Freehand: Iron Cross

It's a busy week for Dystopian Wars here. Today I want to show you the method I use to paint the Iron Cross on my models. It is a pretty simple design to paint as it is basically geometric. However these designs become much more difficult once you scale them up. On my frigates they were hard enough though no bigger than 5mm across. My battle ship was easier as it was tiny more like 3mm. On the Pflichts though I was dealing with about 1cm of space to have to fill. While there are great decals available for these designs I am too lazy to go look for them. Instead I get to practise something I am usually terrible at: freehand. This technique is dreaded by most, including me. However when you see a model with a nice effective freehand design they really are stunning. The shots below are all thumbnailed so click on them to blow them up larger.

Step One: The picture is a little bit hard to make out but it shows the first step. I take some very watered down black paint and I put a dot in the centre of the space where I want the Iron Cross to go. I then define the outer parts also with a dot. So nine dots in all evenly spaced. This is an important step to get right and it is very easily corrcted as you are only placing small dots of black on the model. So if you take your time with this then everything else should be easy.

Step Two: A steady hand helps a little with this step but again it is easily correctable. You are now simply joining the dots up with a thin black line. Using watered down black paint helps. just join everything to the dot in the middle. It is rather simple! Don't worry too much about a wobble on the line. You can correct that in the last step with some white paint if you are feeling lazy.

Step Three:So here is an easy part. All you need to do is to fill in the four triangles you have made. It is much easier to see the shapes if you outline them before you fill them in. Oftern I would have attempted to paint the triangles without outlining them first. This usually leads, at least in my attempts, to a very non symetrical design.

Step Four: So having gotten this far you are pretty much finished. The last thing to do is to get the white lines in. Once upon a time I would have painted the white first and then filled in the black afterwards. However I find that this method means I make better looking designs. So working always from the center out draw even white lines to the outer edges of the cross. This helps keep a point where two lines meet in the center and it means you don't overdo it there either. It is very easy to paint towards the center and go too far making corrections difficult.

So if you follow the steps above you should come up with a design like this one. It was far easier to do than I thought. I was quite nervouse to put this there but really the models need it. The Airships are missing some detail as the baloon area is rather boring. The Iron Cross really breaks this up and makes the model far more interesting. I have also been practising with the Imperial Eagle but I am still not happy that it would look good on this model. Its very much a rushed attempt but I will practise and hopefully I can perfect this design enough to get it onto one of the larger Airships. I can imagine it would look nice on the landing platform of the Imperial Sky Fortress! Though the wooden texture might make it difficult... hmmmm.

Going back to Chaos?

So despite my current attraction to Dystopian Wars I am slowly starting to think about my chaos army again. Again it is the fault of a Podcast, this time Heelanhammer. I think in the year since the relase of eighth edition I have played only ten games. Thats a shame as I really like Warhammer. My current club isn't really that enamoured with it but Hamburg as a few clubs and I am thinking of getting a very quickly prepared army together just to have some fun. However I need practice with weathering pigments and I am going to combine the two. Chaos Warriors are some of my favorite models by Citadel. I can imagine painting them in a very mettalic scheme and then weathering them heavily. It wuld be a very simple way to get an army to the table and I can really improve my weathering skills. As for the composition I am guessing anything with armour. I can't weather flesh so no marauders or hounds, so only Knights, Characters and Warriors. Hmmm lets see if my enthusiasim keeps on the boil. I might pick out a test model tonight to see if the scheme is workable.

I would want them to fit somewhat into the general tone of my current Chaos Army. However I am guessing that they will suit best as Khorne marked Warriors especially considering tht the weathering should give them a strong red tone. I want to get an army on the board as quickly as possible and that is somewhat effective, I am guessing that Chaos fits this bill well. Also it adds to what I have already done so thats a bonus.

Tutorial: Airships for Dystopian Wars

So following on from yesterdays shots of the Pflicht Airships I thought I would show a step by step of how I did them. They were easy enough in the end as they are not too intricate. Most of the shots below are thumbnails so just click on them to bring them up much larger

The bases on the Dystopian Wars flyers are a pain. While nice looking with the arcs marked out they don't fit together at all. After a long long while simply trying to force the stems into the bases I gave up and grabbed my drill. I was lucky enough to have a drill bit the exact size of the stem. However I was unlucky enough that this one was blunt. It still did the trick but it really needed more force than I was comfortable with. The bases are robust enough to take this thankfully. I was a little confused by the white backing the bases had. I took this off straight away but I guess it can be left on to save getting fingerprints everywhere. I can't see that it serves any other purpose. Getting the stems into the model was also a little tricky. One of them really didn't want to cooperate. Eventually I coerced it in. One word of caution however! Don't press the stem too far into the base. I did this and now it is raised ever so slightly off the surface. This causes the model to rotate around the stem easily and I guess it will be annoying when it comes to actually playing. Even with the drill I needed some force to get the stem in and this is why I pushed it too far. So you are warned!

