A Wargaming, Warhammer AoS, WH40k, and other miniatures hobby blog. I like to review products, talk about things going on in the hobby world, and hopefully help people with modelling hints and tips.
Hey guys,
Finished up a realm gate last night, thought I might share. I like the way it came out, but I am kind of biased...
Went with a bleached stone effect, but used the Duncan Rhodes video
as my guide (my date with Duncan, heh). First time trying the glowing effect, I think it came out ok.
Well, with all those new Tau moving walls running around, I thought I would cobble some together for my Age of Sigmar and Warmachine games. Super easy to make, the process is actually in the Warmachine rulebook. You just cut a small piece of insulation foam, I went with 1/2" by 6" and 8". They are, of course, 1" tall. Then I rolled up some tin foil into a ball, to get a nice textured surface. Press that into the foam, then use a ballpoint pen to draw in the 'mortar' lines for the stones. For the base, I just cut some dollar store foam core board into shapes, peeled off the top layer of paper, cut a 1/2" groove in it and removed that foam as well. Then used Elmer's glue to put them together.
After that just paint and detail to your heart's content. I did some grey and some umber walls, just to have some variety. I had the hay bales just laying around from some other project.
Making them in 6 and 8 inch segments means I can arrange them however I like. I made some "forts" below just for examples sake.
Making all 6 took about 2 hours, not counting paint drying time. Simple, easy sunday project.
Well, I saw it, I bought it. I'm like that. It actually looked kind of cool. So here is the review...
I have to say, it does not suck. It's actually pretty nice. For the low, low price of $33 (US) you get 5 40mm and 20 25mm base toppers and 2 bags (not just 1, but 2!) of rocks.
The Base toppers are very well detailed, and they certainly follow the gothic theme of all the GW terrain, especially the new boards. As you can see in the photos, they're pretty nicely done. The detail is very deep and clean on all of them.
At first, I thought $33 might be a bit much, but then I compared to Secret Weapon Miniatures, and the same amount of product from them was $30, but without the rocks. (A quick note on the rocks. As opposed to some of their other basing kits, these rocks look like they were put through a wash before being bagged. There is not a whole ton of dust in the bags. Nice!)
Now, some folks will yell that SWM makes full bases, and these are just toppers. Well, yes, but they have the same detail and they are more flexible in their usage. You can break these apart to make even more bases if you need to... so there! :p
So, all in all, a pretty nice kit, decent price point and essentially, two bags of free, clean rocks. Who can beat that?
So I've been thinking, I have made a ton of urban scenery for my board(s), but I like the mysterious woods as well. Soooo, I needed some woods. I made a base and was getting ready to magnetize some tree trunks when I went to the GW store in Denver. There I saw the Citadel Wood.
Not exactly the coolest looking trees ever, but it would also save a lot of time and let me get something on the table quickly. So, "what the hell" I said to myself, and picked it up. It turned out to be not too bad, overall. The leaf attachments were not something I was interested in at all, but they looked like they would be very easy to paint and make look good.
I wanted each of the trees to look subtly different and even markedly different if possible. Walking through the forest, you rarely see two of the same trees. (Speaking as a North-easterner at heart... not desert forests, pine forests, birch groves etc...) They also needed to look semi alien, but very recognizable as trees. I did not succeed on the alien part, my forest-sense got the better of me :)
Basically, the trees and the base were primed with Valejo Surface primer, then I mixed Artist acrylic tube paints to make a suitable base color. A very light brown. After that I painted on Army Painter QuickShade dark tone. Yes, I painted it on, not dipped it. I wanted it to cover but be streaky and spotty at the same time. After that came many different dry-brushes with different Acrylic paints until I got three distinct, but decent looking trees.
The base was just primed, painted and then washed a bit. Then I hit it with a PVA/Water mix and stuck the flock down. The rocks were painted gray and then highlighted with black lightly to bring out their textures. Then the whole mess was matte finished to secure it all.
Even though it took months to actually finish, this was a really quick project in terms of time spent. Maybe a few hours all told?
So, if you're after some pretty easy woods bases for your boards, you could do worse. Not too bad of a kit. And just so you know, the trees do pop off the base so you can maneuver figures and hands through there more easily. They are good and tight fit, so they don't flop and fall down on ya.
More pics after the break... the jump break that is... it says "Read More >>" and it's down a bit :)
Hiya folks, Just a quick review of another FANTASTIC kit from Laser Cut Card. This one is the Cyborg Sentinel Twin-pack. As you may recall, I built the previous incarnation kit, the Monolith and I was thoroughly jazzed with it. Well, this kit is even, and I mean A LOT better!!
