On Hiatus - The 205th hit the battlefield in 2012

As you will have noticed I have been absent without leave from the 205th... Generally from gaming as a whole. It's been great, I've had more time for me, saved money and had time to play some console games. The mojo is starting to return - but will be halted this Friday by the oncoming Battlefield 3 on PS3...

But you guys don't want to hear about that, you want to find out when I'm going to get moving with the Elysians!

My plan is to give myself until Christmas for playing BF3 as much as possible, then in the new year to get back on the wagon. Starting with finishing my Valkyries so they are all up to a finalised standard.

Once the Valks are done I'll be aiming to paint up my second Tauros Venator and the 2 / 3 Tauros I have. Whilst browsing the usual pages (forge world) I took a fancy to the camp pattern they have on the Tauros.

Seeing as these guys are the fast moving scouts, the camp scheme makes perfect sense. The next big challenge is to decide if I build them with the heavy flamer or the grenade launcher... decisions decisions.

In between all of that I have some more drop troopers to get painted and the original guys to get finished off... And my Protectorate of Menoth force to paint.

So until next year... unless I get the urge to slip into the garage in the meantime ;)

Krom

Gaming weekend

So I have a gaming weekend coming up... or at least a gaming day drinking night and possible gaming morning...

I have my freshly painted realm of battle board... pics to come, my menoth army for warmachine ready (starter set) and my Elysian army 1500pts per my previous post I'm having to proxy to of the tauros venators with tauros... but I know the guys won't mind :D



I also picked up this week a new pack of elysian troopers and the elysian hq command set. Interestingly I think they made a boob with so e of the content, as I received two copies of a few of the sprues. This may be intentional... but I'm unsure, maybe someone else has had the same with this pack?

Hopefully by the end of the weekend, ill have managed to have tested my army and find any weaknesses that might be there.. such as the loss of the vulture!

In addition I have seen I missed some comments made on some previous posts that had been marked for moderation for some reason. so if I have not replied, I'm sorry and if there was a specific question, I will come round and answer them all in a single post for ease! :)

1500pts Elysians IA8

So I've not done an army list on here before, but I though I'd post this up and source some critique on it before I go too far with buying more elysians.

Tauros Venator Diorama

Well I finished the diorama on Saturday and went and entered it at the local GW store. I wasn't completely happy as I painted the guys on Friday night / Saturday, but hey I did all this in to weeks.

the pictures aren't perfect and when I receive the model back I'll take some better ones. I took a couple before these where the lighting was even worse, but I loved the way it add quite a bit of drama with the shadows.

So I'm generally pleased with it all however, I felt I rushed the two troopers and I think it shows... I also think that effected the results of the competition as well as I came second out of three of us.  And this is the winner. It is excellenty executed however something about it rings of something I've seen before by Keith Robertson (Heavy Metal painter) though I can't find pictures. None the less it was very well produced and a worthy winner.

Oh well better luck next time... and must try harder!

Elysian Diorama to date

So rather than post too much waffle... I did that earlier today I'll just post some pics of the diorama to date.

These are WiP, such as the image #4 has a wheel raised off the floor :( This will always be difficult as I'm aiming to be able to use this model for gaming as well.

Thanks for looking and if you have any questions, please fire away!

Day whatever in the diorama building house

Soooo, this regular posting I was going to do whilst doing this diorama seems to have gone out the window!

I have been working on it pretty much every single evening and trying some new techniques... I even bought myself another airbrush for the heady cost of... £20. It's become my new staple airbrush now. Its a simple dual action gravity feed airbrush, no adjustments can be made to it, so it's free of all the usual baggage and weight. I simply control air pressure with my air valve (connects the airbrush onto the hose) and amount of paint by how far I pull my finger back.

It looks a little like this, but with a smaller capacity paint chamber (about 2cc I believe) and a red housing at the back.

So onto my diorama stuff. In the image attached the tauros venator is almost complete, I need to just add pigments and oil effects.

I'm quite pleased with where I'm at, I tried applying rust staining with acrylics. This worked much better than expected, normally I would use enamel and oil paints for this as they can be feathered and adjusted with thinners easily. With the acrylics I added a whole bunch of drying retarder to the paint, this enabled me to do similar as I would previously, but create the feathering and effects with just water! Always a bonus.

I also applied a heat damage style effect to the lascannon muzzle. I tried this before with my valkyries, but it failed. I could never work out why... until last night when it all worked, due to the lascannon muzzles being matt this time and gloss previously.