The most important step in my mind is getting the base colours on correctly. Once you have a nice even coat on the model it is practically playable. For these models I copied the scheme I used for my Ships. German Field Grey(vajello) is the base colour for everything. Its got great coverage which is good as I didn't undercoat these models. I was worried about the spray filling up too much of the detail. However the mould release agent will stop the paint adhering to the surface so it is important to wash the models down with some soapy water. A soft scrub gets the residue off. I then pick out the metals in a bronze colour. I dislike the idea of bare iron on sea going vessels and I thought I should follow it through on the fliers. For a little bit of variance I picked out the Prussian flag on the tails. The edges of the panelling helps keep the lines straight.

Of course I forgot to take a photograph of the next steps but this shot will help explain. I washed the whole model down with a light black wash. This brings out the fine detail of the resin models. It also gives some nie texture to the generally flat area of the baloon itself. Without a wash this would look terribly boring. I then go back with german field green, the base colour, and pick out all the raised areas such as the ribs and gun ports. Finally I mix a drop of bleached bone in and highlight these areas. It's pretty simple. That finishes the green ehough so that it looks great on the table top. Getting more detailed in terms of highlights is really not worth all the effort. I did highlight the edges of the baloon ridges with some of the base colour though so that they stood out a little better.

The metals were picked out in lighter shades of gold. I washed them first with Ogryn Flesh (GW). This gives a nice purple base to the metal without darkening the raised areas too much. I also put some patina on the tesla coils to the front but my eyes are not seeing it on the pictures. It is Hawk Turquiose mixed with Thraka Green and some water (both GW). I just let it run into the cracks. Thats basically how I painted the models. Freehanding the Iron Cross is annoying but I will cover that separetly later in the week. So I hope this is helpful in getting your airships to the table quickly and effectively.

Some new undead

So these images just arrived in my inbox! Some very nice new stuff!
This Ghoul King looks awesome. Its a pity that the plastic ghouls are not equally as nice! Thankfully i have pretty much given up on my idea of an all ghoul army due to the difficulty of picking up the old metal models. If I was doing it this model would be straight in there. Its really great, much better than the hideous Zombie Dragon.

The Cairn Wraiths are nice, not much of a change from before. These are seemingly becoming haracters in the new update. Thats a good change but I can imagine that with the need for magic in a Vampire army these will be more of an after thought when constructing lists.

I really like this piece. I will definitely be getting myself one. It isn't a very practical piece as you won't be able to pop a regiment inside it. I guess at a stretch you could count it as a building or something. I think it will be really nice when added to the chapel and some of the walls. It could make for a very atmospheric graveyard. I really like the direction GW are taking with terrain. They have really come out with some great kits. I would love though if they would make some generic houses though. The kit seems fairly modular as the individual tombs are separate pieces. I guess then I will be buying two and making a slightly larger piee. It doesn't seem to have an overly large footprint. Hmmmm I should get the Dreadstone Blight finished first.

Airships!

I was getting pretty annoyed with the slow pogress of my painting reently. Every evening I seem to have something to do and at the weekends I am always obliged to go somewhere. I haven't had a productive painting session in weeks. However I do think I identified another cause of the problem - lack of motivation. Recently I haven't been that enthusiastic about painting. Generally this comes from being bored or overwhelmed. I find that if I have a crowded desk I just don't like sitting there. At the moment mine is on the edge of being overly filled! There is a Bloodbowl Team, a lot of Warmachine, some lurking Warhammer miniatures and finally some Battletech stuff. However what was really getting me down was simply being bored. Everything thats on my desk I have tried my hand at painting recently. There is just nothing new and maybe more imporatnly nothing challenging.