As you can see in the pic right here, the Sentinals have a nice angle to them, unlike the monolith, which is a square. Also, gone is the cardstock crystal, replaced by the green power crystals that mount into the holders perfectly. The package comes with 2 complete Sentinals, as you see here. Ingenious cut outs in the 'sprue' allow the crystals to ship relatively flat in the package.
Assembly is dead easy, even more than the square monolith. I like the fact that all the stuff in the symbols on the sides is 'backed up' by a small piece of card that you glue in. You can see it in the pic below. That means the highlight painting is even easier on this kit!
Yep, this is awesome filled with awesome sauce, with awesome sprinkles on the top.
Ok, maybe that's over the top, a bit. Or alot.
You see, I am a wargamer by nature, I mean the cardboard counters on paper map type gamer.(Boardgames... ala GMT Games, Compass games etc.) My friend, Mark, and I have a regular Wednesday game going on at both our houses. 2 weeks we play at his place, the next two week at mine. Part of the problem is that we play big, long games, and it chews up real estate in the hobby/game room.
Well, not long ago, Mark got a spankin new game table from Geek Chic, but that was a little too much green for my tastes. Grand old table, I must say, but I am a minimalist at heart and my goals were quite a bit different;
I wanted to build it
I wanted to steal the idea of the inset table with a topper to save/protect the game in progress
Under $750
Had to be 4' x 6' so it would fit my Realm of Battle and other terrain tiles!
So, the wife and I, with lots of wood tools and a little skill set to designing a game table.
When all was said and done, it came in for well under $500 and we actually had fun making it.
What follows is the picture and text reference of how it went. Hope you like.
Hey guys, sorry for the lack of updates lately, but it was a crazy week. The big news is that my new gaming table is almost done! That will be a huge post all by itself, so I shant dwell on that. I have done a lot of side work though...
I started a forest piece (with magnetized trees, more to come)
I built a crap-ton of Eldar and got some of them primed...
And I built some mysterious terrain pieces (maybe lethal terrain even!)
Now, in the spirit of total transparency, I stole this idea directly from Nick at IDICBeer. He has a GREAT YouTube channel and blog, I recommend you check it out. He has a ton of great tips and tricks and he is very easy to listen to in the background. Here are his links;
In his video about lethal terrain, he covers how to make this effect using PVA glue and super glue. The two have a chemical reaction and the result is very interesting. The glue looks like it is boiling up after it dries, very cool. But in his video, he was able to just pour the glue onto the cardboard and it stayed in place. On my first attempt, I had Elmer's glue all over hell and creation. I knew I had to change tactics.
So here is how I changed Nick's idea, just a tad. I won't say improved, I will just say changed. here goes.
Just a quickie here, wanted to share a very cool tool I use a lot around here. They have these bags of glass 'rocks' at hobby lobby, probably at Michael's too. I would imagine something like them appears at any store that has crafting supplies. These were found in the wedding area, of all places.
In the bag is a bunch of very small to medium sized glass rocks. They are not sharp at all and there is a multitude of sizes and shapes in the bag. At around $5 (US) they are pretty cheap and you get a lot.
What do they do? Lots.
1. They are great for scenery, terrain and other things like that. By themselves they look pretty cool, but if you take just a small dot of paint on the 'bottom' of the rocks before you glue them down, you can get some nice colored reflections. Good for Necron and/or Eldar crystals and such. Experiment with metallics and colors to get some cool effects.
2. Paint mixers. Yep. I have a small container of these at my paint station and whenever I open a new GW paint pot, I toss a couple of the larger rocks in there. (I also use a sharpie to mark the top of the pot so I know that pot already has a mixer in it.) Now, when I use my patented, super amazing paint mixer, I get a better paint mix. The glass is nice because, unlike metal, it does not corrode or leech into the paint pot, ruining the color. I used to use BBs for mixing, but they ruined several pots and I learned not to use metal of any kind.
3. Floating things... after all, they are very small rocks... (if you don't know Monty Python, that makes no sense...)
That's all for now, just thought I would share that.
It is coming... after all. My Apocalypse Collectors version really did make the cut at the last minute and is winging it's way here. A more thorough review of the box when it arrives.
Today is another chapter in the Realm of Battle board saga. I bought the extensions some time ago from my FLGS (Active Imagination) and they sat, languishing in the corner. A couple weekends ago, I decided it was time to get them ready for Space Wolf corpses, so I had better get to it.
