First post of the New Year! Happy New Year, hope 2015 was good and 2016 is at least as good.
I spent the week between Christmas and New Year moving, and a fair bit of the time since getting stuff sorted out and properly moving into the new apartment my girlfriend and I are sharing now. An important part of that was organizing the hobby space, of course, for which our second bedroom is going to serve nicely when we don’t have guests over.
I’ve taken advantage of the fact that everything went into boxes for moving to keep the vast majority of my gaming supplies boxed up and in the closet for now, only bringing things out one project at a time to finish and organize things.
Some further changes are coming soon; I’ve found replacements for the pair of battered, decades-old swing-arm lamps (one at each shoulder) that currently light my bench, and I’ve ordered a second Impudent Mortal paint rack to go with the first I got back in late 2014 which should help keep things a lot better organized.
Painting right now is mostly Blood Bowl guys, although I have a bunch of Infinity models I want to get paint on, especially as we have another Infinity event coming up in February!
Various Reaper Bones figures for Blood Bowl, including a really massive feral treeman! Click for slightly larger.
I’m going to be moving between Christmas & New Years so I’ve been busy packing stuff and cleaning; I’ve been in my current digs about three and a half years and the gaming stuff especially has kind of crept all over the place, so it’s a good opportunity for some sorting, de-junking, and reorganization of my work bench. The new apartment will have more space for hobby stuff, which is both great and slightly worrying as wargaming has a proven ability to fill all available space!
Anyway, after boxing up the majority of the gaming stuff and doing some initial straightening of my actual workbench I decided to do a bit of painting to relax, and to work on some figures that have been lurking, mostly ignored, around the edges of my bench for ages now.
Primarily, that mean finally getting some proper paint on the massive Reaper Bones Spirit of the Forest. I based him and added some Blood Bowl-style shoulder pads ages ago (possibly 2014?) and he’s sat around the edges of my painting mat ever since. A base coat revealed that the figure has all sorts of cool detail on him, plants, vines, fungus, and moss all over. I got some of that tonight and I’d run him on a BB pitch without being too bothered, but this really is a figure that will reward some time picking out more details. The one downside really is the sheer size of the figure – that’s a 2″ washer I’ve based him on, and his toes poke over on both sides…
The other figures are a wizard (far left) for those (rare!) times when a BB team gets to hire a Wizard as an inducement; a gnome Apothecary to patch people up and get them back on the pitch; an Ogre so I can proxy my still-unpainted Amazons as a Human team; and finally a big Minotaur that I picked up because I liked the look of the figure but who might now become the centrepiece of a Chaos team from some of the other Bones figures available.
Almost all my painting the last few months has been on the BB Goblin team, so it was nice to get paint on other figures and especially satisfying to start on the giant Treeman.
With holidays and moving I might not get one more post completed this month, so if I don’t, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Season’s Greetings, and Happy New Year to everyone!
(or, you know, Bah Humbug if that’s more your thing!)
I’ve been kicking around ideas for an interior table setup for Infinity for several months now – that is, a table that instead of being buildings and regular terrain, is entirely or mostly the interior of some large structure. A big starship or space station setup was an obvious choice, especially as the faction I run in Infinity, Haqqislam, is described as the premiere merchant marine power with a very strong space presence throughout the Human Sphere.
I had already planned on doing the station walls & bulkheads in mattboard, my usual building material, but finding those textures and realizing how easy they would be to modify and change has actually prompted me to get started in GIMP on creating wall panels and other graphics.
First panel, a 6″ wide by 3″ high bulkhead, with two Haqqislam troopers propping it up. Click for larger, as usual.
I’ve created a multi-layer GIMP image that should make it easy to create lots of variations and slightly different wall layouts for different areas of the space station. The basic module above is 6″ long and 3″ wide; I’m going to use a 3″x3″ module as standard, expanded to a 3x3x3 cube if required, with 6″ and 12″ long wall segments for the most part, with some 9″ and 3″ long pieces just to break things up a bit. These are the same dimensions as the Objective Room I built for Infinity earlier this year, which wound up with a total footprint of 9″x9″ and 3″ tall.
I’ll also do some 6″ high units, especially for very large cargo doors and the walls of cargo areas, hangars, and similar large spaces. Most of them will likely have catwalks partway up the walls, just to add a bit more of the 3rd dimension back into the playable parts of the scenery.
More as this project progresses, and eventually I’ll figure out how to share some of my images, although the working GIMP file is already 7.8Mb and growing!
Finally got a sheet done with most of my Blood Bowl sideline ads to date, arranged in strips and sized for 1″x3″, which is a good height for sideboards or hoardings.
There’s a mix of Blood Bowl-inspired ads, almost all parodies of real products. There’s Haterade, Croak, Plopsi, Goblin Sweat, and DorfAde (in new Stunty Tears flavour!) for starters, as well as the Necromancer Beer ad I’ve posted previously and a Blood Bowl ad/joke.
Later on I plan on doing different sized/differently proportioned versions of most of these, but I needed 1″ tall for the sideline scenery I’m currently building so here it is!
These are all my own work; I’m sure some of the ideas or parody names have been done elsewhere by other members of the BB community but these versions and this artwork is all my own. Permission is granted for personal, non-commercial copying or printing. Enjoy, feedback appreciated!
Simple dugout for the goblin-themed Blood Bowl pitch-side set I’m doing; there will be another dugout similar to this for the other team, and the turn- and reroll-trackers will be done up to look like spectator terraces/stands.
Coffee stir sticks, mostly, over a plastic base. Click for full size, as usual.
