NoVA Prep Status
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Yearly Archives: 2011
Display Board Update
Done painting and varnishing. All that should be left are water effects (though I’m considering putting some blood effects down or something to break things up a bit; we’ll see once I’ve put everything down on the board).
This is it. I’m… not entirely happy with it. What’s there looks good, but it feels kinda bland to me. I wish I’d had more inspiration for terrain to put on it. Water and units might help that out, though. We’ll see.
The stalagmites are done as well. I’m ambivalent about them. They look alright. Better than the styrofoam ones, for sure… but in painting them, I was reminded that I wanted to use those colors (Cryx Bane Base, Cryx Bane Highlight) to paint the Space Hulk Genestealers. Between that and the Alien-esque way they kinda look, I can’t help but feel that they’d be better suited as Tyranid terrain.
After the board’s done, I’ve got to wrap up these freaking banners.
Display Board WIP
I’m waiting on the glue to dry on the board; I’ll go back over everything thoroughly with some watered-down wood glue to fix everything in place. I’ve found that this does miracles for adding durability to ballast (and pretty much everything else).
I’ve finished “sculpting” the stalamites. Each is a 6″ nail run through a 50mm base with successive layers of joint compound slathered on. Not really sure when I decided to use joint compound, but the results look (to me, at least) considerably more natural and believable than the styrofoam stalagmites I’ve made before.
The joint compound’s considerably flakier, however, so I’m reinforcing everything with several coats of, again, watered-down wood glue. After enough of these, the outside will be extremely durable.
Once all of that’s done (hopefully tonight) and dried (hopefully tomorrow AM), I’ll start painting it. That should go pretty quickly: airbrush on the basecoat then a couple of layers of drybrush. Varnish that, then water effects and done.
I’ve stretched my non-existent photoshop skills to the limit to pull together a clever, attention-getting sign to place by my display board. I’m going to keep that close to my chest until the tournament, though: more because I keep dicking around with it than from any coyness.
Finally, I’ve loaded up most of the display case: my Daemons on one shelf and my Dark Angels spilling off of another. The top shelf’s being saved for my Skaven (who are, understandably, a bit too busy psyching themselves up for the NoVA to spend time in the display case) and assorted one-off models that I’ve done.
Yes!
Internet Pseudo-Famous
Did anyone else see my Khornate Daemons on GW’s What’s New Today yesterday?
In the Final Stretch!
I’m in the final stretch!
I just slapped some varnish on the rat swarms and the last model that needed rebasing.
This is the same Poisoned Wind Mortar I built back at the end of ’09; it just needed rebasing to tie it in to the rest of the army.
The Rat Swarms weren’t exactly necessary. They’re there in case the Hellpit dies (likely) and explodes into d3 Rat Swarms (unlikely). Might as well cover all of my bases, right?
That means all I have left to do is:
- Paint three banners.
- Do the display board.
The end, that’s it! The board I’m going to work on this weekend. I’m going to procrastinate the banners until next week.
Display Case
You might have heard about Borders closing down and being liquidated. As it’s where the lovely and tolerant Mrs. Rushputin likes to buy her smut shōjo manga, she’s been cruising through our local store regularly as it goes through its liquidation. While scanning around to fill gaps in her run of Mixed Vegetables, she noticed that they had begun liquidating furniture and fixtures.
They’ve got a number of very, very large tables that would make excellent gaming tables: if we had a basement, it’s the sort of thing that would definitely go there.
More significantly: they’ve got several glass-fronted display cases. IIRC, these were where the overpriced CD/DVD collections lived. Getting a display case for my minis is something that’s been on our to-do list for a long, long time: with as much time and money I’ve invested in my hobby, we’d like to pull its fruits out of plastic drawers in the closet and put them on display. So, when she noticed these, she gave me a call.
We did some measuring and thinking and, after sleeping on it, headed out to buy one.
We had to do a tiny bit of demo to get it: all four of their cases were fixed to each other: an end piece on one side, another display case on the other, and a strip along the top holding it to the case behind it. It took all of five minutes to sort that out, though.
It stands 4’8″ tall, 13″ deep and 3′ wide. It’s pretty big, but not too big. The shelves are space apart enough that their future contents should be well-lit enough, but it shouldn’t be difficult to install lighting if it becomes necessary.
