Back to the hobby!

After the holidays break, and the back-to-real-life-work forced break, I'm back full time to the hobby!

In the last month I could work only for a couple of hours here and there on my Eldar so I could not do anything major, so no progress on the Hemlock for now :(

What little time I had I used to build two 5 men units of Wraithguards / Wraithblades, all magnetized so I could switch between the two as needed:

Behind the Wraiths you could also see a unit of Defender Guardians I'm also working on

In the last couple of day I started working on a new project for a gaming table a friend of mine is building and this is what the next blog post will be all about :)

Hobby vows - February 2013

As you may have read, I did not complete all my vows for January. I probably put too many things on my to-do list and too many of them where basically the same thing done over and over (four almost identical vehicles)

For this reason I decided to go easy on myself for this month. So, here we go with the new vows

PRIMARY VOWS

A bit of change could do me well at the moment so I want to switch focus from my Dark Eldar to my Khorne army. For this reason I want to complete the Chaos Lord I started last month and start working on his Terminator buddies

SECONDARY VOWS

As a secondary goal I'd like to complete at least one of the two Ravagers I was working on in January

BONUS VOWS

No bonus vows this time around :)



Not too much planned, so lets hope I could get them done this time :)

Hobby vows - January 2013 - UPDATE!

With January gone, it's time to draw conclusions on my vows... and it's not looking good. At all

I may have set the bar too high or I could be a little burn out at the moment

PRIMARY VOWS

My primary objective was to build two Dark Eldar Raiders and two Ravagers

One Ravagers is almost complete, I only need to put on the external hull decorations and hanging crew men

All the weapons and weapons turrets are magnetised for gaming and painting purpose. I also put magnets on the sails and the trophies for ease of transportation.

To add a bit of variety I raised the connection points of the trophies here and there in different places on each hulls. I did the same for the other Ravagers and the two Raiders

The other Ravager and the Raiders are a little behind, with work to be done on the crew and the trophies. I also need to do some greenstuff work to conceal the magnets here and there

SECONDARY VOWS

My secondary goal was to came up with a painting scheme for my vehicles: I played around with various ideas but I still have to decide witch way to go

BONUS VOWS

I actually did some good work for my bonus objective, building a Chaos Terminator Lord. Here he is:

I've not yet decided about his weapons: I like the look of the twin lighting claws and the chain fist so I'll probably magnetise his arms

CONCLUSIONS

I think that working on four vehicles at the same time was a bit too much. A little boring too I think :)

Games Workshop CEO steps down after 5 years on the job

An unexpected news today: it looks like that Mark Wells, CEO of Games Workshop for the past 5 years, has decided to step down from his position in the company. Tom Kirby, current Chairman of GW, is taking up the role of Acting-CEO in his place

Apparently the decision was made after coming to the conclusion that Wells and Kirby where doing basically the same job during the last few years

What does this mean for the hobby? I fear that only time will tell us...

A new exciting Kickstarter: James Wappel painting (and more!) DVDs - UPDATE!

I got a very good news today! James Wappel's painting DVDs project has gone live on Kickstarter!

If you have read my previous post you could understand how excited I'm, I really look forward to see this great painter in action, his technique has always fascinated me so I could not wait to learn it to may be able, some day, to paint miniatures like this one:

painted by James Wappel (wappellious)

Or this one:

painted by James Wappel
(wappellious)

Or this one too!

painted by James Wappel (wappellious)

I could go on and on ... just check out his blog for more stunning miniatures!

If you are interested you could help the project by making your pledge on the project page at Kickstarter.com like I just done :)

Also, check out Mr. Wappel post about the project going live!

EDIT

The project has gone live less than 24 hours ago and it is already founded! Congratulations to Mr. Wappel and all the pledgers around the world! Now we just waiting for the other goals to be revealed :)

Hobby vows - January 2013

I started this blog as a way to keep me focused on my projects and the hobby and so far I'm having good results. As a next step in this direction I'm going to start to give me a set of goals, or vows, for each months dividing them in three categories:

• Primary vows: what I want to complete within the current month
• Secondary vows: what I should work on but do not have the same priority as a as primary vows
• Bonus vows: what I'd like to work on if I have the time

Primary vows should be the main focus of the month and should not be slowed down by the other two categories. Nothing bad will happen if I can not meet the deadlines but I still like to have them in place to keep things organised

That said, let's move on this month vows!

PRIMARY VOWS

1. Complete building and pre-paint steps of two Dark Eldar Ravagers
2. Complete building and pre-paint steps of two Dark Eldar Raiders

SECONDARY VOWS

1. Define a paint scheme for the vehicles of my Dark Eldar kabal 

BONUS VOWS

1. Build the Chaos Space Marines Terminator Lord for my Khorne / World Eaters collection

It's a bunch of stuff for me. Let's see what I could do by the end of the month!

Good intentions for the new year!

After reading this great blog entry by The Eye of Error (check his blog, his Dark Eldar army is really stunning!) I started to think about what my goals for 2013 are and I decided to share here what I came up with.

WHAT I MUST DO!

