2019 a Review!

Hoi There,

You guessed it, it's that time of the year again: time for a Year Review! Overall 2019 seems to have not been everyone's favourite year with political and climate related issues the world round, but hobby-wise I am not complaining.
Before I go on to tell what figures were finished this year let me point out that I have got two posts up at the 10th Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge. Go and have a look!

Here's the first one featuring Frostgrave Ghost Archipelago figures

The second post is over here with some 1:72 Post Apoc stuff

 

As for the figure count this year, here we go:

Seven Years War (1:72)  29 figures
Victoriana (28mm) 20 figures
Terrain (large pieces like buildings) 21
WW2 (28mm) 5 figures
Misc. Historical (28mm) 13 figures 
Battletech 10 figures
American Civil War (1:72) 32 figures
Generic Fantasy (28mm) 49 figures
GI Joe (28mm) 11 figures and 11 vehicles
Indian Mutiny (28mm) 44 figures
Hero Quest 26 figures
Blood Bowl 13 figures
Warhammer 40k 71 figures
Harry Potter 26 figures

That amounts to 381 painted items, not bad at all!

So what's up for 2020? Well a lot is put in the painting cue for the AHPC. Amongst these prepped figures are quite a lot of 1:72 HäT figures and a lot of 40k and Indian Mutiny figures.

 While I have a lot I would like to do next year, I have decided to stick with the motto of painting what I fancy doing, since that is what has kept me going and prevented an after-Challenge 9- depression. So yeah loads planned for the next year. I do find myself lacking in motivation to post it on the blog (a Crisis Convention report is long overdue) but I will try to keep you all posted.

For now all that I have left to say is: All the best wishes for 2020!

Cheers Sander

More ACW figures

Hoi,

As promised last post, here are some pictures of the new HäT ACW Confederate infantry figures.

It was really nice to paint these guys in all the different shades of grey...uhm... yeah well you get my meaning. So I guess more will follow in the future.

Cheers Sander

ACW it is...

Hoi,

Yeah well, for most of my hobby-life I have kept well away of the American Civil War but then this happened:

Yup that's my ugly mug as boxart again...

So obviously I now have to buy some boxes of those for the family as well and what to do with the figures eh? Apart from that I also received the testshots for all 3 sets (Command, US Marching and CS Marching) and well I have painted up most of them. Here are the US troops

Oh and yes I am aware I accidentally switched round the Colours, but I can't repair that without damaging the figures so I will leave it like this.

In a later post I will show you the CS infantry.

Always...

Hoi,

In town we have a lovely toy-shop, Het Hobbelpaardje (the Rocking Horse) that sells high quality toys, not the plastic, electric screaming neon colours trash you find in most toy-shops nowadays. They also sell board games, can you guess where this is going? Yeah, a short while ago they also started to sell GW stuff and are now an independent retailer for Warlord Games as well. I might have told in an earlier post that I have painted up a set of  GW "First Strike" figures for demo use and that's pretty much that got me back into painting Space Marines.

Now Arthur has been into Harry Potter for some time now and that got me curious about the Knight Models HP miniature game. As it happens Martijn, the shop's co-owner, had two of the games lying around; one personal box and one for the shop. Since he apparantly has two left thumbs he broke pretty much half of the wands in the boxes and I promissed to see whether I could fix them. "If you are able to make one complete set out of the two that's fine!" he said, yeah well so I made him one big set using all figures by doing some small conversions ;-)

The forces of evil

The Death Eaters:

Slytherin students with Draco to the left:

Giant spiders, Aragogs offspring:

 

The evil force all gathered together to do Lord Voldemort's bidding.

 

The forces of Hogwarts 

 

One of the Hermione figures had..yup a broken wand, so I replaced her hand and painted her up like Cho.

Draco (left) and Ron (right) are both made using the Ron figure. The wand on Ron's figure had broken so I painted the remains brass to represent the deluminator.

Harry himself (right) and an unnamed Slytherin student using the same figure but since the want had broken I replaced it. 

Hermione and the lads all together facing the forces of evil.

