A beast approaches...

Why what a lot of teeth you have!

So,

I with having so much time on my hands i went looking through my models to see if there was anything that inspired me to work on it. Well this little fella jumped out to me, I picked him up about 6 years ago while at Adepticon, was going to use him for LotR or LotHS, but never got around to doing it, this seemed to be the perfect time as any.

Here is the model in bare Bones Material before I started on it.

Pretty good size, at least 13" Long

Close up shot

Another angle

So after getting everything put together and the tentacles in a good place that I liked, it all got hand primed in black paint. Bones material only likes certain spray primers, I have had good luck with Army Painter but I was out and everywhere that sells it was closed. So hand priming with a brush was the option taken.

The beast is changing colors

So since I was not going to use this for any projects, I decided to permanently mount it to a display base, once I found one that worked, I sanded it down and painted it flat black and then hit it with a gloss coat finish.

I then started to cut in the main colors. I spent some time looking at real lobsters and squids (as this had both elements in it. I decided that that hard shell plates would be a bluish color while the softer parts would be more along the colors of purple and reds.

Adding more color

WIP on color

Once I had the base colors down I washed the model in Army Painter Strong tone. I had originally tried painting the eys to match a giant squid, using yellow and oranges, but it looked to fake so I repainted them black with a little white dot for reflection. It looked better. Once the wash dried I Dull coated the model and glued it to its base. Then I started picking out details to bring it to life.

Lots of teeth

The backside of Beast

Close up of back plates

Another view from underneath.

So there you go, a project purchased 6 years ago finally see's daylight and gets painted up in a weekend.

TK

Quarterly Update...Lets See How we are doing.

Well,

Back in he beginning of January I decided to try something new to try stay focused on my hobby. So lets see how I am doing:

First up Kill Team:

GSC Leader and crew

My buddy Drunkensamurai and I decided that we would focus on Kill Team and actually wanted to start some new teams. He started working on his Admech and I decided to finish off my Genestealer Cult. I had started a GSC team for Necromunda and had plans to do a GSC army for 40K but that never happened. So I busted out what I had and started painting. We also talked of getting a campaign going with these new forces. I got my figures painted and we actually got in a few games which I did horribly with. Games were fun and I look forward to continuing as we still had not started our narrative campaign. So overall this quarter and focus on Kill Teams was a success.

Secondly I stayed focused on FoW working on my Mid War Russian tank force that I had picked up. Got all the tanks painted and then switched over to doing Germans using models that I had found.

Why the switch? Well Drunkensamurai decided to work on his Russians and I wanted to see how certain forces would do against Russians. We got in lots of games and it has been fun using certain forces (cough...Tigers and Panthers...cough). And most recently I picked up a good number of infantry for the Germans as I did not have any late war troops. So this quarter was a success as well.

The last focus was on Gaslands and I would say that this might have been the most played and worked on game in the first quarter. 

I built many cars for myself and some of my family members, started working on terrain for the game and played and ran many demos with my buddy Mike from the DaGreenskins blog. I have purchased more cars for parts and for projects and there seems to be no stopping as the inspiration is still very high for this game. So it was a huge success for the quarter.

As a side note I have had a resurgence on posting to the blog with trying to have a post each week with a total of 16 posts for the quarter, which is a nice start as I had lost interest in posting my projects.

So, whats next? Well as I write this I am doing this with looking at staying in the house for another 30 days due to Covid-19. So getting in games is going to be tough, but my wife is helping out with that as well as my son and daughter. Our local shop is closed now and hopefully will be back open, but we are living in a different world now.

With that being said, I do have my next quarter list of things, so here goes:

Gaslands - I will still be working on cars, just last week I picked up another weapons of Implements of carnage from our local shop, so it will keep me in parts for a few months. I also have a canyon to finish.

Mike said I have a month to finish these!

Also Gaslands cars are easy to convert and build and I seem to have a knack for it so I will be busy converting cars for the game.

FoW - Since I have a good sized infantry force now, I need to start working on them this quarter, I think I have about 32 stands to paint. I also picked up some British for our WWI FoW games. So there are a few more projects to work on for FoW.

Fistful of Lead - So while being stuck home just this past weekend, I decided that I need to start working on my next Fistful of Lead Gothic horror game for my friends. The game will be The Curse of the Mummy and will be a sort of Pulp adventure style game with good and bad guys trying to unleash the Mummy onto the world or put him back in the sand. With that said, I have a few miniatures to paint that I picked up a couple of years ago as well as work on some terrain for the game. It will be set in a small Egyptian town (which I have most of buildings done) with a few additions. So this will keep me busy planning and adding in some fun elements to the game. 

Kill Team - Once we get the okay to be out in public again, I look forward to getting in more games of Kill Team. But it all depends on what happens with this virus stuff.

I may work on other projects from time to time but these will be the new focus for the new year. So there you go, stay safe and healthy, will have more posts for the new quarter.

TK

Old Skool neco!

So,

I have had these three Hired hands from Old school Necromunda sitting on my desk for about a year now. To try to deal with my Covid-19 stay at home depression, I figured I would paint up these guys.

