A quick update

 Hi folks,

Still working on the Arbites Patrol Skiff, I've made a successful test print of the main body. Some minor tweaks, but luckily all just cosmetic, to get bits looking a bit better. Still working on the turret itself and the turret and sponson weapons. Not the most exciting parts, so I'm stalling out a bit on those. 

I also got the Space Wolf helmet finished, bar the eyelenses.

And I grabbed some WIP 3d Space Hulk corridor sections from my long-suffering Space Hulk Project. This one was one of my first attempts to combine 3d printing (which wasn't a thing back when I started this project, it's that old!) with more traditional model building techniques. This one leans more heavily on 3d printing. 

Maybe I'll even finish the tiles needed for the first mission before the end of the decade...

Anyhow, I hope the summer is treating you well,

See you next time!

Stonewalling...

This weekend I've been making drystone walls for my 14th century medieval/fantasy village project.
After viewing a few tutorials on Youtube, I decided to go the "gravel and PVA in a mould" route:

A traditional Dwarven breakfast porridge. :D

Put it into a mould with some baking paper:

Leave to thoroughly dry and harden and you have:

Dwarven Granola Bars! :D

I had to do a quick test layout:

Need to fill some gaps on the undersides, but this will work nicely!

Time to get basing!

And a little farm setup with the Perry Miniatures medieval cottage.  Just need to stick some pigs in the wattle pen, cows or corn in the stonewalled fields.
I still need to build one or two wooden gates, as these will probably used for sheep/cow meadows. And then I can start painting this batch!

After that I want to add a chicken coop, some veggie gardens and a midden pile, and then I think I can call this first farm complete. Maybe some random tools and farm implements as scatter terrain.

See you next time!

Doing a bit of World-building

So, been a few weeks since last post, and I've been doing some stuff, so it's high time I shared it with you:

I've started on my Super-Battleship for Battlefleet Gothic (the vessel in the background is a Retribution Class Battleship. The largest class of official ship models for the game...) 

Once fully built, the Super-Battleship will have a double gun deck. It's a bit smaller than some Super-Battleship conversions/scratch builds out there, but I think this size to be a bit more believable.

I've also been playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and so got inspired to pick at my Medieval/Fantasy Village again. I prepped and primed my villagers and livestock.

Hopefully somewhere in the future I'll be able to get them painted as well... ;) And build the village for them to live in... I think I have all the materials by now, just need to keep up the momentum/enthusiasm and hunker down for a few weekends. Unfortunately, all weekends for the coming month and a half have been booked full...

But the biggest thing I did the past few weekends is a set of planets and moons for BFG. An airbrush makes amazingly quick work of painting entire planets!

As you can see from the various views, they all come with a day and night side, to more easily show the sunward edge of the gaming table. 

 "Morning"

"Day"

"Evening"

"Night"

My gaming buddies are still focussed on playing a BFG campaign later this year, so these hopefully see use soon. One needs to refurbish a fleet, and the two others want to build/collect their own fleet from scratch, which is a bit of a challenge. Luckily, if they can't get it all together in time, I've got plenty of fleet(s) for them to loan for the time being. 

So, that's everything caught up again. I'll  likely be hobbbying a bit less the coming weeks, due to, as I said a busy calendar, and I really should start studying for a certification at work. But such is life.
See you next time!

The arrival of loot

This is a loot-themed post...

First, a real-life bit of "loot" arrived. A while ago, I impulse-bought a Geralt of Rivia (of the Witcher game and book series), I came across it at a price I couldn't resist, and pulled the trigger before thinking twice.
Here's the man himself:

 

If he seems a bit moist in this picture, that is correct. As a second-hand, he was missing his box and had been wrapped in bubblewrap for transit. This, as well as the mandhandling he received during his travel by post resulted in some warping of the figure: The sword on his back was bow-shaped and the one in his hands seemed distinctly noodle-like. Luckily some hot water allowed me to reset everything to its intended shape. This picture was taken right after his form-correcting bath...

