Coming into a backlog of photos and posts here…the basecoat of my Forge World Flakk Gun. I’ve got pre-Astro photos and comments, mid-Astro photos and comments, POST Astro photos and comments. It’s a zoo.
But here’s a simple flakk gun base coat for you in the meantime. 🙂
I usually make a significant change to my 40k army each year for Astronomi-con. I didn’t think I was going to be able to do such a thing this year – not only haven’t I had any strong Orky urges recently, but I also thought my list did alright!
I looked through their brand new comp system and calculated out what my list would be – an 18. Not bad, but there was a single unit that was losing me 2 points. I looked into how I could get those 2 points back. A bit of research into numerous IA books, and I came up with the Flakk Trakk, an armor 12/11/10 vehicle that can move Flat Out and still shoot it’s Flakk Gun (Heavy 4, S7, AP4, Skyfire, Interceptor) at a flier. Given the number of croissants and turkeys I saw at Adepticon in April, this started to sound like a brilliant idea. And even better – I had a Flakk Gun model from my Forge World order at PAX last year!
I’ve got less than a week to finish this thing off. I’ve been focusing on the Escalation League this month, thinking that I’d have lots of time to finish the gun. Whoops! This may be a little tighter than I like…
Oh hell, this always happens. I lost my momentum and now I can’t remember anything about day 2. 😛
Ah well, I’ll make it up as I go along.
A giant title for what will be, for me, a small change. I’ve been hanging out at the Park Royal Games Workshop for close to 15 or 16 years, I’d like to spend a few minutes reminiscing and I’d welcome you to join me. This will get lengthy, because I don’t write “short”. 🙂
Time again for the yearly 40k tournament that I look forward to from the time it’s announced until several weeks after it’s over (then I forget about it again for a few months). Get a lot of great people, a great game and some great scenarios together, mix liberally with alcohol and burgers and you have a recipe for a great (almost said terrific) weekend!
I’ll do a small play-by-play after the break, you can skip it if you’re bored easily by long and drawn-out descriptions of board games (and then I rolled a 5 and a 6!), but the first part here should be good.
Aside from the amazing community that comes together for this tournament, the other outstanding part is the scenarios. Astro spoiled me for scenarios from the first time I attended. I’ve always loved jamming on game rules, but…it seems like outside of the Astro organizers, very few people actually want to do this. It leads other tournaments to seem lifeless and limp by comparison. When you play by the basic games in the rulebook, or even some simple modifications on them, you end up with a basic game of “kill the other dude”, a game which I’m not terribly good it.
That game involves tons of study and research amongst 12 (?) armies, with 20 choices each, all with special rules, magic items, wargear, characters that you have to connect together to create the perfect destructive force. I’m not good at that kind of analysis – my brain stops working about 2 pages in. What I am good at – a much more instinct-based form of reasoning, and Astro tends to reward that more. Instead of “kill the other dude”, you play “pick up more boxes than the other dude”, for example. This means you have to think a bit more on the table, instead of front-loading a lot of your thinking, and then applying your choices to how to most efficiently remove your opponents models from the table.
Which, in turn, makes the games much more interesting. For me, at least, because not once in 6 games was I able to out shoot, out melee, or out psychic power my opponent. But 3.5 times I out-maneuvered, and in 5 of the 6 games I felt as though I had meaningful choices to make at every step. That’s a massive change for 40k, in my opinion!
At the end, I came up 2nd in Appearance (painting), 1st in Sportsmanship and 2nd Overall. If I’d known I was a contender for Overall, I would have put more effort into my army list! 😛 Sportsmanship is a really hard thing to win – you have to somehow convince all 6 of your opponents that not only are you a fun-loving guy worth 5 points, but that your army is fun and thematic and worth 5 points, and THEN you have to win more Tournament Points than all the other lucky guys who also convinced their 6 opponents that they and their armies were great. Sportsmanship ties are broken by how well you did at beating people up, the theory being that if you beat up a lot of people and they still loved you, you must be pretty awesome. 🙂 I’ve tied for 1st before, but I’ve never performed so well at the battle part of the tournament to have won that tie-break! Yay me! 🙂
If you want the play-by-play, click the jump. If you don’t, thanks for reading and I’ll have photos of new terrain up soon! (and maybe some photos of the flyer…soooo amazing looking!)