If you’re in a similar spot, and have been looking for a display case: consider one of these (or, maybe, waiting for the liquidators to get more desperate and then consider one of these). This one’s in pretty good shape: some of the others are a bit rougher.
Forge World Skaven
I’m really surprised to not see much discussion of the amazing new Forgeworld Skaven kits.
The Exalted Vermin Lord is unbelievable: I’ll probably have this sucker assembled and painted before I get around to doing my classic Vermin Lord.
The rules for the Brood Horror look like a lot of fun, and the model is pretty cool. Not as cool as the EVL, but still lovely (and heart-warmingly reminiscent of my Hell Pit Abomination).
I’m really excited about both of these models. Now I just need to wait for the crunch to wrap up before I can order them. :)
Painting Progress – 20110809
Had an extremely productive weekend, which was refreshing after what’s felt like an extended period of being too busy to do anything.
For starters, I managed to knock out the rebasing of all of my Stormvermin. That’s several more models than I actually need by the end of the month, but it was easy enough to just power through all of them.
Let the record show that I don’t particularly care for rebasing minis. It’s a little too tedious. Just as well that, at this point, I really only need to rebase a single model (one Poisoned Wind Mortar) before I’m done with all of that.
I also decided to change things up a bit and knock out all of the movement trays. I did a total of six: two 100mm x 120mm trays (from Litko), two 200mm x 100mm horde trays and two 5 model skirmish trays (from GF9). They came together pretty quickly.
I also blew through another six Plague Monks. (Not pictured because we know what they look like and the varnish was drying on them while I took these pictures.)
Finally, a while back I finally got the chance to play Chaos in the Old World (which is seriously a lot of fun), just about the time the Horned Rat expansion came out. The components were solid, and I found it cheap on the internet, so I ordered a second copy of it (the expansion, not the whole game) to use for my army. I’ll probably get around to using the clanrat / cultist tokens as wound counters and the rat ogre / lesser daemon tokens as unit filler at some point. I had a little free time, though, so I ended up throwing this piece of terrain together using the vermin lord / greater daemon token:
It’s just the token, a round wooden chit to give it a base, and some left over Arcane Ruins. It’ll probably go on the center of my display board, I think.
At this point, I’m getting near the end of prepping my army… that’s good, ’cause I’m getting a little tired of painting rats. By my count, all that’s left is:
- 5x Plague Monks
- 3x Rat Swarms (optional, for popping out of an Abomination)
- 3x Banners (everything else is painted, I just need to do something with the banner)
- 1x Mortar Rebasing
- Display Board
This is, I think, pretty doable.
"Let’s Have a Tournament" Tournament
I ran a WHFB tournament over the weekend at GPC.
I think it’s safe to say it was successful: “full” at GPC is 12 players, max capacity (where people have to start playing on 5.5′ tables) is 16… we had 14 players. Everybody seemed to have a good time and, with the solid turnout, prizes were good.
With the NoVA Open on the horizon, I decided to just use their composition rules (making an allowance for Chaos Dwarves ’cause we’ve got a player who’s running them), their first three scenarios (which were kinda lackluster and a bit schizophrenic) and their bracketing (which meant we had two undefeated players at the end of the day).
We had a ton of Orc & Goblin Players, which was kinda neat. No Skaven, though. :/ Warriors of Chaos performed the best, with both WoC players going undefeated through the day. Best appearance went, by popular vote, to Joey J.’s Daemons of Chaos.
It was a long day, but we managed to pretty much stay on track throughout it… a huge accomplishment.
Results:
One of the local players took a bunch of pictures that can be found here. (All of the pictures in this post are his.)
Something I really wanted to touch on was that I decided to take a risk that morning and run the tournament without a laptop. Instead, I used just my iPad… and brought a pad of graph paper in case that didn’t work out.
It worked, extremely smoothly. I had no trouble inputting results; because I was able to just walk over to a table where folks were working through their results, I’d say it was actually considerably easier than it would have been with a stationary laptop.
Tomorrow, I’ll touch on what apps I used. I could probably stick them in here, but I imagine it’d be more useful on its own.
Most Ostentatious Turn Counter Ever
It’s done! I’ve talked a bit about it before, so I’m just going to photodump!