It's a very good figure, with only a few flaws: the mould-lines that were left unremoved and the misplacement of the eye decals, making Gerald distinctly cross-eyed. I'm going to enjoy him in his unmodified state for a few days/weeks as I debate wether or not to go ahead on a full repaint.

The other loot is more gaming related. A while back, I ordered some sets of fantasy coins to use as in-game currency for, for example, tabletop RPGS or my own idea for Questing/Chivalry based fantasy skirmishing. These coins can accomodate a range of wealth from the daily loaf of bread costing a copper bit, up to major purchases using an impressively large golden coin. But as adventurers have a tendency to end up ludicrously wealthy (especially in things like D&D) and like their wealth portable, I needed a way to represent even greater riches. In come precious stones...
Another cheap online purchase:

In this picture you can see a few of them. (for reference, the largest coins in the pictures are about an inch across).

Unfortunately, the glass jewels came with that typical silvered backing, that I'm now trying to remove.
Apparently, a mix of salt and vinegar should work, but I'm not yet seeing much effect:

If this fails, it's on to sterner measures, and I'll see if the same oven cleaner I used on my Gaslands Hotwheels will have a similar effect on these gems silvery coating...

See you next time!

A new year, and some Wraiths...

Wow, it's been a month already?
The annual busy period at work has reduced my time and energy available for hobby stuff. That isn't to say I've been totally idle, but that nothing has progressed enough to take new pictures of. The first Necromunda terrain piece is still PIP, although the airbrush stages are past. I need to get the thing on the painting table for some good old-fashioned brushwork.
The Goliath gang is primered and ready for paint.  The Escher have seen a tentative start at building them.
I've packed away my airbrush kit, partly because I needed a change of pace, partly because my mate's airbrush finally arrived and he reclaimed the set of airbrush paints I was borrowing from him. I need to build up my own stock of airbrush paints.
Also, I needed to clear the workbench because I wanted/needed to do some woodworking again.
I'm making a set of pushsticks for a friend who got a tablesaw for his birthday last fall, as well a cupholder as a (very) belated birthday gift for another friend. My plan for the coming year is to alternate woodworking and wargaming/modelling a bit more because, honestly, between work and hobbies, I'm getting a bit fed up with just sitting on my ass all the time.

With Necromunda having run out of steam a little bit, and me needing to relax after work, I've picked up playing The Witcher 3 again. I find it quite relaxing to just explore and slay (or be slain by) the odd roaming monster.  Which naturally has me thinking about fantasy gaming again. Also I needed a break from all the worn-out tech that has been a main feature of my hobby efforts lately (between Necromunda and Gasland).
So, I've been looking at my tray of primered fantasy figures once more, as a palate cleanser and to get back into a rythm of painting again.
Today, I painted a trio of Wraiths. These Wraiths are converted from GW Empire Flagellants and based on the ones found in, unsurprisingly, the Witcher:
 

And here's my interpretation:

These were painted by drybrushing them up to a light grey and then a final drybrush of pale sand. Afther that the colours were added by thin washes/glazes of the GW washes. This gives them the pale and washed out look I needed for them. The Wraith on the right features a first careful, and probably too subtle, attempt at OSL from the lamp/timeglass. The metal parts of the swords (and the brass bell) were given a very light drybrush of metal.

 " Wraiths are spirits of the unquiet dead. Trapped between true life and true death, they are filled with torment and a burning hatred of the living. They can be found roaming catacombs, near their disturbed or neglected gravesites or sometimes drawn to Places of Power. As such an adventurer must always be alert when visiting such locales and never neglect a sudden chill running down their spines, often a first warning sign that Wraiths are nearby...."

