Hobby Basics - Tools

"Oh nooooooes, another boring of these: use this and that tool! babbling" you may think now. But as not all my readers and hobbiest in general are pros and have years of experience in miniature painting or terrain crafting, I will do a short(?) series of the tools I (!) use. I will give no advices to buy this or that, I will just give a statements of the experiences I made (or make) with the mentioned tools.. Hope you will like it though.

Pliers 

Often needed and a long time not in my toolbox: Pliers! I don't use any fancy and expansive pliers. I bought a small set of fine mechanics pliers in the hardware store and am pretty happy with them. I didn't want one for all, I wanted one for cutting out the miniatures from sprues, one for bending miniatures, wire and so on. I think they went over the tray for arround 6€ so not really expensive and something I couldn't hardly go wrong with.

A set of small pliers

Descent - Journeys in the Dark | Miniatures

As promised I made today some pictures of the miniatures of the boardgame Descent - Journeys in the Dark which I reviewed not long ago. Since there are so many miniatures I didn't set up my photobucket I just arranged them on my cutting mat and did some short photo shooting. If you want any of the miniatures in close up, please state so in the comments, I will then do a in deep coverage of them.

I'll be starting with the different sets of heroes. I tried to make some closeups but my camera played me some tricks, therefore only a group photo:

All of the heroes for Descent

Review - Warhammer Battle Magic

Hey there, since I have shaky hands at the moment (fever and outer temperatures of arround 35°C aren't a good combination), I can't paint and concentrate on doing some reviews of stuff that arrived in the last few weeks. I'll start with the Warhammer Battle Magic cards from Games Workshop.
For the older of us, not to be mistaken with the old Battle Magic of the fourth edition :) 

Warhammer Battle Magic cards

Long time, no see - Distractions, Progress and Summer Flu

Hey girls and guys, sorry for being on the slow lane at the moment. First I had a day off and celebrated my birthday in the biggest funpark here. On top of that I had the last days a training course which was very interesting but really much information and input for my working life. Then my computer nearly crashed after buying ind installing a new graphic card and last but not least my wife and I cought a summer flu. Fever at now 30 - 34°C is not really funny.

But nonetheless I made some small progress with my stuff. As stated in one of my last articles I want to rebase my old models from the nineties. While I was at this task, I also made me a base for my warp lightning cannon and a testbase for some unit filler or multibase. Its nothing special or fancy, I just wanted to show you some progress.

Rebased some old stuff

Save our oceans

Hi guys and girls who read my blog. Today I will write something completely out of context of miniatures or our hobby. I will write something about protecting our oceans and the wildlife within. As I am a scuba diver and therefore very interested in everything related to nature (not only our oceans) it is a deep urge to protect our environment where I can.

HowTo: Building a tower - Part 3

After building and painting the core for my tower, it is time to build the upper level of it. Somewhere the guards or other inhabitants must live.

First I built a core of styrofoam which diamater was a little bigger than the stone structure. Then I glued everything on the top of my stoneworks and let everything really dry. Meanwhile I sorted and cut my wooden "swizzle sticks" into the same length. You need more than you think, I had to borough some of my friend. Lucky enough you get them for free in every fast food restaurant. I used some clippers. The edges don't need to be plain and exact.

Cutting everything to length

HowTo: Modular Gaming Table - Part 4

Ok, we already went through a lot of steps. First we prepared the six basic modules and shaped some with hills and then we started coating everything with our structure paint. Now it's time to adding detail to the whole thing. This part is again not really magical, but you should take care in this process. The most importan thing is that every module must be completely (!!!) dry. We had a kind of "oven" on my balcony on which the modules could dry for a complete summer day.

Drying station for our modules

Rebasing some of my old models

Perhaps you have seen some of my old models in my review of the Feldherr XL and wondered: What the *** are those ugly based miniatures. And you are propably right. But before you judge them I will tell you something about those poor Skaven :-)

Old Clanrats

Review: Feldherr XL figure case

Whether you attend a tourney or need some secure space to storage your miniatures, you need a bag, case, storage for your loads of miniatures. My choice fell on one of the figure cases from Feldherr. The Feldherr XL to be precise. The case has room for 252 figures and if you choose the smaller foams it seems there is even place for one complete level more, so you could store arround 280 miniatures. But this will only work if you have small miniatures, even with my old Skaven and the bigger models I would not use the smallest foam trays.

Feldherr XL figure case

Blog Babble - Viewers, Plans and Distractions

Unbelievable, my blog really hit the first 1000 Viewers! And yes, it's over 1000 views now, I took the trouble to substract the whole pingbots and the like out. *happy dance* For me this is a great thing as I just started this blog to get to know the techniques behind and as "pilot project" for my wife who wants also to start blogging now :-) Sure it would be even greater if there where some more followers and comments, but hey! I won't fall into the german "complaining on high level" thing and just be happy that I have 11 Followers and some people who comment here on a more regular base. Thanks for reading my stuff and following this blog!
Haste makes waste! More viewers and perhaps more followers will come. Especially since I'm listed in even more blogrolls now and sometimes appear on blog networking sites. BIG thanks to Colonel Shofer for his work of collecting all the different stuff from the blogosphere, House of Paincakes for the featuring in the weekly tops some times ago and aaaaall the other great (networking) sites out there.

Damn, these pills are going to make my posting somewhat different... Time to get to a dentist.

Thoughts about the future

So I just sat down and thought about the future of this blog a bit and will do some changes on it in the (near) future. The first thing you sure will have already noticed is that I changed the layout of the blog. This is because I blog and surf most of my time with my tablet:

Blog in old layout on Archos Tablet

Review: Descent - Journeys in the Dark

As my wife asked me this week if we could play a game of Descent I thought of doing a short review of the game. Yes it is not the latest game at the moment but it is a clasical dungeoncrawler. You could even say it is the grandson of our beloved Heroquest which was the starting point for tabletops for many of us. Since I own the game some time, all markers and miniatures are build together already, but at first opening you have to break all the markers and tiles out of thick cardboard and assemble some (few) of the miniatures (e.g. the dragon).

Descent - Journeys in the Dark