With A REBBL Yell!

It occured to me that it's been a while since I showed any of my painted miniatures so I thought it was about time I did something about that.

A couple of years ago, the great Darren Latham* got in touch with me and asked me to paint a miniature to use as a trophy for the Blood Bowl league he was involved in, the Reddit Eternal Blood Bowl League (REBBL). Of course I said yes! This first one was the plastic Blood Bowl Troll from GW:



This one seemed to go down quite well and he came back for more for the next trophy. This one was the Forge World Blood Bowl Minotaur.


After that, I was contacted directly by the organizer of REBBL, Stephen Peers. The next one asked me to do was Vinci's Wolf from Greebo Games.


Finally, the most recent one was the Burning Treeman (with his marker familiars), also from Greebo.


I've really quite enjoyed doing these miniatures, and it's given me the opportunity to see a couple of models from a manufacturer I was previously unaware of. I can highly recommend having a look at Greebo Games, particularly if you're a player of Blood Bowl or similar games. There's some great miniatures on their site, and at good prices.

Thanks for reading!
-Stu







*Yeah, yeah, I'm a name-dropper. Well, I don't get to do it very often...

It's a Fresh New Week...

...and, hopefully, normal service will resume.

Good morning/afternoon/evening everybody!
It's 3 of the Monday morning clock as I type this, while listening to my "Feelgood" playlist* on Spotify, and I've just finished a couple of updates to the Die Rolling and Stuff of Legends pages. So, what am I doing up at such an ungodly hour? Well, I'm acclimatising myself to my upcoming new job. In a few weeks I'll be starting work on night shifts, so I'm going to have to get used to working at nights more often. For the forseeable future, many posts will be at some quite antisocial hours (at least for those of you in the UK...)
Meanwhile, in the nearer future, this week should see the start of my new format of news pages, an update to the Conquest er...quest and I'll try to squeeze a couple of other things too.
Once again, my apologies for the lack of content last week. Thank you for those who have stuck by me and continue to follow my ramblings.
Right, I'm off to get something to eat and snatch some snooze. I'll leave you with this picture of something I finished last week (yes, I actually finished a miniature...!)

The BEST thing about Heroquest is...
or:
Big Hans** is back! 

*Some 80's power rock, an extremely eclectic mix of classics from the 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's, and a few more modern curveballs thrown in for good measure...if you're interested, it's here. 
**Get it? It's because he's got big...oh, never mind. 

The Eldar Phantom Titan: The Base

Greetings, all!
So, after some hiatus, it's back on with the big one- the Eldar Phantom Titan. Now, those amongst you with both eagle-eyes and excellent memories may have spotted the legs of the Phantom assembled in my WIP-shelves photo from my Hatcave (really must think of a better name than that*) announcement last summer. So, I thought I'd better bring you all up to speed with how I got the bottom half of the Phantom built. First, though, there's the base to consider.
A big model like this really needs a base to support it, as the last thing you want is to knock it over with some over-zealous dice-rolling and fracture a delicate part. Big bases are commercially available and the client sourced a suitable one from...errr, somewhere. I really must ask him where he got it from.
Anyhoo, the client asked if the Phantom could be posed standing with one foot on a broken-off Imperial Titan weapon (a Melta Cannon), so the first thing to do was to make the provided broken weapon look right, and position it onto the base.
To start with, I raided the bits box to build a piece that would look like the arm joint had sheared off at a pivot point, exposing wire bundles. I also made a couple of plugs to show where a couple of feeds had been pulled out.

Next up I wanted to make the weapon itself look like it had crashed into the ground after being snapped off the Titan. I figured that something so big and heavy, dropping from fifty metres up would not survive intact, so I wanted to add some heavy damage to it. I cut into the gun barrels and then heated them and bent them (judicious application of the required amount of brute force), as if they'd hit the ground tip-first. Some cuts with a knife and clippers added to the effect of damage.

Then I needed to do some damage to the guard that surrounds the gun barrels. I really had some fun with this, cutting and bending (a hairdryer is really helpful with this sort of thing) and I even broke out the mini-drill to make some scuffs and gouges.

Finally all the pieces were assembled (much forcing and swearing and gluing-together of fingers happened...) and attached to the body of the gun, which had also been heavily seen-to with the clippers, knife and mini-drill.

I then needed to paint the gun before it was attached to the base. I needed to do this as a) the barrels would need to be painted before the guards were fixed in place and it made sense to do the whole thing at once, and b) I wanted to be able to get some painting done, to get a feel for the scale of the thing. 

