Browsing Tag

fantasy

Skirmisher Movement Trays

Posted on November 4, 2012

I’ve been following this great blog recently by James Wappel. He has some absolutely fantastic painting on there, regularly, and recently a number of modelling projects as well. He’s working on a display tray for a tournament that he’s going to right now, which is a great read.

I read through most of his archives, and one of the posts was on skirmisher movement trays. I have this problem – whenever I move my skinks, I always end up breaking the laws of physics. I move one model at a time, each no more than 12 inches, and when I’m done, the unit is no longer in anything resembling a formation. Or if it is, I’ve moved several models 18 inches and cheated.

These were pretty simple to put together – most of the materials are at Michaels :). Matboard, cut with an exacto blade. Measure out your models bases with a half inch space between them. Pull apart pieces of cork as spacers and glue them down with hot glue. White glue sand down, and bingo-bango, you’ve got a movement tray. Repeat times 6.

I’m using them for 3 units of 11 skinks each right now, but I did them in groups of 3, so when I decide to play with Chameleons again I’ll be able to take units of 5 easily.

Primer was no problem, although I worried about the cork slightly…if it wasn’t actually cork…that foam stuff melts under primer. Drybrush my two greys, sprinkle a little dead grass on it. Done!

Thanks for reading!

Musings & Meta

The End of an Era

Posted on August 22, 2012

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”. 🙂

Featured Images

OFCC Army

Posted on June 20, 2012

OFCC in Portland (or Vancouver…) this weekend! I’ve never played with such a large army before (2800pts), and I’m really looking forward to the event! Driving down Friday with some of my Warhammerz friends, coming back Sunday sometime.

If you look carefully, you can see the finished Scar-Vet BSB in here, but I forgot to take some solo shots of him while I was doing this last night. Another time.

Work-in-progress

And now for something completely different – lizardman scar-vet battle standard

Posted on June 1, 2012

The tank weathering takes a small break (I have another 3-4 tanks to go through before the end of August…), before the flyers come out (ZOMFG, want!) to do some touch-ups on a model I’ve been slowly working on for a little bit now.

It was a few months ago that I realized that I really wasn’t enjoying playing my Slann list. I don’t like the magic phase in Fantasy, and I prefer to boycott it whenever possible. Game balance makes this difficult, and so I had been playing a magic heavy list since Throne of Skulls last year. A random comment on our way back from GottaCon made me realize where my heart truly is – DINOSAUR! (you can see him in the title banner for this blog!)

BSBs are pretty much mandatory in 8th Ed, even for an army typically known for not needing a LD bonus, so I set about making a list that worked for my playstyle and desires.

Enter – the dinobus! The center piece of this 1500 point army, the dinobus is roughly 530 points of 14 Cold one Cavalry, and 135 points of Cold One riding Scar Vet banner bearer! (yes, the dinobus is roughly half of my total army, and isn’t very hard to kill. I don’t care – it’s awesome!)

I wanted to do a conversion for the BSB, and so here we have it. This is draft 2. Draft one was about 20% less awesome – with the base being very plain and the cold one mouth closed and not at all ready for battle. RAWR!

The headdress that came with this model was a hideous lightning bolt thing.

Thanks for reading!

Technique

Masterclass Painting 1 – Day 2

Posted on February 28, 2012

Day 2 started out pretty well – I caught the right bus, I knew where I was going, I found a McDicks to get a McGriddle at (praise the evil genius who invented the McGriddle!), I ate breakfast with a fellow painter who was pretty awesome and then we walked to the shop to get our paint on!

We waited for a bit. 9am rolls around, which is when the event starts and we think “Oh well, the keyholder just slept in a bit, no big deal.” Everyone is pretty cool. Another 15…then another…then it’s 50 minutes later and we’re trying to figure out how to get ahold of the guy so we can get into the shop!

The fellow is found and is properly apologetic and we get excited to finally get our thing going. And then…we find…that the door lock has been glued shut. As in, the key hole has been filled with glue. The kind of glue that fills a hole really good, and then sticks really good. Curses, frustration…and resignation. It’s going to be a while to get a locksmith over to fix it…so a bunch of us head to the toy shop across the way (convenient, really).

If you ever get a chance to go into Toy Traders in Langley (God help you if you need to be in Langley…) I highly recommend it. Fantastic toy shop! Board games, barbie dolls, massive sections of comics and collectible action figures and LEGO and Brio and building blocks and if you look up, the owners of the store clearly have a hard-on for Star Wars. Awesome shop.