So here it is, in pictures...
The boards, primed in white acrylic primer and the rocky areas sprayed with Black. The primer is any cheap acrylic primer from a hobby store (Hobby Lobby or Michael's ...), no need to wasted Valejo or <god forbid> citadel primer on this. Scuff up the boards a bit too with really light sandpaper (after you wash them in water and dish soap, like you do with all your plastic minis, right?)
The two boards after having been painted with acrylic tube paints (thinned with tap water, no special care needed here). I used umber/sienna colors to match the theme of the old boards. This step helps in case you get a divot or ding in your flocking. I tried to roughly feather the colors out from the black to the lightest shade, but having variation and hard lines no and then does not hurt. If you ever look at "real" terrain from high above (i.e. an aircraft) you'll see that nature is made up of some blends and some very hard lines. You'll also notice that even in the most unending 'boring' terrain, there is a vast amount of texture and hue difference. Even flying over Kansas wheat fields you see marked differences in the texture and color beneath you.
Again, a closer shot just to see where I airbrushed some paint for fun, brushed and generally played around with it.
In the shot over there on the left is just a sample of the pile of bits I made by taking apart two old DVD players I had lying around. Quite the haul, I think, and all this was for about 15 minutes work. This was 2 old DVD players that are now gone, not used, kaput!
(As an aside, I bought the Blu-Ray for the bedroom so we could watch Blu-Ray movies in there, chiefly, the UltraMarines movie I just picked up on Blu-Ray. Yes, I am that guy who thinks that movie doesn't suck all that bad.)
But anyhow, from just these two drives, let me take you through the pile.
- 6 good motors that can either be speed controlled via battery size, or a decent potentiometer. Automate the turret on that Predator, I think maybe? The motors are small enough to also be used for the turret on my StormRaven, who knows?
- Gears! Everything from scenery effects to using them for that Turret! There are different gears in there, but the ones that have the attached belt and pulley are screaming to be added to my Generator scenery piece.
I have had this card stock kit from Laser Cut Card for a while now, just have not had time to build it. Boy am I sorry, this is great stuff.
I had a Sunday night off (no mothers day here, we're monster-less :) so I looked for something to knock together. There on my desk was my envelope from South Africa (where Laser Cut Card resides) and I decided to do it.
It looked slightly intimidating at first, but reading through the steps on the instructions at the website made it look easier. I have to say that Neal must have put a great deal of thought into his design, because it goes together without a hitch. Super simple, easy to build and very forgiving of a guy with little manual dexterity and lacking modeling talent.
The instructions on the website are clear and concise, but they lacked any information on painting. That kinda sucked 'cuz I spent quite a while looking. In the end I decided just to airbrush regular acrylic paint onto them. It seems to have worked well, but we'll see if there is any warping as the paint sets overnight. I am betting it won't, or I'm sure Neal would have warned users not to do it.
Hint - If he says to do or not do something, he means it. Tolerances are very tight and everything fits well if you 'do it his way'. I won't bore you with tutorial steps on assembly, I'll just put in some pics showing where I deviated because of the paint job I wanted on mine.
All in all, I give this kit a big A or 9.5 (I hate giving perfect scores, it tends to cheapen the scale, I think). It went together, paint and all, in just a couple of hours. A sharp knife and some super glue is all you really need for a great looking terrain piece / objective for your Necron game table. Easy to build, fun to build and paint, what more can you ask for?
I am now totally looking forward to building the 'cyborg defense line' for my next game, since I really haven't painted my Aegis defense line yet...
It's a Christmas miracle... well, an April miracle? I actually have things done for a change. While I would love to take all the credit, my wife stepped in and did some.
My wife offered to help paint stuff, and since she is quite good anyhow, I figured how could I go wrong, right? So I gave her the manufactorum I built from the Imperial Sector set. Wow, did she knock it out of the park. It looks so good, pictures don't seem to catch the subtle shading. My lousy photo skills make it seem clunky and blocky, but it looks smashing!
I can't wait to base this with some rubble and make it look great. It will be a grand addition to the tabletop!
So, I took the plunge a few weeks back and picked up a Realm of Battle game board set from GW. I know, I know, I can hear you saying "What a slobbering fanboi". Yup... and proud. Listen, I have my homemade MDF terrain boards here and I even built a custom frame to wheel those 2' x 2' beasts around. BACK off!! - LOL, j/k.
Yeah, I have heard all the complaints about the GW boards, but I liked the look of them.