Working on a plane tonight. These things are so damn cool looking…I want one for Astro.
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The first tank was a frenzy of trying techniques out – a slap-dash variety of colours and layers of the dry pigments, maybe a dullcoat layer, some blotted paint, another layer of blotted paint, an attempt at rusting that still needs to be fixed. I require order, and so this was the first tank to attempt to bring the process into something manageable.
The tank body itself got 4 dry pigment layers in total. Dark Earth on all of the sides, and high up. Green Earth slightly less high up. Dark Yellow slightly less high up, and then one more Dark Yellow to fill in where it wasn’t bright enough. Then I did a dullcoat layer – the idea of this was to “matte out” the ugly splotch lines of the pigment fixer, and it worked great! Lastly I did a single layer of blotted Codex Grey with a piece of foam. On the previous tank I felt that a layer of Fortress Grey made it to bright, so I took that out.
A few other odds and ends: two layers of rust dry pigments on all of the metal bits, black exhaust from the exhaust vents, and a few carefully lined places of pure Mithril Silver where the vehicle occupants would have had some recent use of it.
There are a few things I don’t like about this tank, which I hope to fix in the next iteration. I’d love to hear about if you don’t mind these things, and if you think anything else could fix a fix.
Derrick mentioned that the grey/yellow dirt thing didn’t look right, but honestly I’m really liking it. I’m thinking it’s ancient dirt from an ancient world, and new dirt from the new world (all of my Ork bases are grey). He thought that was to much explanation, that I should keep it simple. Problem is…I think it’s a great looking contrast. 🙂 What do you think?
And since my Dukie requested full-on photos, I have a few full-model photos in addition to the macro shots I’ve been taking recently. 🙂
Thanks for reading!
I’ve “finished” weathering my first tank. It’ll probably never actually be done, and the goblins on top need a little bit more love before I’ll be really happy with it, but I’m happy with the end result of the weathering job.
I believe that the last time I left photos, I wasn’t pleased with how the dry pigments were working out. I fixed that in a really simple way – add more weathering, of a different sort. I took foam bits and splattered on a gray colour, and I think it looks pretty sharp.
What do you think?
This will probably be a lengthy series, since I’m only just starting and I’ve got a lot of tanks that need a little touch-up. By “touch-up” I mean, making them look like someone has beaten the everliving shit out of them.
A quick update today showing what happened when I put a yellow earth pigment on and then just dullcoated over top of it.
It looks like the dullcoat spritz put dots in the pigments. I think I like it here, but on the tank sides it isn’t so great.
So I’m fixing it…by adding more paint! More photos later. 🙂
I haven’t yet gotten around to writing the final day of my Masterclass posts, so you wouldn’t have read about my experiences with dry pigments. (It’s still on my todo list!) But there is a minor story that goes along with this post. These first two paragraphs are just preamble – head below the jump/line to read the interesting part. 🙂
I leave the class and immediately head to Secret Weapon Miniatures to purchase dry pigments. Out of all of the techniques we learned for vehicles, I felt like this one was the most accessible and the most generally useful for what I wanted to do – mess up some Ork trukks! Upon navigating to the web site I was presented with a staggering array of colour options…I tried to pick and choose the ones that I thought I’d need, only to order every colour they had. $100US and several weeks later, I have the pigments.
You also need a pigment fixer in order to ensure that the stuff stays adhered to the model. I was told that Burnaby Hobbies stocked it, so I went there…only to find that they had sold out. And apparently this stuff can’t be air mailed, so they weren’t expecting a shipment for some time. I asked a few people, did some research and randomly called Strategies on the off chance they had some…Darren told me that they had one bottle left, so I rushed over on my lunch break to grab it!
Head below the jump to read about the pigments, using them, what I liked, what I didn’t like and questions that I have!