A New Hope?

So, I will admit it has been many months since I have done anything with this blog. For the past year I have been working forty hours a week plus studying for another forty hours in order to finish my degree. This hasn't left much time for optional activities, like say, hobbies, or seeing my family, or sleeping. Fortunately the worst may now be behind us! I have finally finished my degree and am in the mood for some serious gaming!

I've recently been tricked by parties who shall remain nameless into getting into DropZone Commander. Pictures of my progress there will be forth coming but I thought I would start with some stuff I finished a while ago and never got a chance to post.

Mordheim. All right thinking people struggle between this and Battlefleet Gothic as their favorite GW game. But like so many others when I looked at Mordheim I thought to myself, self, you know what this needs? Khemri. So when the expansion for that came out I was personally delighted and hatched a plan to build an elaborate system of underground tombs to fight in.

Like most plans this one was heavy on the ambition and failed to factor in time, money and difficulty. Fortunately some of these have now been overcome and I have finally started work.

This is the first room I have created. The idea is to make them all on tiles so they can be slotted together by a random number generator as exploration continues. 

Progress on this particular project has been slow, but hopefully it will pick up now that I have some more free time!

Battlefleet Gothic Planets

My grand plans for a BFG campaign tragically fell through due to a combination of work, school and poverty. I am, however going forward to finish the collection!

Here are a few planets I have been working on. Both are intended to be earth like and are made out of simple styrofoam spheres, sealed with PVA and then spray painted and finished with acrylics. I went with an oil based gloss varnish to give them some depths and a shiny finish. One of them I coated half the sphere with Nuln Oil was and then painted lights to represent major cities.

Battle Mat and Ork Concept

Progress in the shipyard has been slow this month. I've had my parents here to visit and most of my time has been taken up touring around and playing golf. Now that they have jetted off for warmer climbs I need to make the most of the time before the fall semester from hell (tm) begins to eat up my time.

I have been steadily acquiring ships via ebay. The Imperial Flotilla is already completes and I have about 30% of the ork vessels.

I have an orc ship done with my planned paint scheme in outline (no highlights or shadowing) just to see if it would work.

I kind of like it although I think it will benefit alot from some highlighting.

I have also acquired an excellent battlemat. I experimented with a lot of ideas to try and do it cheaply. Eventually I stumbled upon a thread on Boardgame Geek which suggested a vinyl banner. It turns out that a site like bannersonthecheap.com will print a photo on vinyl quite cheaply. I took a high def Hubble space telescope photo and had it printed at 4 x 8 ft.

Although it suffers a little from being blown up so much I still think it looks great, particularly at the low low price of $40. It also has the added attraction of being very easy to transport to the club or wherever. I take no responsibility for those strange alien creatures.

Brettonian Knights like Brettonian days...

Brettonians are another of my hangover armies, things I start after a night of particularly heavy reading. I'm working hard to get all these half finished projects done so I can focus


Last year I read Mallory's Morte d'Arthur and was absolutely blown away by it. Even though it was written in the 1400's it has this kind of intense unknown pagan landscape that really fires the Imagination. It is full of misty forests and strange fey wells and frozen snow covered hills. It's a great deal of fun as well, until the Holy Grail shows up to remind us that there is nothing so fine that it can't be messed up by sanctimonious moralizing. I've always been fond of the Arthur ledged although I prefer the more energetic 'Welcher' versions like Culhwch and Olwen. I guess its just easier to see Arthur in a Welch warband rather than in an English cathedral.

As if this wasn't a heady enough brew, I also acquired an audio version of Barbara Tuchman's The Calamitous 14th Century: A Distant Mirror. This is an absolute masterwork of bringing history to the wider world. Winding the story around the character of one man, Enguerrand de Coucy the seventh, it moves the reader through grand campaigns, peasant rebellions, marauding mercenary knights, worldly prelates, Italian internecine politics, trends in art and literature, crusades, the black death, the murderous Breton wars and a dozen other topics that are spectacularly diverse and come together to produce the best picture of the time I've ever seen. I must candidly admit that I have listened to it three times and it will probably not be the last.

