Merry Christmas to all

I wish you a "Merry Christmas" and hope the "Christkindl" or "Santa Claus" or "Père Noel" or whoever brings the presents to you had a biiiiiig load of gifts with him/here.

Miniature wise I already got my surprise package from Mantic Games, the "Crazy Christmas Box" as present from my wife. There are really some nice addons for my armies in it, I think I will do a "Whats in the box" after the holidays.
And my mother-in-law bought me plastic glue from Revel and an airbursh care kit! Pretty cool stuff! I think the whole family thinks now I am weird :D

I hope you have some nice and tranquil days with your family and friends and wish you the best for the new year if I'm not coming to write in the next few days.


So long,
Paradox0n

HowTo: A simple industrial base

While sitting around and experimenting with stuff, I got the idea to make a simple industrial base for games like Necromunda, Eden etc. As usual I tried to do this with stuff lying around and had in mind to do a tutorial if the result is somewhat OK.
As you read this, I must have thought it worthy to write about :)

Putting some mesh on your base

Some plastic net and a base

To be honest, this was the most tricky part of this experiment. At first I tried to cover the base in superglue and then just press the plastic net onto it. But since I have the "gel type" of superglue I think this didn't work out. Therefore I just used superthinned wooden glue to pin the net down and waited for it to dry completely

Hobby Magazines - Portal Magazine Issue #28

It is magazine time again. Today I will talk about Issue #28 of Portal Magazine with a reeeeally cute cover which fits nicely to christmas time.

• In The Box sees if zombies are really taking over mid-town America.
• Two great tutorials from Sean Fulton and Marko Paunovic.
• Reviews of miniatures from Dark Sword, Reaper, DGS Games, Guild of Harmony and Stephané Simon.
• News of the New Red Box Games painting contest.
• Great gallery with all the entries in the successful Sodapop Miniatures painting Contest.
• The latest news and best releases from around the hobby.

WIP - Lava bases

Finally having the time to try out my 0.2mm needle in my airbrush I did a quick test for the lava bases I plan to do for my Chaos Dwarf army. I cut out an appropriate piece of cardboard, glued some cork onto it and primed everything. Then I loaded the airbrush, beginning with red, mixing in more and more yellow and finally some white. Then (big error!) I painted the cork black.

Test for a lava base

Since it was only a quick test for working with the 0,2mm needle and how much pressure I need for the different layers, it is OK. I now know how to do things for my Chaos Dwarves. First I have to use real bases or some MDF or some plastic card as base, then I'll have to prime everything black and drybrush the stones and THEN the airbrush comes into use. Think this will work much better.

And I'm really scared by the amount of work this will be *looks in fear to his Skaven, Dark Elves and Chaos Dwarves* :) 

Autumnal impressions

Not long ago I went to the "Europa-Park" the biggest funpark in germany because every year they have a nice halloween decoration. This time I was really lucky, because we had most of the time excellent weather which allowed me to shoot some nice Light/Shadow pictures (and some funny stuff too). Even the Eurosat, a big dome in which a rollercoaster is settled is decorated fitting to halloween.

This is Halloween, this is Halloween,
pumpkins scream in the dead of night

It was a funny day and after we returned home, the view from our kitchen granted me another (spooky) view:

If I only could paint somethink like that!

Some more picture heavy stuff after the break!

I received a "Liebster"-Award!

Woho great thing for me, I really did receive a "Liebster"-Award. Thanks to Mr. Lee from Mr. Lee's Painting Emporium for passing me this little golden man with his big golden trophy :)

Liebster Award

But what is this all about you may think now?
As far as my quick research revealed, it is a little "reward" given to favoured blogs with fewer than 200 followers. "Liebster" is a german pet name for boyfriend and could also mean beloved , darling and in the blogosphere I think it should be translated dearest or precious or "valuable to read".
This thing is going viral like hell and I really thought of mentioning or even passing it.

Inspirational Stuff (again)

Hey there, as so often in the last time I just have some inspirational stuff to post. My health and my working life (or the balance I still or again have to find between them) just keep me away from painting or the hobby itseld. But as I browsed through the web, I found some great stuff I think you should know about :)

Ever heard of Julio Cabos? Me not until I found an old PDF and a video on Youtube which were a real mind opener to some stuff I was thinking about.

