A Tale of Duelling Gamers: April Retrospective.

Gadzooks and other foul oaths guaranteed to offend a 16th century audience. Here we are at the end of April, and what the heck happened to my month? I'm not doing the usual thing of going "OMG! I worked SOOOOOO hard and I painted all the time and I only just got things done!" Oh no. Readers with long memories and facial hair to match will recall my almost super human painting speed. I'm more annoyed that it took me THE WHOLE MONTH. Seriously, what's with that?

Well, time to make excusses...

er...

Well, I was actually pretty busy over the school holidays with the holiday program and a few other things. Also the bases I ordered (plain ones mark you!) only turned up on Thursday. And the shields I ordered STILL have not arrived. So there was a pretty big chunk of holiday time where I was not able to do anything and built terrain instead. I guess that's something. Also,it explains why the promised freehanded shields have not materialised.

Anyway, here's the fun part:

The Slaaneshi Hordes! I'm trying to come up with a name for the lord (besides Lord Emo Fringe). I kinda like Gavrillo, but he needs a title. Something like 'Lord of the Enticing Promise'

Here are all twenty of his chums. Dark Eldar models are stupidly fragile. The champion's back banner came off before I even painted, and one of the razor flail things is now two segments long.

Chaos Warriors! I Choose YOU!!! (because that old Slaanesh=Pokemaster joke never gets old...)

Another angle, not sure why I took this actually...

An attempt to show the lightningy blade on Lord Emo Fringe... er... I mean Lord Gavrillo Of the Whispered Endearment.

The champion is understandably annoyed at my slow progress.

And now for the REALLY fun part!

ACCOUNTING!

Er.. yes. Seriously, I think this is really cool. This is a screen-shot of my spreadsheet showing things.

See, this is part of the reason I wanted to start this whole shebang. To show that you can get things done cheaply. Anyway, this is my month's budget. As you can see, I blew it on 26 figures. A lord on deamonic snake thing, twenty of the finest warriors, and five chosen who also look like Incubi. So, at GW prices, I blew $189. Except I got them from eBay and CanCon, so I actuall spent... $81.70.
And what does this tell us?
Well, that you CAN get an army cheaply if you know where to look and what to look for. Stand by for future months when I economise even further by using ONE GW model to make TWO chaos things at once!

Also, this is my first experience of Fine Cast, and I'm not impressed. Seriously, the blades on those incubchosen snap if you sneeze near them.

Er... anyway, that's probably it.
Watch out for further updates, slow painting progress, and also go to The Dweller's Bellow's Tournamnet Called Face/Off because I'll be there showing terrain and building Table 1 which they might be raffling off or something. I dunno. The Ginger Thunder only emailed me last night.

Ishoo Ninty: Farmyard

At long last, here it is! The second TFH Ishoo of 2014 - Ishoo Ninty: Farmyard!

Yeah, I know, we've tackled things like this before. But I have a cool new technique to show you which I found on the Demo Gamers blog. Also, this ishoo makes use of printable templates. Originally, I made these for a 'How to make terrain' holiday program session, but they were not all used, so I employed one on this project to save a bit of time. Although I forgot to use the chimney - pity, because I have another new technique I could've demonstrated on that. Oh well. It can wait.

Anyway, enough rambling! Cue Grot and the Farmyard!

And there you have it Hippo Fans! This whole project was completed in a day (well, it's Easter Monday, the last day of the school holidays, and I ran out of other stuff...) This was made possible by the accelerating effects of heat on PVA glue. The first time I made stone walls this way, they took days to dry. This time, by placing them in front of a small heater, I had them dry in hours. The same goes for the thin PVA on the towel thatch. It can take days to dry on it's own. Or it can take about an hour with a heater.

You can get Aluminium channel from Bunnings or any other hardware emporium. Mine is a 1m length of 20mm square channel. It cost about $5. 

Also, here's the template in question. I made this a while back, and I'd glued it to foamcore for a learn to build terrain session at Gippsland Gamers Holiday Program over summer. This is not the best way to use templates - you can't recycle them, and the paper can be annoying if you leave it on the outside. The correct way to use a template (which I found out later!) is to put it on your foamcore, and use a pin to punch holes at all the corners where lines meet. Then remove the template, and join the dots with a pen, pencil or marker. You can keep the template for later projects that way, and don't have to worry about making sure the paper is on the inside.

Until next time!

A Tale of Duelling Gamers: Lord Emo Fringe

Here we are, the 20th day of the challenge, and I have painted (but not based) by Slaanesh Lord. The original owner had done a fairly terrible job of pinning and assembling the steed, and an even worse one trying to green stuff the gaps. I did my best to salvage the situation, but it's not possible to sink new pins, so I had to work with the existing ones and putty. The glaive blade had been replaced with a flail, and there was no back banner. So I made a new blade from a Dark Eldar Wych Razorflail, and stuck some sort of dark eldar back banner thing on. Also a DE head. With an emo fringe.