So what's the judgement? Well figure-wise, the resin is really fragile it will brake as soon as you look at it. That said the figures are beautiful, truly! If you're a true Potter-head you'll want these in your collection. Price-wise they are pretty expensive so that's a bit of a thing. I was allowed to borrow the rule-book as well and have a look at the magic cards. I think I rather dig the rules excepting the wound-tracking system, that looks like unnecessarilly complicated to me.

For now I have decided to buy some Nano Minifigures Metal Harry Potter figures and re-paint them for use with the ever flexibel Hero Quest rules. More on this project later!

Showdown:

Meet and greet...

Hoi,

As I told you all a while ago the family and myself visited the UK during the summer. We stayed in Canterbury for two weeks and visited the surroundings. Margate and Hern Bay were interesting places to see and London is always a thrill, specially when going to Hamleys with two small lads...

Anyway, one of the absolute highlights of the holidays for me was going to Rye in order to hook up with the legendary Lord Awdry of "28mm Victorian Warfare" fame. We met up at the railway station and immediately set out to find a suitable pub to catch up. We had some excellent pints and refreshments as well as some brilliant discussions, both about the hobby and work, us being in the same line of work and all.

Rye is a brilliant little town and we even had time to visit the local toy soldier shop, Soldiers of Rye, run by an excellently entertaining gentleman who casts and paints his own products and sells some nice books. He even gave us some solid vacation booking advice as well as some nice personal stories.

Some excellent brews were enjoyed and I really had to remind myself I was drinking pints (European glasses tend to contain less beer) This one I particularly liked.

Michael is one of the Hobby's Legends to me and so it was brilliant to be able to meet him. The last time, and also first time, we met was 2 years ago at Hastings and we forgot to take a picture back then, just as I forgot to take one of Arthur, Curt and myself way back. This time we remembered and well I can only hope it wasn't the last opportunity for a mug-shot and we will get more in the future.

I'd say this is what this hobby is all about: gaining new friends to learn from, enjoy each others company and have great fun in general!

Thanks mate and hopefully till next time!

Cheers Sander

Sisters of Battle

Hoi,

Quite some years ago I owned a nice sizeable army of Sisters of Battle for 40k. During my GW Dark-Age however, I sold most of my armies and with them the Sisters. Selling them was hard, it was the army I most hated to het rid off, recently the news that plastic SoB's are on the horizon filtered through to me and I jumped on the wagon again. I have obtained quite a lot of SoB characters and Sisters and even some stuff I didn't own back in the days of old. Painting is slow because I cannot choose what colour scheme. I have found a great blue and white scheme on Pinterest but when I did a test- figure it didn't feel right...

So I started on some of the other figures to start with. Two Death Cult Assasins and a Hospitaler.

The Hospitaler is one of the few figures I kept back from my original army and she wore pretty much the same colours then.  

The Assasins are new, well okay second hand since I bought off Ebay, a great source of figures specially if they come at a nice price.

I really like how the Assasins turned out, I am less sure about the hospitaler. I was not able to get the details as crisp as I would like to.

In between other stuff I have been doing some small commissions, one is a few figures for a friend from his Gloomhaven game. They are some of the main characters, but I cannot say I like them all too much. The detail is shallow and the material is a bit too soft.

We played two quests from the game and the gameplay is not to bad, but it is a far too expensive game with the RPG part of it taken way to much time. It's not my cup of tea.

Next up my trip to the UK!

Cheers

So what have I been up to?

Hoi,

Yeah I know, real life takes up too much time by far. So what figures did I paint during the holidays? Well I did mention I painted quite a lot of Space marines so here are some of my Dark Angel and Death Watch marines.

 These are some Dark Angels. There's a Plasma gunner, you can't have too many of those for sure! The two smaller figures are "Watchers in the Dark" ethereal figures who sometimes help the highest ranking Dark Angels.

 Next up are some Death Watch troopers. There's two old white metal figures (the Ultramarine Veteran and the Blood Angel) and one new plastic one, the Ultrasmurf wielding the Phase blade.

That's it for today. Next time I'll be showing you some more 40K stuff and I will be posting a special item about my trip to the UK where I met a pretty special person.

Cheers Sander