The PDF is called "Painting with Julio Cabos" but it seems it is taken down by Andrea Miniatures (or my browser just refuses to open the link Google spits out). Archive.org is a nice helper there, so perhaps you can try your luck there!

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.


So long,
Paradox0n

Color Scheme Designer

Hello dear readers,

since I don't have as much time for the hobby as suspected (again), I will try to deliver some useful tips and tricks or tools I have found (again again).

Color Scheme Designer 3

This time I will talk about the Color Scheme Designer, a small online tool which allows you to pick colors by tone, hue, opposites, tetrads, triads and so on and so on. It can even give you a hint how colorblind or people with a vision impairment would see the colors (which is not important for miniature painting I think). I came across this wonderful tool in my working life but it is damn useful in our hobby too. Especially if you follow the tips of some of the profi painters with color triads and warm / cold color contrasts.

I will not do a full review of this tool because it is really straight forward, easy to use and free(!) so everyone can make his/her own decision about the tool. I used it (as stated) in my working life and think it is one of the best free tools you can get your fingers on.


So long,
Paradox0n

Hobby Magazines - Portal Magazine Issue #27

Hello everyone,

some time ago, I wrote an article about free hobby magazines and online portals. Since then I thought about posting when one of these publish a new issue. And I came to the conclusion that I will give it a try and do a short sum up if I detect a new issue being published.

I will start with the new issue #27 of Portal Magazine:

• In The Box checks out the new Warhammer board game Chaos in the old world.
• View from the Hill has the second part to the Brett Reavis interview.
• Reviews from Studio 38, Mierce Miniatures, Reaper Miniatures, MDP & Dark Sword Miniatures.
• Our terrain building series kicks off in earnest.
• Event reports from Euro Militaire and GW's Games Day.
• Massive gallery included all the entries from the Hasslefree painting contest.
• Lots of new releases plus all the news from around the hobby and much more...

Whole bunch of stuff this time. As always many pictures of painted miniatures (mostly in a standard I can only dream of doing it myself) and some miniature reviews and common articles, e.g. about the GW Games Day. I won't go too much into detail but two articles stood out for me:

• The "In The Box" article gives a good overview of the mentioned board game
• The terrain buildng article is pretty good and gives some nice tips and tricks for making small dioramas

Feel free and give it a try!

Cheers,
Paradox0n

P.S.: Let's see if automatic publication works...

Wheathering tutorials from Mike Chambers

Some time ago I stumpled upon some really great tutorials on how to stain/wheather wood. Just have a look at Rusty Stumps Scale Models, especially the ones from Mike Chambers are really good.

He uses multiple inks to stain real wood and use it for terrain and buildings. Especially the small series about this technique is really good. If you want to risk a look, here are the direct links to the PDFs from the page:

• Part 1 - Staining Stripwood
• Part 2 - Wheatering Stripwood
• Part 3 - Inking Stripwood

If you like them, just take a look at the other articles on they page, they have some really nice tips there.


So long,
Paradox0n


P.S.: A small comment if I should be continue with stuff like this would be appreciated. Don't want to bore you to death with stuff you all already know :)

Heavy WIP - Bullcentaurs?!

Hidiho, with the new Bullcentaur Renders from Forgeworld and my Abyssal Dwarf Halfbreeds from Mantic Games, I'm in the situation where the models aren't really fitting together now. The Halfbreeds of Mantic are way too small for the bigger bases needed for the new Bullcentaurs. Therefore I tried to fit them together on a base to represent the "multiple wound model" and perhaps give them the appearance of something bigger.

Count as Bullrender

It is really heavy WIP. The models are held together by bluetack and the base will made into a scenic base. But what do you think, could they represent the bigger Bullcentaur Renders in this setup?