To explain a little further, the technique is achieved by airbrushing layers of inks (red, purple, blue and black - in that order) to achieve a banded spectrum look about it... similar to how a stainless steel exhaust looks on a motorbike. The reason it failed before was I tried applying the ink onto a gloss surface and it immediately beaded away from the surface. This time as the surface was matt, it stayed in control and where i placed it.

So onto to tonight when I'm going to stay priming the models that are going on the base, I should also have mentioned I've changed the theme from roadside checkpoint to roadside IED.

Thanks and feel free to ask away :D

Day Three in the diorama building house

So I got back into the garage last night to continue working on the diorama. I didn't get too much done as I spent a good 30 mins cleaning and reassembling my airbrush after a really big deep clean.

Once that was done I lay done a dust layer to the tarmac section and more of a colouring layer to the earth. Utilising lighter shades to add dusting to the sand. I then made a different earth works mix, made out of plaster, gulf war sand, beach sand, light dust, a smidgen of europe dust, a splosh of some VMA sand shades, a splash of VMA white and lashings of vallejo matt varnish. I made this into a real putty like mix and smeared and tapped it all over my sand area.

Once this was one, I threw done a few different shades with the airbrush in the troughs that have ben created by wheels. Just to add a little more shape and texture to the base.

Obviously once that was done I got far too excited with myself and mocked up the venator onto the base.

And here's a few close ups of the decals on the venator.

This is quite an exciting project for me and I hope your enjoying following along. Any questions regarding the techniques etc, I'm more than happy to help.

Laters Krom

Day two of building my first diorama

Wowser... so soon I here you say???? Well the posting boob was all my fault and I apologise for that.

So onto the ultra cool and exciting stuff :D I received a package in the post today containg a few new cool items: Mig Acrylic Resin, Mig Thinners for washes, Mig Pigment fixer: Some great sanding boards, Tamiya putty and some Mig brown for desert filter.

So I've applied some filter to the chassis and parts of the Tauros Venator, but I didn't take pics as the difference isn't too noticeable by camera. Basically th filter works very similar to a glaze and is applied to alter the hue of the model, rather than shade it.

I also got onto doing the ground works for the base as well. Using a mix of plaster, Mig acrylic resin, matt varnish, Mig Gulf war sand,beach sand, light dust and europe dust I made a sickly looking paste/mix

Yeah, don't worry, it does look like I've had a botty accident in the plastic cup, but I do assure you it is the mix from above... Oh I also added tamiya buff paint and some model scenics medium buff ballast.

Then using an old paint brush I painted / stabbed this onto the base.

Looks like cool wet mud at the moment, but it is drying a nice colour.  Tomorrow I plan to lay a dust coat down with the airbrush before adding another small amount of mix with a litter colour to it and alternative mix formula.

In addition to this I also applied gulf sand pigment to the wheel before applying pigment fixer in a circular motion towards the centre of the wheel hub. I'll take phtos of this tomorrow so that the full effect can be seen.

Until tomorrow night.

Krom

My first steps into diorama buildng

Well it's been ages since I posted last... Again! I'm really starting a theme here for this blog. So, why've I bothered posting? Well Pottered into my local GW this Saturday to spend a gift voucher (thanks mart)... I got a sky shield incidentally.

After having a chat with the staff, I found out they do a monthly painting comp. Turns out this month is dioramas.

My first reaction was to not bother, but after going and eating some scran (corned beef pasty!) I decided I would join in. I raced to the nearest trophy store so that I could get a plinth.... With that bought I went to the model shop and grab some more supplies.

I realised I better go and check for rules and deadlines. Eek, the only rule was... There are no rules and the deadline was 2 weeks!

So, I got on with the task in hand. I've already developed a partial name / theme: roadside check point.

So here are a few wip pics.

Wooden plinth base with Das modelling clay added for structure and also Tamiya diorama texture paint (pavement effect dark grey) painted on for the road.

The beast to be the feature of the diorama. Been meaning to get one of these painted for ages, I've got another one to build and the lesser Tauros (Big thanks to blueronin and his crew for this beauty :D)

The awesome wheels! prior to weathering... this is rather experimental as I've never created rubber wheels before

And here is a little detailing added to the tarmac. A simple addition of Iyanden darksun foundation paint applied between a set of masks.

I'll be posting another set straight after these were meant to be last nights images... but i had an incident where I left my laptop in the middle of the street for an hour before I realised... Mart from Marts Warhammer Blog went and collected it for me.