Finally, the gun needed to be fixed into place on the base. I glued it down, and built up some Milliput around it, along with some broken shards of Eldar architecture that the gun landed on.

So that's that. Now I was ready to begin work on positioning the legs. So far, it had been easy and a lot of fun and there was no reason to think it would be any different from now on...

*At the moment, I've using "Edward Shedward" or "Eddie McSheddie McWoo." My head is often an odd place...Please, someone come up with something better...

The Road To Golden Demon 2020

As you will know, if you saw my post about this year's Warhammer Fest, my entry to Golden Demon 2019 was not very successful. I spoke about some of the factors that I believe, lead to my less than stellar performance. One of these was lack of time management on my part. Leaving it until I'd started on my entry for The Masters, I then faffed about on other entries, and thus ended up with a below par Masters figure, and the other entries unfinished. That will not happen this year. This year I will have my other entries ready by the time the Masters figure is announced next year, and so I will be able to devote all my time to it. In order to do this, I'm starting my other entries now. I already have an idea for the Age of Sigmar Single Figure, and I've begun work already on converting the models for the AoS Duel. I also have a diorama, that was begun two years ago (it was supposed to be my entry into the 2017 Winners Competition, but real life stepped in and made sure that wasn't going to happen...) It's a complicated piece (for me) and I'm not sure I'll get it done in a year, so that's going to be of lower priority. I've also got an idea for a 40k Squad.
Working on these through the course of the year will serve another purpose, too...
Practice.
See, I do a lot of painting during the year, mostly commissions and the occasional bit for myself. None of this work is done to a competition standard so, the only time I paint anything to Golden Demon standard is for the Golden Demons themselves. That's like a jogger who does a couple of times around the block every day suddenly deciding, a month before the Olympics, that he's going to compete in the marathon. It's a whole different kettle of mixed metaphors. I need to keep my eye in at a competition level and that means painting more top-tier pieces. Plus, there's other competitions along the way during the year...
The categories for EverChosen have been announced, as has the deadline. July 27th is not that far away so it’s going to be a tough challenge. However, there is one piece to do before then. A standalone competition was organised by Victor Roman over on ‘Eavier Metal, and it’s to paint a model in 30 days. Hence the title, The 30 Day Challenge. The miniature selected (and everybody has to do the same one) is Festus The Leechlord. So, at least if I get this done, I’ll have at least one model to enter for EverChosen…
Also announced, over on ‘Eavier Metal, is this year’s Eadbanger. Now, I’ve never managed to find the time to enter this competition, and it’s gone from strength to strength over the years, becoming one of the most beloved of online competitions and I’d dearly love to have a go at it so, this year, I’m going to give it a shot for sure.
The first step for any competition is to decide which models to enter. The 30 Day Challenge was already decided on, so the next up was a figure for EverChosen.
Even with the maximum 60mm base size there was a lot of scope and I spent quite a while looking through what was available and…frankly, there was too much to choose from. I wanted something that would catch the judges eye, but not be too big, due to the tight time limit. Also, at the moment (as ever) funds are tight do I couldn’t stretch to a £30-£40 model at the moment. So I thought about the Mountain of Unpaintedness and started having a rummage and I found…this. It’s a figure I really like- it’s dynamic, with lots of movement; it’s got a good mix of cloth and armour and it’s got a really expressive face. Lots of scope for a nice paint job. I’m going to mount it on a hero base or maybe even the Dais Arcanum, if I can get hold of one.
Finally, we have ‘Eadbanger (or, to give it’s full title: ‘Eavier Metal Episode V: ‘Eadbanger Stikes Back…)  I'm not sure how many categories I'm going to have the time to enter (I'd like to give one of the larger miniatures categories a shot...) but, in the the Single Figure category, I'm going to enter something I’ve been waiting to paint for a while- a really special miniature that I’ve been saving for a special occasion…
Last November I went up to Nottingham to go to the 40k Vigilus Weekender where my Ork Kommando Boss won me a finalist’s pin. While in Nottingham I caught up with an old friend, the great Kev White, sculptor and driving force behind Hasslefree Miniatures. He gave me a truly wonderful gift- one of the few resin castings he had done of Mariku Yuri, a Van Saar gang leader he made as a personal project.

I’ve been itching to paint it ever since but I wanted to be able to give it the due time to get it right. It needed a special occasion. ‘Eadbanger V is just such an occasion. If I only get one model done for it, it has to be that one and at least I can be sure it won't be painted by loads of other people...!
So, there we have it. Minis chosen and ready to go (at least they will be when Festus gets here). Three competitions to enter is an ambitious task, but I really want to give all three the best shot I can. Watch this space for further updates…