So long,
Paradox0n

Package from Mantic Games - Abyssal Dwarves

As I told you at my review of the Kings of War Rulebook, the package from Mantic Games contained not only the rulebook but also a whole bunch of sprues and sachets with the Abyssal Dwarves. This is only the first delivery, the bonus sprues and the new Immortal Guard still wait for production and the other new bonus miniatures will be shipped next spring I hope. Can't wait to get them :)

My first "backer" package from Mantic Games

Rather chaotic and many many things I have to build in the future. And my Dark Elves and Skaven aren't even completly build together. Damn hobby addiction. If I want to paint them all, I'll have to quit my job and lock me up in my painting room for a year or two :)
So yes, I have many things to do and hopefully I won't fill my "Desk of Shame" even more. But motivation returned, I hope I can finish my tower soon and convince Labschi to do some more hobby sessions in the near future (the coming winter* will help to do so I think).


So long,
Paradox0n

*"Winter is coming!" was the first thing I wanted to write. Damn I'm also too addicted to good fantasy novels/movies/series :)

Review: Kings of War - Rulebook

As I was one of the backers of the Mantic Kings of War Kickstarter I got a nice package a few days ago. In there where the first part of my Abyssal Dwarfs (more of them later) and the printed version of the Kings of War Rulebook. I thought I'll do a short review about it so here it comes!

Front view of the cover

Back view of the cover

Weathering techniques - Videos from Mac McCalla

I found some nice videos for wheathering techniques by Mac McCalla and collected them into a playlist. Some very useful tips there, hope you enjoy them as much as I did:

So long,
Paradox0n

Life signs

Hello my dear readers!

Sorry for not posting this long. After my summer flu I got haunted by a terrible migraine and afterwards my health was really not as good as I hoped. Additionaly I had a rather stressful time at work (including the preparation of my first english talk on a brown bag session in my company).

But at the moment everything is getting back into shallow waters so I hope to find the time and the patience for posting again. Many things happened, for example I got some new Vallejo stuff I wanted to do reviews about and the first delivery from mantic after the kickstarter arrived.

So be prepared for posting time again :)


So long,
Paradox0n

HowTo: Building a tower - Part 4

The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire. I thought a while about the roof I want to build for my tower: Just a flat one with battlements or a pointy one with roofy shingles? Since I already invested so much time I decided to make the pointy one. So start the video and read the rest of this article :)

Hobby Basics - Glues

As promised I will do a complete series of Hobby Basics and here comes the next part, this time I will talk about glues. Every now and then you read on the tabletop forums questions about which glue is the best and what do you use for terrain and so on and so on. Since there is a broad selection on the market and you can nearly buy one glue for one task, this is now a jungle where you can get lost. That's why I will talk a bit about the glues that work for me.

White/Wood/PVA glue

The classics for terrain or base making. I have different kinds of white glue because I like to have different levels of thinning and don't want to mix this stuff everytime I use it. I have a roughly thinned one in my bottle which I use mostly for basing. I like the flow on smaller areas and how you can spread it with a brush. Then I have a big bucket with only some drops of water in it. This I use for terrain making like on my modular gaming board. Through its thickness the basing material sticks much better to the surface which is needed for played terrain (with bases this would only cause the miniature to "sink" into the sand).
As you can see I only use white glue from sone well known manufacturers. I tried out some cheap stuff from the one euro/dollar store but this stuff is even more diluted than my selfmade micture. Which means this is total crap. Perhaps you are lucky and get some better stuff but for me this will not be an option anymore.

White/Wood/PVA glue in different sizes

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

[Update] Battlereport - Skaven gainst The Empire

I will try the first time to give a short battlereport of a 2400 points game of warhammer fantasy battle. It was held at my place following the actual ETC (European Team Championship) draft at this moment. The opposing armies where my Skaven Warhost and The Empire Army from Talabheim (with the rules of the old Empire book). Since the game was held some time ago, I can only recapture the match and will therefore sum up the battle. I only shot a few pictures because my camera went insane on this day and messed the pictures.

The battle begins

[Update]: I just found my played Skaven List and put it in the post down below. Perhaps this makes the battle a bit clearer than before.

