So, I'm Selling Some Things

I am going to do a little shameless plug here because I am unloading a few things on eBay right now, and you might be interested in them or know someone who might be.

The most exciting is my entire Chaos Daemon army. If you're interested in more photos of the army, you can check them out in their post. I haven't played them regularly in over a year. They were my first army and I've loved them, but they're just not fun for me to play with anymore.

It's quite a lot of daemons, I have the whole thing listed out on the Chaos Daemon army auction. 

I'm also auctioning off the Pleasuredaemon I painted up a couple months ago. Without a Daemon army, it'll be a little silly to have this excellent Daemon Prince alternative laying around. I did a post about her back in May.

Lastly, I am throwing up an assortment of Dwarfs. I got a lot of Dwarfs last year and there were quite a few duplicates and many, many of the plastic Warriors that I am not using. I decided it was probably time to send them off to someone who will get some use out of them.

My entire list of auctions (all three of them, haha) is here. Hopefully they will fetch a good price and I can use that money to finance the rest of my Space Wolf army.

First Try with Instant Mold

I gave the Instant Mold a whirl a few days ago. I thought I'd start out with a simple one-shot copy. I didn't want to get too fancy to start with, and I'm going to need the practice for starting the Space Wolves.

 One of my Wolfen is missing the end of his spear, but lucky for him (and me) his buddy has a nice spearhead that I could make a copy of. I didn't have any trouble with the Instant Mold, it softened up quite nicely.

 
I got a decent enough cast with it, although I did use far too much. I will definitely scale back on how much I use next time. I also need to cut it a little straighter next time when I open it up. But this is what practice is for.

Scuplting and Casting Tools Arrived!

I've mentioned that I have Big Plans for my upcoming Space Wolf army, and like most Big Plans, they require new tools. The last package of those goodies arrived yesterday.

I ordered a big pile of Green Stuff, the Citadel sculpting tool, some Instant-mold sticks, a small container of BluStuff, and an assortment of ten colour shapers (size 0 and size 2). Some of it had to come from the UK, so even though I ordered them ages ago, they took a while to get here.

The hard part was going to be letting these things just sit around for a few weeks while I finish my Dwarfs for NOVA. But they're not a priority now. That means I can start experimenting with these new toys now! I've done very, very minimal sculpting before. So this is a giant experiment for me. I'll be making molds to cast some things in addition to trying to sculpt or resculpt things. 

After I get a little use out of the bluestuff, insta-mold, and colour shapers, I'll do a review of each. I've heard good things about all three (and bought them based on recommendations) so hopefully they'll do the job I need.

I haven't 100% settled on what I'll be doing to my Space Wolves, but there will definitely be some resculpting, adding wolf pelts and fur, and a new Great Company badge.

NOVA Open: Ogres Are Up

Since I dragged my feet so long on the Longbeards, I still have to finish up 40 Dwarf warriors and all my war machines before the army is done. I'm supposed to have them ready in 2 1/2 weeks for NOVA... but it's not going to happen. Not just because I procrastinated, but also because I haven't been able to get the pirate dwarfs to fill out the warrior unit.

I have a handful of the Long Drong pirates I want to turn into a unit of pirate Warriors. There isn't much available in the way of pirate Dwarfs at the moment (although Avatars of War is putting out a box of ten soon) so I find myself short some warriors. I had models that could stand in, but I don't want to spend a lot of time painting them when I don't intend to use them for long.

 So, instead, I'll be playing at NOVA with Casey's Ogre army.

Slaughtermaster.

It's not my first choice, but it was getting close to now-or-never time to buy our tickets. I can't get the Dwarfs finished the way I want them, so this is my best option. Still, I feel a bit weird going to a tournament with an army I didn't paint.

You can head on over to Casey's blog to check out more about his ogres.

The Bulls.

While I'm disappointed that I'm not able to finish my Dwarfs in time, I'd rather they get done the way I want them. That means waiting until I can cobble together the pirate dwarfs, which will be December at the earliest. I will finish the remaining lords (because I'm using them for Mordheim, too) and then shelf them for now. I'm going to have some Fantasy fun at NOVA with Ogres and then it's 40k time.

 I've already gotten a few games in with the Ogres and I'm really impressed. They play very differently from the Dwarfs, but it's a style I think is better suited for the way I like to play. I'm still tweaking the list a little, but it's going well. As long as I can get in at least four more practice games before the tournament, the Ogres and I are going to get along just fine.

40 Longbeards Later...

Wow, these guys took me a while to get painted. Their skin was finished ages ago, but only because I just cranked out the skin on every model in the army (took me 2 Raws and a Smackdown to complete- roughly 7 hours). They ended up running around through a number games just like that, slapped on crummy temporary bases.