 The personal fantasy/dungeoneering setting I'm placing my fantasy skirmishes and dungeoneering projects in is a mix of various factors that interest me. It's a witches'  brew of "traditional" fantasy and folklore, mixed with a good dollop of historical 14th century for the villages/towns and general architecture, and a healthy helping of Cthulhu Mythos for the deep dark places in forests and dungeons, far from the light of civilisation... Nothing set in stone, or even written down, for now it's just a ghost of a dream in my head. But the last few iterations a lot of the Witcher universe and Slavic folkore in general has been spicing the mix.* The more I look into it, the more it intrigues me. It's all just unfamiliar and dark enough to be interesting (to myself and players) as well as form a nice bridge or gradient between the civilised parts of my setting and the truly dark Cthuluesque parts. As a result I'll be adding a few of the monsters and creatures from these settings into my collection, in addition to the Western European folkore and mythology "classics".  I just need to find  good models to represent them or convert them from. I'm even considering painting all the signage and such in Glagolotic instead of Roman/western letters.

*: In fact the Pavesiers/City Guard I painted more than a year ago take their heraldry from Rivia, a small kingdom in the Witcher world....

See you next time! Don't get bitten by a Domovoi!

I'm gonna have me some fun...

As I said in my Photobucket gripe post, it was my birthday last week and my wife gave me a Proxxon Thermocut (she loves me, she really does!).
Almost immediately I ordered some supplemental tools from GeBoom at Shifting Lands through a friend. That friend showed up yesterday for a game of Gaslands with those cutting aids.
As they are laser-cut mdf they required some assembly.
Well, some assembly was done today:

(As you can see Geboom also threw in some of his lasercut windows, as a teaser. Thank you!)

Assembly was easy, but you have to pay some attention to orientation of parts (I only messed up on the first one, resulting in the large fence being a bit tilted, but nothing that will interfere with proper functioning.)
Once assembled, they are nice and solid. As with the wirecutter itself, using these guides will take some practice and development of skill. But I'm looking forward to finally getting to grips with that pack of XPS I've had in the garage for years...

So what are the plans? First off: Dungeons, naturally,  as I haven't painted that pile of dungeoneers and monsters over the past two years for nothing! I've stalled on dungeon terrain for a long time, as I couldn't get the accuracy of cuts I wanted by hand. Now, I have no excuse, but I need to figure out seriously how I want to go about building my dungeon terrain first. Do I go with floor plates and loose walls, do I build individual corridor sections and rooms, or do I go with modular tiles?
No longer are these thoughts idle daydreams...

Then there is the idea of building a fantasy medieval village for my Chivalry project (itself part of the larger dungeoneering/fantasy meta-project). Having the cutter will open up the option of making some stone buildings and maybe even a keep or castle for my young lord!

Ofcourse, anything I build for dungeoneering or the chivalry game, will also find use in Frostgrave.

Necromunda as well, as I was envisioning a number of concrete butresses/pillars where gangways and shanty towns were built against their surfaces.

Lots of ideas that can finally become reality!

Yet, oddly enough, it is most likely I will grab my old hand-held foamcutter the coming weekends instead, as I intend to build some Mad-Max style desert wasteland terrain for Gaslands... Ironic really, I've been lusting after this foam cutter for years, and now that I finally have it, I grab the tool that has been in my garage for years. Oh well..

See you next time!

P.S. Still working on downloading all my pics from Photobucket to restore this blog, but PB is fighting me every step of the way....

Warhammer Questions: Hesitations over Hammerhal

So, a new iteration of Warhammer Quest has been released. And unlike Silver Tower, this one actually had me interested/excited: Hidden conflict in the catacombs under a great, magnificent city, seeping corruption. The preview art showed the Heroes facing off against corrupted Nurgle warriors. Rumours of campaign rules, options for adding more monsters and creatures to the game. So, the right mood, the right setting, promise of replayability, this could be it! I said to myself that, if the funds were available at the end of this month, I'd treat myself to it.
Now, the end of the month is here, the funds are there, but I'm still holding off the order.
Why? Because doubt has set in about wether this game is really worth my money...

Part is because the setting of the game isn't as focussed as I had anticipated, instead of being more Nurgle-centric, GW has tried to cram all four Chaos Gods into this set. Which struck me as odd, as the first WHQ-reboot game was all about Tzeentch.

