Birthday!

Hoi,

On Monday January 6th I turned 34, Huzzah I guess... Present-wise I was very spoilt with hobby related books. So what did I get?
Well first off I had gotten the first Space Captain Smith novel by Toby Frost from Saint Nicks and now I have the remaining 3 novels in the series as well.
From my Mum and Dad I have received the amazing Wargames Illustrated special issue Mega Wargames which is absolutely stunning!

From my lovely wife I've gotten Spartan's scenery set Barracks Accessories

I also received the truly amazing Haynes Owners Workshop Manual of the Imperial Death Star

So you see spoiled as a spoiled brat! Besides that I also got the new Terry Pratchett book "raising Steam" and an audiobook "Pyramids" also by Terry Pratchett and read by Tony Robinson.
Now where to start reading?

Cheers Sander

Listening to: "Pyramids" read by Tony Robinson

2013 Review

Hoi There!

This is most probably the final post for 2013 and as many bloggers are doing: I will take a little step back and reflect on this years' hobby ventures.

The one regret I have concerning the 2013 Hobby year is the small amount of games I've played. The only true wargame I've attended was the 7YW Black Powder game I won from Pijlie at the IMPACT convention. I also played quite some games of X-wing, but for some reason I cannot find them to be a real wargame as more of a board-game.I will have to do something about this in 2014.

Paintingwise the year has been quite good. The 7YW Austrian army is nigh on finished, I have managed to paint up quite some French Napoleonic Horse regiments and some small projects along the way as well. A glimpse through the posts for 2013 will show you what the latter were, I'm not going to go into detail here right now.

While I still have a large amount of GW models lying on the unpainted-pile, I am fairly confident that I will not buy (at least certainly NOT for the full prise) any of their products in the future. The company's antics are just about enough for me at this moment in time. The miniatures they produce are still really nicely done, but all the other stuff is just utter bollocks!

Old year's Eve is usually one of my most productive days regarding painting, but with Arthur at the age of 2 and needing a lot of attention I will not get anything done until he's asleep. So what projects are currently on the workbench? For starters I am painting up an English Regiment of Foot for the 7YW, basecoated as well, are the following mini's:
- some Battletroops DC troops
- 5 Dark Angel tactical Marines
- 5 Deathwing Terminators
- A vignette featuring Murat and his ADC's
- A WW1 German vignette
- two gladiators
- some Star Wars fighters
- A Napoleonic French Artillery battery.

These will never get done today I'm afraid, but I will try to have a go at them.

This brings me to the BIG project of Salamanca. Usually I place updates in the appropriate "other" blog but for once a post here will have to suffice. Progress is steady but slow as I have been expecting anyway. The boards are all landscaped and I now need to find time to sand them and spray-coat them. After which painting will ensue. My biggest concerns are the placing of the figures on the boards: will drilling holes, fracture the layers of coating? Besides that I'm really bothered by the adding of scenic details like flock and vegetation. What colours do I use, in what amounts and do I put this on before or after putting the figures in place. Regarding the figures I am seriously lacking in usable French and Portuguese figures, but the huge amount of British figures needed will see me painting on for some time yet so HäT or any other producer has some time left to get cracking on some decent sets.

Well that's all for so far from me, all that's left for me to do here is thank you all for the great year of 2013 and wish you all the best for 2014!

Cheers Sander

Listening to: "the Top 2000" on the Radio

In a Galaxy not that far away!

Hoi,

Some time ago I mentioned obtaining some great old OOP West End Games Star Wars figures. In the time between then and now I've been painting some of them up and thought I'd show them here. Now I have quite a lot of Tatooine flavoured stuff so I based them desert-fashion. That said I do not yet have anything resembling desert terrain so the figures are photographed on my usual grass matt which feels all wrong.

 Now without further ado:

Some desert-dwellers

Staff at the Cantina

Mos Eisley Residents

Jabba's Muscle (certainly not his brain...)

And finally the proverbial Local Yokel, about to have his Galaxy turned upside down...

