Test Post...

Over a year ago the camera I was using for my blog updates died. As funds were tight and I couldn't justify the expense of a camera for taking pretty pictures of my lil army men, I've let this blog kinda wither on the vine and die...

That is not to say I've not had an itch as of late to give it a second try...(or third if yer a schmuck and keeping score). This Christmas my brother and I did the "annual swapping of the Christmas gift cards" we're famous for, and this year I ended up with a $50 best buy card. 

The first thing to pop in my head was "Ok...now I'll look for a camera"...and off to best buy I went this evening to do just that!..

I ended up with a nice lil Canon Powershot A2500

It's not the flashiest camera on the market, but it was cheap, and came bundled with a mini tripod, case and 16gig sd card for a lil over $80.00.  Not bad considering the camera alone was $69.00...

As for picture quality, it seems to do an ok job...but lighting in my painting cabinet will be an issue....

I'm gonna play with lighting and distance this week to see what gives the best picture...maybe jury rig a photo booth...more to come.....

Murl

New digs...

I'm back. Woulda posted something sooner, but the camera I used in the older posts has died, which left me in a bind. Sorry in advance for the quality of these photos...

I've been painting a lil lately ...gaming a lil as well. Loving the new chaos codex. I'll post some thought on it at some point in the near future.....

In other news, my step son wanted a bigger bedroom, which means cleaning out the upstairs storage room and moving all my modeling/painting crap out of the bigger room and into his current, smaller room. This was the perfect opportunity to redo my work space.

This was my old set up.....

It  had some issues, namely a lack of space and an inability to hide the mess. With that in mind, I stole an old computer cabinet that been sitting in my parents garage collecting dust for 10 years...

Again, sorry for the quality of the pics....my cellphone camera isn't the best. The room is still a mess as well, but at least the cabinet is in working order.

This thing rocks....I love the fact that there are doors on this thing, making it very easy to hide the mess. The main shelf has plenty of room for paint racks, basing flock and brush storage. Underneath the main shelf are two roll out shelves...the top one is a great height as a main work area, with plenty of room for paints and pallets. The one below it works as a holding area to store model I'm working on or as a prep/construction area.

Below those two roll out shelves is another shelf that you would normally put a printer on.  Here, I'll put different projects I'm not currently working on. Along the bottom of the cabinet is a plastic office drawer for storing extra paint, modeling plastic and plenty of room for cans of primer and sealers.

Up top, I added a $12, 2 setting LED light strip from Lowes to brighten up the cabinet a lil. In the middle, I stuck a plastic drawer unit I stole from work. Made a great place to store weathering powders, sculpting supplies, spare basing flock and basing bits. The two side compartments up top will house a set of computer speakers and an ipod dock for listening to music/podcasts while I work....

Eventually I want to stick a magnetic strip along the inside wall of the cabinet to hold files and other tools..... maybe a couple lights on swing arms I can pull out as needed.......

So, that's my new work area....thanks for reading, and I'll see you next time.

Crawling out of my hole...

Hi...it's me....again...

Like alot of you, I had gotten seriously bored with 40k towards the tail end of 5th ed. My fav army (deathguard) had gotten stale and outdated. I had gotten bored with my other projects (IG, orks and wolves) as well. Hell, I even quit trolling the forums and blogs. 40k was dead to me...so I just decided "meh, lets wait till 6th"....

I picked up the 6th ed rulebook over the summer, read over the rules...found it a rather nice change from 5th. Still had no desire to play...

Then the chaos codex....(...insert snoopy dance here...)

As a chaos player with fond memories of the 3rd ed  codex, I really find myself liking this codex. The point cost and "slow and purposeful" on the nurgle daemon prince kinda hurts...but that aside, the codex really seems balanced with plenty of options (my big gripe about the last codex).We'll see if that holds true once the "new" has worn off in a few months....

This past weekend was my first 6th ed game. I came vs a fellow chaos player and his 1000 sons...













(Thanks goes to Neverness Hobbies for this photo)...

It was a 1500pt game...I'm not sure where I stuck my list, but it included about 21 plague marines, a dread/hellbound, lord, DP 3 spawn and a small pack of possessed.

Screech list (I think) had 2 squads of 1000 sons, a pack of chosen in a raider tooled up with a lord, and another pack of 1000 sons with Ahriman.


Really enjoyed the game. Unfortunately,  I lost on secondary objectives. Couple thoughts...

1) Force weapons really hurt me...Screech was easily able to kill off my lord and DP with them. Come on GW, was eternal warrior on the DP really that big of a deal?

