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! 

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! 

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! 

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! 

I did it!

I've reached quite a cool moment on my hobby.. For the first time in the 20ish years I've been playing, I've actually got a fully painted 2000 point army for 40k!

I've collected a lot of armies over the years, but I've never been all that disciplined in getting them painted. I've always gotten distracted by other projects.

Having taken part in a 40k league at the local club for the last six months though, it's helped me focus quite considerably.

It helped that Orks are quite fun to paint and I chose quite a simple paint scheme. It still took me the better part of two years since restarting the army to get there though. 

Just in time for 10th Edition to screw with the points!

It's fine though, it gives me a solid pool of finished models to draw on to keep to my goal of only playing with painted models in 10th, with a fair few more that could be finished quite quickly if I want to use something different, so it's onwards and upwards from here!

Next up is getting some Corsairs ready for a Middle Earth event at the end of the month, then tackling the Leviathan box, so that should be a lot of fun. 

Until next time, happy hobbying! 

Gordakka Da Stompy

I had lot of fun this week painting up my Mega Dread.

I had the night off work on Thursday with nothing else to do, so I really managed to get into the flow with it. About 9 hours work in total. I don't think I've ever painted up such a large model so quickly!

It's always a nice feeling when that happens. I wish it was that easy all the time. 

I also had some fun with applying transfers. Normally I don't bother with them with Orks, as I think they look a bit out of place, but with a bit of experimenting I found they worked perfectly for what I had in mind, especially once I did a bit of weathering over the top.

I even managed to get the glyphs on his knee pad to match his name. It's something which literally noone will ever notice unless I point it out, but I know it's there at least and that's what matters.

Next up is the Deff Dread and some Beast Snaggas and my league list is fully painted. If I can get those done before 10th Edition drops I'll be very happy, but I'll have to see how I get on. I've got a busy couple of weeks ahead of me at work, so it'll come down to how much free time I end up getting.

Enjoy the pretty pics for now though. I'll hopefully post more soon! 

Contemplating 10th Edition

OK before I start, I need to confess that I've already gotten distracted from my Dark Elves. Hardly surprising to regular readers of this blog, but I do have a very good reason for it, which will hopefully become apparent over the course of this post. With Old World still a while off, I can weave my Druchii around other stuff I'm working on anyway, so it's not a complete disaster.

Moving on though, the upcoming release of 10th Edition has me a lot more excited about 40k than I've been for a long time. I think it's because I'm actually getting more chances to play than I have done in the last few years, thanks to being able to attend a gaming club more or less every week these days. I think I've played more 40k since the start of this year than the last four years combined!

Regular games have meant that I've been working on my Orks a hell of a lot more than I did previously, to the point where I can easily field a 2000 point fully painted army for the first time in ages.

That got me thinking that I want to carry on that momentum going into the new edition. With that in mind I've decided to give myself a self-imposed rule of only fielding fully painted stuff when I game. That should in theory give me the push to actually get things finished up if I want to use them.

With that in mind, I'm going to loop back to the reason I got distracted:

I kitbashed together a Mega Dread ready for when the points go up in the final few games of the 40k League the club has been running! I've wanted to use one for a while and had an old Redemptor Dreadnought laying about, so my Mek brain got to work. It was a lot of fun to do and I'm pretty psyched to start painting it in the next few days.

I also needed a second Deff Dread so I made one of those too, again from an old Marine Dread I had in a drawer:

I was a little shocked at how quickly and naturally this came together. It was only about an hour's work, including magnetising the arms. Hopefully I should get this done pretty quickly too

So yeah, I've been well and truly distracted, but in a good way. I'll let you know how I get on with them. 

Until next time, happy hobbying! 

Looks like I'm back!

Well I was right, the Old World preview got me fired up. Even if the game's coming a bit later than I'd hoped, it still did the job of getting me painting again. I'm determined to finally get my Dark Elves sorted and ready for the table for when it does launch. 

I got so excited that I actually got an entire unit of Dark Riders done in less than a week, which is pretty damn speedy for me. 

They're certainly not the best paint job I've ever done, but they look good enough for me. I'm not a huge fan of these particular sculpts, but they'll do the job until I can get hold of some of the classic models. I'm holding out hope for a Made to Order for a lot of the 6th Ed metals when the game drops, as ebay prices are looking a little ridiculous right now! 

It actually feels pretty weird to be painting up my first Fantasy regiment in nearly six years, but it's a nice feeling. Fantasy was never my main game, but I still have a lot of nostalgia for it, so it's great to be able to return to an army I thought had been permanently shelved. 

Digging out everything I could find from various boxes, turns out I have a lot of work to do! 

Most of my old Dark Elf army was in the process of being stripped for repainting when it went into storage, so I basically have an entire army to paint up. Should keep me busy! 

In a bit of a rut

I've absolutely no hobby in the last three weeks. Nothing. Ziltch. Nada.

I just haven't had any motivation. What little I had just evaporated. Granted I had Pokemon events to prep for and focus on, but it's still rare for me to do no hobby at all. 

I feel like I'm in a bit of a limbo atm. With 10th Edition 40k on the horizon and possibly Old World coming sooner or later, I feel I don't know what I should be working towards until I get more information to act on.

Hopefully the previews at Warhammer Fest this weekend will get me fired up again, but for now I'm languishing in my demotivated state.

I did manage to get a couple of games in for my local 40k league though. Yesterday's Ork v Ork scrap was particularly fun.

I managed to give the Goffs a good krumping with my Lucky Blue Gits, including having my Beastboss' Squig eat Ghazghull himself! All great fun.

The league is starting to wrap up now, so there'll be more opportunities to play some games other than 40k soon. That might get my creative juices flowing again. If not, I'll have to see what this weekend brings.

Hopefully I'll be back soon with a return to my usual hyper-productive self, but we'll see. Until then though, happy hobbying! 

Low Effort Hobby

I've been feeling a bit burned out on hobby, after nearly three months of being ridiculously productive. I'm not sure if it's just I've been a bit busy with work, or that with Pokemon Internationals coming up my mind's just been elsewhere. Either way, I've not been wanting to do anything too involved on the few occasions recently when my mind's turned to painting.

Luckily I have the perfect project for that:

My Heresy Imperial Fists have an incredibly simple scheme, 90% of which is just blocking in base colours. It's the kind of thing which is perfect for doing mindlessly in small stints, so that's what I've been doing.

It's actually pretty relaxing not having to think too much about what I'm working on, whilst still making progress. 

I'm sure once 10th Edition 40k rolls closer, I'll move back to something a bit more involved, but for now I'm enjoying the slower pace of hobby.

That's all for now. I'll post more as I get more done.