Wednesday 6 March 2024

Savage things

So after my last post I was raring to go with hobby and get a load done. My body had other ideas though and I spent the next week and a half feeling extremely ill. Bloody typical!

Now I'm in the mend though, I've not only been able to get a couple more games of Old World in, but I've managed to sit down and do some hobby for the first time in a couple of weeks. 

Despite their absolutely abysmal performance in the game last night, I decided that my Boar Boyz were next up on my hobby desk. 

I'm actually really quite happy with how they turned out, considering it was just a few hours work.

 Weirdly, despite appearances, the Boars took longer than the Boys to do, needing several layers of drybrushing and washes, whereas the riders were mostly Contrast, with a few strategic highlights. I'm clearly starting to get get the method locked down for the army scheme, as it was a breeze to work through.

I think the purple really does make the whole thing pop. I'll definitely be integrating it more into the rest of the army as I go along.

That's it for today though. Hopefully this burst of progress will propel me forward and I'll be have more to show soon. I'm definitely riding this Old World kick right now, so no doubt it'll be something of that ilk, but only time will tell what specifically that might be. 

Until next time though, happy hobbying! 

Tuesday 20 February 2024

Old World Shenanigans

Despite my best of intentions, I've been pretty lazy with posting so far this year. 


January is usually quite a productive month for me, as I normally work a bit less as things calm down from the Christmas rush, but it turned out to be an unexpectedly busy month this time round, between work and Pokemon Regionals. Then in February I just haven't found the time to sit down and post anything.

Luckily I actually got a ton of stuff done, albeit more at the start of January than past couple of week. I got the entire core of my Orcs and Goblins done for Old World.


 Turns out that a looming game release after three years of procrastinating was a fantastic motivator to get shit done!

I still need to finish up the Squigs, Chariot and a few extra dudes, but I still got a huge chunk done. It was mostly done using Contrast and speed painting techniques, but they look pretty great when ranked up, so I'm pretty happy with them. 

I'm actually really proud of how my Great Shaman/Wurrzag came out. It was only about three hours work, but I absolutely loved the result!

I wasn't originally planning to use a big Orc Shaman, preferring Gobbos when it comes to magic. He was just part of the big lot I bought ages ago, but I like the paint job on him so much I'm definitely going to try to squeeze him into a few lists.

On top of my Orcs, I also dug out my old Dark Elves and gave them some fancy new spaced movement trays to get them compatible with the new edition:

They still need a lot of work to bring them up to a good standard, plus I built/rebuilt a load of monsters to go with them, but I'll cover that in a later post. This is already getting pretty long already and I also wanted to show off a few pics from the games I've had already. 


I've been having an absolutely fantastic time in just the three games I've played so far. It's not just the nostalgia talking, there's just something about it which revs me up far more than anything has recently, especially compared to the latest incarnation of 40k.

Heresy and Middle Earth have come close, but honestly I can see this becoming the main game I'll be playing for a while, even more so than it did back in the day. It's incredibly good fun.


Anyway I'm going end this post here and try and be back soon with another, now I've gotten caught up. I'm actually off work this week, so hopefully I'll be able to get some stuff done which I can show off. It is nice to finally get a post out though. I do enjoy posting here, it's just not as easy to keep up as it used to be. 

Anyway, until next time, happy hobbyingl

Wednesday 3 January 2024

Goodbye 2023, hello 2024

Happy New Year to you all!

Im a little later than usual with my end of year hobby review post, but at least I'm here now. Welcome to my annual hobby ramble! 

I actually had a really good hobby year in 2023. I joined a new gaming group at the start of the year, so I've been gaming a lot more than I normally do.

They're a great bunch of guys and I've had some really fun games, including participating in a 40k League and trying to introduce them to smaller games like Middle Earth and Heresy. 

On the whole it's been pretty successful and I've had a blast. It's also given me a huge boost to my mental health and a good excuse to get out and be more sociable, so I consider that a win all round. 

I'm honestly little shocked at just how much I've been playing. I've always been far more of a hobbyist than a gamer, but it's been rather excellent getting out and getting some serious gaming in. In previous years I was able to get one game a month if I was lucky. 2023 saw me play 55 games. That's an average of more than one a week! 

It did feel like I'd gotten less stuff painted as a result though, as I've been playing instead of painting on my main night off every week. Turns out though that when I gathered everything together for a photo, I was very wrong:

That's a pretty massive chunk of hobby progress!

 I still thought it was a bit less than previous years, but it turns out I'd pulled out 454 points of hobby progress, which was actually a few points up on last year. I guess I'm just really crap at judging these things! 

I guess I was a little fooled by the fact I've been working on a lot of points-heavy big things, but I certainly won't complain. All hobby progress is good progress! 