The basic structure is coffee stir sticks over a plastic sheet base; the hoarding along the back will have ads on both sides, similar to the ones used on the scoreboard and some others I’ve been working on.
More soon, although I’m packing up all the gaming stuff before the end of the year to move into a new apartment with my girlfriend, so that will (among other things!) disrupt the finishing of this set of scenery. Also, Christmas, New Years, all that holiday stuff. Still, updates will appear here when I can!
The base of the new Blood Bowl scoreboard is now covered in sand, painted, and flocked. I might still add some additional foliage or other details to the base, but it’s perfectly usable as is and I’m willing to declare it finished and move on!
Base finished on the scoreboard. Click for larger.
Instead of puttying around the strip of plexi in the centre of the base I used matchstick-sized wood strips and made it look like rough timber foundations. I also put a wooden boardwalk across the front; I figure that’ll be a good hangout for markers or sideline figures for the stuff like cheerleaders, apothecaries, wizards, or other BB sideline addons.
I’m still brainstorming how to do team dugouts and turn- and reroll-tracks to match this scoreboard, but I should the details figured out by this weekend and then they, like this scoreboard, should be fairly quick and simple builds. After that, the more involved project is going to be doing a new fabric pitch, probably on the back of the current lizard-themed fabric pitch I made last winter.
Decided that my Blood Bowl Goblin team, currently glorying in the name of T.U.R.D. (what that stands for changes every single game they play…) needed a scoreboard, to use as substitute to my existing Lizardman temple BB setup.
Goblins have an reputation for being clever but not smart, and for lunatic behaviour at the best of times. This presumably explains why they attempt to play Blood Bowl at all, and excuses all sorts of things like really shoddy carpentry. With that in mind, I broke out the craft wood and set to work!
Goblin BB scoreboard in progress. Three billboards for colour, and the actual scoreboard part two-thirds of the way up. Weather indicator will go between the two score placards. Click for larger.
The main structure is coffee stir sticks, with basswood strips for the big vertical beams. The eventual plan is to have small rare earth magnets behind the scoreboard, embedded in a wood beam, to hold magnetic strip score number placards in place, and to have a smaller weather placard in between the two scores. There’s still some details to add, like “US” and “THEM” labels above the two score areas, and possibly a small announcers stand right at the top of the whole thing, some sort of rickety crowsnest with a raving goblin announcer howling away.
The base has a strip of scrap acrylic with two holes drilled in it to support two bits of wire that go up into holes in the bottoms of the legs, holding everything solidly, and then some scrap plastic to expand the footprint a bit more. I’ll putty along the edge of the acrylic to blend everything together and strengthen things further.
Three trolls and the scoreboard. You can see the rickety walkway in front of the actual scoreboard part here.
The second image has all three of my trolls, all still very much works in progress. Left and centre troll are the same figure, with some fairly extensive arm surgery on the left hand troll to give him a different pose than the stock centre troll. All three are Reaper Bones plastic figures, which are awesome for Blood Bowl conversions! You can see the narrow walkway in front of the score panels nicely in this shot, which might get a gobbo scorekeeper perched on it eventually.
More soon; I’m currently out of rare earth magnets and need to restock before I can finish this project the way I’m planning it. That should take place this weekend and then it’ll be fairly simple to finish the rest of the thing!
I’m off in Vancouver this weekend, so have a brief link to an older Penny Arcade comic about one possible solution for that age-old gamer problem, “My dice hate me!”.
I might need to get this kit for some of the d20s I use in Infinity and at least one set of my Blood Bowl block dice…
Quick and dirty late night snapshot of my workbench!
Troll surgery and various other things on the bench. Click for larger, as usual.
Front and centre is a Reaper Bones troll (in white plastic still, hence kind of blown out in the pic…) next to his orange-painted buddy. I’ve cut both arms at the elbows, repositioned them, and gotten started on puttying to cover up the damage. He’s for my goblin Blood Bowl team, eventually, so the rather rough putty work will be covered with football pads similar to the ones worn by the right hand figure, who has just had pads added to his basic pose.
Most of the rest of the clutter is also Blood Bowl related; there’s a wizard and a doctor just mounted on their bases to the right, a couple of goblins lurking, and two Bribe counters in the left foreground – the plastic sprue will eventually be painted to look like gold bars.
The background is mostly Infinity stuff, a pair of new figures for my Haqqislam forces and six consoles from Warsenal. More on the consoles sometime soon, as I’m writing up a review of them and the Supply Crates I also got from Warsenal.
I’ve previously shown off big (5″ tall by 3″ wide) advertising graphics intended for use on an Infinity table – Weyland-Yutani, a travel poster, and Blue Sun; on Friday evening I decided to sit down and crank out the structure all three of those graphics will be shown off on.
The basic structure is actually very simple, being two vertical strips of mattboard with some cuts to make it look more interesting and some simple details added with scrap card. The frame is 2 inches wide, with the base being 3″x2″. There’s various horizontal pieces at several levels up the structure, although the structure is (deliberately) not optimized as a sniper nest. You can use it that way, but you are going to have compromised lines of fire no matter where you set up on the thing, and a number of the positions are also very exposed.
Weyland-Yutani & Blue Sun advertising on this side. Click for larger.
Total size is about 11.5″ tall with a footprint of about 3″x4″ or so; the dark blue figure at the base is the Fiday that has been seen in other photos.
Travel to Varuna on this side, and some more open structure above. Click for larger.
Incidentially, the three blue things on the left are Tri-Ad Advertising Stands from Antenocitis Workshop; I picked them up recently along with a few things from Warsenal and at some point I’ll probably do quick review articles on them and some of the other pieces. Nice solid pieces of small urban clutter, anyway!
