Video stole the painting star

Cheesy, yes but stoopid NatX kept up the pressure and I finally caved Monday and bought Halo3 on launch day.

I had a Best Buy gift card, I read a bunch of reviews, I love multiplayer co-op games... So I caved and between that and trying to install blinds/curtains/bathroom vent fans in my house this week all of my free time has been sucked away. I need at least a solid hour block to do any worthwhile painting and I just haven't had it. The trollbloods sit there taunting me and I just take it and go back to playing Halo.

NatX even gave me Bioshock for my birthday and I haven't even really put that in to try and finish the game which is probably a 6-8 hour commitment at this point since I'm at least a 1/3rd through already.

Oh and the worst part is I keep checking ebay to see if I can get a deal on a different Hordes warpack so I can get a friend into this thing. So far, no luck.

So week 1 of painting a Trollblood a week isn't happening. Hopefully by week 2 I'll have knocked one out. I'm involved in an all day kickball beer party Saturday so that kills that free day. Sunday I may be hungover. Don't want to paint hungover. That's how Trollbloods become troll blobs.

Oh and if anyone reading this (all 2 of you maybe) has a 360 and hasn't gotten Halo3 or Bioshock yet, do yourself a favor and splurge. Halo3 is great for multiplayer, Bioshock is a great storyline shooter with good twists that I think make it the game of the year.

Trollbloods have arrived

They got here about 6 days after order. Not terrible. I did an unboxing that I may put up later, nothing fancy.

So my new idea is to try to do one of each of them every week so in a maximum of four they'll be done. This should be interesting. I've got the first two soaking in a little dish soap right now to take some of the grime off 'em. I'll try to post pictures with the updates. This all assumes I'll have at least 3-4 hours a week to paint. The clock starts Sunday since I want to at least have a few glued together and primed to begin. All I can say right now is great friggin' sculpting on them. Hopefully they turn out cool. I bought the P3 paint set for them because I felt they were the most difficult faction to paint.

I'll take all the help I can get from the proper paint to get them ready.

Okay off to take them out of their soak.

-Lefty

P.S. Everblight is also a pretty cool looking faction and probably would have been my second choice.

Yay! I got one group painted... oh wait

Just when I thought I had the whole Warmachine Mercenary starter set painted after throwing myself into it for about 90 minutes last night while watching the new high def TV in Man Island, I bring Magnus back to the desk and see that I'm still not done with one of the light warjacks.

DAMMIT!

So close! My Hordes order has in fact shipped. I found my priming spray, I'm trying to dedicate a few hours to them Saturday morning if possible and in an effort to be more proactive I'm hoping to paint maybe a little more tonight or tomorrow night.

In the meantime I'm thinking about selling off some of my star wars minis. I have WAY too many. I spent way too much, I could sell off some rare and very rare ones I have and probably raise plenty of cash to support my metal miniatures interest. Besides I think the quality of the minis from wizkids has really dropped off. The Bounty Hunters set really dropped the ball I thought. I haven't bought any of them since and the Halo Clix aren't looking too good. Which is kind of a shame when Rackham are putting out good plastic pre-paints like AT-43 and Mongoose has done a decent job with Battlefield Evolution. Oh well, I hope to finish off the last Mercenary from the starter and possibly the two Confrontation solos I started last weekend. One is essentially done, the other needs a few highlights.

I also finished off the only Reaper C.A.V. figure I have. It was my first real attempt at drybrushing and I think it turned out pretty good. Maybe a little heavy with the amount of the mini that got drybrushed but you learn. I don't think at this point I'd buy more of them. I'm not inspired by them. But Wyrd Miniatures keeps taunting me by showing sketches and greens of the new factions they are putting out. I REALLY want to get my hands on some of them. I'm trying to wait until they make official factions for the game so I can somewhat justify it.

Pictures of some of my stuff are coming soon. I just have to figure out how to maximize my paltry setup so the pics don't make my already mediocre paint jobs look worse. I'll probably then submit some to cool mini or not.

P.S. painting eyes still sucks!

Pressure to paint

I just got back from a relatively nice weekend at the beach. Aside from a four hour trip home that should have been an hour shorter and the thousands of meatheads on their motorcycles, it was a nice weekend.

