Constant

Everything is still pretty constant with wedding prep, work and the new cat disrupting life pretty heavily still.

The new Eldar codex had my mind ticking away at work today though, with colour schemes and ideas for my piratical/harlequin support for my counts-as Exodite army. I want to wait until I have the codex though so that I can read more about what the available options are before I go ahead and make any more models :)

My wife & I were discussing hte other day the idea of moving our bedroom. Currently the bedroom is in the attic room of our house and is a really large space, which we are obviously only in to sleep. We were discussing how good a space it would be for a study/gaming room allowing more easy setup/packup for Malifaux/board games and the like.

This is a pipe dream currently, but once life has gone back to normal a bit more we can start considering measurements and moving of furniture to one of the spare rooms and see if this will work :)

Sorry there isn't much going on at the moment, it's pretty frantic and will be at least until best man duties are done & dusted

Thanks for stopping by

Lofty

Beyond The North Waves

It's been a while, but there has been lots going on!

First off was an absolutely fantastic holiday. Starting with a weekend staying with relatives in London, a week in the Norwegian fjords, and a week off at home.

Norway was completely spectacular, it's a beautiful country, which I would struggle to convey with words or even photos unable to capture the sheer scale of the place.

Aside from some really bad sea conditions overnight on the boat, the food was excellent and the excursions we went on in the ports were really great.

Our week off afterwards really didnt go as planned however. We were going to catch up on some things around the house like hanging some pictures, playing some Malifaux etc. However when we got home on the Monday, I could hear a cat outside but dismissed it as one of the local cats trying to be let into its house. I could still hear it very lat at night though, so out we went to investigate and found a 10 week old kitten out in our yard hiding under a bush.

So our week ended up being spent calling around local vets/pet rescue charities printing & putting up posters. Because we already have cats we had to keep him in the bathroom which meant even taking a shower was at least an hour long process, moving him into a temporary cage downstairs, showering, drying everything down, moving him back.
Anyway, the upshot of all this is that we haven't been able to find the original owners as he doesn't have a microchip, and no one has contacted us from the vets or posters, so I guess he lives with us now, which means the sage of introducing him to three shy/grumpy adult cats can begin...

I know you don't tune in here for cat stories, but it;s the reason I've had a lot less time than I hoped for hobbying this past few weeks.

Unfortunately I don't have a free weekend until after my friend's wedding in November, so I'll only be posting snippets of any work i manage to get done in limited free time.

Hoping to be able to grab the new Malifaux book & deck to get the October mystery box promotion, and then the November promotion is for the Jury & Miss Anne Thrope who will go great with Rollins Black.

On top of all that, Eldar is the next codex to be released! And I just got a promotion through work.

Very hectic st the moment, but hopefully I will have more to update soon!

Thanks for stopping by
Lofty

Loss of Signal

I've mentioned previously that we are away on Holiday at the end of the month. This week will be pretty busy with packing/getting sorted etc.

I guess this is just a reminder about the lack of posts for the next week/ten days or so.

Returning the first week of October, fora  week off work with no real fixed plans so hoping to get a fair amount of hobby time, including hopefully more than a few games as well as painting :)

So, bear with me, I'll be back soon :)

Thanks for stopping by
Lofty

Preparation

Saturday yielded some pretty good progress, with 4 Guild Hounds, Kamaitachi, & 3 Terracota Warriors assembled & based (except for sand/texture paste). The hounds bases needed a 'lever' in the same way as the watcher/Guardians for Hoffman due to tiny contact points on the base. The levers are more subtle, with bits of broken fence/building rather than full on sewer pipes as the models are pretty agnostic of any of my guild crews at the moment, and 'McCabe' is primarily desert/wasteland based. I didn't really have an opportunity to airbrush on Saturday. My wife was busy preparing for a stall on Sunday and the cats were shut out of the kitchen, so I didn't want to stress them out any more by making weird noises and smells whilst they sat in the study with me.

All models for the guild apart from Lucius & lawyers, Nino, Governers proxy, Mounted Rollins Black, Iggy Pup & the Ramone sisters are also now pinned to (magnetised) bases ready to hit the table. I got pretty sick of all the new stuff I had bought just sitting in a drawer waiting to be painted, and having so little time recently. The Wild Ones models need a little bit of paint on what will be impossible to reach places once they are based, but after that I'm happy to continue painting them once they are based. Nino also has a pose which creates impossible to reach areas once based, so he needs a little work before basing. The other models simply aren't a priority right now so don't have a base ready to go on.

We have a holiday coming up from 21st September - 2nd October, so in and between sorting things out for that, I will be continuing to prep models for table time, and maybe even get some painting done during any longer times I find myself with for hobbying :)

Lists are definitely the devil it seems, having good intentions is one thing but listing what I aim to get done seems to invite something to crop up and prevent me from having the time. I need to rethink this idea for the blog, as I still want to list progress & what's on the table so to speak but it isn't working out brilliantly in its current format.

Malifaux bootcamp was cancelled due to dates confusion, but I'm still taking my guild to play this Saturday evening for a couple of games, so the expanded collection will be good to have for that.