Besides, GW could release the 2nd coming of Christ and they would get
knocked for him being too expensive and way overpowered compared to
Necrons. My favorite complaint was that models slide down the hills on
these boards. I have to laugh my ass off at this. If any of you think
plastic minis are going to hold their position on slick plastic boards,
you're too stupid to play 40k, turn in all your crap and get out your
checkers set! (Yes, I heard this complaint on a podcast. Somebody was
stuck on stupid that day). I have also heard people bitch that the
hills are too gentle and people don't measure elevation changes during
movement correctly. Umm, SLAP THEM, they are cheating. If you let it
ride, then its your fault, get over it.
I knew the board would need to be flocked going in so I laid in supplies. I used thinned down acrylic tube paints blasted through an airbrush to do the terrain. I find these paints tough and durable and they spray pretty well through a .5mm airbrush. I used;
Raw Sienna (Liquitex Basics)
Burnt Sienna (Liquitex Basics)
Raw Umber (Liquitex Basics)
Payne's Grey (Liquitex) (Super secret wash... more later)
Long weekend, short on ability. Story of my life, it seems. I did something to my arm Friday night and spent the whole weekend aching. It falls asleep a lot and tingles just about all the time. Methinks this is not good. Anyhow, between that and some other malady's, my hobby work was cut quite short. So, first off, a big "huzzah" to Danica Patrick for taking the pole for the Daytona 500. you go, girl!
Next, I was able to finish up on my Aquila. This version does not suck nearly as bad as the last one. Here it is, it still needs dullcote and some final tweaks...
The next thing I worked on was the new icon for my chapter, the Templars Sanguine. I will be putting up a whole page of their goodness, with preliminary fluff and designs very soon. What I needed was the blood angels wings with a templar cross. I can't have my brand spanking new chapter going around with the wrong iconography. So, since I was working on my Storm Raven anyhow, I decided to cut apart the wings from one of the icons. I also hacked up a banner from the Black Templar upgrade box to get the cross. I had to chisel off the skull and re-shape it a bit, but it made the grade.
Ok, no whips and chains, really... I meant Works in Progress. Get your minds out of there!!
I am posting a pic of my new improved Aquila from the Honored Imperium set. I think the stone look came out ok, but I think it will really pop when the background is painted on. I am following the same basic thoughts as the Warhammer Lady (see link to the right). I want that look of fallen stone, not the fallen metal Aquila I had tried before. In retrospect, it looked garish in metal. I'm glad I stripped it. Hopefully I can knock it all out this weekend.
Got a new piece of Pegasus Hobbies Terrain, the small Gothic City Building kit. Very cool kit, it really is a decent investment, and I am just about to plunk down the money for the bigger set. A great alternative to GW terrain and will make the board look a little different. The picture just gives you an idea of what's in the box. It snaps together, but for any real gaming, it will require glue and a lot of mold line work. All the usual prime/paint stuff as well. But again, their stuff is modular, so you can combine the kits in a particular range to get something really cool. Odd part on this kit, no floor or roof. Easy enough to fix, but just kind of odd. Also, the conical caps for the columns, only 8 in the kit, but there is a crap-ton of columns. I wish they had tossed in a few more sprues of those. I may just have to cast some of those from plaster or something like that. These are not a lot cheaper than the GW stuff, but the change in design and look is worth it, I think.
Also, just ordered Death From The Skies. GW's new compendium of aerial rules. Yes, I paid the $33 for the book, like a good GW fanboi should. But it looks really cool. And the promise of being able to use the Storm Raven with VSM and Templars is just too good to pass up! Especially now that I have redone the fluff of my chapter to be a cross between BA and BT. I have heard a lot of arguments that say this is a bad thing, GW selling this direct order only, with no pre-release hype, but I cannot say as I mind. There are no secrets in this hobby, everyone knew it was dropping today. I'm looking forward to it!
So, I went up to Denver this weekend for a quick trip and some serious shopping. After the great desk debacle of 2012, I have really needed a computer room make-over. Since the guys from HGTV are not coming to the state of New Mexico anytime soon, I have to do it myself. Enter Ikea. Oh, yeah, Euro-goodness. More on that later.
The weekend started bad and went downhill. I'll spare all the drama, suffice to say, I'm sick as a dog, but managed to shop and at least get to the aquarium. Enter, the otters...
Ok, enough of the terminally cute otters.