HowTo: Modular Gaming Table - Part 3

It's terrain thursday (nah just kidding, atm I am in the mood to do so) so I will post another part of my modular gaming table series. After preparing the six basic modules and shaping some with hills it is time to get dirty and put some paint onto our modules. Therefore we mix our own structure paint (the paste/paints you can buy are WAY too expensive). Besides a big bucket (~5l bucket is big enough) we need:

Bucket of PVA/white glue:

Approx. cost:  ~ 8 Euro

Bag of bird grit:

Approx. cost: ~ 90ct

Bottle of brown paint:

Approx. cost: ~ 5 Euro

Pour everything together, in the end we used a mixing ratio of about 1:1:1:1 (water, paint, sand, glue). Just try it out what suits you best. The structure paint should not be too runny and should not be as thick as toothpaste. You should be able to spread it out easily without the paint beeing transparent or only gluing sand...

Applying the structure paint 

Blog Babble - Pingbots

Anger Kitty is dangerous

Again a more personal ramble about something what pi**es me off at the moment: Ping/Spambots.
I think every blogger has this problem: You have an eye on your statistics and are happy that your views are going up. But then you are looking closer and realise that some views are not real viewers but ping- or spambots which are not filtered out by Google. If you have millions of views this is a mere trifle but if you have only a handful of views a day, it messes everything up.

For me this is pretty annoying because in working life I have to deal with these *** bots (but can beat the crap out of 'em) and now they are messing up my blogger statistics without being able to do something against them because only Google can filter them out. Feeling like a hamster in his wheel is what angers me the most. You have to wait until somebody else fixes this problem. Or am I unaware of a solution to this problem?

How do you deal with the problem of pingbots? Is there a good solution without hosting everything yourself? Perhaps another statistics tool for blogger?

Questions above questions... Perhaps some of you know the answer.

An angry but helpless,
Paradox0n

WIP - Plague Furnace

After some terrain making and a big motivation leak while painting my Verminlord, I switched to painting my Plague Furnace. Only bad thing about this modell: I bought it used and everything is glued together which makes it not as easy to paint as it should be.
Nonetheless I will give it a try since I want to use it in one of my next battles :)

Primed and ready to paint

Damn this thing is so big, its even too big for my photo bucket! I will try some things and will look how it will turn out in the end.

So long,
Paradox0n

Video tutorial from Massive Voodoo about weathering techniques

Just a short post in between. I think weathering could be very interesting for everyone of us, so I have to post this really good video tutorial from Massive Voodoo. Sadly the MV channel on Youtube has no playlist for all the videos from the series, so I put one together (hope they don't mind). The video is in german, but on their blog, they also have an english text version about weathering.



So long,
Paradox0n

HowTo: Building a tower - Part 2

Ok, after showing you how I build the foundation for my tower, now it's time to paint the stone carvings. This will be only a short part, because I think I can't show you some wicked magic here, it's just good old handywork.

After the core was build together I primed everything black. At this stage I didn't have my airbrush yet so I was forced to do everything by hand.I used some cheap black color from the hardware store to cut down the expenses. After three layers everything was completely black. The three coates of paint had one side effect I noticed when everything was dry: The carving was much more stable than before.

Primed everything black

Free magazines about tabletop & miniatures

Ok now, since I'm in a big motivation hole, I thought of collecting some of the free magazines and fanzines that I read and share them with you.
For me these free magazines are a great contribution to our wargaming community and they deserve every support possible.

Fanzines:

Skavenblight Gazette: A Fanzine about the Skaven Hordes of the Underempire
The Bellower: Fanzine from Ogre Stronghold about... Ogres. Hope it will be continued...
Word of Hashut: Fanzin about Chaos Dwarves. he current issue could be found in the forum

There are some more, e.g. the Druchii Herald, but most of them I know have been discontinued.

Free Magazines:

Portal Magazine: Magazine mainly commited to painting and converting stuff
Irregular: Community driven magazine about our beloved hobby
The Ancible: Magazine specialized to scifi and fantasy wargaming

Others:

Tabletop Insider: A german print magazine about wargaming. But(!) the first issue is available for free download.


That's it for the moment. If you know some other magazine, please share them via comment. I will update the list if there are more magazines you should know of.


