WOMP day one...

So pow, an explosive start to the Week of Mega Power (it's a thing now)!

Well, almost, the Patriots vs 49ers game last night went into overtime, meaning we didn't get to bed until after 4am, which impacted negatively on the time we then got up this morning. When I did manage to get some coffee in myself, I set myself up for a day of painting:

(ignore the dancing statue of liberty, it has no relevance) - a nice assortment of bits and bobs, including some mystery miniatures from ebay that will hopefully be fighting Conan at some point in the future, although I've been thinking about picking up Song of Blades and Heroes to rock some warband scale skirmish at some point too. Dammit, that reminds me, I still need to get a Conan miniature...

Despite my high-falutin' intentions, I only actually managed to finish a single miniature today:

My second Black Cat Bases Rat Swarm (and yes, now I can use my chambered Star Wars acronym joke - it's a 'womp'-rat!), so that I can field a Rat King to it's fullest potential in games of Strange Aeons:

Finishing that doubles my productivity for the year thus far, and takes the tally to:

2 vs 27 = -25

Tomorrow, I will endeavour to finish more than a single miniature, and if some more sand turns up, I can crack on with some halo funtimes...

Final thought - sometimes, you're out drinking, and the pool table's not free, what do you do? Yes, you remember you've got Citadel Combat Cards stashed in your bag:

(and yes, I won)

There can never be enough Energy Swords...

Wow, half-century post, bam!

Well, my afternoon/evening has been spent prepping some Halo minis ready for WOMP, starting with various iterations of the faceless hero, the Master Chief:

The plan is to have various miniatures with different weapon loadouts, to allow some sort of weapon-swap feature when it comes to actually wargaming Halo. Due to a lack of minis / not wanting to prepare so many versions of the same character that it puts me off painting them, I ended up with seven differently armed chiefs (although I have another three or four weapons on generic spartans that are ripe for conversion, as well as having to decide whether to sell or paint the 'active camouflage' (read: see-through) Master Chief with Energy Sword that I have...)

Once that was done, I cracked on with converting and rebasing some bog-standard Spartans:

The plan for these is to be able to run some PVP redvsblue games, again with weapon swapping - entirely arbitrarily, I think six different sets of weapons is good, as it allows for some D6 rolling fun. As well as painting them red and blue, I wanted each pose to be different too - thence ensued some weapon swaps and the joy that is reposing plastic miniatures using the Turkish Bath method:

On the left is the original (and, in all honesty, a little silly looking) Snifer Rifle armed Spartan. A simple weapon-swap with a Battle Rifle armed Spartan and voila! We have a new pose!

The same goes for this chap - an SMG armed Master Chief had his sidearm removed, the gap filled over with liquid Greenstuff, and then had a new pair of arms grafted. Voila! We have a new pose!

And then... well, you get the idea. At this point, I've got the first four weapon options finished, from left-right, front-back: Dual Magnums, Shotgun, Sniper Rifle and Battle Rifle.

Once all these are done, it's ready for the tabletop! and then I can go back to bigger ideas - either Master Chief versus hordes of bad types, or some sort of Halo Wars-esque battle type games (along the lines of what Halo Tabletop Waraming is planning).

Due to the limited number of sculpts and poses available, I'm going to have to do a lot of converting to try and make this project look more interesting (handily, I've plenty of ideas bubbling away, like converting a Brute Chieftan with a Gravity Hammer, since my secong Master Chief with Fist of Rukt came broken...). And anyway, research for this project is a lot of fun...

Prep for WOMP and the postman hates my tally...

So, in preperation for the Week of Mega Power (which shall here on in be referred to as 'WOMP'), I've been prepping some minis:

Yes, I have to undercoat my miniatures in a carpark. And it started raining immediately after I took this picture, forcing me to seek shelter and finish spraying later.

As usual, I've had some more miniatures arrive:



2 Runequest Baboons from the ever-wonderful Svennn, for Planet of the Apes shenanigans. I'm still having trouble finding chimps in the right scale, as Mega Minis have sold their moulds and the UK importer of Eureka miniatures don't seem to have the chimps on their site...

