy theory.

Hopefully  I can boot strap my way back into productivity. My jaw hurts less today and I may even let people hit me tonight. I'll let you know how it goes.

"Epic Fail" round for Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge

Hi All,

The "Epic Fail" theme round is up on The Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge Bonus Theme blog.

I did actually submit an entry this time, you can see it on that blog here, or you can look at the following pictures. As always, I urge you to go over there and check out the submissions and vote for whichever ones strike your fancy. Hopefully mine will be worthy of your vote.

"It was at this point that Snozgit realized Bolgag was putting him on about the anti tank squigs."

Thanks to fellow Oldhammer in the New Worlders Bulldog and Malcolm for supplying me with the stuff to make this happen.

The offending right heavy bolter. This Leman Russ started off so promising and became quite difficult. I was going to say that I hate everything about it, but that's a tad over stated. As some of you may be aware, I originally glued the right heavy bolter in upside down and only realized it after assembling and gluing the whole damn sponson on.

The tracks went together great. I had some trouble with the body of the tank and then the bolter housing on the front some how got flexed and wouldn't seat flush. I think the gap filling on the main gun with Tamiya putty was successful, the Yellow milliput around the front heavy bolter housing, less so.

I painted this whole beast with a brush, even the primer, and it was very frustrating. I should have just sprayed it, but the weather was weird here last week and it was right on the edge of the temperature range for spray paint. The coverage was bad, lots of streaks and brush marks. I feel like the wash was a little too brown, and the matte varnish went on rather rough as well. Thankfully it doesn't show in the pictures too badly.

I also don't really care for the metallics I spot colored on the tank. The bronze on the tail pipes and grills is ok, but the Reaper Honed Steel on the Heavy Bolters looks off to me. I was tired at the point I was painting them and thought "Eh,  close enough." I need to sort out a replacement for when my Boltgun Metal runs out.

Snozgit here painted up pretty straight forward. I think the four or five different browns used on all the pouches and patches don't differentiate as well as I'd hoped.

  
A pretty basic paint job, I was just pushing both of these models through.

He's supposed to be wearing striped pants, but it doesn't come through that well.

Another entry done and dusted.

Thanks for looking.

Paint Table Saturday 115 - More prep

Hi All,

I'm working on something for the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge Bonus Round and just waiting for some things to dry.

So here is a picture of my table from this morning.

There have been a lot of hobby ups and downs this week but I'm soldiering on and I'm confident I'll make the deadline of 11PM my time tonight.

Also I'd like to welcome RMacedo NoVember of One Fine Day in August. He has some pictures of his figures on his site.

Thanks for looking.

Do web bots dream of Spam?

Hi All,

  Overnight I got spammed by "Web Services" and "I am Psychiatry". I'm sure most of you already know how to do this, but in case your new to blogging, there is an easy way to get rid of Spam comments.

Inside your blogger dashboard you can go to the comments tab and see all of the comments in chronological order. It tells you who made it, you can read the comment and it shows you what post it's on.

All you have to do is hover over the comment and some options will appear near the bottom. Spam is on the right of the group that pops up. It removes the offending comment and , hopefully, reports the user to blogger. It only took me a couple of minutes to trash 20 or so comments.

***Explicit Language Advisory***

So a hale and hearty Fuck You to "Web Services" and "I am Psychiatry"!

***End Strong Language***

I'm hoping to get something in to the painting challenge today. Sorry Dave. I've been trying to put together something Sci-Fi for the epic fail bonus round and screwed it up slightly. I'm not sure if I can recover. So I'm left with many incomplete projects and a lot of anger.

See you round the interwebs.

Just feeling bummed about David Bowie, RIP.

I wasn't a super fan boy but this makes me sad.

I find this rendition of Space Oddity very beautiful.


Thanks for looking.

Studio shots of vacation figures and Bertok size comparison

Hi All,

So I tried to take some better shots of the first three entries into the AHPCVI. This is just using my usual desk lamp lighting and laptop control of the camera on a tripod.

I think the layers show up a little better on Bertok. In the previous picture I had to use flash to get enough light.

I probably could have posed these a little better and lit them a little better, again no flash. It was hard to get these guys grouped and in focus on an 8.5" wide background.

Same for the Gladiators. Also the two huys hunching forward just don't photograph well.

L to R: Eeza Ugezod, Troll, Bertok, The Merchant of Venus XII

Finally you can see how massive Bertok truly is. Because he had a non slotta base I mounted him on the thinnest plywood base I could get from Litko. All the others are your standard ~3mm high plastic base. So yeah Bertok towers over a troll. Maybe I should have based him on a 40mm base.

Anyway thanks for looking and thanks to Armand for linking my last post on TMP.

The Merchant of Venus XII et al.

It's way past Uranus buddy!

This is what I submitted as my first entry in the Sci-Fi side duel over on the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge. It can be found here. I decided he had to be paired with the Minion Bots as they use the same Aerial technology. It's also probably impossible to tell that he has buttons on his front colored Red, Green and Blue.

Hopefully I did the Colony 87 sculpt justice. I don't know what the bright blue spot on his shoulder is all about. I missed it before posting. So there it is. ***EDIT: I did not mention it here but was in error as to who sculpted the Merchant. Colony 87 is the project of Jon Boyce of Magpie and Old Lead. However the figures were designed by Will Beck and sculpted by Michael Anderson (who seems to sculpt a lot but I can't  seem to find a website for him). Thanks to JB Asslessman of Leadplague for giving me the 411. /EDIT***

The gold to silver to gold transition on the staff is the multiple pieces I had to use to try and fix the staff. I "repaired" it three or four times. Hopefully it doesn't look to bad. The transitions are a combination of wire, aluminum and plastic tubing.

Oh and the bots are named HU-E, DU-E and LU-E after the bots from Silent Running.


I'll be sharing the first picture at the Emporium at some point. Somehow we'll get them into a game of Rogue Trader.

Check out the AHPC Bonus round

Hi All,

  The transition from holidays to regular schedule has been difficult. A visit from my brother and his girlfriend saw a frenzy of tidying around the house and then both feet into the school week left little time for hobby stuff.

  That's a long winded way of saying I didn't do anything for the bonus round. That being said you really should head over there and take a look. Some seriously good stuff.

You can find the Bonus round blog here.

The two stand outs for me were Michael A's The Great Escape and Alan D's Forgotten Heroes of the Advancing Game.

There were also some very nice Oldhammer entries (in no particular order):

AaronH - Goblin Spider Chariot

AlexS - Oldhammer Orks

ByronM - Eldar Farseer

GregB - Citadel Imperial Guard

IannickM - Oldhammer, Three Champions of Chaos (my favorite)

IgnacioR - 10mm Warmaster Chaos Army

JamieM - Rogue Trader Guardsmen

Barks - Robin Hood and his Somewhat Ambivalent Men

JohnSe - Old School  Space Orks

MilesR - The gateway drug

KyleC - Warhammer Daemon (holy #%&*!, I missed this when it came out.)

PhilH - Plaguebearer Daemons (newer models but worth a look)

StefanK - Dark Angels Brother Nostalgico

TeemuL - Bloodbowl Blitzers (Keepin' it Oldskool!)

So have a gander and vote for the ones that catch your fancy, you can pick as many as you like. Voting is open until the 9th I think.

I'd also like to take the time to welcome fellow challenger Sander to the blog. He pens the blog Modus Reg Magni Momenti among others.

I have a bunch of stuff to do/ on my mind. I'll try and do a recap of 2015 and a plan for 2016. But next up will probably be a post about my latest challenge entry.

Toodles!