Category Archives: General

The War Room

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So, last time I showed off this WIP room was back in January, where we put a ton of work into the space. That link also shows the development of the shed from “full of junk” to the start of what it now is. Also shows many of the first shelves go up, for those interested 😉

By request (and let’s face it – it was gonna happen anyway!) – here’s the (virtual) grand tour:

Bike Racks, out-of-the-way shelf, closed terrain cabinet.

Finally got the bike mounts installed and got them out of the way – giving us much more floor space. Likewise with the high shelving that I finally got finished which gets those detolf boxes out of the way – even more floorspace freed up. Continuing on that theme, the cheap pine shelf will be disposed of. The boxes that fill it are all basically empty. Just being kept for now to rebox stuff that comes out of storage inside much larger boxes after culling. There’s a set of shelves with Rackham prepaint models behind it.

Scenery!

Yep, the metal cabinet is filled with scenery. The GW boxes in the pic are filled with things like fences and hedges and such so they take up less storage space. I reckon it’s about time I finish painting those bloody adobe buildings. At least doing them now, 10-15 years after buying them they will be painted as more generic buildings so they can fit into modern and historical middle-east gaming rather than being covered in checks and dags to become Ork buildings. (though they can obviously do double-duty!)

Shelving!

Two new metal bookcase-style shelving that replaces the old, shitty MDF bookcase that we had for 20 years (and was falling apart). Allowed me to move some of the boardgames out of the inside of the house to a more appropriate place to store them – so I chose “large tabletop” ones to bring out. The Sedition Wars box has been gutted and just filled with 3 copies worth of floor tiles. How I wish I could get my money back for that Kickstarter! The white crate is filled with bottles of homemade pasta sauce which my parents still do every year or so. The bottom right shelf is filled with old roleplaying books from my youth. Cthulhu, Twilight 2000, Judge Dredd and others. About half of that shelf is filled with MERP and Rolemaster (Rulemaster!) I’m wondering if I should palm those off on my friends that I used to play RM with, since they take up a lot of space, and I’d like to have my old WD mags out here.

Alien, Predator, Jeep, models, scenery.

On the neighbouring shelf there’s a bunch of scenery kits that need to be built (some really old now – from the Necromunda era of plastic bulkheads and card). A 1:6 scale 21C Jeep that needs me to find some troops to crew it, and a duo of the Kotobukiya Alien and Predator from AvP. Nice statues, bad film. Top shelf mostly contains resin and metal scenery bits, as well as oversized models that I’ve gotten assembled/primed from eBay – DE dragon, a griffon, and a couple of other things. The LED Lantern was bought on a lark, but I’ve actually found it useful, and should I ever play Cthulhu again it’ll be making an appearance. The lower shelf has a bunch of resin and metal scenery – which like the Fleshhounds just above them were planned for my next set of blog photos about a month ago. So I’ll hopefully get those pics taken in the next week since much of the other work that was stopping me has finally been done.

The other shelf!

And yes, I finally found a place to display some of my Star Wars Kotobukiya statues. They share the space with the Star Wars miniatures AT-AT. It was quite a decent game, and even as a longtime painter and miniatures collector, having a game with prepaints is no bad thing. While it’s a shame that the game was discontinued, I picked up the VAST majority of my collection once the game had gone into liquidation. I was lucky enough to pick up most of the rules (that Sith box is filled with maps and rulebooks) so I guess it worked out pretty well for me in the end. Other than that, it’s the partially-painted KoW Ogre army who have featured in these pages before, sharing space with the partially-painted Elves, the blu-taced Basileans/Lions, some trees and a Dranei Paladin from World of Warcraft.

Desk – ready to work on!

