Hobby Bingo 2018

I joined in the Hobby Bingo challenge in 2018 but frankly it was a bust by the time we closed December. 2018 was a hard year to finish, after such a bright start.

However, some of the challenges were completed! Every title is clickable through to the original post ...

Play and Paint a Model For an Army or Game You haven't Played in Over a Year
Guild Ball Morticians had Veteran Graves and Vileswarm added. I do miss playing this game.

Paint All the Models in a Faction Starter Box
Primaris Marines from the Dark Imperium box. This isn't quite a faction starter box, but it's equivalent - so I'm claiming it!

Paint a Model and Use a Technique You Haven't Mastered
Shadespire Ironskull's Boyz, using NMM copper.

Buy a Model and Paint it Within 48 Hours
Attended Banshee's painting workshop in March, and by the end of the weekend I'd painted the bust that came as part of the course.

Paint a Model in a Color You Don't Normally Use
Word Bearers. I've traditionally stayed away from reds, as mine ended up too pink - but I changed it around and pushed into the shadows for depth, and it worked quite well. So well in fact my daughter practically has a whole army of them now.

Make Something That's Not For the Battlefield
Love my sci-fi vending machines and, while they're part of a larger piece, they meet this requirement admirably. In the grim darkness of the far future there is only a nice row of chocolate bar dispensers.

Finish Painting a Model That's Been in Your Do-Do Pile For a Year 
Norsemen from Hasslefree were a purchase from ... 2016! So nearer two years on the painting pile, but we got there.

However, that's a very poor seven from a potential 25. I plan for 2019 to be a better year on this front.

Fishermen: Tentacles & Shark

May was a funny old month, with work kicking my behind, but I still managed to get a couple of small projects moving. One current focus is trying to complete my Fishermen lineup - so I tackled Tentacles and Shark.

First time in a long time I've tried doing any wet blending. That wasn't terrible, and fun to use such bright colours for a change!

Conversely, here's Shark. Who I was far less happy with ...

... but it's out the way, and that was a painful experience, as my ability to paint small figures to a reasonable standard has disappeared altogether. This usually means I'm feeling a little jaded, so giving myself a few days off before diving back in.

Morticians: Display Base WIP

This is a little catch-up post covering the display and travel board for my Guild Ball Morticians team.

It started life as a Mob Football tray from Bendy Boards (http://www.bendyboards.co.uk/) but wasn't quite sufficient for my needs. The black mat you can see peeking through is magnetic sheeting, and I've attached metal washers to the underside of all my figures. It's strong stuff and you can turn the populated board upside down and nothing falls out, or mount the washers sideways for a test photo ...

I wanted the board to have a little character, so using some plaster resin (you can see it in the first picture) I built some stone walls. After that, I took some Vallejo basing paste to fill in the gaps and add earth. Basically, it should look graveyard-ish by the time it's finished.

Priming this thing was the "what have I done" moment. We're way outside my comfort zone here ...

... but it's okay! Some  greys, some browns and a bit of foliage and it's looking like an actual thing now. Phew. Still need to tidy up the black edging but we're almost there.

I've added grass clumps, some static grass to support the clumps, more grass peeking through the gaps between stones.

... and after a few months' thinking it's finished. I went back and painted brick patterns across the top of the wood, as it looked strange without it. Add a few details on the base and call it done!

Morticians: Display Base

Finally finished my Guild Ball Morticians team board. Loved painting these over the last two years, but also glad to finish :)

I'll post a couple of the older, WIP shots later this weekend but it started life as a Bendy Boards tray, added magnetised matting to the board and washers under each figure ...

... how strong is the magnetic connection, you ask? Flick to the last picture.

All the stonework is plaster I added after assembling, then Vallejo textured basing, some flowers, a little scenery and that's it!

Vampire Sportscaster

A mere 15 months after completing his Ogre counterpart, I've wrapped the second of the two sportscasters from Willy Miniatures. One small step for painting, one giant step to wrapping up another project.