Any comments and questions please fire away, and I'll be more than happy to help/answer where possible.

Krom

So.... I better do an update before I lapse into my old self huh?

Well in my last post I discussed I'd been building a new work bench for my hobby zone (or garage to a non hobbyist!).

I basically built a large bench using Formica (kitchen worktop), smooth timber, screws, blood, sweat, a cel power8 workshop and some google sketch up.

And this is my current state of affairs.

Fairly swish I must say. It needs some more work such as wall brackets for the speakers and some sort of hanging shelf underneath for the amp. You may also note that within that shot there is also a rather "slick" bookcase... You'd be right if you guessed it had been crafted by my own hand and the nifty power8 workshop in the left of the image.

Here it is




Ok there might be a slight angle to it... But it was built from my last gaming board. A fitting end to an old friend, after years of having dice, models and rules thrown down on it, it is now a perfect storage facility for all my rulebooks and gaming aid paraphernalia.

So onto the new kid on the block... The Realms of Battle Board! Basically it's going to be a desert board and have some cool as monkey poo terrain on it!

I've textured with sand so far... And the pics to prove that fact!















Since these pics have been taken I've also started laying down the undercoat of grey primer for the sand sections and black for the rocky bits.

And a little tease of one of my Grey Kinghts



I'm currently planning and working out how I can get a really cool textured and detailed base to represent a marble mausoleum type effect.

Hopefully results will appear once I've done some more testing!

thanks for reading

Location:New workspace and board

Where the have I been...

Wowser it's been far too long since I last posted! In fact I was on a strange mission to re-learnt paint. What's worse the results looked turd!

However it did teach me to be more careful with my painting and that I desperately needed glasses and a magnifier for painting. Since the escapades of the ultra smurfs... That results in 3 part painted minis, I jumped at the GKs as a force to try and make look fantastic... Dare I say, aiming to trophy status...

The GK are progressing and I'll take pics soon. The elysians are still my "love" force and I plan to kick start them soon enough.

However, the past 2 weeks I've been re-fitting my hobby zone (garage as the wife has banished me... Who am I kidding, I love it!). I've built myself a proper work bench that's solid enough for a fat bloke like me to stand on! It's not finished quite yet. I need to relocate my amp and get myself a/some display cabinets.

I've also chopped up my gaming board and turned it into shelves... With left over sheet material for other projects. Again, it's not the end of the world as I have my realms of battle board to texture and paint.

So many projects and so little time... Harumph!

Well I plan to get some pod sorted of a few things so that I can keep you guys posted of everything that's been done... And to be done.

Until then...

Back to Basics has a reason

So I just wanted to share the next project I'm working on (fear not the 205th are not dropped and I'll make some updates on them in the next week or two).

Tim (Dezartfox over at The Vanus Temple) and myself had a real hoot getting into the best army nominations and gaming together. So we have started planning our next doubles force. On my behalf I'll be entering with Ultramarines.... I know I know... But I've always enjoyed the crisp cleanliness of them and I want to turn my hand and messing these guys up with some weathering etc etc.

The plan is to go for a desert theme again as it will help the blue "pop" against the base, I have a handful of conversions / mini dioramas planned for my side of the force.

The theme is going to be of two forces joined together to combat the xenos threat of nids. 

So onto test colours. I really want to achieve a muted blue, that still manages eye catching, so I've gone into the Vallejo model colour range and also some model air as I'll be aiming to get these guys painted with the airbrush as much as possible. Here are the colours I've selected so far to trial:

VMC Dark Blue, VMC Ultramarine Blue, VMC Royal Blue, VMC Andrea Blue, VMC Deep Sky Blue, VMA French Blue and VMALight Sea Blue.

(VMC = Vallejo Model Colour, VMA = Vallejo Model Air)

So my first port of call was to lay down some Primer. I use grey primer these days from the Vallejo Model Air range. Once the primer was dried I layed a solid base colour down using the airbrush and VMA French Blue. This is a really rich shade of blue, however it does have the "classic" cartoony look to it. Again once dried I then airbrushed a highlight using the VMA Light Sea Blue. This was the result.