It has helped that I've been trying to only game with fully painted models whenever possible. There's nothing like wanting to try something new to give me the push to crank out some fresh models! 

So moving on, where am I going in 2024? Well I've decided to keep it simple this year. At least to begin with I want to get a few existing projects finished, like my 30k Emperor's Children and Imperial Fists, as well as keep working on my Old World armies. 

That latter one is likely to occupy most of my immediate attention, especially with pre orders having been announced. I'm just so excited to have Warhammer Fantasy back! 

I reckon most of January will be consumed with mass production of Orcs and Gobbos. I've got a good method down for them now, so I should be able to zoom through a ton of them, it's just a matter of putting in the time. 

I'm kicking myself a little at having let my Old World projects slip so much, even though I've known the game is coming for four years. I was hoping to have a couple fully playable armies ready to go for launch, but now I'm running out of time, especially as I know a lot of the local players are chomping at the bit to dive in with it. 

I've just got to try and play catch up as best I can. At least it'll keep me busy and motivated! 

Apart from that, i just want to generally focus on getting stuff done for a while. I'm quite comfortably in positive painting points now, but my backlog is still pretty ridiculous, so a bit of a pause on model buying outside of Old World makes a lot of sense for a few months. Quite honestly, I could probably not buy a single model for the next few years and still not run out of stuff to be working on! 

The first few months of the year is normally a good time for me to focus on my backlog anyway, as the hours at work go way down, so I don't have a huge amount of disposable income. It also gives me more free time for hobby, so it just makes sense to focus that for a little while. 

Whatever I end up doing, I do want to try and post on here more regularly. I'm fully aware that in 2024, hobby blogs are a pretty dead form of media. Social media is definitely where it's at for online hobby. There's something very satisfying about maintaining this blog though, so I want to keep it going as long as I can, even if noone's really paying attention to it.

So that's it for this year's round up. It's a little less structured and wandering than usual, but you don't come here for concise thoughts anyway, so it's all good.

Have a fantastic 2024 and I'll catch you all soon! 

Saturday 23 December 2023

Green Christmas

I've spent a lot of the last month being pretty ill. Nothing too serious, but I've been feeling rough as hell.

As you can imagine, that put quite a crimp in my hobby mojo for a while. Luckily in the last week or so I've been able the get some of my momentum back.

I'm definitely on the hype train for the rapidly approaching release of Old World, so I've gone into full mass production mode on my Orcs and Goblin army. 

As you can see I've been pretty productive! 

Although I've still got a long way to go, it's definitely one of those projects where Contrast paint is my best friend. It's ready made for the kind of batch painting. I wish that it had existed back in the day, as I would have faced much fewer hordes of grey plastic!

Anyway, a few days after that pic was taken, I used my last night off before Christmas to get a few units finished, after a lot of playing around with methods and trying a few bits out:

I also popped them in my light box to get some better photos, but I just wanted to get a group pic. Maybe it's the nostalgia kicking in, but there's something very satisfying about seeing even a couple of Fantasy units ranked up together.

Anyway, here's a close up. 

It's a really simple scheme, but I reckon it looks pretty effective. More importantly it can be reproduced over 100+ models without driving me utterly insane!

The Goblins do look a little odd on the new larger bases. Some of that might just be the break in how I'm used to seeing them, but the Skull Pass Gobbos were also tiny in comparison to the multipart kit. I reckon if I mix a few of those in as the horde expands, it should all be good.


The Savages Orcs on the other hand have the opposite problem. 

They were almost too big for 25mm bases even in 8th edition and we haven't been told their new base size yet. I'm guessing they're going to go to 30mm, but I'm not wanting to jump the gun on it. I do however want an army ready to go for release, so I've decided to paint them on their original bases for now, then put them on correctly spaced movement trays later.

That'll do for today. Hopefully I'll get a chance to sort out my usual hobby review post between now and the new year, but for now, I'll just say Merry Christmas to you all and see you soon! 


Thursday 16 November 2023

Catching up

I know I vanished a little after my last post, but don't worry, my hobby mojo hasn't evaporated already! 

I'd love to say that I was just waiting until I finished up some stuff before showing it off, but honesty I'm just really terrible at finding the time and focus to write up blog posts.

As ever, I'll try and get better at posting in sometime resembling a timely manner, but for now have some nice photos of finished models to distract you from my failings:

I'm continuing my push towards the launch of Old World and managed to turn out an entire regiment of Executioners in the space of about two weeks. I'm really impressed with how they turned out and I have to say that the sight of a fully ranked Regiment makes me both nostalgic and excited for the return of Fantasy!

I haven't neglected my other projects, but there's far too much to go through in one post. I'll just show you what I've been working on in the past few days and try to keep things up to date in future:

I actually managed to crank out these three relatively quickly. I've got a Middle Earth event coming up this weekend, but I've been dithering on what to take. I finally decided last week to go with something a bit silly and fun, but I was short a few painted models I needed to make it work. 

