Fast And Furious

I know from the title of this post you're expecting a cool post about bikers or land speeders or something, but since I don't have any of those models here to paint right now, I'll have to let you down.

Being mostly separated from the hobby in france for these past few weeks has given me some time to reflect and distance my self. I'm eager to really start getting busy with my tau army, and this is brought on by a few thoughts I've had while here.
I've been involved in this hobby for a good five or six years. I am a dedicated hobbyist and don't see myself ever getting out, for better or for worse.
In this time, I've collected many models, and started many armies but the only ones that have manages to be mostly finished are my dark angels and imperial guard, and even then they aren't that huge, no more than 2500 points each.

While i was slowly collecting and painting my Dark Angels and imperial guard, GW was busy updating rulebooks, birthing new codices, ans in general slimming down and modernizing their business. While this means that we don't need ever fear the extinction of our, and I use this term loosely, beloved gaming company, it also means, at least for me, that I miss out on a lot of the hobby.

Let me explain. If I were your average 30- 40 something year old, middle class, wargamer, I'd have piles of disposable income to spend on whatever new toys I wanted. I'd never have to worry about buying something that I wouldn't use, because it would be a relatively minor expense.



(This is what my dark inner self really looks like. My friends don't know this about chick magnet though ;D)













(Me and my buds in a number of years. Hopefully??!)









Unfortunatley for my hobby, I'm not 35, I don't have a middle class job and I don't have disposable income. I'm 16, the only money I come by comes from the odd commission and gift money around the holiday time. Thus my yearly hobby budget is limited in that could only ever be from 200 to 400 dollars per year.

If you consider the amount of money I might have spent over 5 years, and then subtract the money wasted on unproductive tangents, that is to say all the armies half started and never finished, I end up with a pretty small chunk of playable stuff.

What this all leads up to is my growing fear, that I am missing out on most of the hobby. I don't get to pick up cool new toys to paint, I don't get to switch back and forth from several healthy armies, and I can't allow myself to start collecting cool new ones when they come out. I feel more and more, that with all the Gw releases over the years, and my uncertainty about the future of the hobby, that I'll never get to do these things. I'm a kid in a candy store with empty pockets, and every day I'm taunted with new sweets. Just to enrich this metaphor lets say my parents were dentists and candy never gets stale here. (work that one out)



(GWs stock over the last few years)

Who knows what GW and the rest of the hobby will look like in ten years, or in fifteen when I too have piles of disposable income, as well as decades of painting experience? Will I get to collect wicked converted imperial guard units? Will I have enough brilliantly painted armies to never get bored, and never have to think twice about buying a new toy, knowing I can certainly use it in one of my numerous badass armies?

Bringing this all back to the present, I do know that if I want to enjoy the hobby like I've been wishing to that last few years. I'm going to have to start painting more, and faster than I do. I'm also going to have to find more work, and more money, as well as finding more good gamers to actually play games with, since another thing I seem to have forgotten is that I use these tiny, often frustrating miniatures to play a game that I think is called Warhammer.

What I want to know is, and I'm asking the older hobbyists this one, is what you thought about when you were passing your first few years of wargaming. Did it look at all the same? Did you ever have periods of doubt, feelings of regret? Nightmares of your plastic grey crack being taken from you while at the same time wondering why you drive your self to collect these little men just to paint them nice and put them on you shelf, waiting for that promised time when you could actually use them?

I think this post is already long enough, so I'll leave you to think on my words. Or go through the rest of your blog list looking for a proper miniature blog post ,D .

Cheers, Tom

Howling Griffons And Chaos test models.

So, since I am lacking models here in france, I've only had a few to work on. But I will try to post a few times while I'm here. First, I've painted my Howling Griffons Attack bike, well, At least some of it. The armor and metals are down, but the metals need a wash, and I didn't bring badab black, or devlan mud.
My yellow is a really simple, and since I'm already punishing, i mean rewarding, myself by painting the tau with a white undercoat, I decided to go for an easy yellow.

-A solid base coat of Iyanden darksun (3 - 4 thinned coats minimum) This step is crucial because if you're base coat isn't perfectly opaque, the glaze's are going to make it look dirty by tinting any black showing through a dirty olive color.

-Carefully line in the crevices with brown ink.

-fine highlights of bleached bone and then white, this is important as well, you want your highlights to be tinted a bright sunny yellow, so even though it looks strange over the base coat, try to make them as light as possible without using pure white.

-Last, A few fairly rich glazes of yellow ink. make sure you add a little mixing medium, so the glazes aren't just washing over your model, you want an even coverage of the flat parts, not build up crevices.

Its not perfect yet, and I still have yet to try out different highlight colors and glazes, but I like the end result, its quick enough, and still yields a rich yellow.

The red was done following a tutorial by Simon at
Stuck Between Stations. My hasty pictures don't do it justice, but it yields a very rich red, with hardly any time at all. The green wash gives the shadows great natural depth, and really makes the red pop.


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I've also been fooling around with chaos schemes using this ogre as my test model he was one of my exchange partners brothers, but I swiped him (the brother no longer plays) and cleaned up his terrible paint texture, then added my scheme.
The skin is using the technique described on Gws site, in the painting ogres section.

I really like the look of the new skaven storm vermin's weapons, so I'm going to paint my chaos warriors and marauders weapons like theirs.