So with that in mind I picked up some Dystopian Wars stuff last week. As always seems to happen I was listening to the d6 generation and they started talking about the game. Then I started thinking about it. I then annoyed some of my club mates to see if they were coming along with their fleets. So in the end I picked up some Airships. Not only were they adding a third to the points of my small fleet but they were something different to paint. I had tried the ships before but not the airships. I have to say they were great to paint. The textures on the canvas of the airship meant it was very hard to build up any form of highlights and that washes would look strange. I am still not sure how to make this less apparent. It would seem that the excellent moulding process picks up too much detail. Whereas the less sensitive moulds used for metals would have given a flatter surface these picked up some of the 3D printing process I think. Its fine in the end, not too noticable, but it does make some of the advanced painting techniques a little more difficult!

So I am hoping to have about five hundred point finished for the next meeting of the games club so I can finally have a game. That depends on some of the other guys getting their stuff done too... It would seem that everyone wants to get their fleet finished before using it which is nice.

Getting an Island on the board!

I once again picked up some Dystopian Wars stuff last night. I was supposed to be doing the grocery shopping but I happened by the gamestore and as a reward for all the housework I thought a few miniatures would be fine.

As I get more and more into this game, depite attempting not to, a project has cropped up in the back of my mind. I really would like to play over a nice game board and what could be better than a real island scaled down to 1:1200. The island I am talking about is Helgoland, one of Germany's most important naval assets. The rough dimensions of the island are 135cm x 42cm x 105cm whic fits on a single 6' x 4' board (180cm x 120cm). However it probably doesn't leave enough room for much action around the island which would be the main point of having the board in the first place. Okay it is nice to have the island for ground forces but really everyone here wants to play the naval game foremost.

So what to do? Well I have been thinking on this a little and the best i can come up with is to split the island right down the middle and mount the two halves on separate boards. At least this way we have the island for larger games when the two boards are placed together. We can also then play along one of the coasts without too much difficulty. We could even use the boards as modular pieces and simply arrange them in any configuration that suits. Its not the aim of the project but it provides a lot of better playing opportunities this way.

One problem remains... storage. There is no chance in hell that I can manage to get this to reside within my apartment. Well I could but then I would have to move out! Especially if I ever wanted to play on them. So maybe I need another plan. There are not so many islands in the North Sea that can be scaled down and I don't really see my Prussian Fleet operating in the South China Sea. Anyway I will see what I can come up with.

Bugman's somewhat lost rangers!

I managed to get my Dwarves finished for this weekend. It didn't take too much as a lot of the models had been started already. I was just getting them to a presentable stage so that I could finally field a proper painted warband! Thankfully it isn't such an undertaking at the Orc and Goblin Warband we have in the campaign. That one has seventeen models in it. That would take me far too long to do from scratch. However my painting laziness probably puts me at a disadvantage. I really won't be able to compete equally against a much bigger warband. I need to be lucky in my opening salvoes to even the numbers a little and then hope I won't be swamped by the remainders. I shall see how it goes over the course of the campaign. I have eighty gold to spend and I can invest that in another Thunderer or I can instead armour up my ather vulnerable leader... I am not really sure which direction to go.

Tonight I am giving some painting lessons so that should be fun. Some of the other Battletech players want to paint up some of their miniatures and I am happy to oblige them by letting them try it out with my equipment and hopefully pass on some tips while at it. At least it bodes well for the genreal committment to the game. If the players are showing enough enjoyment and dedication to want to actually paint their stuff then it would seem I can look forward to a goood few more games... nice!

Dwarven Rangers

Despite the fact that last weekend wasn't as action packed as the previous few I didn't make much progress on my painting projects. At the moment I am a little scattered and this means that while I might get a lot done I don't get a lot finished! I am working on Dwarves, Menoth, Battletech and Terrain! I got these five rangers done over the course of Sunday. I am playing Dwarves in Mordheim and I want, as far as possible, to use the Bugmans Rangers models. While I have enough done already to use them I felt it would be better to do the warband from fresh and then to add these to the Warhammer regiment as eventually I have to make that a little larger. I of course couldn't get these guys 100% finished, that would be too easy, as I ran out of Graveyard Earth to do the bases. So again this week I have to make a trip to the gamestore to pick up paint. It seems like a weekly event at this point.

Friday Night, Fright Night

So Friday sees my first game in the New World of Darkness. It has been well over ten years since I ventured into any World of Darkness product so this is really going to be interesting. I am planning a relatively short three scene beginning which should only take about three hours. That allows a little over spill in case we are slow with the rules. It also means I don't have to prepare too much. In this session I will be mainly concerned with introducing the players and then having some NPC's intorduced too. So I really just need to hammer out whats important and I don't need to have the entire Chronicle ready.