I managed to get these done in just a couple of long sessions. They're by no means my best work, but I'm pretty happy with them and they'll do the job.

That's it for today. Like I said, there's a ton of stuff I've gotten finished which I just don't have space to show off. Like I said, I'll try and keep up with things a bit better in future.

For now though, happy hobbying! 

Sunday 15 October 2023

I'm back!

I finally managed to break out of my hobby slump! 

After a few months of doing pretty much nothing, I've actually been able to coax my hobby mojo back into life over the last few weeks. Turns out all I needed to do is jettison 40k from my project pile. 

Despite having a strong start, I've been coming to the conclusion that 10th edition is a bit of a mess and not too fun to play right now, so I've decided to focus on other game systems, such as Heresy and Middle Earth instead. I might wheel back to 40k later once a few more Codexes are out, but honestly I'm having more fun elsewhere atm. 

It did help that I've been able to get quite a few games of 30k in recently. I've even being able to get down to one of the regular Heresy nights at my FLGS, which has got me  super keen to finally sort out my Emperor's Children. 

So yeah, I'm on a real Heresy kick right now. I even found a pretty good deal for a bunch of Heresy Emperor's Children on a FB trade group, which I snapped up pretty quickly:


 There's a lot of work to be done on them, but I was going to be doing some pretty hefty conversion work on them anyway, so it's not too bad. 

It gives me a very solid backbone to build the army around, so I'm going to enjoy working through this lot.

In the meantime though, I decided to work on some Kakophonii to 'get my eye in'.

I really liked how these turned out. They're really a a rebuild/paint of my old 40k Noise Marines, but I think they do the trick and give you an idea of how I want the final army to feel.


They're a bit more '40k' in feel than most 30k EC's you see, but that's kind of the point of the army. It's meant to be a Siege of Terra force. The 3rd Legion fell quicker and faster than most other Legions, so a sprinkling of chaotic nonsense seems fitting. The real trick will be making sure they're still unified enough to pass for a 30k force. 

I'm going to have a lot of fun with this project. I'm very much drawing on 80's/90's Slaanesh models and iconography as an inspiration. So much so I decide to attempt some freehand to jazz them up a bit.

The stripes aren't perfect but not bad for a first attempt I reckon and looks decent enough from a distance. Given the plan for the army, I'll certainly have plenty of chances to practice!

So yeah, just in case you couldn't tell, I'm massively excited to be finally getting this project properly off the ground. Ive actually got a week and a half off work starting today do I'm hoping to really crack on withthis over that time. Wish me luck!

I want to get as much done on this as possible before the new year, as it was confirmed yesterday that Old World will finally be releasing then and I know I'm going to definitely get sucked into that in a big way!

But yeah, I'll post up how I get on this week. It's good to be back on the hobby train again. See you soon! 

Tuesday 5 September 2023

I ain't dead!

I've stayed in my hobby funk pretty firmly over over the past few weeks.

I had just been kicking my heels waiting for Epic to release, not really getting anything done. Then the game got delayed, leaving me with nothing to do at all!

I've still been gaming, but not felt too much motivation to actually sit down to build or paint. It's not really that bad. It's good not to force these things. It does feel very weird though considering how productive I normally am. 

I have gotten some really good games in to be fair. I managed to get a 30k game for the first time in ages against a mate a few weeks back. My Fists got a complete kicking from his Night Lords, but it was good to get something other than 40k on the table for once.

I also got a fun game of Age of Sigmar in against another friend at the club yesterday. 

It was looking really scary when his entire Beasts of Chaos force ambushed me turn 1, but I managed to pull it back in the end.
 
I've only played a few games of Sigmar, but it does seem a lot of fun. I don't think it'll ever become my main game, but it's nice to play a game where my Slaaneshi Deamons actually aren't completely terrible!

After that, I actually think I'm starting to feel a few twinges of motivation returning, so I'm hoping that I'll actually be able to bring myself to sit down and do something in the next week or so. I'll have to see how it does. I don't want to move too quickly and spook that elusive motivation away!

Anyway that's all for today. I just wanted to put up a post to show the blog's not dead! Hopefully I'll be back soon, but until next time, happy hobbying! 

Wednesday 2 August 2023

In a funk

My hobby seems to be a bit all or nothing atm. After a few weeks of being productive, I've not really touched too much for nearly a month now. I think it's a slight bit of burnout after my blitz of activity in the build up to my last Middle Earth event and the excitement of 10th Edition's release, but also I don't really have anything major to be focusing on right now.

Hopefully the release of Epic in a few weeks will change that, but for now I'm just 'picking' at various projects without actually getting too much done. Real life has kept me pretty busy as well, so I guess that's contributed to it too.

