Delete! Delete!

Finally got round to finishing this bundle of metal emotion hating joy:

My, these pictures are awfully yellow. The cybermen are Micro Universe conversions:

Mmm. Bendy. As usual, the paintjobs were a lot more labour-intensive than you'd guess from the pictures - as well as experimenting with 'Necron Compound' (the metallic drybrush paint), there was lots of carefully placing washes to try and differentiate between different silver bits (so, the inner lining is a different shade of silver to the chest plate, for example).

Here we have the plasma gun wielder conversion from earlier, as well as a pair of Cyber-Leaders and a Cyber controller. Yes, canonically there would probably only be one Cyber-leader at a time, but I couldn't find out for sure so did two just to be safe (and this way, I have two squads with a leader each). Foolishly, I converted too many things though - I've only got two more MU cybermen stashed away, and I need three for planned conversions (Lumic on throne, Pandorica wrecked cyberman, and a cybershade using a Ramshackle Games model as the basis) although I guess for one of those I only really need the head...

Finally, these badboy not-cybermats are from Crooked Dice, which are absolutely lovely but dinky! One of them tried to escape under the coffee table while I was finishing off their bases, and took a little while to find again...

Finishing these metal meanies brings the total to:

56 vs 79 = -23

Lord knows what I'll paint next - I'm in a bit of a Star Wars mood (there's a stormtrooper stood on my laptop as I paint this), but then again I got a gratis copy of Mega City Undercover vol 2 today, which has rekindled my desire to convert and paint Wally Squad Judge Dirty Frank in 28mm, as he is the single greatest thing in any form of literature. Ever.

Post-Salute post and the pre-Salute post that didn't post...

Strap in, this could be a long one...

Foolishly, I went out to celebrate a friend's birthday the night before Salute. There would have been a post bemoaning my own foolishness (complete with pictoral evidence of the number of empty glasses), but it didn't post (presumably as the pub we were in was a lead-lined box with no signal).
Five hours sleep later, I was up and raring to trek to Salute. The journey was relatively straightforward this year, as no-one had decided to wander onto the line like they did last year, and we managed to get to the Excel centre just after doors had opened. However, when we got to where we needed to be, we saw that the queue went a fair ways back (literally as far as the eye could see...). Trekking to the back of the queue, we found a man with a sign saying 'cash queue'. Turns out as we had tickets we didn't have to join that queue at all, and (feeling somewhat foolish) began the long walk back to the entrance...

As ever, Salute featured many, many shiny things, many of which I'll realise I somehow missed when they start appearing on other peoples' blogs. Firstly though, I failed to meet up with any other bloggers - I saw The Angry Lurker and Ray in the cash queue, but must have got the time wrong for the bloggers meetup as there was no-one I recognised by the entrance at half 1 (re-reading Ray's blog post, it turns out I should have been by the seating area - that's what I get for not reading the map and assuming it was oriented with the entrance at the side! - it also turns out that whilst I thought I was following Ray's blog, blogger disagreed with me, but that's now fixed). I saw the back of Tomsche's head (well, his Pikachu hat) at the start of the day but didn't see him again to say hey; I walked past 6milphil and didn't twig who it was until afterwards... Basically, I suck at networking.

On to the pictures (alas, I only took a couple, as I was busy walking round gawping at things and scrabbling through buckets):

Epic 7TV table from those wonderful chaps (and chapesses) at Crooked Dice. Shiny.

VBCW table (presumably hosted by GWP?) that I had to walk away from as it was making me want to buy things from Dixon and Musketeer...

Captain Scarlet will always be aces in my books...

There's just something about a trench table that appeals to me. Especially a trench table with details like this:

Hee hee. Onto the main body of the post though: the loot!

• The freebie mini (the lovely Aztec looking chap)
• A freebie stapled to a hinchcliffe catalogue (something historical, I chose the one with the biggest hat)
• 'Aaron', the not-Kick-Ass from Hasslefree (I started to think I'd imagined him, but the ever lovely Sally found me one, and gave me a goodie bag and a free sheet of scenery stickers - huzzah!)
• A handful of Star Wars Miniatures Droids - annoyingly, the ones I really wanted (various R4 and R5 Droids) turned out to be out of stock, but the nice man at Tritex games said he'd send them post free if I emailed him.
• Crooked Dice Minion specialists and a couple of head sprues for conversions (one with a welding mask to put on the minion with the flamethrower, and one with some beret sporting chaps heads)
• A Skaven Jezzail, because it was £3 (they're 3 for £30 new!)
• An SJS Judge (because they're awesome)as well as a couple of minis that were in a bucket on the Mongoose stand (a Sky Surfer, a Blood Bowl Skaven player and an old-school GW beastman)
• Some Amera craters, because I need me some generic terrain and I was intrigued about these after seeing how nicely these vac-formed terrain pieces can look in Kevin Dallimore's book
• Knight Models Boba Fett. I begrudge paying £13 for a single miniature, but then again he's absolutely beautiful (and anyway, it's cheaper than buying a less nice one from Wizards of the Coast). I ummed and ahhed over buying this for a little while - the man on the stand saw me gazing lovingly at it and pointed out that I had Boba Fett holding a boombox on my T-Shirt... I managed to resist for about half an hour after that, but eventually caved. When I got back there were none left on the stand, but luckily the chap had one stashed away in a box!
• A Salute bag, to store my loot. Alas, neither I nor Uncle Johnny had a golden ticket to win a free storage case. Next time gadget, next time...