I don't like the face on this sculpt, it feels wrong. He should be leering, and the mouth feels a little too big. It's beyond my skill to make it look other than a big happy grin, but there we have it. I did enjoy painting the leather coat, it's another approach to leather in constrast to my other recent projects.

Here's a shot of the pair of them together.

Eagle eyed viewers will notice I've gone back and updated Bob Bifford the Ogre's scarf to match Jim Johnson the Vampire's scarf. Plans are afoot to build a nice sideboard for my Guild Ball games to feature crowd and commentators, but that's way down the list of projects at the moment.

I feel my something-better-than-tabletop painting has come on in the 16 months between them. Especially in trying to build textures. Still a long way to go but it's nice to feel I've progressed.

2017 Goals - End of Year Review

Well that year drifted by quickly, didn't it? The progress in the last six months from the original list written up at the beginning of 2017 hasn't been a pretty read for progress I'm afraid. But let's look at progress across the year.

The Bad

• Infamy [3] - No progress.
• Guild Ball Fishermen [5] - No progress.

Whoops. These just dropped down the list when new projects present themselves. I'd sorely love to wrap up the Guild Ball figures just to tick another one off the list.

The Inbetween

• Hasslefree Miniatures [12] - Completed 4.
• Heresy Miniatures [1] - Completed 2.
• Warhammer 40,000 Space Wolves [28] - Completed 9.
• Warhammer 40,000 Death Guard [16] - One test model done, but will pause this as I plan to swap to Word Bearers.
• Shadespire [4] - Started.
• Guild Ball Morticians [3] - Completed 1.
• Willy Miniatures [1] - Started the vampire, but not finished.

Hit and miss here. Some forward steps made but then a few steps back. Space Wolves were complicated by buying the Dark Imperium box set and Shadespire, so they've taken precedence. I did manage to complete the Inceptors, Ancient and five Wolves from the original box.

The Good

• Colony 87 - Completed all 9.
• Blood Rage - Completed 1 wolf.
• Conan - Completed 10 wolves.
• Zombicide: Black Plague - Completed 22 wolves.
• Terrain - 6 pieces from Crooked Dice, 3 containers from TTcombat, 3 armoured containers, 9 barrels, 12 crates from Games Workshop, and a few other odds and ends.
• Human Interface - Completed 3 characters.
• Arcworlde - Completed 1 Ork.
• The Walking Dead - Completed 1 zombie.

 A few really small projects were completed at the last minute (Human Interface, Arcworlde & The Walking Dead) which was nice to clear off the backlog. Small projects hanging around start to irk after a while, so these quick wins please me.

The Summary
The total number of distinct things completed, not including tiddlers like crates and barrels, is over 100. Which is honestly about 40-50 better than I thought it would be, despite my optimistic goals at the beginning of the year.

I'll think on what I want from 2018 before posting goals. Some quick ones come to mind, but let's make it a challenging one again too.

2017 Goals - Half Year Review

Approaching the half year mark already, so it feels fair to look back at my Painting Backlog Goals and my progress against that to-date.

Infamy [3] - No progress.

Colony 87 [9] - Completed all 9.

Hasslefree Miniatures [12] - Completed 4.

Heresy Miniatures [3] - Completed 1.

Warhammer 40,000 Space Wolves [28] - Wolves in progress. First 62 bases completed.

Warhammer 40,000 Death Guard [16] - One test model done, but will pause this as I plan to swap to Word Bearers instead later in the year.

Guild Ball Morticians [3] - Completed 1.

Guild Ball Fishermen [5] - No progress.

Willy Miniatures [1] - No progress.

So a lot still to do from the original list - but with the above progress and other pieces, that's 41 models done so far. I feel the Colony 87 were the real highlight in the first six months.

Interesting to see on my painting desk how easily distracted I am. In between inventing work for myself with the mass wolf painting, there's a lot of undercoated pieces which aren't listed above - that have somehow, magically made it to my desk. For someone who considers themselves reasonably focused for work, it's interesting how I've let that slide when it comes to hobby ... so greater discpline is required.

Onward to greater heights for the second half of the year!