I finally have the group formed, a relatively small one considering the number of eager players where I work. The group consists of three very inexperienced players whose roleplaying extends only as far as Dungeons and Dragons. This will be a steep learning curve for them and I really don't expect that they will like it much at first. While I would like to dump them straight into some action so they get a feeling of what is happening I can't. Thats just not my World of Darkness. It has to be a slow tension building exercise otherwise all the effect of the game is lost. This has the downside, especially with an inexperienced group, that forming a coherent party with a strong story is difficult. While I have discussed this with the players I haven't as yet had a response.

Battletech vs. Warmachine

So I managed to get my first real game of Battletech in this week after a fifteen year gap in playing. I have to say it was great. Now I should preface this by saying that it really does reflect some 80's game design and while that is fine there are a lot of ways to streamline this that sometime in the future should be considered. As I played I was reminded of Warmachine quite a lot. In my mind a lot of ideas for Warjacks are very similar to Mechs. The armour for instance is the exact same system but in much less detail, so are systems. However both games are attempting to emulate very different things I noticed. Battletech is a naval game, pure and simple. I was suprised I never noticed it before. Warmachine is more of a standard wargame albeit on a skirmish scale. In Battletech I find myself playing completely for position. Indeed the most important phase of the game is the movement at the start to achieve the 'weather gage' on your opponent. These opening moves determine a lot and as was seen in the game this week I had a strong advantage due to some bold moves early in the game. I rushed my opponent pinning him on a downhill slope while I was on the opposite side of the valley, also on a downhill slope but with my Mechs entrenched in a wide river providing some cover. Interestingly I committed my heavy support Mechs too far forward and having weathered their fire my opponent was able to cripple one causing me to have to abandon my position to seek safety.

Warmachine has a similar need for board control and careful positioning but it doesn't, at least for me, feel the same. The forces in Warmachine are all glass hammers. They can deal out a lot of punishment but they can't take it very well. The 'jacks will stand up to some and I mean some repeated punishment but any true application of force takes them down. In Battletech the Mechs are able to take this beating and return the compliment. It gives an interesting feeling of mighty dreadnoughts of the sea whereas the 'Jacks feel more like they are represented as six ton steampunk robots! Warmachine does a nicer job of individualising the 'jacks whereas a lot of the Mechs feel very similar. They only vary in weapons loadout whereas 'jacks have induvudual rules such as chain attacks and such that flavour them a lot better. The interaction between units, Warcasters and everything else that Warmachine has ensures that it will remain a superior game but Battletech is still rewarding to play.

So I am still looking forward to playing more Battletech. It offers me something that Warmachine doesn't that being a second gaming group. I play it in work with some colleages and it is fun even if the game takes four to five hours to resolve.

Battletech WIP

I don't usually put up a lot of WIP shots here as I find them not so interesting. People want to see the finished article! However I don't have much of an option as I am really not getting anything finished these days. I am starting a lot of new stuff but like my usual habits I jump from one to the other rather quickly. It does mean that sometime in the near future I should get a lot of things done at once. As I am using my Battletech stuff before anything else I decided to give it priority so ma Avatar, Dreadstone Blight and Mordheim Warband are all on hold while I get these models done. I just want to get my Heavy Lance finished so I can play with them. I am also doing it as an instruction exercise for one of the guys in my office that has never painted. He is slowly learning how and watching my progress helps him understand the steps he needs to follow to complete his stuff. After that I can get back to my Mordheim Band.

The Lance is nearing completion. Everything has been washed down and just needs to have the highlights built up and the camo schemes fixed. I don't do much to the grey as its fine after a light wash. I try to fix the yellow to give the model some contrast and I add some red to do the same. Again these are most definitely gaming models... nothing special is being done with them. Thankfully I don't feel so bad as they are cheap to buy from the local gamestore.

The Warhammer is based and finished

You saw this fellow last week but he wasn't finished. Since then I managed to find some hex bases and I mounted him up and finished him off. The bases are metal and they are annoying as hell to paint. Everytime I pick up the model the paint on the base comes off. Now I know this is better than paint coming off the model but still it is annoying. I have varnished the base sides multiple times but as I water down the varnish for use in my airbrush I think it might be a little too thin to paint on. Yes, I am too lazy to fire up the airbrush just for this guy. Maybe once I get them all finished! I am still debating if I should add some weathering pigmets or not but as it didn't look so great on the Blackjack I don't think I will.