I still have quite a lot of Tatooine themed figures awaiting basing and coating but had to order more bases from Renedra. Amongst these are about all the available Bounty hunters including the famous Boba Fett...
Talking philosophically about these miniatures: at the moment I am more into them from a collecting point of view. As such basing should not be a problem, but my present collection has two main angles. These are Tatooine, as already stated, and some space-station/ Star Destroyer kind of theme. The latter needs an all together different approach base-wise. No real decent bases are available so I need to get converting or get my friend Mark to laser me something. I might just know what that should be but I am keeping it to myself for now.

Anyway hope you like these and keep your eyes peeled for more in the (nearish)  future!

Cheers Sander

Listening to: "Blunderbuss" by Jack White

The Saga continues and Seasonal Greetings!

Hoi,

Huzzah the Holidays have arrived, 2 weeks off from work. Well I need to correct some tests, but other than that I'm free as a bird. So Sunday evening I have managed to finish my regiment of Napoleonic French Dragoons. Since they are Italeri figures, and the paint doesn't adhere to their plastic as well as to HäT's or Ceasar's, I wanted to give them a spray-coat of matt varnish. My spray-can was empty so I took the lad along and went to the local GW retailer. Funnily enough this shares it's premisses with a flower-shop and is run by two twin-sisters which I have come to know fairly well over the years. While the rants against GW policy has been going on for years the ladies have always been pretty positive and have had a very large offering of the assortment for sale.So when I went on the look for the varnish cans, one of them appeared at my shoulder and said: "take anything you want it all has 50% off". A bit flabbergasted I asked why the huge sale. "Oh we've had enough of GW's antics, we're closing the GW section of the shop down." And voila another one bites the dust!

This shop, located in the heart of a thriving neighbourhood organising and participating in diverse conventions and tournaments is finally forced to close down. They are thinking of still offering a table or two for youngsters to come and play on but all good things must come to an end I guess...
Si due to the sale, no varnish in the house alas, I went away with December's WD (got it for €4,- but that's still too steep a price imho) and some paints, and a very nasty gut feeling!

Still tonight is Christmas Eve and while the rain is positively hammering the windows and I'm a bit queasily anticipating tonight's over-copious diner, I thought, let's put up a post with some nice pictures of the newest regiment of dragoons. They depict the 13th regiment, which was faced yellow if I'm not mistaken. Since they still have not been varnished no flock has been added yet but otherwise they're all ready to go.

Very Merry Christmas to you all!

Cheers Sander

Listening to:  

Napoleonic Brits!

Hoi,

One of my all-time favourite sets of HäT figures is the Peninsular British. Here's is my first truly complete regiment of them. The command figures are test-shot figures so they are missing the King's Colour which ill follow soonish.

enjoy!

Cheers Sander

Listening to: "El Camino" by the Black Keys

Back in a galaxy far far away, with some more Napoleonics!

Hoi There,

Another, rather too long, period of real life catching up with me.This did not prevent me from both painting and obtaining new figures. I have painted some Napoleonics and bought some HäT sets from the E23 release, on which in a future post more, and some OOP West End Games Star Wars miniatures.

The boxes shown below are the Heroes of the Rebellion and A New Hope collectors boxes and usually these sell for over $70,- I was able to pick up both for under $20,- each. The boxes were in very nice condition, all figures were accounted for and even the original foam and astonishingly the paper leaflet containing the in-game statistics of the figures were present!

Apart from these I have been able to scoop up 2 lots of blisters of the same range from e-bay at a very good price with some more characters I'd really like to add to the collection. Funnily enough I owned a good deal of these figures some years ago. I had bought them with gaming in mind and was frustrated by the lack of rules and figures available back then (as well as cash) so I sold them on. Now I have decided that gaming is not my main priority but painting and collecting is, so here they are. Keep your eyes on this spot for future posts on painted Star Wars stuff.

So what Napoleonics did I paint? Well it's HäT again! I came round to painting up two bases of Württemberg horse artillery. 

They paint up really well, but since I wanted more then 4 crewmen I split up the last crew in the box. The guns are left separate from the base in order to literally limber them up. Limbers and teams will come from HäT's Austrian train set, in due time. The howitzer barrel is from the Austrian artillery set as well.   

Cheers Sander

Listening to:

Steampunk?

Hoi,

While browsing youtube I found these really cool clips!

Arms race


and


Airlords of Airia

cheers Sander