Guild Ball Morticians: Scalpel

Life delays have taken a toll but hopefully it's back to normal now. All is well, just no time to sit down and photograph anything. And indeed, no desk until the other week.

Couple of quick paintjobs done in the last month to keep the momentum going - so it's still moving forward, albeit slowly. Here's Scalpel from my Guild Ball Morticians coming in around 90 minutes.

She felt very utilitarian, so everything is shades of brown and leather. "Brown and leather" may be the name of my first glam metal album.

2017 Goals - Painting Backlog

When I started writing everything down I realised it was becoming quite a lengthy post, so have split it into three sections. Summary, Hobby and Backlog. Here are the broader goals around the painting backlog

This year I wanted to be a little more disciplined in my approach and wrap up projects, rather than let whimsy take me where it will and end up with too much start on the workbench. So here are my goals with which I'll judge myself by end of year.

Infamy [3]
With pretty much the whole range of figures sat in a cupboard, I'm waiting for my  Twistered pledge to arrive before dive into this lot as I want to have a consistent feel through everything - so crazy as it sounds most of these will wait until 2018. But I do have a couple of larger 54mm automatas and a Tesla bust to improve my larger scale painting with.

Colony 87 [9]
Finish all the figures from the second set released last year, completing the set and bringing the total to 15 models in all.

Hasslefree Miniatures [12]
Paint everything I picked up at Salute - Admiral Almos, Colonel Hogan, Hostrom Hammersmith, Ullr the Red, Bolverk the Bold, Howling Gorvhogguth, TradKarl, Weird West Boudi, Harby, Rogue Drax, Blanche and Mystic Warrior Jen.

Heresy Miniatures [3]
Finish everything I picked up at Salute. Started with an Ogre at the end of 2016, and have a few more left - the Colossus, Ghoul King and Brother Bude.

Warhammer 40,000 Space Wolves [28]
Dust off and rebase my existing models with the new Sector Imperialis basing kit. Paint up the whole Ironclaw Strike Force that may have been purchased over Christmas. Whoops.

Warhammer 40,000 Death Guard [16]
Complete two tactical squads and a random Demon Prince I found in the cupboard.

Guild Ball Morticians [3]
Complete the Season 1 & 2 roster with Scalpel, Vileswarm and Veteran Graves.

Guild Ball Fishermen [5]
Complete the Season 1 & 2 roster with alternate Shark, Corsair, Sakana, Jac and Tentacles.

Willy Miniatures [1]
Sportscasters. I finished the Ogre (let's call him Bob) last year and have the Vampire (who is definitely not Jim Johnson from Blood Bowl) and then that completes my homebrew Guild Ball NPC collection.

This sets my initial goals at 80 figures, which would be more than I've completed in a calendar year since returning to painting at the start of 2015. That's an average of over 1.5 figures a week, consistently through the year. Quite a challenge for me I hope. Now a number of these will be tabletop or thereabouts, but a few will be stepping stones in pushing my ability.

Achieving this would also mean I can play a nice selection of rosters for Guild Ball or Kill Team events in 40k. It also helps flesh out my sci-fi civilian options for a diorama that's brewing in the back of my mind.

There's a bonus entry here too. Complete everything in my Zombicide Black Plague monster set. That's a little more ambitious as I think there's about 100-150 figures in that pile. Note that doesn't even include the hero characters - because I have 66 of those sods, which is a year on its own at my speed! This one is definitely not very smart, but that's why it's down here as a bonus.

So that's me and the plan for the coming year. You'll already see I've managed to start into the Colony 87 figures but need to pick up the pace - as one figure a week isn't going to be enough to meet the targets. Especially when there's such variety in there, but let's see I we do!

Guild Ball Hunters: Theron

This is the last of the three figures started on the painting course with Arcane Paintworks and of the set, I'm glad this one is finally out the way. It's Theron, the captain of the Hunters from Guild Ball.

Considering at the start of the project I was convinced the eyes were unpaintable, it was nice to finish with blue irises on the little fellow. Had a lot of fun mixing colours and using yellow to highlight up on the green and browns which was very much outside my comfort zone and Meg the instructor was great at encouraging us to do exactly that.