One of our old computer desks is my new workbench out here. I’ve got the ultrasonic cleaner out to strip some figures, who are right now soaking in Simple Green. Need to pick up some cheap lamps later today to use for my light box, so I can take some better quality mini pics from here on out. I probably need to get an A1 sized cutting mat as well. The idea is that I’ll do things like dremelling and scenery building and paint stripping resin moulding and casting and things on the “large and heavy” (and toxic) side of the hobby out here, while the more delicate and arty stuff happens inside. Big box there for the recyclers. We have a fortnightly pickup. We filled our recycling bin and those of our close neighbours up, and three days later our recycling bin was totally filled up again. Looks like we’ll be doing the same again with our neighbours’ help once more when they come again. It’s been a pretty full-on cleaning operation. My old printer also now lives out here as a photocopier (if not for the driver incompatibility we’d have kept it inside – one of the best random late-night purchases we ever made. Going out to buy some blinds this afternoon for the window.

The War Room. Today.

Pretty much the “room shot” – best compared to the following image from before we started at the very beginning of this year:

The Shed full of Junk. January this year.

No need for a pile of text there. I think the two pics say it all.

Spotlights!

Not the most exciting photo – but a pretty exciting thing to have. A set of LED spotlights above my gaming table spot. As originally suggested by Chris, the awesome electrician I had in to do my work. A real top bloke and a gamer himself, though more of a CRPG/Console gamer. It was great to be able to have someone doing the work who could appreciate our hobby, and chat about shared interests like games, movies, pop culture and all of the rest.

Another flouro!

Equally unexciting from a photo perspective but brilliant if you’re actually here is the addition of a second flouro light on the opposite section of ceiling to the existing one. Really, really brightens the room. With the original, it was still quite decent, but now there’s really no comparison, especially at night.

Entertainment and Atmosphere

The “atmosphere” is supplied by a 50″ 1080p LG plasma. I actually planned to get a much smaller TV (30-40″ or so)  but then I found this particular plasma model had been marked down to less than the 40″ LCDs. So I did the only thing I could do and bought it, and rejigged the entire original wall-mount plan. The green is one of the burn-in slides that are still cycling through. Added another floating shelf, picked up a new, cheap Blu-Ray player and put it in the bedroom, brought the old one down here, added a WDTV Live box and a bunch of appropriate DVDs and Bob’s your uncle. I know it’s right next to the window, but the tv is padlocked to the wall mount, the alarm unit has been moved to right there, the “flyscreen” is actually security mesh that will apparently break your hand if you try to punch through it (I’ve declined to try it out myself) – we got every window covered in it before we moved in – much nicer than shutters.

Games table, and some junk.

Not the best photo, I guess. But you can see the shelves we put up earlier in the year. The lower level is filled with models and such while the upper contains empty boxes and some more random things that aren’t too heavy. The big white board is the games table, in storage mode. The white cabinet behind it is a cheap pantry cupboard that we bought to use in our previous shitty rental that had no clean storage space for the kitchen. Now it holds hills and unsorted scenery objects.

Spray paints and more junk.

Finally, the final corner of this long-winded panorama. Some art supplies (Ink, PVA glue, etc), latex and resin for moulding that I never quite figured out to any decent skill level, spray paints for modelling, a desk that needs to be disposed of. The remaining junk boxes of the moment that still need to be sorted through, and more scenery and things to make even more scenery with. And a bunch of HeroScape stuff.

Welp, that’s it! A bit more sorting, throwing junk away and cleaning still to go (does that ever end, though?) Blinds. A split system cooler/heater in the future perhaps, but that’s pretty much one gaming room ready to roll. After so many years of wanting and planning for it to happen, it’s still pretty unbelievable for it to actually be a thing that exists. Now I just need to make sure I use it!

Inconsequential Things

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As I get older, I come to the realisation about many things in my life. I’ll probably never get around to watching all the TV shows I’d like to. Likewise with movies. I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to playing all of the board and miniature games I’ve bought – and I know I’ll never finish all of the PC, 360 and PS3 games I’ve bought. I also realise that I’ll probably never get around to painting all of the models I own – yet, as with all of these things – I continue to collect and accumulate more and more of them – on a weekly basis.