Anyhow, you can see how I was practically forced to start a Brettonian army... Unfortunately, as with many of these literary sprees, the inspiration dosen't always last. I plan to sell what I have painted and hope for a profit. I'm trying vainly to clear out the backlog of fantasy stuff so I can address my backlog of historical stuff. Sigh.

I need to either read up on how to set up models for photography or, more likely buy a new and better camera. Even with the macro feature on this one seems to kind of grain out on me and pick up too much glare.

Anyway without further ado…

Knights of the Realm

One of the great things about Brettonians is that not only are you free to paint your army in any scheme you want, but you a free to paint each individual a different color scheme. I chose to keep the champion and banner man fairly similar to reinforce the idea that the members of the unit are feudally linked to the particular family whose banner they are following.

The Green Count

This particular character was inspired Amadeus VI of Savoy who makes periodic appearences in A Distant Mirror. He was reknowned for always wearing green, being accompanined by a body guard dressed in green and often lead into tornaments by ladies dressed in green. Where his nickname comes from I have no idea.

Black Guy

This guy is one of my personal favorites the inspriation behind him is Guy Du Bas-Tyra from Raymond Fiest's magnificent Riftwar saga.

Black Guy

This is another shot I tried of him. It was my first attempt at stubble on a model and I wanted to capture his face, unfortunately I failed.

Viney Knight

This was an experiment in using patterns. It worked ok but I think it makes him look a bit too fancy for a regular knight. Maybe for a character model.

Banner

Banners are awesome. You know it. I know it.

Champion

This is the unit champion. I really dislike the stretched out neck on the horse. I guess it would look ok on a galloping mount but here it just makes it look like the horse is having some kind of cardiac event...

Random Shot

This is a random shot.
 
So much for the knights. On to the artillery!

Trebuchets: Throwing heavy things since time immemorial.

Obviously it is missing its counter weight. I actually have this painted but am struggling to find a way to suspend an extremely heavy metal weight up in the air. I need some kind of hard core superglue I guess.

Side Shot

Other Side Shot



The Motley Crew

 And last but not least a shot of the crew of this incredible machine. Unfortunately the child/teenager/midget sitting on the wheel barrow suffered a terrible varnishing accident which completely screwed the paint job and it was a terrible shame because he looked AWESOME prior to that. Lesson learned go easy on the varnish.
 
That concludes my Brettonians for now (although I have to admit to having 2 more units of knights in need of painting). My full focus can now go to my Chindits who have been waiting so patiently...

Dark Elves

I finally manage to take some decent photos!  These Dark Elves have been an ongoing project of mine for the last 18 months or so. I orginally bought them for my friend Damian back in 2004 when I was in England so its only taken me 7 years to get them all painted. The spearmen in particular have a storied past having survived a car wreck back in 2010 when I was on my way to my local game store.

The add up to about 2000 pts a pretty standard size for a Warhammer army. I have thought about selling them on a number of occasions but because they sort of belong to Damian I have held off. I also need to make sure I have at least two armies so we can play when he comes to visit. I've been trying to get 2000 points of skaven done for him but it seems unlikely that will happen before the next visit in feb-march. Although I should put together some sort of army list so I know what I need to aim for.

All in all im trying to avoid staring any more Warhammer projects for now so I can focus on my historicals. I may work a little more on the Skaven if I can finish up my other projects by the end of the year.

The aforementioned spearmen survivors of my poor driving. Its proably more miraculous that in the 2 years it took to paint them none were lost or eaten by my children.

My first unit of cold ones, I was inspired by Gila monsters to go for the orange and black rather than the more traditional green. Alot of these were bought second hand hand had to be stripped and repainted.

My second unit of cold ones, this is actually intended to act as a bodyguard for my general.

Malus Darkblade Esquire

Morathi, not the greatest photo, I had originally intended to do the base as a pentecal of purple flame but I whimped out.

A scorceress lightly converted.