Not as bad as I'd imagined (or hoped), which brings the tally to:

39 vs 79 = -40

There were a few other things I either couldn't get or almost got - I fancied some more scenery, but other than the Amera craters there was nothing that really grabbed my fancy; I was tempted by some VBCW, but since Gripping Beast didn't seem to have the schoolboys that they do I was able to resist the allure of Musketeer and Dixon; I almost picked up some Malifaux from Simpe Miniature Games as they had a 'buy two starters and get the rulebook free!' deal on, until I relised that I'd be spending fifty quid to save a tenner on sixty quids worth of stuff that I didn't really fancy much...

After trekking back to Canterbury, Uncle Johnny and I got to chatting about the new GW paints, which led to popping into the local stoe, which led to me buying some paints. And a book. It's a nice looking book though (the Blood in the Borderlands one) so that make it okay I guess. I even got a replacement backpack for the Witch Hunter I got for Easter after the staffer heard me bemoaning the quality of Finecast to John. There goes my planned 'Failcast' post then...

The road to Salute

(sung to the tune of 'follow the yellow brick road' from the Wizard of Oz)

Follow the men with the beards! Follow the men with the beards! Follow follow follow follow follow the men with the beards!

One more sleep to Salute!

On the morrow a quest begins, as we journey to fabled Londinium for our yearly dose of Salute fun.

Unlike every other blogger on the internet, I'm not taking a list, as there's nothing I'm planning on buyng. We'll see how that pans out though, as I seem unable to pass up miniatures that are close enough to touch... Hopefully I can find some Star Wars miniatures though, as my fancy has turned that way at the moment...

And it's a friend's birthday, so we're out drinking tonight, which will invariably lead to a cheerful start tomorrow...

In other news, blogger has changed, and I don't like not knowing where all the buttons have gone.

Red vs Blue and first problems with the new gw pots...

Bam, finally got around to finishing my first two sets of Spartans for some Red vs Blue action:

The blues came out a little darker than I thought they would, but all in all we're good. Painting these was a bit of a nightmare, with lots of referring to the Halo Encyclopedia to work out where various bits of armour ended and undersuit begain, but once the basecoats were blocked in it was pretty much plain sailing. However, they did have to wait a fortnight or so until gw released their new paints so that I could get a bright enough pink to paint the needler ammo... which leads me to my next point:

Although the new lids are great at staying open, when you close them the triangular bit doesn't pop back out to it's starting position, they get caught under the lid and get forced into contact with the paint, leaving you to have to pop them back out with your finger and get covered in bright pink paint. But I digress...

Finishing these two squads of six brings the tally to:

39 vs 68 = -29

Not bad, and if I can remain focused enough to fnish everything currently in front of me that'll be another 18 off the total... Before I go to salute and we see another swing backwards...

Victory is mine: A quest for cork concluded

Like all things in life, if you need something, you can probably get it at Ikea...

(I don't normally look this manic, but then again, I don't normally get to complete a long ongoing quest either...)

So after all that, I have me some cork now.

A couple of four packs of placemats and some thicker hot pan things should keep me in enough cork to make a whole bundle of scenery, huzzah!

The only problem was the other six hours we spent there, looking at beds and sofas and various other things that aren't 28mm scaled.

But then again, there were also awesome meatballs...

Easter acquisitions

Nipped into Games Workshop this morning, where my beloved young lady bought me some presents for Easter:

Thematically coloured paints (I wanted some pinks so that I can paint the needlers on the Spartans that have been sat in the painting queue for as long as I remember, and picked up some textured brown paint and metal drybrush paint to try it out) and the new Witch Hunter - he's beautiful, and makes me excited to play some Mordheim, but he's my first Finecast purchase (ignoring the White Dwarf subscriber miniature I got at Christmas) and I'm not looking foward to the clean-up - despite the fact that the GW manager went through all the blisters with me to find the best quality casting, now I've got him home I'm noticing more and more bubbles and rough patches, but then again did I mention what a handsome mini he is? Even though the backpack with the bag of stakes is the one with the double handed sword, which I didn't want to use, but that bag of stakes is such a cool little detail...

I finally managed to snag an appropriately scaled helicopter this week in Poundland:

I'd been looking for one for a while to make into a wreck, and boom, appropriately scaled heli for a single english pound!

Hopefully I'll be able to post up a step by step when I get around to making it into a piece of scenery, but with my attention span who knows when that will be...

I also picked up something interesting when I was picking up another copy of the Doctor Who magazine with all the little dudes on the front:

One of those magazines where you build a model skeleton over a number of weeks, where the first issue is only 99p. With some cork bark and a ton of filler, it should make an awesome skull faced rock/hill, suitable for 70's villains' lairs and overwrought fantasy battlefields the world over:

With the addition of my new Witch Hunter Captain, that brings the current tally to:

27 vs 68 = -41

And now for the inevitable ramble - I'm currently reading the new Gotrek & Felix Anthology, which has fired up my enthusiasm for Warhammer Fantasy somewhat - at the very least I hope to paint the Gotrek & Felix minis I bought a while back, and maybe make some headway on the max sized unit of Slayers I bought a load of minis for (annoyingly, it looks like there are two newer sculpts in the Slayers range, but I don't want to have to buy a box of five just to get those two - Mail Order, how I miss thee); I even fancy starting a campaign using the 3rd/4th edition rules (I forget which, the ones where players have to roll on a d66 table and are punished horrifically by only being allowed to take war machines / magic items / monsters etc if they happen to roll up a specific bit of territory).
Other than that, on the painting table at the minute are some things that make me think of Sesame Street (namely that 'One of these things is not like the others'):