So long,
Paradox0n

Oh nooooes - Motivation leaked

Motivation leak

Have you ever been in a situation similiar to this:
You prepared a miniature you wanted to paint for a long time. It was stripped from paint, glued together, the base is prepared and everything is primed. You arranged your working place, readied a new audio book (I LOVE listening to audio books while painting) and put the first colors on your wet pallete. You load your brush with paint and after the first layers of paint: BAMM!
Your motivation to paint is gone with a single blow. It comes so aprupt that you want to throw your miniature against the nearest wall.

This happened to me with my old vermin lord. I had painted him in the old colorful scheme and wanted to give him a new, somewhat darker look. But with the first layers of skin (unfortunately I hate painting skin) my complete motivation to paint him vanished... At the moment I really regret stripping him from the old paint.

How do you overcome such situations and get your motivation back?

So long,
Paradox0n

HowTo: Modular Gaming Table - Part 2

In the last part of this HowTo series, I explained how I build the base for the gaming modules. In this part I will describe how the hills were made and how I prepared the board to get the first layer of the structure paint.

I suggest you listen to this song while reading the next part:

[Updated] Another warped tree

I couldn't resist to buy another aquarium decoration tree. After I had some nice results with my first one, I found another one in my hardware store. And with a price of ~3 euros it was again difficult to do something wrong by buing it.
They really fit into my warped, beaten up ad dark concept for my gaming table. And I play Skaven so warpstone trees are even better!

No long chit chat, just a short shot from my photo bucket:

Tree from the front

Tree from the back

Baking time

Today I took advantage of the beautiful weather outside and went to a walk with my wife. We both looked out for our collectibles: She for herbs and plants like elder flower or wild strawberries and I myself for basing materials. I was very lucky to find an uprooted tree from which I could scrap of some bark. Therefore it's baking time!

Baking the bark

HowTo: Building a tower - Part 1

Again I'm keeping one of my promises, I start the second planned series of my HowTo's. Today I will talk about building a  tower from scratch.
As you have seen in my other HowTo's I like building terrain pieces from spare parts or even garbage. But in this case all my thoughts about how I could achieve a decent result failed. Therefore I started planning a complete building from scratch. Thanks to some research and one REALLY good tutorial from Gidian Gelände, the concept grew fast. So I collected the needed material and started to experiment with things I had never done before (again).

Chips and Selitron

Inspirational music

Again something I listen to while painting/building. With this score I can close my eyes and drift to other realms, imagine kingdoms far away and get some inspiration from my own visions. Screwed up, isn't it?

Blog Babble - Motivation?!

Its (blogging) weekend and I just started to write at my two new HowTo series when I realised that sometimes while writing I think: Why I am doing this sh**?! I'm running the blog now for about two months, wrote about twenty real articles and will try a short resume of the last weeks. If you now think: "Oh noes, no babble about personal stuff!" I'm completely fine with it, skip the post, but it's something I have to do :-)

HowTo: Modular Gaming Table - Part 1

As promised I will do a HowTo-series about how I build my gaming table. The gaming table was build last year, toghether with a close friend of mine and has seen now three battles (one you can in my first battle report). We had enough of playing on a normal dining table. The Citadel board was too expensive for us (since we only play on an irregular base) so we researched a bit and planned our own modular board.
Modular because:

• we wanted a table which looked different when we wanted to
• I have not enough room to store one or three big plates
• and we wanted to save some money :)

So we made a masterplan and went shopping in the local hardware store. After the first tour we replanned everything because we didn't want to spent as much money for material as we would have to pay for the Citadel board... Therefore I will do a Step by Step how the boaard was really build and will give an overview how much the material had roughly cost.

Terrain out of junk - Impassable terrain

Again an article about something I made up to create terrain out of junk. We had our fruit basket full of exotic fruit and to our misfortune some of the passion fruits were really dried up and not ready to eat anymore. They were so hard, I think I would be able to throw in a window with them... But no, building terrain with them is much more fun. They have a real alien look so you could use them as tyranid spores or as some warped stones from the chaos desert or dragon eggs or something like this. Decide yourself ;)
 

Dragon Eggs? Warpstone? Tyranid Spores?

