Hobby Update, February 2020

Hi All,

Sorry to have been absent from the bloggisphere for so long, it was not my intention but life sometimes gets in the way. My hobby, such as it is, has become more of a background thing as I am trying to manage my son and his growing teen angst about things.

One of the hardest things about parenthood has been feeling unable to effectively help my children overcome the issues of what I see as my worst traits. Wanting my kids to feel better about themselves than I ever did/do. But anyway, as one of my friends put it "life is managed failure." It sounded more uplifting when he said it.

Enough with the downer part.

While I haven't done a whole lot, I have played a few sessions of WFRP. Our game master has his own blog, It always rains in Nuln, and wrote a nice piece talking about our party of deceased characters from when I joined the group that is still currently playing. You can read it here.

If you are interested in hearing our scintillating live play you can find it here. Just look for the Thousand Thrones.

I am still collecting bits and pieces of my Skaven force, trying to fill the odd gaps in what I will loosely call a collection. I also found the Skavenblight Scramblers models I'd buried and partially forgotten about, so I'll be adding them to the queue. If only I could find my Ratskins, year of the Rat queue would be complete.

I've also gotten a fire under my ass to get back to my Mighty Empires campaign. I know, I know, I've been talking about this for years. I made some progress on my map but realized it was at the wrong scale after finding and reading trough (again?) Charles Grant's Wargame Campaigns. I'm still trying to trace my old hex map into Worldographer and got it pretty well sorted before I realized it wouldn't work at the scale I built it at. I almost shelved it again, but I'm going to keep on plugging away now that I have a pretty clear picture of the path forward. I'll try and share that more moving forward.

As for actual paint on miniatures, I'm not sure what the hold up really is. I'm really struggling with feeling like I have the time and space to get cracking. Last years effort to move the hobby and try to be more engaged with the family while doing so didn't really work. I got the lighting in the garage sorted, but it is still a horrible mess in there. I'm still trying to dig things out.

I've also been thinking about trying different techniques to help me get a little faster in putting out models. If I can't lower the indecisiveness time, I can at least make the actual painting go smoother.

Anyhow. I'll try to do better and also get back to reading and commenting on other hobby blogs.

Paint 'em if you got 'em.

Peace out!

Happy Year of the Rat

Hi All,

Today is the Lunar New Year, so Happy Year of the Rat. Around our house we say 恭喜发财.

So I thought this would be the perfect time to get myself together and paint those Skaven that have been sitting in the lead pile for far too long.

You've seen these guys on the blog before. They are the Rat Ogres from the Isle of Blood Box. Somewhere I also have their handler and a Reaper Giant Rat painted. Of course I couldn't find them for this photo.

Some of the Skaven from the Advanced Heroquest box. I have a few more, but you get the idea from these. I also need to paint up all the adventurers and Men at Arms.

Some Plague Monks. I may have more lurking around. Who knows. In fact I'm pretty sure I have a few with a knife and scroll somewhere. I'm so disorganized.

Somehow I won a shrink wrapped Screaming Bell on eBay. Every now and then you get lucky.

Some more of the Isle of Blood Skaven. Again I'm sparing you the pictures of sprues, I have more.

Random assorted Skaven I've bought over the years in peoples basements and parking lot exchanges.

And last, some 20mm Ratmen from Splintered Light Miniatures. The big boy at the back that I'm using as a Rat Ogre is a 28mm scale figure from Highlander Miniatures? I forget. Anyway a cool sculpt.

So that's it for me, another project on top of the others, we'll see how it goes. Next will be to set them up and figure out what sort of "army" I have. Then print out an Army Builder list and get cracking.

Thanks for looking. I hope you find something in your pile that you feel inspired to paint.

Vermember entry, Diehard Kickstarter and Dragon Bait Indiegogo

Hi All,

A lot of stuff going on, I'll try to keep it to three topics only.

Vermember:

Over on The Bazaar of Crooked Wonders we had a Skaven painting challenge. I painted three.

I had originally thought I would do the Rat Ogre on the left then morphed it into the handler and other Rat Ogre as well.

As the month wore on, and little progress was being made, I thought about not finishing the second two. But it always seemed like there was time to add a color or layer while things were drying on the first one.

I found out this morning that I could only pick one as my entry, so I picked "Old Sword Hand". I felt like his colors just came out better overall. The first Rat Ogre seemed to have all the browns, tans and ochres just kind of run together. Even his eye doesn't look as red in the picture as it does in real life. Maybe I chose the wrong White balance. It also appears that the OSL and verdigris on the brassy bits was nearly obliterated by the final grunge wash. Again it's slightly more obvious on the actual model, but maybe I need to be a little more bold with OSL.

Thanks for looking at these.

Diehard Kickstarter:

Just under two days left. The Chaos sorcerer and Hill Giant (?) have been released. At the start of the campaign I was really hoping for Son of Slomm, but it looks like he may have to wait for Diehard II the Wrath of Slomm.

Pinched from RoC80's here.

Dragon Bait Indiegogo:

Some more cool figures. "I know Sean, blah, blah, blah buy more miniatures." But they are pretty cool and they've added a sculpt of a Witch for the Krakatoans which can be seen on Blue's blog here.