I have to say, Square One in Denver is a great GW store. It's a small shop, but the owner is a stand up guy and he runs a good shop. I spent WAY too much money there, with the highlight being a brand new Realm of Battle GameBoard set. Other purchases included;
Ball Predator
Space Marine BattleBarge (Battlefleet Gothic)
Space Marine Strike Cruiser (Battlefleet Gothic)
Blood Angles Sanguinary Guards
A Warhammer Wraith (Vampire counts) (to convert a Necron Wraith)
Some Termagaunts and Brood Lord (For the wife's Nid Force)
And fa la la la...
Yeah, i dropped some hard earned money there, but hey, I'm trying to help the economy!! I'm doing my part!
The store was really hopping when I was there (twice, I hemmed and hawed about the RoB board purchase) and there were games on all the table space. There is a paint bar and all the usual shelves of GW stuff and such. If you're in the area, do hop in and say hi, you'll be treated well!
I'm really looking forward to getting this beast primed and painted up. I have been working on my own set of terrain boards, but to be honest, the thought of transporting them anywhere was daunting. That and I was having to make them too generic in order to be flexible. Now, they are going to go full Necron World. Be ready, these Necron boards are going to be all Necron, all the time.
So, off to bed with me, try to get rid of this cold and maybe build a desk...
“It is better to have tried and failed, than to have never tried at all.”
(or... “Thank the emperor for simple green!”)
That may not be the full, or even correct quote, but for my purposes, it works perfectly.
It’s the truth. I have had a part of the honored imperium set, the fallen aquilla, on my desk for a long time. I have been working on it, adding a highlight here, a shade there, for a couple of months. I got it to the point I thought it was done.
Then I saw the one that the Warhammer Lady did on her blog... Yep, that was it for my model. I just pulled it out of the simple green tub that I use to strip models. I learned a big lesson here. It’s not that hers is something I am going to copy or anything like that. It’s that mine was bad, and no amount of “tweaking” it was going to fix it. Now, my statue from that set (shown here in this post) is a model I really like and think came out great. But the aquilla never really worked for me, and instead of stripping it and starting over, I tried to fix it half a hundred times.
Sometimes it just makes sense to start over. I am doing a whole new set of tactical marines because I changed the “fluff” of my chapter. I have redone the scheme on my drop pod and several vehicles to fit the new chapter, why did I hesitate so long on the aquilla?
I'll tell you. A mistaken belief that it was salvageable. That’s why. I thought I could save it. That is an attitude I have to learn to leave behind. I’m not saying that every time you paint a fig you should be so self-critical that you immediately plop into the stripper vat. But I learned that I need to be a little more at ease with the thought of tossing something into the vat that deserves a fresh new start. It is not defeat, it is learning and growth. That’s all. I didn’t want to start over because I feared I was giving up on my painting skills. Nah, I’m just learning that I can do better and I need to embrace that and quit trying to save the dead patient.
So, I took a break from the warhammer 40k modeling this December to make a Christmas Present for a friend. I've had this cannon kit for some time and decided it would make a great gift if I could make a diorama out of it.
This is a James Cannon from the pre-civil war era. These were the guns that were originally smooth bore, but were then rifled to extend their range (and useful life). I decided to make the diorama from the Shiloh battlefield. The kit was relatively easy to make, but needed a lot of cleanup. There was a lot of metal nubs to clip and general cleanup to do.
A while back, there was a night. A very hellish night. Lots of things happened, but the end result was this. My computer desk's glass top exploded into a gozillion pieces and Delphia took a nose dive. (Delphia is my 27" iMac
with the i7 processor, 16GB RAM and all the bells and whistles). This was a bad night. Not only did I spend bowling league night cleaning up broken glass, but I had to sweat out whether or not the Apple guys could fix her again. Long story short, I got wayyyy lucky. It was only the glass, and they had one left (yes, 1, uno, singular... the last one) in stock. The great guys at the Apple store in ABQ uptown got it replaced lickety-split and I was off back home in short order.
Well, with all those new Tau moving walls running around, I thought I would cobble some together for my Age of Sigmar and Warmachine games. Super easy to make, the process is actually in the Warmachine rulebook. You just cut a small piece of insulation foam, I went with 1/2" by 6" and 8". They are, of course, 1" tall. Then I rolled up some tin foil into a ball, to get a nice textured surface. Press that into the foam, then use a ballpoint pen to draw in the 'mortar' lines for the stones. For the base, I just cut some dollar store foam core board into shapes, peeled off the top layer of paper, cut a 1/2" groove in it and removed that foam as well. Then used Elmer's glue to put them together.