2) I had some FW plague ogryn I hauled out for use as spawn...while they didn't do much, I am seriously a fan of the new rule set for them. Same goes for the possessed. I'm not sure how many list I'll be taking them in, but they are much better than the old dex...

3) I had my reservations of FnP on a 5+, but came away really enjoying the change to the rules. Taking FnP on power weapons and the like really made up for the weaker 5+ roll.

4) I know I'm rather late to this idea, but after further wrapping my head around this new rule book, I'm seriously tempted to pair Nurgle marines with epidemous from the Daemons codex. His tally ability would really help out a Nurgle CSM army, and deep striking plaguebearers would be great for objective contesting, especially after the tally has had time to build.


Thats it for now, hope to be back next week with an update on a couple painting projects.



o/

Murl

Just a quicky this week....

I've had this set of forgeworld space wolf termies forever. Da masta chef gave them to me when I had a space puppy army back in college. Got bored this week and decided to finally get around to paint them.

I'd like to say, for the record, hate the powder blue space wolf paint scheme. Hate it. Can't make it work...and in all honesty, it just looks so wrong for a bunch of space Vikings to run around in pastels .

So, I tried something different. Went with a fortress grey base coat with a dry brush of codex grey. The shoulder emblems and chest marking were done Vallejo brassy balls ( i think ) and washed with Magic In A Bottle...aka: devlan mud. Leg joints and creases in the armor were washed with watered down badab black for shading.

Flesh on the head was an easy bleach bone with a wash of ogryn flesh wash. Now, I've done complicated flesh painting techniques in the past....but for me this is much easier and delivers good results.

Still a work in progress...but kinda nice. Will post more when I have them finished.

It's the necro-blog....

Hi...remember me?

Well, the last year has been interesting to say the least. To make a long, boring story short, in January of last year we learned the house we were renting at the time was going to be put up for sale. The church that owned the property needed funds for an expansion project. After months of house hunting, we finally were able to work out a deal with the church for the house, and closed on it the first week of October. That's 8 months of hell I do not wish on anyone!

That settled, I started developing a bit of the painting bug. I'd not lifted a paint brush in months, and my hobby room was in a sad way. The extra room I have my stuff in doubles as storage for the house, and it ended up being a dumping ground for all the extra crap we had started packing we believed we were going to be moving back in march. Spent a couple days cleaning and organizing..(my OCD wife thought this was the best thing since sliced bread)..and with a lil work...


Very happy with the "de-cluttered" table.....(it was that bad...)..

That done, I started looking for something to start working on. Dark Eldar have looked interesting to me for a while now, so I grabbed some minis...

I tried several different schemes before settling on this brownish look....very happy with the results so far...we'll see how it goes with the rest of the stuff I've picked up.

I've also hauled out some of my old deathguard minis...

This is "Big Ugly". Love the model, but after looking it over, the paint scheme was a lil dated. I reworked the metal on him, as well as the flesh tones. Much pleased with the end result.

So, that's it for the first post back after a year. Lil rambling I know, and I'm sure this post will read like a middle schooler wrote it. Just bare with me till I knock the rust off. As for what the future holds, the 13th are still packed and waiting on me to develop a desire to work on them again. I've got 3 or 4 chimeras waiting to be assembled, and a third leman russ needing paint...so who knows......

A quicky...

Lil Offical Dark Eldar blurb...

Clicky

Nothing earth shattering, but after all this time, it's nice to finially nail down something from GW on this army...

whelp...

In the ongoing train derailment that is my Imperial Guard Blog, I give you, an ork...



Not a great picture, but you get the idea...

Had this guy sitting on a shelf mostly done, and got motivated to finish him. The conversion was fairly straight forward. Took the Blackreach warboss, repositioned the head a lil and shaved down the lower tusks so a metal jaw from the nobs kit could be fit on. Greenstuffed the lower barrel and added the nozzle of a flamer to that section of the gun, making it into a combi melta, and finally extended the boss pole and added a snake bits pole top.

Painting was fairly straight forward...lots of leather and earth tones on the clothing, P3 pig iron for the metal bitz, and knarloc green for the flesh. Everything received a coat of pure talent in a bottle..(devlan mud)..with the metal parts getting a lil badab black as well. Once dry, the flesh was lightly dry brushed with knarloc again, followed by a quick goblin green dry brush.

For the base, I went digging threw my bitz collection. In a box of space marine vehicle parts, I found the space wolf rhino door you see. It was a door that had been poped off of a model, and was already broke around the bottom edge. Scuffed it up a lil, shaved it up a lil here and there...added some bullet holes...and presto, neat base.

All and all...a very fun model.