This was also reflected in the miniatures. Several let-downs on that area, in my eyes: First: no new sculpts, at all. Plus, there were less mini's than in the Silver Tower box. (And even less still, than in the original WHQ box...)
And to be honest, of the mini's in the box, the only ones that I'm actually interested in are the Cogsmith and Putrid Blightkings. Oh, and the Gryphhound. :)
The Kairic Acolytes actually annoy me for being in this set. I don't like the sculpts, far to bulky/beefy and not near mystical enough for followers of Tzeentch. Apparently they are the cockroaches of AoS as well, as you seem to find them everytime you go into a dark and dank area...  Sigh.

Finally, there is the doubt about how much I'll actually get to use it. Aside from some (semi) regular RPG campaigns and the occasional wargame with Johan, I don't really game that often anymore. (Something that I'm trying and willing to change, but hey, calendars and real life and stuff.)
So, I'm not sure I want to spend the cash on something that may just end up a closet-filler.

On the plus side, it has got me thinking about dungeons and dungeon terrain again, in other words, it may have lit a spark under my Dungeoneering project... (Which may turn out to be bad news for my Howling Griffons. But then again, that project has lain dormant for a month already. And maybe this will fire up the old hobby engine again? Which could benefit the Griffons as well.)

As a result I've been looking at options for dungeon terrain again, and thinking about what I really want from it.

There are ofcourse various commercial options, like Dwarven Forge, Hirst Arts molds, Ziterdes and things like Maki Games' M.U.P. and te offerings Manorhouse Workshop (though I discovered their excellent dungeon walls are no more to be found on their store.). Quick to get up and running (except maybe for Hirst Arts), but very spendy and ofcourse, clearly mass-manufactured.

So, I'd be expending a significant amount of cash (which I don't have to spend) to get a reasonable sized setup that isn't very unique in the end.
Plus, being an artsy git at heart, I like the stuff I use to be unique and "mine".

However, I have learned from my Space Hulk 3D project, that if I do build it from scratch, I need to do so in a way that is both quick and easy. I need to acknowledge that I no longer have the (near) unlimited time and energy of my youthful years.
What I've taken away from my Warhammer Quest Display and the walls for Frostgrave is that most time is consumed by the various styles and types of stonework.  I'll need a way to speed that up, and still get good-looking final results.

I could look at sheet materials for the textures (plasticard or resin), casting molds or maybe even texture rollers (though I don't know if those are tough enough to texture foam, most I see are intended for putty or clay). Or I could go monolithic and carve or stack XPS blocks.

What do I want from my dungeon terrain? I want it to be both modular and atmospheric and moody (just look at the picture above). I don't want/need squares or hexes per se, though it would be nice if it were easily made compatible with the original Warhammer Quest. I'm not sure if I'd want terrain tiles with (groups of) rooms and corridors or separate individual rooms and corridors. I think I'd even be fine with combining the both. A Forgeworld Zone Mortalis type set-up, expanded with a number of moveable walls would also be worth considering. I'm a bit hesitant about the Dwarven Forge style modules, I'd like a whole corridor or room to be a seamless whole where possible, plus all those little bits take a while to set up before a game. Definitely no papercraft for me! I'm looking for a (moderate) variety of styles, including cellars and dungeons and crypts/catacombs.
At some point I'd definitely want to expand it with caves as well. Multi-level is cool, but may already be too ambitious, let's just get a basic set done first.  I'd like to be able to build some larger dungeons, so I should be able to fill a 3x3' or 4x4' square table, for warband-sized skirmish wargames.

So, anyone have any suggestions or ideas how to go about this? Maybe there are some products or companies I haven't seen yet, that would be perfect for this?

See you next time!

First half of the Pavesiers done.

So, here they are:

 Scruffy townsfolk behind bright colourful shields... Medieval working class warriors, of sorts.