Out of the bucket

Again I did some shooting.
The first victim is a skaven clanrat I did shortly before my last warhammer game. I followed the paint scheme most of the army I bought had.

Skaven clanrat from the front

Skaven clanrat from the back

The second victim is a Cawdor Heavy from Necromunda. Yes this is a very old modell, I think I painted it somewhere in the 90's when Necromunda was a big issue here in Germany.

Cawdor Heavy from the front

Cawdor Heavy from the back

And yes I'm still experimenting with the photobucket. I'm not completely satisfied with the results. But luckily they are WAY better then the old pictures.


So long,
Paradox0n

Articles to come in the near future...

Happy news, i finally should have some more time for the hobby and blogging in the near future. The project I worked for the last and a half years has finally launched and therefore 14 hour shifts and working in the night should have an end :) Therefore I want to give you a small preview of some of the stuff I have done in the last view months respectively articles I will post in the near future and give you the first hints with this post to raise your curiosity.

Stuff from my working table

With my new photobucket I tried to make some new photos of the stuff lying around. Yes I do really paint! So I didn't want to keep back and show some finished miniatures even if they are somewhat older or just experiments for things to come :)

The first ones are my old reptile riders. They are unitfillers for my darkelf army since they don't really fit into my cold one regiment. I don't know from which manufacturer they are, they are made out of resin and are from the late 80's or early 90's. Some weeks ago I painted the eyes od the reptiles and finished the riders for my first match in 8th edition.

Reptile riders from the front

Reptile riders from the back

HowTo: Photobucket

Everytime I made some photos I cursed because without the right equipment the pictures often get somewhat blurry, oversatureated or shiny. Therefore I searched for an easy way to build me place where I can make my pictures. Prices for professional equipment ranges from 40€ to open end and I didn't want to spent my money on something like this (the money saved could be invested in paints/miniatures or a nice evening with my wife). The best solution for low budget I found (in different places) seems to be the photobucket:

Photo bucket at no cost

Preparing my paint - "Agitatorkugeln"

Hello together,

today is a wonderful day, the sun is shinning, a blue sky and it is pretty warm. And the best of all: I have some spare time! Therefore I planned to get some paint on my marines. So I prepared everything: wet palette, shaking the needed paint pots, got some fresh water and readied my brushes. Then I dropped some elfic flesh on my palette and: AGGRO MODE! Even though I shaked the paint for more than two minutes the pigments were cleary seperated from the medium.
But lucky for you I accept the challenge and took the chance to show you a product I really got to love since I first saw it:
In german it is called "Agitatorkugeln" - plain, rustless steel balls which you can drop into your paintpot:

Agitatorkugeln

My airbrush setup

Raindrops are falling on my head...
Wait! Wrong context :)

After plaing around for some days with my airbrush and feeling like a soldier who can disassemble his gun while sleeping I think I can finally show my setup. Because I bought a complete set I can't say how much the parts would cost. The whole set charges around ~200€ in germany. In the following I will try to go through the different parts I have bought and in use.

Starquest Miniatures - Marines WIP

Another peak on my working table. Today I show you some pictures of the GSG from Starquest. They are stongly WIP I've only done the basic shading with my airbrush. First thing I learned to love in preshading with the airbrush is the soft color transitions you get. Especially in this easy way, with a normal brush I could never achieve this. Again my camera blurred some of the transitions :( I must look to get some better photo equipment.

Review: Harder & Steenbeck Airbrush Workshop

So I got my new (and first) airbrush system and with the set also arrived a dvd called "Harder & Steenbeck Airbrush Workshop". I ordered this dvd because I thought some advice on how to work with an airbrush could not be bad. Therefore I thought of doing a small review on my first thoughts about this dvd from the view of an absolute beginner in airbrushing who only watched Youtube tutorials.

Harder & Steenbeck Airbrush Workshop

Starquest Miniatures - Androids

As promised I started painting some of the Starquest miniatures. Since I am really out of painting and never used a airbrush I thought of using this miniatures for some experiments.The first miniatures I chose are the androids (very similiar to the Necrons of Warhammer 40k).

Androids of Starquest