I brought my paints with me as well as two of those confrontation minis I recently got and a CAV mech I want a redo with, a mega minis knight I've had for a while and finally the remaining unfinished mercenary box set from warmachine (really just finishing Magnus, the warcaster). Believe it or not, I primed and mostly painted the two confrontation dudes and I think I finished probably 2/3rds of the work on both of them. I also actually tried some ink washing I'd seen on a tutorial at Brush or Die .

I even did some dry brushing. Things look pretty good. Before I left I emptied a minis container I use to cart them around and now that I'm looking at it. I actually did a pretty good job on the two Cygnar warcasters I have, Darius and Caine. I still suck at eyes but they may be entries to colminiornot if I can photograph them semi well.

Hordes warpack should be delivered soon. That's part of the reason I wanted to paint this past weekend. Get me back in the groove.

Hordes... oh how I loathe you

So to make fixing up my house go in a timely manner, I devised a point system of how much each task was worth. Crawl in the attic feeding wire and connecting ceiling fans... 3 points. Clean up and connect all of the electronics in man Island now that I have the new glorious 47 inch TV, just one point. This whole thing was also done so I'd pace myself on buying things I lust after, certain things I wanted had a point value.

Anyway, I've been hard at work almost every night this week, with my father no less and I love the man, I really do and I appreciate everything he's done not just with the new house but in general but we have differing styles. He ponders for a long while, ponders some more and I just want to get sh$t done. So working in close quarters has probably been somewhat of a study in patience on both our parts.

Back to the story, I've been busting hump, racked up a bunch of points. I was all set to get another Warmachine starter when I just happened to linger on the Hordes section of the Privateer Press site. I liked the looks of two factions, read a very in depth review from TGN . I liked that for the most part the only difference between the two games was the warcasters weren't as powerful and the action in hordes is more aggressive. So I spent my "points" and bought the Trollblood warpack which I'll throw a picture in from the PP website below. I went to Superhero gameland, which right now is kicking CCG Armory's butt by a few $$ in price and ordered the warpack AND because I want to try and paint the traditional colors plus I'm curious about the new paint line. I bought the corresponding Formula P3 paint. The warpack was less than $32 and the paint another $12-$13. Once again let me state that I would love to support my local store but they want as much as it cost me for just the warpack as the warpack, paint and shipping cost me at Superhero Gameland. If you really want to sell, discount the starters a little so we don't feel like we're getting ripped off getting into a new game.

We'll see how Hordes goes. I now have to convince one friend to buy a starter pack of Hordes (Sarge?? Nat X, JayJian??) so we can play. Otherwise I'll have to break these out on JayJian's WM army. I think my already overflowing workbench just got a new group which is now being pushed straight to the top. Fall and Winter are coming and that's when I actually play with my miniatures.

Here's a picture of the Trollblood warpack. Incidentally this did win Miniatures game of the year at Gencon.

New Mini lines coming out that look promising

Because I can't get enough superheroes and I think it would be cool to get a true metal miniatures game based on them I'm pretty excited about the Pulp City game coming out. The ape with the chain gun hooked me. That looked too cool.

The other newish miniatures line out there that I think shows some promise is the AE-WWII game by Darkson Designs. I know WWII stuff is very overplayed in both miniatures and video games but this just looks kind of cool. I love the alternate history angle and the weird genetic mutations. Below are two figures from the Darkson Designs site.

Wyrd Miniatures

Say theoretically somebody got some birthday money. And theoretically that somebody had what some have termed a problem with his miniatures hobby. That somebody may be looking at Wyrd miniatures as his new crush.

I know I'm no great painter by any stretch but look how friggin' cool these guys are. These are my current top 4 favorites from Wyrd. Eventually Wyrd is going to release a game around their wonderful miniatures and take the ones already created and add some cool new ones to form new factions. So while these guys aren't part of a game right now. They will be. Apparently the game may not be dice based either.

This is Killjoy. Love the cleaver

This is Nicodem the Undertaker. The vulture is just bad ass

This is Seamus the Mad Hatter. Don't F with the Irish!

And last but certainly not least. This is Viktoria the witch hunter.