I did finally manage to get some Killa Kans and a Mek done for my Orks this week though.

They're nothing too fancy, but it is nice to call something done. It also keeps up my self-imposed pledge to paint things up before I use them in 10th Edition.

The guns are fully magnetised too, so I'll need to paint up the spares at some point, but for now I'm happy to take the small win and enjoy the feeling of actually getting something finished!

Hopefully I'll break out of my funk more fully soon, but until then happy hobbying! 

Tuesday 4 July 2023

Hobby Adventures

It's been a strange couple of weeks for me in the hobby. 

First of all, I'm happy to report that I managed to finish up the last of the Corsairs I needed for my event, embracing the 'good enough' mantra I talked about last post:

They came out pretty well in my opinion. Reasonably high tabletop standard, with a bit of extra effort put into Dalamyr, but nothing too fancy.

I had a really fun time at the event too. I met some great people and it was pretty excellent to be playing some Middle Earth again after several months of mostly 40k. Definitely going to have to find some time to get some more games in at some point!

That time might get a little squeezed though, as I've picked up a new game! After years of grumbling about what GW did to the Old World, a mate of mine down the local club has finally convinced me to give Age of Sigmar a try!

To be fair, I've been oggling the Hedonites range ever since it came out and I've been warming towards the fluff for a few years now, so I figured I'd give it a go using my existing Slaanesh Deamons army for 40k. Turns out it's surprisingly fun! It was actually the most fun I'd had playing with my Deamons for years! 

So I'm an Age of Sigmar player now. It certainly won't become the main game that I play, but it'll definitely scratch my Fantasy itch for a while, at least until Old World eventually comes out.

I needed some Mortals to go with my Deamons, so ended up picking up the Hedonites Vanguard box when when I went to collect the Leviathan box last weekend.

My excited mood was a little soured by just how fiddly and awkward the Blissbarbs were to build. They were *very* CAD designed and took me nearly six hours just to build this lot, but I persevered. 

I'm really looking forward to getting some paint on these. I'll have to hurry things along though, as GW dropped a massive bombshell over the weekend that is likely to suck up a lot of my hobby time and budget.

Epic's back next month!

I knew it was coming, but didn't expect it quite so soon. I'm a massive fan of Titanicus already, so I'm going to be buying into this in a big way! That means I need to definitely clear some space in my backlog.

So yeah, there's been some big swerves in what I'm doing, but I'm pretty psyched for the hobby again and feeling pretty good right now.

Watch this space, I'll be back soon! 

Monday 19 June 2023

The Art of 'Good Enough'

I've been in a bit of hobby existential crisis this week. 

You see I've been painting up some new Corsairs I've got for a local Middle Earth event next week, which I got from a quite excellent 3rd party company called Medbury Miniatures.

They really are lovely sculpts. They put GW's Corsairs to shame. They're up there with Forge World in terms of quality I'd say and were a dream to paint up. 

The problem came when I went back to start doing a spruce up on my existing Corsair army. GW's models are bad. Not just in comparison, but just objectively. They're an older plastic kit and it shows. The details are lumpy and shallow, with the mold clearly wearing out. 

I consider myself to be a pretty decent painter, but this is the best I could do with them. 


Of course my pedantic, autism-driven brain went into overdrive. The difference just seem too much to reconcile and I immediately set to work trying to apply more highlights in an attempt to bridge the gap between the two sets of models.

Then I stopped, put my paintbrush down and started thinking. Why did I need to do that? Not every model needs to be a work of art.

If it looks decent enough on the table, why worry too much about it? Seems a bit obvious when I write it down like this, but I am guilty of going overboard with my painting projects.

Of course it's good to be trying to improve my skills, but it doesn't need to be done with everything I do. I can probably get away with not going in to that third or fourth highlight on trooper 5 of a 30-strong force. It's still going to look decent on the gaming table. 

You're probably thinking "Congratulations, you've just discovered Tabletop Standard painting", but I've always had a perfectionist streak when it comes to painting, so it's good to think about it every now and then. 

Moving forward, I'm going be trying to not worry so much about achieving the perfect result on each individual figure and focus more on how units appear as a whole. That lets me save the more involved stuff for characters and other centrepiece models.

I'll see how I get on with that. It might even have a positive effect on my endless backlog!

On a side note, I also had my first game of 10th Edition 40k this week. It's hard to judge too much from just a single game, but it seems pretty fun and plays much smoother than 9th ever did, even though I need to shake up what I'm running with my Orks quite a bit. 


I've got another game scheduled for Monday, so I'll be able to get a better idea of things then, but if I can play the game without the rules bloat and mental fatigue which plagued 9th, it'll be excellent and keep me far more excited for the game than I've been for a long while. 

Oh and I'm picking up my Leviathan box in the morning, so that's fun too!

Until next time, Happy Hobbying!