I also bought some Warmachine minis that were on clearance at work, but no pics of these as I've already built and opened one of them (which you can just about see in the first pic - and yes, it's not based for Warmachine)

leaving the tally at:

1 vs 27 = -26

but if WOMP is especially successful, I'll have no problem getting back into the positives. Surely. Don't hold your breath.

Anyway, now to rebase and potentially convert some Halo clix...

Halo, and the upcoming Week of Mega Power...

Spent the evening sorting out some Halo actionclix and heroclix ready for some repainting. Just look. Mmmm... toys:

No Ghost, but I can live without it (especially since they're around £25 on eBay right now). I really need to get the Hunter Combat Pack though, as it's the only way to get the two Hunters and sniper marine sculpts (I'm kicking myself, since we used to sell them at work, but I was young and foolish and hadn't yet given Halo a chance to enter my heart...). But last year all that changed, I gave Halo a chance rather than just dismissing it out of hand, and now several games, a couple of encyclopedias and a whole bunch of little men later I'm quite the fan.

Whilst not sorting out a hundred little men on the coffee table, I also made myself this fancy hat:

My young lady was especially impressed.

And so, on to the Week of Mega Power! Next week, as we're off work, the plan is to do something hobby-related every day and blog about it, thereby increasing our creative productivity (and blogging regularity). The name still amuses me, and if it works, may become a semi-regular feature...

Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun...

First miniature of the year finished:

Studio Miniatures' 'not-Ash', ready to take the fight to any deadites or primitive screwheads that get in his way.

He'd been in the painting queue for a little while now (pretty much since he came out...), but having finished him means I can now retroactively claim that all those hours spent playing Army of Darkness on my iphone were justified for research purposes (and yes, I did check what colour various parts of the chainsaw are in the game...)

However, as is traditional in nearly every post I make, it's not just a positive swing for the tally, as my order from Heresy arrived this morning:

There was a sale on! However, I was much better than I usually am at restraining myself from buying miniatures, and came away with only 7, all sculpted by Steve Buddle - the two packs of modern zombies, and a monk type chappy with a hammer that's such a lovely sculpt that I'm rather looking forward to throwing some paint at it...

So all in all the 2012 tally stands at:

1 vs 22 = -21

Not where I was aiming to be a fortnight into the new year, but then again not so deep into the negatives that I can't see myself getting out...

The tally's first hit of the year...

So, yeah, my high hopes for this year being different to last year have already taken a drubbing... A new pot of TCR came last week. Oh, and all these miniatures:

In my defence, I had a discount code for Black Cat, hence this box of lovelies - there's a couple of packs of Obelisk bits in there (zombies to menace Conan and Baboons because they're great) as well as some of Black Cat's own apes that I fancy painting for some Planet of the Apes style shenanigans.

Also arriving today was this package from em4 (which arrived frighteningly quickly, as usual):

Mostly bases, as I'd nearly run out, but yes, there's a miniature hiding in there too (they're just so cheap, it's hard to resist!)

With this little lot, this year's tally of painted vs purchased currently sits at:

0 vs 15 = -15

And yes, I took advantage of Heresy's Christmas Sale to pick up some Spyglass/Eolith minis, so it's going to go even further into the negatives in the near future...

Honestly, I have been painting recently, I've just not finished anything to post up! My young lady and I have a week off in about a fortnight, so I'm thinking of doing some sort of Mega Power Week (or Week of Mega Power, the name's not confirmed yet) whereby we pledge to try and complete something hobby related every day and post about it, with some sort of reward at the end of the week if we succeed...

Speaking of my young lady, today she hit some charity shops, and amidst the old vinyl and wellington boots, she picked me up this:

Which is fairly handy, as I'm almost out of sand...

2011 in review, and looking forward to the future...

Well, a year in already! (well, technically the blog is a year old tomorrow, but let's not quibble over details). 9,368 page views is a pretty respectable amount, especially considering the fact that I had a slump that lasted a couple of months and meant no new posts...