Burnt Terrain

So following on from yesterdays post on me starting Mordheim (or Mortheim as it is called in Germany) I thought I would show you a building I recently finished for the club. I haven't delivered it yet but next time we will be able to fight over this. I wanted the building to look completely burned out and with a layer of ash over it so almost everything is in grey.At least this makes it nice and easy to paint. I would have liked to make the base a little more rough but then it is practically unplayalbe so I left a lot of space clear. The terrain has to be useable too... I also like to have a lot of ground cover when I play Mordheim as it is easy to focus too much on multi-level buildings.

Here are some thumbnails of both the finished work and some in progress shots. This piece was far harder to build than to paint. I simply sprayed it black and then white. This gives a nice ash effect I have noticed when doing it before. I didn't pay enough attention though to get it perfect but I will if I do it again. Some areas are still a little too black as I didn't get them at the correct angle while one or two places are nearly white. This is especially apparent on one of the walls that you can't see on the picture. Sadly I have done the wood already so I can't easily rectify the problem. I just need to keep saying this is a gaming piece... The wood I simply washed afterwards as I knew this would only provide a hint of colour. It is still fairly strong as the rest of the piece is very onochromatic. I haven't really figured out a better way to do this just yet. I stuck in an awe and dwarven rune just for something to break up the plain grey colours. I was thinking about some grass but I think that wouldn't look right either. So now I just need to decide if it was worth the effort and if I should build more!

Mordheim underway!

So I had a busy weekend but I still managed to get two games in. My german team meeting was on and as the Team Leader I was obliged to go along. It was fun but it meant that no painting got done. Not the end of the world I suppose but recently I haven't had much time just to sit and paint. Hopefully this week will finally be a relaxing one and I can get some progress made. Mordheim was the first game that I played. It was fun, a little better than I remembered it. It is still no Warmachine but it has its charms. I am playing a Dwarven Warband so I have to deal with a few disavantages. I played against Lars and his Cuthulu themed Chaos warband. With movement three I really struggle to do very much. I have my entire warband armed with Crossbows. I was able to set up four guys high on either side of the board to rain down shots. We were playing Breakthrough so Lars needed to get off the tble. Instead he concentrated on taking out my guys. I had the two remaing Dwarves, my leader and Trollslayer in the centre of the board to cut him off if he ran for it. These two basically were never going to get into the action unless Lars wanted them to. He easily outpaced them and managed to gang up on my leader. Some fortuitous positioning on my part prevented him from being surrounded and quickly taken out. My crossbow armed guys on the flanks were able to take out a member of the chaos warband each turn so I forced a quick panic test on the Chaos Warband and they faile just as the Possessed and Dark Souls reached these positions. So I was lucky. No injuries to me and two heroes taken out of the Chaos Band. Checking for earnings I managed a nice 80gc setting me up well for the next game at least. I noticed the Orc warband has seventeen members, so each of my dwarves has to kill three of them!

I also mananged a nice game of Warmachine versus Jan with his Cygnar. I am unable to beat Cygnar. I have no idea why... Its not like the shooting is doing too much but it slowly adds up and then I am dead. This time it was a CRA from the long gunners into Severius. I need my revenge soon...

Kreoss, Grand or High?

So I picked up another unit of Knights Exemplar. This is pretty much my first duplicate unit and it was an impulse buy. I like the Knights but they always seem to get shot before they can really do anything. Thats the beauty of Warmachine however! If you want them to be effective you have to commit them but that means the enemy has the chance to deal with them first. Having two units means he has to deal with them twice... well thats the principle in practice it is much different! I am a big fan of the tier lists. I like the little boosts you get and themeing a force always made sense to me. I was really happy to see them in MKII and I want to make a competitive list using them.

So with that in mind I scanned the army book and came up with a few options. Both of these revolve around Kreoss. I played last week over Vassal and I found that the Epic version is what I would like to play with the most. Getting to tier four won't be that easy but it will expand my force without too much duplication so thats good. I can also easily reach tier four in thirty five points which is a big bonus. I hope the list in competitive though I do feel that it needs to go to about fifty points before I have enough options to round it out. Currently the shooting options are sparse and I have no great area of effect weapons. Getting to fifty points will alleviate that a lot.

I like the Exemplar Errants but I really can't get them to work ever. Having tried them a few times on Vassal I thought that I would have gotten a handle on them but I really haven't. Neither their ranged or melee attack is that powerful, weapon master does help though. Quick Work never really makes that much of a difference and then they are expensive in money terms. I also have to admit that I dread painting a full unit with command as these guys have a lot of intricate detail. Has anyone some hints for how to use these guys?

