Grrrr – damaged house

No dear friends, do not fear, my family home is still intact. Even though we’ve had earthquakes and driving wind, torrential rain and weird lightning storms our house has weathered it all without so much as a whimper. 

No the title of this post refers to my hobby and in particular the below mathematical formula, of which many of you are familiar;

Children + Party at your house = damaged Sarissa Building

So what is my lesson learned from this little experience? Don’t let a 4 and 6 year old you don’t know go anywhere near your prized wargames scenery!

Oh and bottling up your rage and fury is really flippng hard whilst the little demons are standing innocently behind their parents as I say (for political, must keep the neighbours happy reasons) “don’t worry, I can fix it”.

Ho hum!

BFG Transports

You know when you've completed a plastic model and the pesky manufacturer provides you with oodles of extra's that you don't use, well I decided to use some. Yes this is another take on my building something from nothing insanity.

As I was recently painting up my BFG ships I thought it might be fun to have some transports as objectives, a quick trawl through the t'interweb for inspiration resulted in me gleefully diving into my bits box looking for old bits of sprue to kit bash together.

So what we have here are parts from GW's Tau, Space Marines and Imperial Guard Range cobbled together to create what I think are perfectly acceptable transports for BFG. I did manage to squeeze a few left over weapons batteries and comms towers in there too to keep the scale right and overall I'm quite happy with how they've turned out.

Here's a shot with my recently completed Frigates to show scale, I'll add them to the group shot once I get round to taking one.

Oooh, Spaceships

So I’ve just managed to get finished the final batch of ships for my Battlefleet Gothic Imperial Fleet. These little babies are the Sword and Firestorm frigates, nice little models with plenty of character.

The Sword is armed with a weapons battery (think naval broadside) whilst the firestorm has a forward firing lance, easily enough to handle those pesky chaos raiders.

 
As I said this finishes off my BFG fleet however I do need to go back and do some more detailing on the bigger models, that’s the curse I guess of painting stuff over a ten year period. You end up getting better and need to redo stuff!

So once I’ve touched up the older stuff I’ll do a group shot, then it’ll be time to get out the space sheet and play a few games of space warfare!

More recycling - but not hobby related

Its amazing what you can pull together from junk you find lying about. This workbench took me about 3 hours to build and cost me $5 in total. All the materials were either left in the garage by the previous owners when we bought the house or sourced from the junk pile at my kids school. The only thing I had to buy were the nails. I guess this is vaguely hobby related as I can now crack on with boarding the garage and turning half of it into a gaming room. My garage is currently a disaster area with things strewn everywhere, however this workbench is the start of a general tidy up that should result in a rumpus/gaming room! I already have a pool table, just need a dart board and games console!

And yes it is very tall however I am 6ft 2" so ti means I can work on things without getting a bad back

More stuff from nowt (Part 2)

We've been watching a Brit drama series called Happy Valley that's based in Halifax, which is a couple of miles from where we lived in the Uk so I've found myself becoming incredibly "Yorkshire", hence the "nowt" in the title (which for all you none Yorkshire speakers means "nothing")

Anyway here's the second installment of my "somert fo nowt" (or something from nothing) post - Ruins. As Ash and I got into Frostgrave I decided to build a ruin, which I posted about a while ago. Then Scott got me thinking about making some Osgiliath/Ithilien ruins so I set to with sharp knife and scrap poly and hey presto, more ruins.

Beanomir still searching for that elusive "precious"

"Oi Sean..... er I mean Beanomir don't go in there, you might get jumped by a Hobbit"

Beanomir continues to wander about, bloody hell Sean it ain't in there!



Posing dramatically!

"this looks a bit like the pub!"


"I know, up them there steps, thats why the pie shop....err I mean the ring is"

"Yup definitely in there" and the strange Yorkshireman marches off on to the moors for a ramble!

And here's the latest batch of recycling all together. I do have some more ruins in the pipline and I may have to build something that is a little bit more 3d, do we can play on different levels.

Warlord Games British Paras

And finally Bolt Action had acquired a little momentum down here in Kiwi land and as such I thought I'd finally out paint to brush and get my paras done. These were the very first Bolt Action minis I ever bought back when it was just a miniatures range and Alessio was still dreaming up the rules. At the time I was looking fir an alternative to the nightmare that had become GW and these guys were just singing out to me from the shelf "buy us and read Pegasus Bridge !"

So I did and the rest is history so to speak.

Anyway here's a small squad with Vickers MMG in support. I have to say I'm happy with how the dennison smocks came out and also the mustachioed medic who looks quite distinguished don't ya think?

Because I enjoyed putting these guys together so much I decided I needed more, luckily the redoubtable Mr Bowman has decided to set himself up as a Warlord Games trader (seeing as there are no actual games shops in the Wellington region anymore) and has become the go to guy for all us big kids who need our fix of hobby related plastic krak, and therefore I placed a request for some more of these chaps to round out my platoon. Now I just have to paint them!


Also here's a bit of a work in progress shot, after all the Paras have to have something to capture!

My never ending quest to turn junk into something useful (Part 1)

I know, I'm cheap. I'm also a bit of a sustainability nerd and can't abide throwing away something that can be reused. So as you can guess my garage is slowly filling up with stuff that falls into the category of "ooh, that could come in handy".

The easiest stuff to find a use for is polystyrene packaging as it's just a few minutes work to hack it up and make it into some simple terrain! And so I present the hills of Cha'ick'caratharan (I figured they look a bit fantasy hence the dumb name!)

Left over poly, old hard board and some bark chips from the garden. PVA, beach sand, cheapo artists acrylic and then flock so all in all about $2 to make both hills. Obviously it took time as well but it was fun and who can put a price on fun!

Beanomir searching for a pint and meat pie.....err I mean the ring! (Everyone's favorite Gondorian Yorkshireman included for scale purposes).