I was thinking about what I could do to get better at the game, and thought that having cards models in deck boxes makes it a real faff to look through and read abilities etc, so I had a look on Amazon for a card binder and ended up with an A4 and A5 one of these which I really like, and enables me to flick through and ready cards easily, and see upgrades at the same time too.

The City Of The Damned

It's so hard not to just hop on a computer game after getting home from work, and then it being nearly 9pm by the time we have cooked, eaten, watched this week's TV Show (Preacher), washed up, prepared food for tomorrow. A shorter commute would be amazing, but having the money to move house isn't realistic right now.

It's not all doom & gloom, just a commentary on life as-is. The stag weekend last weekend allowed me to catch up with a high school friend who lives a couple of hours away, who also happened to come 14/200 odd in a Malifaux tournament with Yan Lo. We got to chatting about wave 5 releases and GG18 being tricky for guild. The Hen weekend for the same wedding is next weekend so Mr Yan Lo, the stag and I are all at a loose end next weekend. The stag has to work on Saturday so we have a Malifaux boot camp planned for Saturday. Mr Yan Lo usually drubs me pretty badly but in a well meaning friendly kind of way :p so there should be a lot for me to learn.

Which (finally) leads on to the main point here, which is that I have a target to aim for to get some models ready. Hopefully Tomorrow night, Friday and most of Saturday will allow some painting time to get progress made on the Ortegas & DM recruiters et al. Maybe even some more airbrushing on Saturday. Some planning/prioritising will be needed to make sure I get the models ready that are most wanted on the table top. Maybe even a current state of affairs for the guild/each project is a good idea to see what needs doing versus how much it's needed. Maybe this would fit well into the project pages, but it would also benefit from a post in itself.

Long and rambling seems to be the standard these days, apologies. Hopefully a bit of planning/structure will allow a bit of motivation, even without a lot of time so it doesn't feel like 'not enough time'

Thanks for stopping by
Lofty

Ours is The Fury

Tenuous post title at best. I'm away on a stag weekend as of tomorrow, so I won't have any time to sit and paint or otherwise make any hobby progress, except maybe some assembly/basing this evening.

After airbrushing recently, and having a much better time of it with the smaller needle (or maybe it's the better airbrush) I felt empowered to try something a little more involved with the airbrush than just base coating. The flow control felt good, and the results were pleasing, so I look forward to getting the brush out on something a little larger, maybe the Eldar vehicles which I currently have WIP. I'm not sure when this will be, but October will hopefully be a lot quieter, and allow chance for a lot more hobby time (we are away for ten days towards the end of September).

I was also reading around some of the new Wave 5 upgrades & models, as well as seeing some of (presumably) Wave 4 models used in a battle report which made me really want to get my recruiters finished, and get back in to gaming regularly full stop. It seems to be the first aspect of the hobby that suffers when time is of the essence.

Another busy couple of weeks meaning that setting up some hobby space for an hour or so has lost out to easy, quick computer game sessions, this time I've fired up Mordheim again with the Witch Hunters DLC. Admittedly I'm already planning on going back to a Mercenary warband, but hopefully the Witch Hunters will capture my interest a little more before too long.

Not much actual content again, for which I can only apologise but the end of the year should allow for a lot more :)

Thanks for stopping by

Lofty

Quick Work

After a good weekend, despite not being at home very much, and a music festival providing a strange morning/evening routine with bands on until late, I did manage to get done the airbrushing I planned previously.

The 5mm needle in the older brush is far too big, it throws out gallons per seconds worth of paint, only some of which gets on the model of course due to a wide spray cone versus a relatively narrow model profile. The Ortegas that got sprayed took a whole heap of paint, but when using the 3mm needle in the newer brush (being too lazy to clean out the brush for a second colour had a surprising benefit), the paint is much more targeted, and didn't really take that much longer. Coupled with the fact that less paint overall was used for only one good coat instead of multiple brush coats, I'd call this a win! This doesn't seem like much at all, and is far from exemplary use of an airbrush, but it's progress, and saved time :)

There are a couple of further notes I'd like to make at this point about the equipment I'm currently using.

First off, the airbrush booth doesn't seem to drag away a massive amount of the paint... This is either because I still hold the miniatures i'm working on quite close to me whilst working, or for other as yet unknown reasons. Also, probably because of the sheer output of the 5mm needle, there was some paint which made it through the gaps in the fold out parts of the booth and onto my desk. This was easily cleaned with some airbrush cleaning fluid on some paper towel, though so not a massive issue. Lastly some paint DOES still come out of the filter at the back, so unless the booth is venting out of the window using the parts provided, some paper behind the vent at the back is necessary to preserver whatever might be behind the booth in your setup (my monitors/items on the monitor shelf).

Second, the newer airbrush is far superior to the first one I bought. It feels smoother in the trigger, and paint flow, and clogs less which is a huge plus! It says something that the older brush clogged more with VMA paint and paint thinner than the newer brush did with VGC paint and thinner...

Lastly, regardless of using an airbrush booth or not, ALWAYS wear a filter mask. This is probably related to my holding miniatures so close to me still while working on them, but I felt a bit light headed after I was done, and breathing in atomised airbrush thinner can't be good for any aspect of health really. Look after your lungs!