What have I been doing?

Hallo. Not posting in here as much as I should.

Ok so the Knight Titan has ground to a halt unfortunately. Usually happens, he's more or less at the detailing stage. I'll get back to it anon, but don't hold your breath. I think this site should be seen more as a home for ideas rather than the place you come to see finished products! Still, serves as a record to my ADD-like approach to hobbying.

Anyway I have been doing other things. I've painted a squad of IG for the Kataan IV army. I'll get these photographed and posted probably tonight. I don't do a lot of painting so this is a good thing. Better still it's firmed up the colour scheme with new paints, some of the gw ones I was using have been discontinued. I've found replacements in vallejo and am happy.

Also bought some new brushes. Spent a while looking at various ones without much understanding really. I went for the army painter ones in the end. They offer useful descriptions of what the size could be used for, and the handles are more chunky (a toblerone style grip) which are good for my ageing hands ;)

Yesterday I undercoated the command squad and the veteran squad for my guard, so painting has begun on them too.

Also (wow busy busy), I've started my storm troopers. I originally bought some RT guard to use as storm troopers, but I'm not happy with the size differential. I think they'll go back on ebay at some point. So mine are normal cadians with pig iron heads and some gubbinz. Will post pics.

Bought one of the new hellhounds too. I'm combining this with the parts I had laying around from a predator to make one of my rhimera jobbies. The other half of this (chimera tracks, rhino chassis) will form the base of my second artillery piece. I was going for a griffon, but got a bit diverted by the idea of a manticore. mmm rockets. The griffon I have the pieces for us going to use a FW thudd gun.

Damn I need to sort out the photos for all these guys. Perhaps that's a job for tonight, document my IG properly?

One last thing, great new source for wheels. Over on Ammo Bunker Digits drew attention to some he'd seen. They're a little taller than ork wheels, a little thinner, and basically perfect for IG. I'm going to make a six wheeled variant of my Chard pattern chimera. In fact I've already started. Details on buying are in the linked thread. 50p each,I bought twenty and am very happy with both the sculpt and the casting. Chris from Tablescape is looking into variants too for differing sizes. I'll keep you posted.

Oh yeah and I also bought a 1/48bradley kit dirt cheap for the road wheels. These mean I can finish the chard pattern hellhound I started months ago.

It's all go!

The Power of Fairies!

Random postage. So I've tried most different things for stripping paint from models, although never been able to get hold of Simple Green and refuse to pay the stupid postage costs they were asking last time I checked.

Anyway finally tried out Fairy Power Spray. And it works! I'm flummoxed. I put three metal minis in to soak last night. Two were ebay purchases with undisclosed amounts of paint, the third was my old space wolf captain I've had... oooh about 18 years. He's been many things in his time and has a lot of knackered paint on. Had several goes at stripping him but never really succeeded.

About 16 hours in the power spray and the paint was literally falling off. I scrubbed down the two new ebay ones and I'm happy with them. Wolfie has had a scrub and is back in to soak for a while longer. I've also added a load of other guys in.

I'll get some pics when they're all out. I may even do a proper test showing before and after pics. But yeah, well worth a go. And pretty cheap stuff too. Excellent.

Back once more!

Woo! It's been a while, but I'm finally back on the 40k trip so thought I'd update the site. Work has ceased for the meantime on Stadtheim, my fantasy terrain I've been doing. It's like all my hobby impulses, they come, they go, they usually come back again.

Even found myself working on the Great Gargant the other day until I ran out of pins. Unfortunately the ice and snow foiled my attempts to get some more, and then the urge passed and now it's on the shelf again. Hah.

My current whim then is my Knight Paladin. I'm basing him on a lego bionicle figure, but if all goes well it won't be immediately obvious at the end. Hopefully the first reaction will be "cool", rather than "oh cool, lego".

Finally I've got around to tweaking a few parts of the site. The latest blog updates will appear at the top of the home page, and things should look a little slicker in IE. I still recommend Firefox, but I'm getting around to hacking the site for IE's display bugs.

Anyway, just announcing my return. Hope everyone had a good christmas, I know I'm enjoying my week away from work!

And we're back!

Woo. The site is back online at last. I'm not quite finished, the army lists section needs a little tweaking, so I've turned off account registration (the only part of the site you really need to register for at the moment) until I sort that.

That section will let you create your own army lists online, then share or print them as you wish. As I mentioned before, I needed a tool to put together my own so I thought I'd share it. If anyone uses it that's great, if not, never mind hey?

I need to tweak the way my lists are displayed so I can link in my appropriate project logs to each part of the list, otherwise it's not much use for me (as a non-gamer!)

So the whole site has been written from scratch this time, meaning if you find any bugs I'd really appreciate a heads up. The project blogs are the main feature on the site and I think they work fine.

Thanks for coming back!

UPDATE: bugger. see this is what happens when you design sites that look right in firefox, safari, opera, chrome... I'm fixing the layout bugs in ie, but it may take some time. Oh and if you're using IE6 when I've stopped pointing and laughing I'd politely suggest you update to something a little more recent. Sorry, but it's just a dire browser to work with, I'm forced to do so all day at work, and I just can't face it in my free time.

The New Site

So as you may have gathered, the site is still offline. I decided to get the new version finished rather than spend a good hour uploading the old one.

Good news is it's nearly finished! A few sections to sort out, then it can go back online whilst I work on the admin side of things. Hopefully this week we'll be back in business.

Currently spending the rest of my free time working on Stadtheim which is making a refreshing change from the grim darkness of the future! Does mean I'll have no new updates to go on the site when it relaunches, but that's kind of the way this site has always worked. A few months of frantic creation then a few months of nothing.

My hobbies are nothing if not eclectic ;)

Moving host

Right, all packed up and on the road! The site is currently offline whilst I move everything across to the new host. May take a while, I'm in two minds about whether to upload the existing site, or use it as a push to finish the new one.

Trouble is if I wait for the new one to be done likely to be a long delay. We'll see..

Stay tuned though, something will be back soon, whatever that happens to be!

Where are the updates?

So ok, I'm guessing no one was really asking that, but I'll tell you anyway.

I am working on several projects at the moment, as usual. I tend not to update this site as much as I could, because I always feel I have to compliment updates with photos and that's hassle. Hah, I'm lazy I know.

However things will be changing. I've transferred my domain from one host to another, when that happens I expect the site will pootle offline for a while. I'm writing a new script for the site which will let me manage more things and even offer a few shiny features to my visitors. Oooh, see now that got you interested didn't it?

But for my projects I've gone off on something of a tangent again. My praetorian vehicles have stalled and are strewn around the room. I started a four legged sentinel which is looking awesome but unfinished. Now though I've started something I've wanted to do since I got into this hobby 18years ago or so.

I'm building modular terrain! I know, odd for someone who doesn't actually play the game. But I've always loved terrain building and wanted a modelling project to get my teeth into. And the other slightly odd thing? It's Mordheim terrain. Different to all my other stuff, but that's exactly the point. I've liked Mordheim as a concept since it came out and wanted to create a medieval/fantasy town to play it in.

I've got most of the materials now and I'm having a go at my first board piece. We'll see how it goes. If nothing else I've got some fun projects to do like a hirst arts church (pre-cast, those moulds are damned expensive to get over here) which I'll be customising. I'm making my own moulds for bricks in the same way I did the gobsmasha wheels. I've put in an order to antenociti's workshop for a load of fantasy accessories.

I'm looking forward to this. I'm taking two weeks off over the summer too, so I'm hoping this'll give me something to get stuck into.

Not quite sure where I'm going to store it mind, but that's a problem for down the road. :)