Looking back at the projects listed in my original post, we can make a breakdown of productivity for the past year:

Zombies: Miniatures painted, rules lost in laptop debacle.
Three Kingdoms: No progress made, still not a single finished figure.
Firefly: Three miniatures painted.
Strange Aeons: the project that got the most love, I now have just enough miniatures to actually start playing some games! I loaned the rulebook to one of the guys at work though, so I probably won't get a game in for a little while...
Doctor Who: Bits done here and there, but still not enough to play an actual game (although if I could just focus for long enough, I should have enough miniatures to play the Canary Wharf scenarios...)
VSF: no progress made, not even on the converted miniatures that sit mocking me in their drawers...
AEWWII: dead project. The only miniature I have on the go for this is a Captain America, and I can't yet bring myself to paint all the tiny white stars on his shield. There's some Tamiya tanks in a box for this project though, so I might get round to building and painting them eventually.
Warmachine: I sometimes take these miniatures out of their drawers and boxes, sigh, and then pack them away again.
Anima Tactics: Pretty much the same as Warmachine, I've four or five half painted miniatures that just don't grab my attention when I'm choosing what to work on.
Evil Genius/7tv: Only two finished miniatures so far, but tons more to come...
Marvel Superheroes: Percentage-wise, one of the most expanded projects. It's probably the fact that each part is only a single miniature, which is so different to everything else in my collection, that keeps me interested.
GW: combining all the projects into one, we get: blah. Yes, that's a giant in the picture. No, he probably won't get painted next year either.

...

Well, I'm not swearing off GW completely, I'm still halfway through painting my Blood Bowl team, planning to paint a max-size unit of Dwarf Slayers, epic Zombieslayer-inspired Undead army (I've got Kemmler, Krell and the Wyvern) as well as being tempted by Skaven, but who knows what I'll actually get done.

As far as new projects go, it's the generic fantasy that is the biggest, and most likely to get other bits added to it, purely due to it's breadth, and my inability to focus on an particular thing for more than a week or so.

As it's the last day of the year, it's the last time we see the tally looking like this:

122 vs 295 = -173

before we reset to zero tomorrow. Hurrah! Although I kinda wish I'd bought a load of miniatures to go on this tally rather than next year's, since this one was already beyond redemption...

Looking forward to next year, there's a number of new projects I'm considering starting. I'm loving Halo at the minute, and so quite fancy repainting some Heroclix for that. Star Wars is a project that's been nipping at my imagination for some time now, primarily due to the number of plastic prepaints I own - I think it reveals something about my character though that I haven't yet started the project because I don't have enough miniatures to make a detachment of Stormtroopers as described in the old miniature battles book - despite the fact that I'm unlikely to ever need a detachment, and the fact that if I started painting a detachment I'd rapidly get bored and wander off to do something else. Gundam and Evangelion would be awesome to do too, but luckily the fact that they're not in God's True Scale has stopped me from starting either of those (yet). Ooh, and Planet of the Apes - I could use survivor miniatures from the Zombie project for this, meaning I'd only need to convert and paint various chimps, gorillas and orangs armed with makeshift spears... well, an expansion of a project doesn't count as a new project surely?

I might need to do something to sort out my productivity too. These days, I have a couple of drawers of miniatures in various stages of completion, and spend almost as much time going through minis choosing what to paint as I do actually painting, which combined with the fact that what I fancy painting changes from session to session results in how rarely I ever actually complete a miniature (the Christmas Zombies posted recently were the fist time I'd painted something in one session in longer than I can remember). A few years back, when I was just starting my AEWWII project, I had a system. I had three tiny trays (that were originally dividers in the box I store most of my paints in), each probably 2x3". I'd only paint what was on one of those trays, and couldn't start something new until I'd cleared a space by completing something else. Each tray could hold maybe three miniatures at a push, and you'd be amazed at the number of miniatures I finished purely because I'd just bought something else that I really couldn't wait to paint. Admittedly, I don't think I have the willpower to be that strict with myself these days, but it's something to consider...