The basing isn't much to write home about, but apart from my Morticians having slightly more themed bases, I plan to keep most of the Guild Ball teams on pitch-style bases.

Didn't quite get on with the sculpt, which is a shame as there's some lovely detail in there - but it simply didn't tug at me the same way a lot of the other Guild Ball sculpts do. With that said, I caved and bought the rest of the team in resin when they were on sale recently - so this colour scheme will feature again.

Goblin Referee

Following the Ogre Sportscaster, this is the second of three figures I started to paint with Arcane Paintworks. He's a the Goblin Referee from the excellent Willy Miniatures (again) but painted up as an annoying little human - as I haven't yet seen goblins make an appearance in Guild Ball.

He's quite a small fellow too - compared to his colleague the Ogre. Smaller than a standard 28mm character and here's a scale shot to demonstrate the difference ...

The challenges here were:

• Use non-skintones for my shading. This adds a depth of colour and interest that's usually lacking in my skin work, and while my highlighting still needs practice I was delighted with the shading side of things - even if it was a little OTT.
• Paint four stages of eye following this guide. I managed to squeeze all four in here, as you can see from the top picture. This felt like quite an achievement considering the scale and space to work in. Moreso when you consider I only used a size 2 brush for the eyes to get that done.

At this point I genuinely feel my painting is starting to progress.

Ogre Sportscaster

This is the first of three figures I started painting during my painting course with Arcane Paintworks, and the focus was the jacket and face. He's an Ogre Sportscaster from the excellent Willy Miniatures and having looked at this month's White Dwarf, he bears more than a passing resemblance to their cartoon figures advertising Blood Bowl, but moving on ...

The base is very vanilla as he'll be standing to the side of the pitch mocking my Guild Ball players. The painting challenges for me here were:

• Highlight with a colour I wouldn't normally use. So there's a lot of yellow to work up from the base colour of tan ... you can see some areas of the figure were less successful than others, and that's fine. They're my little, horrible badges of honour while I got to grips with techniques. 
• Getting to grips with shading using a two-brush blending/feathering technique. Hard, hard, hard. My brain needs to think about this more, and my hands need more practice - but it started coming together after the first few tries.
• Try to use less colours on a figure. This worked well to make everything else a gentle background to try and emphasise the angry face.

I threw in some extreme highlighting on black trousers, as they were the last item on the figure to do and I'd painted myself into a corner.

Guild Ball Morticians: Bonesaw

October's been a frustratingly, unproductive month on the painting front - so I've settled for a couple of older WIP models and gone for "it'll do" figures to get projects moving along and the mojo working.

So first up here's Bonesaw for my Guild Ball Morticians.

That leaves me with Scalpel to do and then the Morticians will be completed, which is quite exciting!

Guild Ball Morticians: Graves

Last one of the regulars is finished, Graves.

Primer nightmare gave me an slightly gritty surface but I ploughed on (to my regret - wish I'd stripped) but at least he's now finished up. Strange model this, I didn't like it at the beginning but he's grown on me while painting it up. Colour scheme is a little duller and perfunctory than the others, he strikes me as a man who doesn't have time for anything that gets in the way of his job - so he gets a single purple feather by way of a highlight.

Two more to go - Bonesaw and Scalpel. A little of my enthusiasm for this project is returning on the basis that the finish line is in sight. Nearly there!

Guild Ball Morticians: Obulus

Obulus time! The mighty captain, and a mandatory pick.

This now means I'm able to legally field two fully painted teams - Morticians and Fishermen. Bit of a watershed moment as I've never played any tabletop game with fully painted teams before. So even this small achievement feels pretty pleasing.

Oh and here's a ball ...

Exciting, huh?

Do wish I'd approached the display base the same way and trimmed a little from the bottom of the tombstones and sunk them in the base rather than letting them sit atop. Lesson learned for the future.

