Well, life happened at me, a lot...

Yeah, so I had a two-month stomach bug, followed by a corona scare. Luckily all is well, but I'm still rebuilding my strenght/stamina after barely holding on to nutrients during the stomach bug.

Which left little spare energy for hobby.

I did manage to squeeze these lot out: 

A Squig with a fancy hairdo: 

Naturally, I also participated in the Iron Kingdoms: Requiem Kickstarter, and this has once again urged me to do a bit more on some IKRPG character miniatures:

 

 

They're two minis for the same character, a Knight-Ironhead. As the new version of the IKRPG doesn't work off combining two archetypes, I'll have to figure out how to make him work, ruleswise.

 

Also, ofcourse I pre-ordered Cursed City. Warhammer Quest, but horror, and with a strong Eastern European vibe? Perfect.

So, not much to report. See you again next time, whenever that may be!

Post vacation update.

Well, that took me a while now...

Lots of stuff took my attention away from the hobby for a bit:
-Studying for a qualification that would net me a "permanent" contract at my workplace. (I succeeded on the exam, so now I'm once more in permanent employment. Yay for financial security!)
-Work was busy, so often in the evenings my batteries were drained.
-The efforts to get my mother into the necessary psycho-geriatric care are still ongoing. But there seems to progress.

But I've now arrived at the last day of my three week summer leave, and have remedied the lack of hobby progress...  I had to spend the first week of it studying for the qualification exam. After that was done I could get down to serious relaxing.  I had brought my painting kit along on vacation, plus a squad of my Word Bearers and a squad of Chaos Cultists I'd paint for a friend. I figured I'd finish one or the other this vacation. That's not exactly how it went.....

I finished both! As well as a second squad of Word Bearers, when we went home for a day in-between!

Here they all are:

The gunnery squad. Both the unit champion and the specialist have been partially magnetized, to give them a measure of flexibility in their loadouts.

The assault squad. Here only the specialist is magnetized.

The cultists are un-based, as my friend will handle the basing himself.

Part of the reason they all went so fast is because I had a clearly set out goal to paint these to a tabletop standard and not lavish too much time on them (I will be taking more time for centrepiece models, but rank-and-file I'll be focussing on speed and looks en-masse.)
I had taken a headstart on the basecoat a while back with the airbrush, giving them a zenithal primer and airbrushing on the red of their armour. After that it was mostly just basecoating the details, giving the models an all-over wash and adding some selective drybrushed highlights here and there. Basing was done equally quickly with a GW basing mix (Agrellan badlands, I believe) followed by a wash and a drybrush.
I've currently got an Aspiring Champion, a (Finecast) Dark Apostle and a Master of Possessions ready for primer. Those I'll spend some more time on painting. And I'm building a unit of 10 possessed and a Hellbrute to be the second batch of rank-and-file models to speedpaint.
That should get me the core of a Word Bearers army in a relatively short amount of time.

My goals for this project are to:
A. Get an army done within a (for me) reasonable amount of time spent. (Not counting the occasional hiatus. Like the one the past few months, between doing the basecoat and actually finishing the models this month....)
B. Finally do something with the stockpile of Chaos models I've had since 4th/5th Edition 40K.
C. Actually, finally, own a fully painted, functional army, other than my Orks, which are now 3-4 editions behind the times. (They still work, but I lack all the fancy gear from the Post-Stompa era...)

Ofcourse, this throws a spanner in my plans to work on preparations for the release of Reality's Edge, the Cyberpunk skirmish game from Osprey... But eh, the muse flies where she flies.

See you next time!

A Derelict Citiplex, continued (aka part 6)

Still awaiting suitable battery holders for the food stalls, so why not get going on the Multiverse Vault Builder terrain set? It's been a while since progress were made, and seeing how I intend it to form the backbone of both my Necromunda and Cyberpunk gaming indoor terrain, I'd best get on it!

 A while back I built a double-length wall, as a test of concept (I don't remember if I showed that one at the time?). It was meant to prepare myself for the second lit feature of this terrain set:  A wall with two malfunctioning lighting units. Well, this weekend, that one got completed:

The modification involved a fair bit of hacking the wall system, as you can see above. First to make the wall double length, and then to drill the holes for the leds (below) as well as saw out the recess for the battery pack (above).

 Here you can see the leds, with their transparent resin hoods glued in place:

 

I mustn't forget to mask these before primering!

Additionally, I also built a regular wall section, and using the left over parts from one of the double-length sections, I made a connector wall with two "male" ends:

Great for keeping doors in place, relative to pillars, or connecting larger sections of walls together.

Here are the non-lit walls, all together:

The pieces of mdf you see there are offcuts from the "sprue" the walls and floor connectors came from, cut to size and fitted with a strip of magnetic sheet, so they can attach to the steel strip some wall sections have. I will paint these as signage.

See you next time!