For me this was just a tad to "baby blue"... however it may work, once weathered. Though I didn't bother finding out. I reapplied the base colour and this time added a highlight using a 50:50 mix of VMA French Blue and VMA Light Sea Blue. Much better! from here I went a hit an edge highlight on using pure VMA LIght Sea Blue... Big mistake, it ended up looking messy:

It's almost there, but the extra highlight was rather sloppily applied for an edge highlight and looked more of a bad line highlight. However, not one to consider myself a quiter I decided to see what it would look like with a little more colour added - This is messy, so please don't judge... I just wanted to test! 

The white is the worst messy bit, but I decided I wasn't going to continue adding another 10 layers to get it smooth whenI could see the colours were just looking too cartoon.

back to the drawing board and to trial some of the other shades I have!

Back to Basics Pt2

So after finally getting round to finishing this guy or sort of finishing him, I took a few quick snaps.

I didn't go too far with this guy getting into the weathering etc as I know I can achieve that look. I'm relatively happy with this guy, though I think I can definately improve my edge highlighting technique!

Anyway here's a couple of snaps.

Anyway, comments on points to improve would be greatly appreciated :)

Back to Basics

So after a really successful trip to the 40K Doubles held at Warhammer World, Dezartfox (Tim from no on!) and I have already decided on what we will be doing for our next attempt at the best army title.

What I felt after being in the nominations, was "was I really up to the level required... or do I have a shiny a Forgeworld Army". I think it was a blend of it being 1) Elysians 2) I painted them quite well... but not perfect and finally 3) I was with Tim, a previous best army winner with his Deathwing.

Obviously I have had the thought... Am I really good enough? I think personally the answer is no. Me and Tim have had a good chat about it and come up with a potential screamer of a problem. I currently paint at nearly arms length in an almost comical fashion, as when I hold it closer I struggle to see the model. The answer is possibly glasses. I'm going to try and arrange an eye test if I can this Saturday.

Aside from that, I've ever truly worked on ensuring I have a clean, smart and tidy paint job in my life. So after taking some inspiration from Ron (FTW) and Dave (N++ Wargaming) I decided to go "Back to Basics".

FTW Back to basics
N++ Wargaming Back to basics

So I present efforts so far... Smurf #1

This first image I have applied black undercoat, and base coat of 50:50 black and regal blue and then another layer of 50:50 regal blue and Ultramarines blue.

In this second image I've appled line highlights of ultramarines blue, followed by an edge highlight 0f 50:50 ultramarines blue and space wolf grey. I've also notice I've taken some paint of the toes... Next lesson is painting on a handle.

C&C welcome as this is going to all about improvement.

GW Doubles Nomination and my Army

Wahooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I recently went to the GW 40K doubles tournament held at Warhammer World. It's a great even, I absolutely love it and will be going back for more. Dezartfox over at the The Vanus Temple and myself took a combined force of Angels of Redemption and the plucky lads from the Elysian 205th Air Corps.

The force really worked well together as the Angels of Redemption were the real hitting power to the force and the guard ran distraction. It worked so well we managed to come 13th place from what I hear... not only that, but we got nominated for Best Army as well.

So here's some pics of our force in the freshly installed cabinets.

And here's a few links to the blogs of the guys I went with:

The Vanus Temple
Marts Warhammer 40K Blog
The Rune of Stone

Nerd Splurge!!!!!

Wow, I went down to the exhibition held by my local war-games club today. It's an event called Vapnartak. It's a great little event for finding the occasional little gem.

Vapnartak is predominantly a historical war-games event, however games such as 40k and warmachine have been worming their way in. So much so that the 40k tournament being held there, managed to garner the prime spot!

Is was originally going to attend the tournament; a great little 1,000pts compt'd event. However, I had the opportunity to go to a comedy gig the night before.

So I popped down to see how the tourney was progressing and consider buying some Pegasus terrain... If it was there.

That's when what I can only describe as madness hit me. It's something that I think is a dormant beast residing within all gamers. I call it Nerd Splurge!

Basically, the average gamer turns into a spending idiot because they are at an event, with little or no thought of the repercussion.

So what was the result of my Nerd Splurge.

The blue crystal chessex dice.




Incursion - I have considering this for awhile.



Posh static grass... Though thus stuff is awesome



Shot of what you get with a paint pot for scale... It's double sided as well.



And a shot of it on a base.




Vallejo varnishes, matte medium and glaze medium




Vallejo fluro paints and my attempt to find and an alternative to brazen brass




So there we go... Did I need any of it? No! Am I chuffed with the result? Yes. Do I regret it? Partially, but I'll get over that.

So tell me about you Nerd Splurges.