So what does this mean for painting? Well, there are two main roads I can go down. Either I can try to paint better, and spend all my time trying to learn new techniques, increase my skills, and improve all elements of my game. My friend Cash Wiley is one such painter, who has come along incredibly in terms of skill in the last two or so years. However, Cash only finishes a relative few figures per year – albeit to a high standard that is increasing all of the time. My (failed) target last year was 365, and I’m on my second attempt for 365 this year. The other path is that of simply getting shit finished and onto the table. Because you know what? “Good enough” is actually good enough from four feet away when each individual in a block of 10 or 20 or 40 really isn’t all that important and doesn’t need to be anywhere near your best work. I’ve been reading the Bolt Action and Hail Caesar rulebooks over the past few evenings, and almost all of the sumptuous models in those books, in the evocative and atmospheric photos simply don’t pass muster as display models. Yet, ranked up or walking through hedgerows in the close-up photos in those books, they still manage to look fucking amazing.

So what for me? I won a few painting comps in my youth – my best and most amusing being equal first with myself (they couldn’t choose which of my two figures they liked the best) at CanCon back in 1992. I should photograph and post those guys sometime, too. But with father time and my own inevitable demise starting to make themselves felt, I’ve decided that every model can’t be my best model. As readers would have seen with the recent speedpaints of Zombies and, erm, more Zombies, and the Treeman and the Bolt Throwers, I’ve been going for speed lately. I think really though, my path as a painter needs to go down the middle. I need to finish stuff. Now more than ever really, especially with my games table now being a thing that exists. I also need to take time out from mass production and speed-blasting through stuff from time to time to work on individual figures with details and freehand, for the soul of it all.

This post, aside from reading a bit like a teenage girl’s diary or a man in midlife crisis (neither of which is totally accurate :p), is mostly a chance to show off a bunch of stuff I’ve gotten done this year. Nothing amazing or outstanding. Inconsequential things really. Much of it is scenery, and in the scheme of it all, none of it is really important. But it’s a bunch of stuff that got done, and in that, it’s good enough. The plan is to photograph everything that I finish this year, and eventually to photograph everything that’s painted in my collection. That last part might take some time.

Mid-90’s GW Dryads.

These guys are some Dryads that I was either given or sold quite cheap by a friend back in the mid-90s. I’m not sure why I wanted them, so they must have been cheap or free. I think they may actually be recasts, given how malformed some of them are. Anyway, I found them in the bottom of a box of figures recently, and since I was able to finish the Bones Ent/Spirit of the Forest in a day recently, I thought I’d try and knock these up quickly as well in a similar manner. While they’re no works of art up close, they’ll look fine from across the table in KoW or in a game of Pathfinder, etc. A good example of “good enough”!

DUST Quonset Huts

Dust Quonset Huts

The Quonset huts I previewed a few posts ago when I cracked open some of the DUST Tactice expansion boxes. These painted up pretty quickly. I went with a worn desert scheme since my main mat is a desert mat. It also seems to be the most appropriate colour for moderns, and of course works just fine for WWII and 40k. I need to buy another couple of packs of these – they’re pretty great as well as inexpensive.

DUST Quonset Hut with Space Marine for scale.

Dark Angel Marine charges out of the Quonset Hut doorway.

I also took a couple of pics featuring a GW Space Marine, since they’re so ubiquitous that they’re very useful for establishing scale for this sort of thing. I’m sure the Dark Angels have some fights around these huts in their future!

Aged statues.

Here we have four statues made from random miniatures, some short resin columns that were no doubt in a bargain bin, and some plaques made from card. These were all originally made about 8-10 or so years ago. The writing is all painted freehand, and comes from an English-Greek dictionary, and an English-Russian dictionary. Naturally, I can’t recall what they actually say so many years later. This year’s work on them has been to “dirty them up” as they were way too clean – hence the dirt and wear on the stone, and the verdigris on the statues – which was my first play with the new Citadel Technical Paint “Nihilakh Oxide”. Verdict: It’s okay.

Resin wooden barrels.

Resin wooden barrels. Chronopia figures for scale.