Knights and hovels

Time for another update:

Work on the farm has stalled a bit, as I need to start doing things in Balsa, and I need to dig out my balsa stash and get used to working with the material again. Also, I've been out of the running with a bad cold/mild flu the past week (I need to be able to talk all day for my work, so not having use of my voice effectively puts me out of commission). I needed a project I could easily pick up and put down to make use of the time I wasn't actively being ill.
Inspired by a Twitch stream of someone painting their Adeptus Titanicus stuff, I decided to use the bursts of time where I could do stuff to continue building my Imperial Knight.
I do want to continue working on the farming village, and working on the Knight gave me an idea: Imperial Knight worlds are usually Feudal worlds... I could, ofcourse, build some "40K-ified" additions to the farm to use it as a Feudal World setting. Put an Ambot in a shack, an agricultural servitor somewhere. A data-shrine in a corner. Just enough to add some Grimdark to a very pastoral medieval setting. I'm still having this idea fermenting in my head, so any pictures will be some time out. For now, I'll just focus on finishing the first farm.

Also, I played a game of "What a Tanker!" the week before that with Gunbird and that was quite a bit of fun. So I'm looking forward to playing more of that in the future.
Also BFG is still on the books somewhere, and I really should be completing the terrain set for that. Build some gas/dust clouds and markers for solar and radiation flares as well as a sunward edge markers and I should have the essentials, giving me more time for extras such as Warp Rifts and fleet support vessels. (Oh, and I really should start working on that certification for work...)

Anyway, here are some pictures of my activities:

The base frame of the Knight, with the carapace on top, but unglued.

 And all the additional parts that will be painted separately. As you can see I've magnetized all the weaponry. For heraldry I want to go with a more medieval/Bretonnian style, so the shields will bear individual heraldry instead of just the house crest. I also want to add pennants and streamers to various parts of the model, just make it look more noble and knightly. Here and there I will also hang shields displaying the heraldry of honoured allies that Knight fought alongside. These will include, among others the Space Wolves and Howling Griffons (the chapters I build/collect), the Scythes of the Emperor (as an homage to Shas'El Tael/Sebastian) and the Cardinal Archivists, the homebrew chapter of the Snipe and Wib community.

This will be the crest of my Knightly House (blatantly stolen from the Darkest Dungeon game...):

 

 Still undecided about the name, thinking of going with House Dravion (named after a DnD character I'm currently playing... Yes, I'm a Nerdus Universalis. :D ) Ofcourse I won't be freehanding this across the entire Household-to-be, so I'll be dipping my toe into home-made transfers... Plus I'm seriously considering lighting up the next Knight I build.

This was the final outcome of the game of What a Tanker! My tank rammed Gunbirds, but caused so much damage we deemed it a Monster Truck style run over.

Oh, and I forget to mention last time, that due to a purchasing error, I had only bulls and oxen for my medieval village. So half of the oxen found themselves modified to have udders, giving me a mixed population of bulls, oxen and cows: 

 The lengths I go to....


See you all next time! (No telling what the project will be then, focus is non-cooperative at the moment...)

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!

This is London calling. And a shout out to a wonderful man with a wonderful project.

Thursday last week, Devil May Cry 5 released (no, I will not be wargaming DMC...) and a few of my favorite streamers started playing it. The game is about fighting Devils in a ruined, London-esque metropolis. Which triggered memories of an old favorite... Hellgate London!
Not the best of games, but an excellent setting to explore.

Friday a week ago, me and some friends had a hobby evening. Inspired by the DMC 5 footage I decided to build some extra Hellgate London demons to add to the few I had already converted a few years ago.

The rough and ready basics were done on that friday night:

Together with their older siblings:

During that weekend, the greenstuff phases followed:

This Saturday, the airbrush was employed for primer and basecoat (and as I was at it, a second project also got some paint sprayed on).

 Which, today, resulted in painted miniatures:

Here's how they match up with their elders:

And as I waited for paint to dry on the demons, I used the downtime to progress on the vendomats:

Dirty and grimy and worn, perfect for cyberpunk, post-apocalypse or any current era metropolis....

Ofcourse I couldn't help set up a little scene:
Templars fighting to reclaim a base lost to the demonic incursion:

Maybe next weekend, I can try to get some paint on the Hunter faction (soldiers and engineers) miniatures I have lying around. Then I just need mini's to represent Cabalists, and  I can start finding a suitable ruleset to modify and playtest. (Currently thinking about IHMN and its derivatives, but perhaps this summer Reality's Edge may prove to be a good match?)


As an added bonus, yesterday my sister came over (she builds 1/12th scale dollhouse style rooms, I guess it runs in the family!) to help me get over my nervousness about soldering LED circuits.
Baby steps, but so much options for terrain:

Now, I also mentioned a shout out to a deserving man with a wonderful project. The man in question is Mel Bose  a deeply likeable man with a very informative Youtube Channel about building wargaming terrain. What makes him especially interesting is that he regularly collaborates with artists from other disciplines to exchange techniques and knowledge.  Why mention him now?
Well, he has a Kickstarter to publish a book collecting all his accumulated know-how in physical format. While I have seen most of his videos (and I advise you to watch them too, if you have an interest in terrainbuilding!) I am somewhat fond of terrain-building books, and I know his is guaranteed to be a good one!
Check it out here:
Terrain Essentials Kickstarter


See you next time!