The Warhammer

So I managed to get my Warhammer done overnight, I had him started so it wasn't much to do really. I was supposed to be playing some Warmachine but I was too tired to actually think so instead I put on an Audiobook (No Country for Old Men). As I have a big game next week, on Tuesday I think I need to get in gear and get a Lance finished. That means four Mechs of about the same weight category. I want to represent the Grey Death Legion but I don't really have a clue about whyt they typically might have in their armed forces. At this point I am going for two Warhammers, and Archer and a Marauder. This would be a fairly heavy lance I guess. I have no real reference! It has been fun reimmersing myself in the universe of Battletech. While I won't be investing in the game heavily, or at least as heavily as usual I am looking forward to some good games.
Glueing this model together was a pain. Firstly it is twelve parts so thats annoying already. Then the legs have no anchor points that they can be glued to systematically. No instead you have to hold four pieces together and hope it works. Having glued my fingers a few times I finally got the model to sit as you see it now... crooked. At the time I thought it gave a nice twist to the hips and made the model look a little more agile. However as I look at it now I gave it too much of a human pose and that takes away from the sense of a giant metal robot. There is just no easy way to get this model together that I could manage and I guess there are a lot of these out there that are very similar to mine. Anyway for now he is fine. Its not like I will be playing that much with him...
I copied pretty much the colours I used for the Blackjack yesterday. I did bring the camo scheme up a step. The stripes are much more visible now. I also was able to make them longer but spread further apart. I still think I should probably have gone for more distinct thick bands of colour but these are fine. I did put some more effort on the spot colours bringing them also up a little. I also made sure that the yellow and black stripes were more prominiemtly placed so that it breaks the camo scheme up. Combined with the very blue windows and the red missiles on the shoulder this guy is already looking better. I haven't settled yet on what more is needed but it is a good start!

Grey Death Legion

Here is my first mech in over a decade. It is a Blackjack painted in the Grey Death Legion colour scheme. I am really unhappy with it but I am viewing it as a test piece. This model is basically a 6mm scale one and I really haven't uch pratices with these. Highlighting the armour plates for instance presents a particular problem. In all the Battletech miniatures I have seen these small angular plates predominate. I feel like I shouldn't indivually highlight them all but I should do it as a whole across the model. This is more in keeping with a style like a 28mm model. So in the end I decided to keep the highlights to a very minimum and to just ensure that the plates were well defined. Thats easily done with a black wash! I also wantd to make the colour scheme of grey a little bit more visually appealing. I failed with this model. The camo scheme which I have to admit I have never been able to paint properly fades to much into the base grey colour. In my future mechs I will need to get this to stand out a lot more. One of the iconic colour schemes on Mechs is the yellow and black warning stripes. I put them in the rear of the model here as a test and I like them. I will go back and add these to the front I think. I didn't want to break with the camoflage scheme too much by adding a lot of these stripes but as the front of the model is so boring I guess I have to. There are some areas that immediately stand out. The top (proximal) ends of the arm mounted guns would be good. Also the prominent rounded torse has some piping underneath that would take it really well. This should break up the monotomy of the front without being overly obvious.

I also wanted some rust on this guy. The photograph has really picked out the orange colour and it is far more stark than I hope it is in reality. Looking at the photograph this is terrible... I might have to find a way to revise that rust. I just put it on in a few places to see if it looks good. At least I know now it doesn't look that good so I can be more selective in how I apply it. I managed to get my Warhammer glued together last night to with some luck I might get him painted tonight.

Avatar Preview

It has been a while since I managed to sit at my painting desk. The last few weeks saw an incredible increase in the amount of work landing on my desk so I really didn't have time (or the desire) to paint much. I managed an hour scattered here and there but really it didn't add up to much. This weekend also presented the chance to go to Berlin so I jumped at it. The city was nice and I can't recommend the Pergamon Museum enough. The British Museum were not the only looters of ancient cultures it would seem. The one thing I have been consistently working on over the last few weeks is the Avatar. I am terrified he will crumble in my hands due to the woeful cobbling together he had to suffer. So far he has remained in one piece... lets hope my luck holds. I really want to get him finished but it is a very detailed 'jack, at least in comparison to his future neighbours in my painting cabinet. I am not going to weather him too heavily as I guess this guiy would be the most taken care of 'jack in the menite arsenal. He has to have some somewhere but I will really keep it to a minimum. I will hopefully get him done this week before my Battletech stuff arrives.