Hobby Basics - Gaming Tools

Its quite a long time since I wrote something for my Hobby Basics series. With my latest purchase I thought this would be a good time to do another article here, this time covering some of the tools you will need for war-gaming (my experiences are mostly for WHFB, KoW, Warmachine/Hordes and similar games). I have no experience in historical war games, but I don't think that they differ so much that my points will be invalid :)
I again warn you: Big chunks of text incoming! So be prepared if you follow me after the jump :)

Review - Laptop cushion as paintstation

Today I want to show you my new painting station which I can use if I paint in front of the TV. Since my wife has to sit alone in our living room when I paint or tinker and we only have these evening times together, she bought me thisthingy which she thought would be cool for painting at our TV desk. Normally this is a laptop cushion with a pencil- and cup holder. And a small LED lamp. The lamp is powered by batteries so no need for some nasty cables. The surface is somewhat rubberized so the stuff on it won't slide around.

So what will I gonna do with this thing? Slot for pencils = slot for brushes, slot for cups = slot for water pot and rubberized surface to keep my painting pots and wet palette on place. Check! I did some testing with arm position and the like and it seems pretty decent either lying on the table or resting on my legs. The LED's give a rather cold light, no clue how near or far away from daylight this may be... But for some basecoloring or stuff it is more than enough. The light also is so focused that I can paint while my wife is watching TV and we could spend some time together. And maybe it can motivate me for some more hobby time :)


So long,
Paradox0n

Basket full of gifts

Perhaps you remember that I had my birthday some weeks ago. After having my birthday party last weekend and receiving lots of hobby related presents there, I thought I want to share with you the stuff which was given to me. A big thanks to all my friends and family for supporting my nerd hobby!

From my mother-in-law I got a whole bunch of modelling tools. First I got some modelling brushes or clay shaper or whatever these things are called in English :) That was really something I missed at my last experiments. And I also have the need for them in a future project I am planning at the moment.

Hobby Basics - Basing material | Part I

From time to time you will hear the question "Oh what do you use to do this and that on your bases?" or "Where can I find some stuff for basing my miniatures?". Therefore I thought of making a small list of the things I found work well with miniatures and what stuff I don't like.
And to be mentioned at the beginning: I will not talk about premade bases! This stuff is great but most of the time too expensive for big armies.

Today I will talk about the different basing materials I use especially the stuff you can get for free (or with very small costs):

A case of brushes

For a long time I cramped up my brushes just in my painting box together with my paints, knife and all the other stuff. It didn't matter if they were detail brushes or old, frayed ones used for drybrushing. But with my new Da Vinci brushes I couldn't do that anymore: I cringed to "throw" them into this mess. I really feared that the bristles will get damaged, even though I have them protected by the plastic caps for the tips.

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

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

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.