The command.

I lazed around on these guys for a while because I didn't have all the models I needed. I really like to have the whole unit, so I can batch paint them all at once. I scored an unopened box of Longbeards and a command blister on eBay in April, but they sure took their sweet time getting here. Then I took my own sweet time getting around to them.

In the mean time of slacking off on these guys, I finished all the bases for the army and painted up some of the lords and heros, so I wasn't resting entirely on my laurels. I had a ton of fun working on their beards, but after that, there was just something about doing 40 of them that started to drag me down.

My Grombrindal on Shield is snuck in there, too, as a unit filler. His base takes up 6 spaces, he was far too wide to do just 4. I was 5 Longbeards short for a full unit, and didn't want to drop another $30 on a box of ten.

The whole unit, all together. I still have to finish up the movement trays. I'll probably just paint them green like the bases. I don't think the moss will work very well on them though, so I think I'll leave it off.

Cleaning Minis with Dawn Power Dissolver

I talked about this product before in a post back in November, it's one I pulled over from the old website. But I've used it again several times recently to great effect, so I thought I would talk about it again in a little more detail now that I've used it more.

I used to use Simple Green for cleaning paint off pre-owned miniatures. That's what Hubs introduced me to when I got into the hobby and it worked well enough. I have a few problems with Simple Green, though, the most glaring of which is the toxic fumes it gives off. Ten minutes of scrubbing a mini off and I felt light headed, bordering on passing out. No good.

When I faced cleaning 120+ Dwarf models with that, I felt some dread. I mentioned my dilemma to Richard and he suggested I try Dawn Power Dissolver, which he liked. I used to it clean my Dwarfs with great success. Right off the bat, I was pleased it didn't smell as though it's killing my brains cells. It's pleasantly soapy.

It also didn't require nearly as much soaking time or scrubbing as the Simple Green. Simple Green needed to sit a few nights. I left the Dwarfs overnight, but I've learned since then that it'll do a great job in less time than that. Unless there is paint caked on the mini, you could let it sit just for a few hours. It cuts down a lot on the whole process.

The Dwarf Warband Suffers a Great Loss... Twice

The leader of my Dwarf Warband has been having a rough campaign. In our second campaign game a few weeks back, he died. So I bought another one to replace him... and in the next game he suffered a leg wound so he was -1 movement. Slow Dwarf was slow.

Worst Noble ever played.

 Tonight, we played two games. He died in both, and the second time all his equipment (including his Gromril armour) went with him. Sigh. I needed to throw all the gold and wyrdstone I found to replace his death-prone butt and his lost equipment.

The only upside to the games tonight is that one of my clansmen got upgraded to a hero, so now I've got another hero floating around. Bad news is, though, that I can't afford to replace him or the other clansman that died. All told, I have less gold, less equipment, and one less character than I did before. One step forward, two steps back.

I've been having such a rough time with them that I actually turned the warband roster PDF into a fillable form so I can just click a few things to update it when people die. This may be a sign that it's time to swap the model out for another less cursed one... or maybe I should just create a Lizardmen warband.

Painting Procrastination

There always seems to be a point in every army where you get so tired of painting little dudes that you start finding other things to do. It's just like writing a paper in college- when suddenly you realize how dirty your dorm is and that you must wash all of your clothes immediately.

Haven't you learned to paint yourselves yet?

We've all been there. Sadly, I'm there right now. Here's what I've been up to instead of painting Longbeards:

1. Reading
     I haven't done as much reading as I'd like to lately (that always seems to be the case) so when I hit that rut, I often pick up a book. I have a long list of books to read, so it's never hard to find something. My current pick is a Black Library book, so that's shouldn't count against me, right?

2. Clean All The Things!
     The biggest time waster of them all. Just like in college, suddenly my painting area, kitchen, bedroom, well, the entire apartment actually, has become a disaster zone in my eyes. So I must clean, and clean everything. This includes dusting off bookshelves, reorganizing my spice rack, and giving the dog a bath. She had it coming anyway.

3. Cooking Elaborate Dinners
     Nothing eats up time like spending 5 hours to make dinner. I could just throw something into the crockpot, turn it on low, and forget about it all day, but then I'd have time to paint, wouldn't I? So, I brined Cornish Hens last night. That involves quite a bit of hands-on time, not to mention all the clean up afterwards. The most delicious form of procrastination.

4. Obsessively Checking on Work
     I work from home, so I set my own pace most days. I do my tasks, check my email a few times, and that's that. But when I'm in painting procrastination mode, I find myself checking my email twenty times in ten minutes. Then I realize I don't quite like a spreadsheet layout... next thing I know it's two hours later and I haven't done anything else, but that spreadsheet sure looks good.