Off to do chores, paint that blasted banner, prep miniatures, and try to figure what else I need to order to get ready for the challenge.

Of Rat Ogres and misplaced banners

Hi All,

I'm giving you a WIP so that I don't cry and give up the hobby all together. Well perhaps I'm being a tad melodramatic.

"Old Sword Hand" showing the Tamiya putty on his neck. I did a little filing on the top of his head.

Minder and Knuckles were undercoated with a brush using Raw Umber. I normally use Burnt Umber but needed to resuscitate the Raw Umber and try to use it up before the whole 4oz. craft bottle goes bad. Of course later I mistakenly grabbed the Burnt Umber and base coated Sword Hand and did touch ups on Minder and Knuckles. I thought the color difference was wet versus dry. Doh!

I'll probably just leave it as I'm probably going to do a black ink wash anyway.

Oh and I seem to have misplaced Makari's banner. What a pain in the ass!

Keep your brushes pointy.

Paint Table Saturday 106 - Putty Table Saturday

Hi All,

It's getting to be a habit that i don't have any painting to show you. Just getting busy and not managing my time well.

I've set up shop on the dining room table, where my son does his homework, so I can be there to remind him that he's still working when his mind wanders off. It's exhausting.

I did manage to put some basing grit down for the three skaven figures. I'm not as happy with my Green Stuff gap filling, but I realized that old sword hand needs the join between head and body filled. I got several suggestions on putties to try instead of Green Stuff.

I was mostly recommended Milliput, but it doesn't seem to be available in any of the shops. 24 Cigarettes recommended Tamiya putty and I bought the Squadron putties because I was there and they were there. I'll let you know how it goes.

Evils of close up photography aside, the banner is shaping up. After painting in the black checks I haven't had the fortitude to paint this one. It needs a lot of touching up.

Of course it's not going to get any easier around here. My son crushed his previous race times in the State Championships and ran a 13:11 3K, coming in 7th in his age group. We're off to Albequerque next weekend for the Regional meet and I think he qualifies for Nationals with his time. Being our first season I'm not sure how it works.

Hope your having a good, and safe weekend.

Vermember and gearing up for Curt's challenge.

Hi All,

Not a whole lot of hobby actually occurring as I horde more lead and plastic. I realized I'm running out of time to finish a Skaven figure for Vermember and a little bird told me to look out for an announcement about Curt's painting challenge on the 20th.

So I realized I need to get serious about prepping more figures.

While I do have a few of the old Plastic Regiments Skaven, I acquired an Isle of Blood box not long after Age of Sigmar came out. So above are the Rat Ogres and packmaster alongside a 20mm Splintered Light Rat man that had a void in his shield that needed filling. The plastic models have a lot of nice detail, but the sprue attachments didn't cut as clean as I would like and were a tad difficult to clean up on some surfaces.

They were all two part, so I had to glue them together. It's not clear to me if they were meant to be snap fit, but they were hard to test fit and then pull apart to glue. They also were a bear to fit tightly and I had to green stuff the gaps.

I used Vaseline to keep the green stuff from sticking everywhere but the model. That works much better than water for me. Spit as non stick, yuck. I also had terrible timing. I started gap filling at 10AM and had to be somewhere at 11AM. I tried freezing my ball of green stuff and found it was still usable at around 6PM when I had time to finish. I didn't use it all up so refroze that. I'll check on it later this afternoon after my errands.

I'll try to do some posts about the Kickstarter loot that's rolling in, and maybe about the insane amount of stuff I've been dealing for on Facebook.

Paint Table Staurday (Friday Night) - You must WIP it!

Hi All,

Well it's Saturday in certain parts of the world.

I've been busy/mopey. Found out I'm going to lose my tooth and then they were worried I was on the verge of having a heart condition because of my left shoulder, side of face issues.

Clear bill of health, normal EKG, although there was an unpleasant conversation about the effects of Brain tumors on facial nerves. But we seem to be in good shape.

Sorry, your here for pictures of little men. Right!

Above are those 40mm zombies. I missed last week for Zombtober, seems to happen every time I start to assembly line paint. There are not finished,but are a wash and a couple of details away.

Basing gunk on the 20mm metal Lizard men and remaining 1/72 plastic goblins.

I decided to was on sprue the plastic 28mm GW zombies I got from Stevo. The are underneath a spreu of Gripping Beast Celts I'm planning to paint up as Thugs for my Tzeentch Warband.

I figured, while I had the tub out for the zombies I'd wash the High Elves and Skaven from the 8th Ed. WFB box set I bought awhile back. I thought it was a good deal for the figures and figured to capitalize on the purge due to AoS before these became "rare" and "OOP".

I also received my first big box Kickstarter in the mail today. Blood Rage. I'll show it off soon.

Another Cross Country meet in the morning for the boy. Wish him luck.

EDIT

I keep on forgetting to welcome Brummie to the blog. He runs Brummie's Wargaming Blog and is also running the Zombtober festivities. Go check him and the other Zombtoberers out.

/EDIT