A rather breastly sorceress I think this is convereted from a warmachine fig but im damned if I can remember. I'd kind of like to change the base and have her standing over the dead dark elf from the Tyrion model to represent the sacrifical dagger however the larger base would be awkward for game play.

Repeater crossbowmen, greatest warhammer unit ever. I have two units of these but I misplaced the pic of the other one.

Corsairs, I wish I had another dozen of these, in the two games we played this small unit never made it to combat.

The Bolt Thrower, the one unit of this army I was unsatisfied with, It just looks a bit sloppy for some reason.

I really wish I had though to take a picture of the whole army when I did this. Well perhaps when we play in february I can get a shot of them as a whole.  If I had the time money and energy id add 10 mor corsairs, a unit of dark riders and a unit of black guard. Perhaps that will motivate me to finish my pike and shot....

Resurrecting This Blog! - The Six Month Plan.

Resurrecting This Blog! The Six Month Plan.

I haven't posted on this blog since 2009. I somewhat naively started it in the hospital while my wife was recovering from the birth of our daughter. Six months of colic and a year of sleeplessness gobbled up most of the rest of the intervening two years. I've also been extremely busy with work and school (these factors will continue) but I have recently been motivated to take up the toy sword once again.

I've decided to shift my focus to historical gaming rather than Games Workshops 40k and Fantasy. Although fantasy at least will probably still appear from time to time my interest in it just isn't as intense as historical gaming. I have been a huge history buff all my life and I think combining this passion with my passion for painting and gaming will go along way into keeping me focused.

In a similar vein I hope that posting on this blog will keep me focused and force me to stay on task rather than changing course with every idle fantasy and leaving me with dozens of half completed projects.

In the real world I am just about to buy a house (fingers crossed) and a lot of my time is going to be taken up by packing and moving and working on the new place. This means that my gaming and painting time is likely to be somewhat limited so I want to set out a six month plan so I can make the most of what small time I have.

The Six Month Plan:

1) Family, house, school and work!!

2) Complete a 16th century Spanish pike and shot army, this will double nicely as an Estilean themed Empire army for fantasy.

3) Complete a small WW2 Australian Infantry force for Operation Squad. This seems to be the game of choice of the group of gamers I've recently made contact with and looks like a lot of fun.

4) Connect with the historical gaming community in the area. I've recently discovered a group of historical gamers who gather at the gaming club just a few miles from my house. I'm looking forward to meeting these guys and doing a bit more gaming and making a few friends.

5) Paint and sell my Brettonians, my imperial guard and maybe my Wood Elves. The Wood Elves are contingent on me finishing my Spanish however because I need to have at least two Fantasy armies complete when my best friend comes from Australia to visit me next year.

6) Keep posting here.

This is an extremely modest goal but then again I managed one post in the past 2 years…

Wood Elf Autumn Force Pt 1

It has been a long time since I've made any particularly concerted effort in terms of Warhammer. I've recently moved however and have the wonderful chance to put aside all the half finished projects festering in my closet and make a fresh start.

These Wood Elves are my first project. I had previously been adverse to collecting Wood Elves for a couple of reasons. I found the old models rather uninspiring and the ubiquitous green color schemes a little bit boring. That being said the new much more elfinn models and darker background has converted me. I decided to go with an autumn scheme for the chance to create a force that is a bit more unusual.

The backbone of this force is made up of 56 glade guard, two units of 18 archers and the balance deployed in two scout units.

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Glade Guard

I used mostly browns and reds to create these models with yellows as a tertiary color. I did originally attempt to use orange to complete the colors of autumn but found it to be in general too much of a clash. I have completed my first thirty six archers and need only to complete the scouts to wind out my basic infantry.

I based these models with some home made flock. There is an excellent article on miniwargamming.com (link forthcoming) which explains how to make simple cheap and good looking flock. I made enough to do my entire army for the cost of a trip to a local woodworking shop and a couple of bottles of garden variety acrylic paint.

The banner (dubbed the pretzel banner by my not so adoring fans) is the concept for all the army banners, although given the skirmishing nature of wood elves there wont be all that many.