What I've been up to

I've been taking a bit more of a relaxed approach to my hobby since the event the other week. After the intensity to mass painting Hobbits to a deadline, it's nice to just pootle along and flit between whatever takes my fancy.

As a result, I've gone back to my pile of unpainted Harry Potter stuff and plucked out a pair of House Elves to work on:

One day I'll actually get a game with all this Potter stuff, but for now it's fun to paint and a great little pallet cleanser.

I'm pretty happy with them, but they are looking a little blank-eyed atm, so I'll have to go in with a tiny brush and a very steady hand before I can call them done. I was hoping to avoid that, but it can't be helped.

Moving on from that, I also built something which I find pretty damn cool:

He started out as a conversion turning a Necromunda Ambot into a Big Mek in Mega Armour and he kind of grew out of all control until he became the mechanised monstrosity you see above! 

Thus Bozrog da Skraplord was born. A deranged Big Mek with Tellyporta Blasta and Ded Shiny Shoota who leads my Ork Crusade army. He's already laid low two opposing Warlords with a frankly ridiculous amount of Dakka and he doesn't show much sign of slowing down. 

I do still need to do some clean up work before I paint him, but that should come about reasonably quickly. I'm pretty excited to get him finished, so he might be all I work on for the next week or so. We'll see though. I am somewhat infamous for getting distracted! 

I'll leave it there for now though. Stay safe and happy wargaming! 

Harry Potter Progress

It's been an absolutely crazy couple of days for me. One thing after another's been going wrong. Luckily I had a chance to finish up some models before everything went to hell.

They didn't photograph as well as if have liked in my lightbox. The colours a bit bolder in person. They still look pretty decent though, so I can't really complain too much. 

I might redo Ginny at some point, as the varnish I used killed a lot of the subtler shading and highlights on her, but on the whole I'm happy with them. I particularly love how Luna turned out. 

It's actually quite refreshing to have a break from painting GW sculpts. The Knight Model Harry Potter range is a joy to work with too. I'm probably going to do a couple more of them before returning to working on GW stuff. My friend is making noises about having stuff for me to do with the Death Guard codex approaching, so I'm guessing my near future will be somewhat Nurgle-y! I'll have to see how I feel now I'm going back to work.

Stay safe guys and I'll be back soon.

Blam!

That's the sound of my painting points being shattered into a thousand pieces!

To cut a long story short, whilst everyone's been getting excited about the reveal of 9th Ed 40k, I've veered off in a completely different direction.

My hobby motivation has very much come in fits and starts over the past few weeks. I think being stuck inside has been starting to get to me a little. It pretty much killed my will to work anything. When I did, I found myself unable to focus on any one project for very long. 

A friend of mine managed to really stoke up my hobby inspiration again a few weeks ago though, which led to a completely unexpected purchase:

I've always been a massive potter nerd and loved the look of the Harry Potter Miniatures Adventure Game from Knight Models ever since they started previewing it a few years ago. I never had anyone to play with though so I never actually picked it up until now.

 If that sounds like a familiar story, that's because it's exactly what happened with Middle Earth last year! It was even the same friend who convinced me to take the plunge on both occasions. 

That friend added me to a Facebook group he runs for the game and let the beautiful models splashed across my FB feed slowly erode my self control. Clearly he's a bad influence on me! 

The models were a dream to paint up. I enjoyed working on them so much I managed to finish all of them over a single weekend. The small size the game is played at and the scale of the models themselves also really encouraged me to treat each one like a character piece in their own right, so they were great fun to do. 

I'm really proud of how the they turned out. I feel like these are some of my best painting to date! Normally I'm really self critical of my painting skills so that's saying a lot. 

After finishing the Order, everything kind of snowballed. My mate pointed me in the direction of an ebay shop selling other models for the game at ridiculously cheap prices and just like that, I was hooked. Three weeks after buying my first models for this game, my collection looks like this:

. 

I regret nothing! 

Yes my painting points are totally ruined when I already have a massive backlog of other stuff to work through, but at least it gives me something to occupy my ever dwindling attention span with whilst I'm still stuck inside. Even if I never actually play the game, they'll make excellent display pieces. 

That's all for today. Hopefully I'll have some more to show you soon as I get my hobby mojo back and try to dig my way back out of backlog hell. I've even had a fun idea to try and actually get some games ayed of some description, but I'll tell you more when I get there. 

For now, stay safe and I'll catch you next time.