1) Complete (building & painting) my 6th Ed. Dark Eldar list: The Kabal of the Golden Rose

2) Came up with a 6th Ed list for my Eldar and build & paint it. May be themed as Saim Hann or Alaitoc uhm

WHAT I'D LIKE TO DO ALSO!

1) Start to seriously work on my Khorne collection

2) Build a Coven themed Dark Eldar army

3) Build an Orks army!

4) Build and paint my Eldar Revenant Titan

5) Work on an miniature or two from my "Miniatures I'd like to paint" list

CAN I DO IT?

Uhm it sure seems like a lot of things to do for someone who work as slowly as me!

As I said in my first post, I started this blog to keep me focused in my work and I think this is starting to yield results so I will use my blog to keep track of my project, I just need to figure out how those Blogger Pages works lol

And to show that I'm on track, today I started to work on two Ravagers for my Dark Eldars:

A new exciting Kickstarter: James Wappel painting (and more!) DVDs

About a month ago, while I was reading the new posts in my hobby news-feed, I came across a really exciting news! James Wappel, AKA wappellious, is hard at work planning and testing out all is needed to release a series of tutorials DVDs about his wonderful and quite unique style of painting! and sculpting! and terrain making too!!

For the few of you that don't known Mr Wappel and his work, just let me show a small selection of miniatures taken from his blog, James Wappel Miniature Painting:

Angron  from Forge World painted
by James Wappel (wappellious)

A Space Marines Predator from Games Workshop
painted by James Wappel (wappellious)

Grey Knights themed flyer base sculpted and painted
by James Wappel (wappellious)

Blood Vestals from Raging Heroes painted
by James Wappel (wappellious)

An Engine of the Gods scratch
sculpted and painted
by James Wappel (wappellious)

Elven Sentry Post scratch sculpted and
painted by James Wappel (wappellious)

I could go on and on, there are so many incredible miniatures on his blog!

The painting (and sculpting! and terrain making!!) DVDs project is going to be founded using Kickstarter, an online fund raising platform that is becoming well known in our hobby

If you read all his posts about the Kickstarter project, you will see how much preparation work is going on right now and how much attention to every little details is begin taken to give us a top-quality product. For this reason, Mr Wappel decided to start a Beta Test program to reach two very important goals:

• raise enough found to acquire a good-quality video editing software, a very important piece of "equipment" needed to put together the actual videos for the DVDs
• get an early feedback from the tester on the videos while they are still worked on

As beta tester contributors we will have access to the beta DVD months before it's release around April or May and we will get one of the official DVD for free after their release. 

I'll refer you to Mr Wappel post for the actual details on the the Beta Program but let me tell you that I personally think that this is a very good opportunity to help a great painter, to contribute to the hobby community and to learn some great stuff about painting and sculpting. And it's for this reasons that I have already given my contribution to the cause :)

Go Wappellians!

My personal chaos

How do you define "chaos"? A common definition is "a state of utter confusion or disorder; a total lack of organization or order"

Seems pretty spot on, uh? As it happens, you could use the same definition to describe my hobby life. Seriously!

I started playing Warhammer 40000 roughly three years ago and I was immediately drawn in this obscure and really intriguing world of war gaming, collecting, modelling and painting. It was all new to me, I never actually played with models / toy soldiers before (if you exclude Lego) and I certainly never used a brush to the extent required in this world so it was a really slow start.

So slow that after three years I still don't have a painted army, just some experiments here and there.

I could say in my defence that I have little time to dedicate to the hobby as I (luckily) have a full time job so I usually sat down with my minis for two hours late in the evening and on the weekends.

Yeah I could say that, it's true but the real problem is another one: I can't stay focused on one project at a time! I keep jumping from one idea to another, I start building this unit and then I suddenly think that it will be cool to assemble or paint another model and I stop what I'm doing at the moment and follow the new idea. So, as you can imagine, I have a bunch of half started models and nothing is getting done....

A real chaos!

To regain some sort of order I decided to start this blog to help me stay focus on one (or maybe two or three as I also bore easily...) project at a time. For the same reason (and also to give a little something back to the wonderful hobby community you could find there) I recently started a YouTube channel. There are only a couple if videos up there at the moment but if you are interested you could find it here


So... What could you expect to find here?

That's a really good question!

My main army (and first love) is Eldar and I'm in the process of building a Dark Eldar one

I'm currently working on an Aegis Defence Line for my space Elves, some Raiders/Ravagers for the Dark Kin and a model conversion for a friend. I've also some Chaos models from Dark Vengeance on the table (well, in a box UNDER the table actually...) and I recently bought some of the new Chaos Space Marines models. Not that I'm planning to start a CSM army but I really like the models and the World Eaters / Khorne fluff so expect to see some red / brass stuff around here. I'm also a big fan of Forge World so you may see some (good) resin too.

I will try to start a small project at the time (like the Aegis) and complete it before moving to something else but I already known that it would be hard to do so... I had to hid the HelDrake I just bought because it was staring at me and i keep hearing this voice saying "build me, build me" in my head!


A real chaos... Seriously!