Here's their banner:

The symbol on the blue streamer that forms the top of the flag is a crossed mash paddle and ladle, signifying that this unit of militia consists of members of the Brewers Guild. (Each guild in a medieval city, which my fantasy setting is heavily influenced by, was obliged to be able to arm their membership and so provide units of militia for the city's defence and policing and to fulfill military obligations to feudal lords that controlled the city. The units would be equipped according to the wealth and status of the guild in question.) The Brewers Guild, not being exceptionally wealthy or poor, but being a large guild (as beer was the main drink of the era), provides the pavisiers in my setting. As you can see the more well-off members have better gear and more important duties within the guild militia.

And here's the pavise of the bannerman:

The captain/guildmaster will get a similar shield, but with a canton (inset) bearing a golden tree on a black field.

About that heraldry: The shield designs aren't just chosen at random or for prettyness. There are some references in there I'd like to share.
The heraldry on the majority of pavises and the banner is the heraldry of Rivia, a sovereignty in the setting of the Witcher, from Andrzej Sapkowski's books and CD Project Red's Witcher game trilogy. My littly geeky tribute to books and games that I love.
Just this week I discovered, by accident, that this is also the heraldry of a historical Dutch family called Zael or Zael Utteneng. Who apparently held lands or office along a part of disputed territories between two Duchies in the Holy Roman Empire, one of which now forms my home province Brabant. Funny that. I just love it when such coincidences pop up!

The rest are nods to regional history:
The red three-towered castle on a white field is the medieval version of the arms of the Quarter of Oisterwijck, the 14th century administrative/feudal domain my home city was part of back then.
 The gold tree on a black field, that I will paint as a canton on the militia captain his shield, was the medieval version of the arms of the Mairie of 'S-Hertogenbosch, the larger feudal (sub)domain within the Duchy of Brabant that the Quarter of Oisterwijck fell under.

Not the proper/historical way this heraldry would be used, but hey, I'm playing a fantasy game here... ;)

See you next time!

Pavises in Progress

Today, I spent some time at the painting table, here are the results:

What's left to do on these? Just some highlights on the red parts of the heraldry, the addition of symbols of the Brewers Guild (crossed mash paddle and ladle) to the blue portion of the banner, and some clean-up/minor detail (including doing the eyes on them and dirt on the lower edge of the pavises).
Then I've only got the other half of this Urban Militia to paint, and their commander/guildmaster.  But those may have to take a temporary back seat due to my sudden, inexplicable Man O'War craze...

See you next time!

I am sailing... (a.k.a. "Welp, that was unexpected!")

Well, as I said in an earlier post, I was working on a unit of Pavesiers for my Fantasy/Dungeoneering games. But last week Johan gave me the last missing component for my Man O'War Dwarf fleet. My original intention was to simply strip the paint off, and store it with my Man O'War stash until I could get around to it one day.
The Muse, apparently refreshed from her prolonged absence, thought otherwise...
Before I knew it, I had cleaned and assembled all the Dreadfleet terrain (yeah, I fell for the Man O'War nostalgia buy :/ ) , and was well underway assembling my Dwarf fleet:

The Dreadfleet Dwarf ship snuck into the assembly line as well. Might as well paint all the Dwarves in one go. And he may just be useful as a sorf of superheavy battleship? Missing from this picture is the second squadron of Monitors, and the other two Ironclads. I also have a second set of 3 Nautilii, but these can wait a bit, I fear 6 Nautilii may be a bit overkill...

Speaking of Nautilii, I want to do a bit more for the submerged option than just plonking down a "submerged" counter next to the model. I'd like to build proper submerged models and have been thinking/experimenting on how to best go about it:

From left to right:
    -A. My original idea of making a Natilus profile as a "submerged" marker.
    -B. A based, non-submerged Nautilus.
    -C. My second idea, of making an empty base, to serve as the "submerged" marker.
    -D. A still-unbased Nautilus, for comparison.
My intention is for both option A and C to have the chimney and banner still sticking out of the water. On option A I tried one of the ideas for doing water on the bases:

While I like the effect, I fear that doing all my fleets this way will simply take too much time/greenstuff. I will paint this one up, and try another one with acrylic gel, to see which I like best.

After that, insanity struck...