These barrels were started years and years ago. When? Who can remember. The important thing is that they’re finished now. I had a bit of fun (back when I started them) freehanding the cans on the two smaller sets. I’ve included the second pic with the Chronopia figures for scale – the barrels are a good size for both roleplaying as well as various types of wargaming. Sadly, I found several more of them in a box this evening. So.. more to come, more to go. After a bit of Internet Detective work, (and using my memory) I found the barrels, which are still available, over at Scotia Grendel Miniatures.

Battle for Macragge Power Pylons

Power Pylon things from the 4th Edition 40k starter set: Battle for Macragge. I just added the tufts to these this year, and that’s too little for me to count them as part of this year’s tally (they were only finished last year). They were sitting next to a bunch of the other stuff I grabbed to photograph tonight, so they got a pic taken as well, since they fit the theme of this post, and as stated, I want to eventually photograph and post everything.

Trapdoors and Grates.

More random resin stuff from my dark past. Dungeon scenery stuff this time, along with two trapdoors from the GW Lord of the Rings Mines of Moria boxed set. The usual drybrushing and so forth, of course, but with the addition of oil-based MIG rust washes added. An example of wanting to knock stuff over but also using simple, inconsequential  things as an opportunity to play with new materials and techniques. – Like the statues above and Nihilakh Oxide. And I’ve just found them. The Grills pack from Grendel – though my pack  back in the day only came with three, not the six they now come with. The last piece of that set is on my “stuff that’s been started and put aside” shelf right now.

Resin Graves

More resin gravestones.

Once again, more resin randomness from my past. At one point, back when I started these in the noughties – I planned to base them on and make a single large scenery piece of a graveyard that I could plonk down on a table. At some point back then after startting the large base I changed my mind and decided to leave these as standalone pieces, which I think was and remains a better idea. Much more flexible this way, and I can still make an actual graveyard piece if I want to use the various tombstones that have been part of various GW (and others’) skeleton kits over the years. While these are more fantasy themed, but these could also work well for WWII or Zombiepocalypse gaming quite easily. And yep, it turns out that the graveyard set is also a Grendel Set. I suspect that a huge percentage of my resin scenery will turn out to be these kits. I bought a hell of a lot of them back in the day.

Secret Weapon Scrap Yard Barricade Truck.

Secret Weapon Scrap Yard Barricade Truck.

Secret Weapon Scrap Yard Barricade Truck.

Secret Weapon Scrap Yard Barricade Truck.

One of the real highlights of my Secret Weapon Miniatures Bag(s) ‘o’ Crap that I picked up in December – along with the Hesco and Jersey barriers shown previously was this overturned Half-track Ute (or truck) from the Secret Weapon Miniatures Scrap Yard Barricades set. I had quite a lot of fun painting this, with layers of washes and drybrushing and mediums and edging and applying effects with foam and so forth. Obviously this thing works best for Sci-Fi/40k/GorkaMorka/Post-apocalyptic stuff, but if you squint, it could also work for moderns in Afghanistan or the like.

Secret Weapon Destroyed Tank Turret.

Secret Weapon Destroyed Tank Turret

Secret Weapon Destroyed Tank Turret.

Secret Weapon Destroyed Tank Turret.

Another nice surprise in my Bag(s) ‘o’ Crap was this turret. Part of the Secret Weapon Miniatures Scrap Yard Destroyed Tank set. A pretty nice piece, though Holy 3-d print lines, Batman! Still, for the price I paid for it, and even full RRP ($20 for a whole tank) it’s pretty nifty. It’s just occurred to me that I should have taken a scale shot with that Dark Angel next to the Truck and this Turret, but rest assured that both are well taller than The Emporer’s Finest, and I’ll take a couple of scale shots as an append to one of my next blog posts. Again, with a little squinting, this thing will work well in games set in any year from 1940-41,000.

And that, my friends, is that.

A not insubstantial update, but as I noted at the start, made of many of the sort of things that hardly justify an update in their own right. I’m up to 81 miniatures finished so far this year on Day 60. I’m ahead of schedule, though only because my criteria is so loose. Still, shit’s getting done. Which can only be a good thing. I hope to soon finish a few of the things blocking me from a couple of “fun” figures that I’m really looking forward to.