My Vision

Image stolen from geekologie.com

I thought I'd take a break from my usual posts just to tell you a bit about why I choose to post the things I do.

Obviously, the main aim of the blog is to put up photos of my army, and that's generally what I concentrate on. However, before I started on this blog, I always enjoyed reading about someone else's army and being able to find out how they've produced the models I'm looking at.

To this end, as well as pictures of my models, I also want to post about the ways in which I've gone about painting and modelling. I'm well aware that much of this will already have been discussed elsewhere (indeed, I've discovered many of these techniques from reading blogs and forums, and I do my best to acknowledge where I have learnt techniques from), and quite often by someone much more skilled than myself, but I want people to be able to browse through my army and, if they want to, immediately find out more information about the techniques I've used.

Aside from that, it also serves as a record for me, so if I haven't painted for a while I can easily look up the techniques or the paint scheme used!

Anyway, the upshot is that I'm hoping that even though you can often read about this stuff elsewhere, this blog provides a 'one stop shop' for the hobby - as far as the production of my army is concerned - and that people can learn something new from my articles. To that end, if there is a technique, conversion, or anything else that you would like to find out more about, please ask me and I'll do my best to give you an answer!

And just so this post isn't completely devoid of any army pictures, here's what's on my table at the moment:

Back to the usual stuff next time!

Reinforcements Arrive!

It's been a busy few weeks, and I didn't have much time for the hobby until the week just gone, but I finally have some more Guardsmen painted! You might notice I've changed the base rims to be Calthan Brown (I had originally painted Squad 812 with Scorched Brown rims) for a bit of contrast - my army will all be like that.

I also decided to borrow Admiral Drax's idea for unit identification markings on the rear of the bases. All the troops have squad markings on their shoulderpads, but with the weathering I do that's not always easy to see. Hopefully the markings on the base make organising my troops a bit easier!

These changes have also been made to Squad 812 - apart from that, they're painted in pretty much the same way. I tried painting a darker complexion on a couple of troops, using a paint scheme I found here. I modified it slightly, so it ended up being:

1. Chaos Black basecoat.
2. Scorched Brown/Chaos Black 50:50 for the next layer.
3. Scorched Brown next.
4. Scorched Brown/Graveyard Earth in a 50:50 mix.
5. Graveyard Earth.

I didn't highlight any more as it started to get too light. Let me know what you think!

I'm on a bit of a roll now, so hopefully I'll start cranking through some more stuff soon!

Air Time

Whoops! I knew it had been a little while since my last post, but I checked last night and it was over 2 weeks ago! This is just a quick update to let you know I'm still working away - I'll hopefully have more to show after the weekend!

I was excited to see this rock up in the post last week:

My brand new hobby compressor! It's a nice little unit, and is really quiet, which is a plus. I'll be putting it to good use once I get to painting my tanks. Hopefully I can replicate the techniques from the Imperial Armour Masterclass and create some nice-looking tanks! Stay tuned...

I've also been painting up the start of my next squad. I'm waiting to do all the sergeants together, then all the heavy weapons together etc., so that's why I still haven't finished off Squad 812. I'll be getting around to them soon though! So here's what's on my painting desk at the moment:

Most of the work has been done so far, which means they shouldn't be too far away! As I mentioned, I hope to have them done by the end of the weekend, so I should be posting another update then.

I'm in a bit of a groove with painting these guys at the moment, so I'm hoping I can keep that going and chew through a lot of painting pretty soon. That's the plan, at least! I must admit, it is a good feeling getting things finished after all this time.

Thanks for looking!