Oh, hey, I went another month without an update... Sorry about that.

I have been doing hobby stuff, just not as much as I'd like.
Focus has still been all over the place, sadly I don't see that changing anytime soon.
I've been meaning to press on with my Multiverse Gaming Terrain and painting for Blackstone Fortress, but the drive just isn't there.
Instead, I converted two Jetbikes for...reasons. Built a converted Ambot-alike and done some painting on my BFG Fleet Auxilia (Defense Platforms, System Ships and Defense monitors).
I've also converted a drifting wreck and made a sector map for our BFG Campaign later this year.
And I tried my hand at a candy colour paint on one of the jetbikes.
Anyway, here is the pictorial evidence:

See you next time!

New year! New.... well, nothing really... Just more of the same...

Another month, and another year have passed...
What have I been up to, and what do I intend to be up to?

Well, the past few weeks have been very busy, holidays, busiest time of year at work, and health worries about my mother, plus frustrations about not being able to get her the care she needs (and we need her to have) have kept my energy and time for the hobby low.

I've kept going on the Blackstone Fortress set, and have the first character and two sets of monsters done:

Espern Locarno and the Spindle Drones (Sounds like a band name...):

Ofcourse at this point I realise I forgot to paint the trim on the inside of his robe...
Bases will be done at a later point, all at once.

And the Ur-Ghuls

(In this foto I hadn't done the mottling on their backs, I'll do some glamour shots later, once more is finished).

The Multiverse Gaming terrain hasn't progressed since last time, I still need to get my feet wet with LEDs, before I dare continue...
Doesn't means I've been sitting still on the terrain front, though.
Last week this arrived:

So, I can get started on building some containers/container shanties for Necromunda.

As always, it'll work fine for 40K and Kill Team as well.

Additionally, I started a little conversion for the fun of it:

 Not the final head or shoulder pads. I may end up going with larger shoulder pads and a Ruststalker head instead. I just need to source the bits and see if I like it. It will most likely be an assault/labour servitor or a midget Ambot or some such.

As I got a pot of resin for Christmas, I needed something to try/practice it on. So I started making some toxic sump pools for Necromunda:

The sand-PVA mix on them is drying at the moment, hopefully paint and resin next week.

Past year's paints:
I've also taken the time to look back at what I painted last year, and I managed to get 47 figures painted, 2 scratch-built Necromunda terrain pieces, and one of my 4 sets of Multiverse Gaming Terrain. For me, that is a reasonably good year, these days.

Looking to the future:
So, what are my plans for the coming year?
Basically for the next few months I want to finish on two main projects:
-Blackstone Fortress: I want to get all the mini's painted and start playing it.
-Multiverse Gaming Terrain: I want to finish my set of Multiverse Gaming Terrain, so I have a decent set of Zone Mortalis (esque) terrain for Necromunda and Kill Team.

However, me being me, some secondary projects have popped up.
-LEDs: For the Multiverse Gaming Terrain, I want to incorporate LEDs, but I need to do some practice pieces to build confidence.  So, I will have to plan and build something that needs lighting up (any suggestions?)...
-Resin: I have a pot of resin now, and I intend to use it before it goes off. The Toxic Sump Pools above are just the trail project, to see how I should handle resin. After that there are various, still vague plans. I hope to incorporate the resin in the Multiverse Gaming Terrain project as well, to use as leaks and the toxic pools shown on some Necromunda terrain boards.

Both  the above projects tie back in to a main project and will teach me new hobby skills so I'm okay with that, and the side projects were more or less planned.
Less planned is the Space Wolf Army that seems to have spontaneously materialized... I bought the Stormclaw at the time for the Ork content, and to get Space Wolf Terminators for the Space Hulk project. Now I ordered the Tooth and Claw set, to use the Genestealer Cult models for the Space Hulk Project/Necromunda/Kill Team project.  But now I'll have a Primaris contingent of Space Wolves as well... Plus the remaining metal Wolf Guard, Wolf Scouts and Characters I kept from an aborted earlier edition Space Wolf army...  And an airbrush to paint all that grey quicker... And a clear idea for the colours to use from the Inquisitor scale Space Wolf I did last year. The snowball is rolling and growing, and I'm sure I can hear wolves in the distance... ;)  It's not like I have a Howling Griffons army to build, or a Word Bearer one hiding in boxes for assembly...  But on the other hands, it would mean some opposition for my Orks, so I could host games and maybe introduce my son to 40K.
Eh, I have a whole year ahead of me, we'll see how it goes.

See you all next time!