The State of the Hobbiest

With work and school taking its toll on my schedule, it's been a while since I've been able to work on any hobby goodness, let alone post about it here. In response, here's the current state of my hobby progress and where I'm headed in the future.

Before I begin, I'd like to take a moment to recognize my favorite podcast: The Masters of the Forge. These guys are single-handedly keeping me interested in the fluff and keeping my mind on the hobby while I'm spending time away. Snorre and Adam are always coming up with new interesting ways to play the game and going into detail about the parts of the background that I've always loved. In a world of responsibilities, they're my one last bastion of hobby goodness. If you haven't listened to them yet, go check them out.

And now, on with the blog post.

Gaming Table:

The table itself is complete and the first set of tiles is finished. I only have one set of trees to place on it, but I'd like to make a whole lot more as well as a little farm to put next to the road. I'm hoping to do some more work on it after I've gotten a sizable force of Knights Bellicose completed.

Current Knights Bellicose Project:

Right now, I'm working on the third Tactical Squad for 4th Company. My goal for now is to duplicate what I have in my Ultramarines force, then expand on it from there. Ultimately, I'm planning on completing the entire company, then move on to other companies until the entire Chapter is complete. Once this squad is complete, I'll have three full Tactical Squads to work with, and they'll all have options of which specialist weapons I want to include. Here's how they currently look:

Having recently completed my skin test, I'm confident I can add some radial diversity to my Chapter, which is something I've always wanted to do. In the spirit of that, this squad will feature three separate Marines without their helmets on. In order to better facilitate the painting process, I'll be painting the heads separate from the rest of the Marine.

Future Project:

Once my third Tactical Squad is complete, the force still won't be playable. I'll need some leadership for that. To help me break up the monotony of painting so many Tactical Marines, I'm going to work on 4th Company's Captain and Chaplain next. I'll probably even do the whole Command Squad, so the whole leadership section will be completed in one go. As of now, I've purchased the models and made sure there were no defects since I went with Finecast in an effort to build a whole army with no metal in it. Here's the models I chose:

Hopefully, I'll be able to devote more time to the hobby in the future. I really miss being able to work on my models as much as I used to and I miss posting on the blog as often as I used to. Once I get a little more homework out of the way, I'm hoping to spend a very large amount of progress in the hobby room. Keep checking back to see how things turn out!

Have fun painting!

Knights Bellicose, Eldar Progress

With the release of the new Codex: Space Marine, I've decided to formally begin work on the Knights Bellicose. When thinking about the new army, I've considered changing up some of my techniques. One thing I've considered doing is to use waterslide transfers to apply the tactical markings to my units. To test this, I took a large flying stand and glued a bunch of posts to it. I then hung a shoulder pad from each one of those. I painted each shoulder pad as if it were from a different company, just to see how they would all look. After that, I started applying some waterslide transfers to them, just to see how it would look. Here's how it turned out:

Left: waterslide transfers / Right: hand-painted (incomplete)

You can see the edge of the film pretty obviously

As you can see, the waterslide transfers are far too obvious and would detract from the models. It looks like I'll be hand painting them. When I complete my second test (the one on the right in the first picture), I'll be sure to post more pictures and let you know how it turned out!

Progress on the Eldar army is coming along nicely. The Harlequins are almost done! Most of the models are done and sealed. All I have left is the Troop Master and the Shadowseer. Keep checking back to see how the progress is going, but you can have a sneak peek right now!

The masks really make the model stand out.

So Drew, you're working on three armies now? What? No! Well, kind of.

Since I'm going to start working on the Knights Bellicose, I'm setting aside the Ultramarines. In the beginning, they weren't intended to be a full army anyway. 1,000 points is a nice round number to stop them at for a nice little side project. I'm now going to devote my time to getting the Knights Bellicose up to full strength. I plan on building the entire chapter someday! So right now, the only two armies I'm putting effort into is the Eldar and the Knights Bellicose. I think that if I try to do more than two armies at once, I'll get too bogged down and I won't ever finish anything.

Because of the circumstances I find myself in, I have the opportunity to have a gaming table once again. My awesome father-in-law is helping me build it. That means that in a few months, I'm going to be able to start working on terrain! When that happens, I'm going to devote some attention to building and painting some awesome terrain to play on and take pictures on! I'm going to put as much effort into the terrain as I do the armies I build. Hopefully, we'll have some pretty awesome terrain to use! Keep checking back to see how it all turns out! I'll be sure to post up some tutorials as the terrain happens!

Until next time, have fun painting!

Finecast, Titan Lasers and Necron Rumors

Well, it looks like the Army got in the way of things again. After three weeks of working out in the field, I come back to see that a lot has changed in the hobby. What's this Finecast stuff all about? Games Workshop is moving from metal to resin? As soon as I heard about it on 40k Radio, I ran straight for my local Games Workshop store to check it out. From what I've seen between my local GW store and the spread in White Dwarf, I think that the Finecast range shows a lot of promise. The real test, however, will come when I convert and paint up the Ultramarines Honor Guard to fit in with my Knights Bellicose.

I've never been one to rely heavily on rumors, but all the talk on 40k Radio, Bell of Lost Souls, and everywhere else on the internet seems to be pointing towards a re-release of Necrons in the August / September timeframe. I'll probably never play them but I'm still excited to see them get a new codex and new models. I've always thought that the current models were too flat and too plain for a painter to show off any real skill. When the re-release happens (if the rumors are indeed true), I'll definately be getting the codex and I might even paint a Necron or two for a painting challenge.
So, after drooling over all those new resin models, I decided to get back to work on what I was currently working on (which just happened to be resin anyway). I sat down at my painting table and fed my addiction to painting, trying to get back what the Army spent three weeks taking from me. I was able to completely finish the turbo laser arm on my titan and am now about halfway done with the plasma blastcannon. I have pictures posted up in the Other Models section so head on over and check them out!

As far as the painting goes, I've finally hammered out a painting schedule. With the unreliability of my work schedule, I can't post actual dates of when I'll have squads done or pictures posted but I can tell you what order I'll be working in. As soon as I finish the plasma blastcannon, I'll have a working titan. With that, I'm finally going to switch back to my Ultramarines after not touching them for almost a year. I'll do a squad of them (my last tactical squad probably), then an Eldar squad (Dire Avengers) and finally another titan weapon. After that, it's rinse/repeat. I'll do an Ultramarines squad, then an Eldar one, and then the final titan weapon. With the titan finally done, I'll just be going back and forth on the Eldar and Ultramarines until both armies are completely done. Then, and only then, will I start working on my Knights Bellicose. Maybe if I get bored, I'll start up a squad of them or maybe paint a few captains. Most importantly, however, I want to finish my two current armies before I start another one. Otherwise, I'll never finish anything.

Out in the field, I did some writing and figured out how all the officers in my Knights Bellicose are going to look. Here in the near future, head on over to their page to see just how I've planned them out.
Keep checking back for updates on the Knights Bellicose and to see the rest of my titan weapons! I should be updating those things pretty soon!