Determined to complete the full Morticians rosterbefore moving to the next project, so that leaves me with three more figures to do - Graves, Bonesaw and Scalpel. Hoping to have those finished in the next week or two while my mojo's working.

Guild Ball Morticians: Silence

We have another member of the team wrapped up - this time it's Silence. I can't recall where I saw the white robes for him, but loved the idea and accordingly nicked it and implemented it badly but there you have it.

He's got a bit of (OTT) OSL and I gloss varnished his little decanter of poison. I love playing this guy, he's seriously versatile, tough as nails and capable of handing out significant amounts of pain.

Made a bit of a schoolboy error with my Morticians. I started painting them as a group and having them on the painting table for this long has dampened my enthusiasm to the point I just want them gone now. Beginning to run out of steam, but Obulus is on the table next so on we go!

Guild Ball Morticians: Ghast

Continuing my theme of trying to finish up the work-in-progress figures, here's Ghast for the Morticians.

Tried to make the skintones a little greyer in the dark areas, but not a grand success - but he's finished and it's onto the next.

Guild Ball Morticians: Cosset

Second update in the same week? It's like buses! Well, that's if buses were updates on a blog, instead of large red vehicles capable of carrying dozens of people on a predefined route.

Another member of the Morticians finished up, this time it's Cosset. Yes there's a point missing from her trident. It was sadly lost in the great Curious Child Incident of 2016.

I've tried to introduce a bit of texture to the dress and fabric with striping and, while it's a little heavy-handed in places, I like the result so will try again on another figure at some point with a bit more care. One frustration was painting up the poppet doll on back of her belt, then you apply the swooshy fabric and it's now obscured! Grrr.

It also highlights one minor niggling frustration with the Guild Ball range in general - the two petite ladies I've painted so far (Cosset and Angel) have enormous eyes compared to all the other, larger figures. Still, that's nearly a legal team fully painted and I'm hopeful of wrapping a few more figures in the coming weeks.

Guild Ball Morticians: Casket, Dirge & Display Board

So, the display board is finished. I've opted for a sensible three headstones in a line, added some more foliage and left it at that. Happy with the end result.

In addition to the board, my goal for the Morticians is finished.

Also, two of the players are now wrapped - Casket and Dirge.

This weekend I'll be attending a two-day painting course run by Siege Studios. In my local gaming group there are no other painters - which makes it different to gauge how well you do things; as I'm keen to improve as a painter, here's hoping this will assist in unlearning bad habits and learning good/better ones.

I've also changed how pictures are hosted so if you click them they'll expand, rather than redirecting you to PhotoBucket.

Guild Ball Morticians: Display Base WIP

Hobby has taken a backseat over the last few weeks as my last job finished up and I'm hunting for the next (the downside of becoming a contractor) which sucked up free time and meant my figures aren't getting painted while I try to find someone to give me money in return for work. However, I'm back into hobby stuff this week and managed to make progress on a side project that I've wanted to get going for a while - a display and travel board for my Guild Ball Morticians team.

It started life as a Mob Football tray from Bendy Boards (love these guys) but wasn't quite sufficient for my needs. The black mat you can see peeking through is magnetic sheeting, and I've attached metal washers to the underside of all my figures. It's strong stuff and you can turn the populated board upside down and nothing falls out.

I wanted the board to have a little character, so using some plaster resin (you can see it in the first picture) I built some stone walls. After that, I took some Vallejo basing paste to fill in the gaps and add earth. Basically, it should look graveyard-ish by the time it's finished.

Priming this thing was the "what have I done" moment. We're outside my comfort zone here ...

... but it's okay! Some  greys, some browns and a bit of foliage and it's looking like an actual thing now. Phew. Still need to tidy up the black edging but we're almost there - however, this is where I'd like advice from the smarter and wiser among us. What do I do now? Do I need more grass clumps, some static grass to support the clumps, more grass peeking through the gaps between stones? Also, would it be overkill to drop tombstones behind each character slot? Quick dry fit illustration ...

... thoughts? Currently I'm leaning toward adding the tombstones but clipping the smaller ones at various angles to make them appear to be sinking into the uneven ground.