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

Oops I did it again...

Hoi,

Perhaps you remember me telling you way back I had joined a Kickstarter. It was for the Battletech computer game and was a mixed succes. I entered at the lowest entry level that gave you the game as well as some perks. In the end I ended up with a nice soundtrack, some digital art and fiction and a game that didn't run properly on my notebook, big bummer.

Now Catalyst games is doing a miniature themed Kickstarter and after much deliberation I decided to enter that too. At a higher pledge level this time and boy has it taken off. I really think I get a lot of nice free goodies this time!

Go ahead and have a look:

The Clan Invasion

More news later!

Out with the Old in with the New

Hoi,

It cannot be denied that it has been a long while since I have posted here. Now you will have noticed the update of the look of the blog, that was one of the reasons for my stay of absence. There are legio other reasons but I won't bother you with that now. Let me first tell you about the picture now adorning the banner of this blog. It's a drawing of me, obviously, in 7YW Austrian uniform.

It came about due to my close relationship with the great people at HäT industries, who at one point realised that since most new boxart is done digitally, it could be done with real people's faces on them rather then invented persons. So I was asked would you like to donate your face to some boxart? Oh hell yes I would like to! So now you can go to any good modelshop and buy two different boxes featuring my ugly mug i.e. the 7YW Austrian command and samples boxes.

Save to say I am immensely proud and happy to receive this honour. I am allowed the use of the picture for own use so I asked a co-worker of the arts-department at school, who's great with digital stuff, to create me a new banner and hey presto. The fact I am not able to centre it correctly is due to the vagaries of Blogger, but hey it looks nice enough to me.

Meanwhile I have been busy doing work but have also done a little hobbying by the side and I will be showing some of the results of that here soon.

For now that's all folks, cheers Sander

AHPC update

Hoi,

No less than 3 post are live on the Challenge site.

Two earlier ones (dating February 12th) are these:

- Heroquest

- GI Joe vehicles

Today the Water feature bonusround went live, so a vote would appreciated
Look for "SanderS All aboard!" in the list of links to the right of your screen in the webversion of your device.

AHPC Post II is live

Hoi

Meanwhile my second post for the Challenge has been online for some time now. So you might want to drop in and have a peak.

HERE

Cheers Sander