At about 11am we get into the store and get going. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover and not a lot of time to cover it in. We order pizza in, and we ended up skipping the last section of the class. Sadness. 🙁

Technique

Masterclass Painting 1 – Day 1

Posted on February 27, 2012

17 people at Game Stars in Langley!

It was a few months ago, probably at Astronomi-con, that Mr. Dyer mentioned organizing painting classes in Vancouver. I said yes, please, that sounds great! I have been looking forward to these classes for months now. My painting style has grown, I think dramatically, in the last year or two and the chance to take a class to try to solidify some new skills wasn’t one I was going to pass up. The downside – this is the busiest February I’ve ever had, I’m moving, I’ve had a few weekends packed up, and now I have two complete weekends filled with painting classes. I don’t regret it…but the timing is poor. 🙂

The teacher for the weekend is Mathieu Fontaine (Blog) – a winner of multiple Golden Demon awards (that’s good), a phenomenal painter, and a general bastard (in a good way). It turns out that he’s also a phenomenal teacher – able to explain difficult concepts while jet lagged, with a friendly and patient attitude. I would recommend him.

I took some notes while we went, and I took some photos. I painted for about 20 hours, and I didn’t finish the model. (No one did – that wasn’t the point). I learned some lessons about photography while I was at it. 😛 Hit the jump to read my (cleaned up) notes, and see some photos!

Featured Images

Kroxigors – Final 2

Posted on March 11, 2011

The other photos of these guys weren’t so awesome, so I took the time last weekend to take some better ones. Some sunlight, a white box and a few ambient lights later and I have some decent photos.

Also, Cin might be right. Dude on the left is pretty adorable :P.

Featured Images

Kroxigors – Final

Posted on March 4, 2011

Alright! These guys were 3/4s finished when I got inspired to paint/assemble again, so they were an obvious choice for finishing up. I’m VERY happy with how they turned out (although slightly embarrassed about the blurry guy on the left…bad photographer!). Went to GW tonight, almost had a game but there was a couple people there ahead of me, so I sat down, pulled out some models and a paintbrush and had at ’em. The result – finished kroxigors. Awesome. 🙂

Particularly pleased with their backs. Horns down the center are a simple Scorched Earth, Dessert Yellow, Bleached Bone combination, heavily watered to allow for decent blending (actually, now that I look again…these photos all suck…damnit >.<). The scales are my favourite part – again, really simple – Mechrite Red, Blood Red and Blazing Orange. My favourite thing is that I don’t think I’ve ever successfully done a very light edging of a strong highlight colour. Whenever I try, it usually ends up looking to strong, to thick, to blocky. But this time…oh this time, I took my time, had the right amount of water and it worked out wonderfully. You really should see them in person, they are amazing.

This gives me hope – it means that I should have two really amazing looking units, and two pretty good looking units and my army is just going to pop off the table with the strong reds/oranges against the cold gray. Very excited to start working on the next 10 Temple Guard (yes…I assembled another 10 of them…).

Featured Images

Wizards – Final

Posted on March 4, 2011

I bought Duke the Empire Wizard box for his birthday. I also promised I’d paint them for him, for his fledgling Empire army. I assembled and primed them…and then, like so many other projects on my desk, left them to languish.

But a sudden flush of painting/modeling inspiration, brought on by an invitation to the Throne of Skulls tournament in June, has had me attempting to clear some of the crap off my desk. The first step – finish these two models so I didn’t have to feel guilty about them sitting on my desk anymore 😛

The disclaimer: I suck at human flesh >.<. Also, the cloaks were less interesting to paint than I had hoped. Sooo…overall…models less awesome than I had hoped :(.

The first is a Life wizard in a delicious Snot Green.

The second a Death (or Shadow) wizard, in Lich Purple.

(I didn’t do the bases on purpose – left those to Duke’s thematic desire).

Work-in-progress

Kroxigors 1

Posted on December 2, 2010

Got down to some minor painting this evening at GW after a solid game. Put a layer of dry brushed Codex Gray and a wash of Badab Black on these bad boys. Got home and pulled out the new camera (I don’t think I mentioned a new camera) and the mini-studio and took a few photos.

I like it! Not as nice as my dads DSLR, but not nearly as expensive either :). Oh, and the kroxigors are pretty cool too :).

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