Old Skool Hired Hands

 Now, as most know, I can paint very fast, but these three models took me well over two days to paint. With everything going on in the world and having to work from home, I am feeling a bit depressed and have no motivation to paint. Our hobby is very much a social one, and the fact we have to stay away from folks is making me loose my drive for the hobby.

So in order to try to get back on the hobby horse I forced myself to paint up these three guys. I really do like the old figures, they have a lot of character. Not sure if I will ever use these guys, but it was nice to finally get them painted up.

Better picture of the dastardly three. 

Well, I had hoped that this stay at home stuff would cause me to get more done, but that doesn't seem to be the case, but I will try to get stuff done.

TK

More Vehicular Carnage

Well,

I wanted to make sure I was posting every Monday, but real life and some such virus has caused the world to go into shut down. Well I have been trying to keep busy and here are a few cars that I finished last week.

First up a Aristo Rat car that I added an engine to the front, machine guns to the roof and the mesh inside. I really love this car, so much that you can do it and if you go over to Mikes blog, Da Greenskins, you can see what he did with his.

Modified Aristo Rat

 Next up is another Custom 71 El Camino, aka Jet powered El Camino. This one makes number three for me added to the collection. I still have about four of them to work on! All I did with this one was add the ram to the front, added the machine guns to the hood and added the spike to the wheels. I decided to go with a purple and yellow scheme, reminds me of something you might see the Joker drive around in a Batman comic book.

Joker inspired car!

Both new cars side by side

As I said above, I now have three '71 El Camino's completed out of the seven cars I have. Some folks in the Gaslands community said that perhaps Mattel is onto us with these cars, because you don't need to do much with them. Just add a few parts and your all set.

Three of a kind, sort of!

 The other car that I have is the Bone Shaker, which I have about a dozen cars collected. The latest one that I did I added the rocket tubes to the steel plated roof but kept the stock paint job on it. I find that I always use this car in demos and I am running them as an Idris team. I just love the rat rod look to the car and it has a huge skull on the front!

Perhaps my favorite car made.

 Beside the cars, I also have been wanting to build some tire barricades. I saw another Gaslander use Nerf darts cut up to make tire piles and barricades. Well I tried it last week when one of my cats found a dart under the couch. So I cut up about four darts and glued them together. I had hoped that I would not need to base them, but they were just to flexible for my taste. But for using some Nerf darts, they came out very nicely.

Tire Barricades

Closer look.

So there you go, sorry for the late update, will try to keep up with post during this "interesting" time we are all in.So stay safe people and hobby on!

TK

Build it, and they will race it!

Well,

A few weeks ago while running demos at Imperial Outpost games we cam up with a cool large game concept for Demos. We talked about the scene in Fury Road of the canyon and thought it would be cool to build a canyon to race through. The idea was to have at least a 16' canyon. So I started thinking about how we could do it.

My idea was to take a 2'x4' MDF section in have in a jagged pattern so we could place the canyon walls on wither side. So a couple weeks later off to Home Depot for supplies. Well last weekend I started working on the canyon sections.

Canyon section (2 of them) taking shape.

I cut basically four sections and then glued down 1"pink foam onto then and roughly cut them into shape with a foam cutter. Then the fun part started of carving the fronts to look like rock, which is very messy.

 The plan is to use these for more than Gaslands. I can use them for Bolt Action or Flames of War and by keeping the back sides flat, I can place them together for a lager hill. Also I kept each end 8" wide so that they can all line up to make a bigger canyon wall or one side hill.

 Here are a few more shots of the carved rock work, which I will say again was a mess and not fun to clean up!

So next up is going to be the small detail work to be done, smaller rocks and dirt, still trying to figure out what I want to do about covering the flat areas, I have used Liqutex in the past, but this is a much larger area and would eat up at lease two jars of it.

So there you go, a small terrain piece for a few games.

TK

Stripping, not the pole dance kind.

Well,

This week I decided to try my hand at stripping factory paint off of the Hot Wheels I use for Gaslands. Up to the other day I just used 150 grit sandpaper to sand and rough up the stock paint before priming. But my buddy Mike from Da Greenskins Blog turned me onto Citrusstrip.

Magic in a bottle!

 Mike had found out about this magic in bottle from the interwebs and was highly recommended for stripping paint from metal (important point here) models. Do not, repeat do not try stripping plastic models, it eats into the plastic and in some cases will turn said plastic into a glob of melted plastic (may be good for Nurgle players!)

So since I will be doing a demo on weathering cars at the AZ Game Fair later this month, I decided to choose a model to strip. The lucky truck below was chosen and after I disassembled the truck, into the stripping fluid it went.

Lucky truck for stripping!

I placed the truck in the Citrustrip overnight and the next day I could tell the paint was coming off. I carefully used a toothbrush to scrub the body but the paint just came off without much scrubbing. I rinsed the body off (out side into my rocks) and this is what I had below.

perfectly stripped

Add caption

After I rinsed the body down, I took it inside and washed it down with warm soap and water to remove any residue that may have been left on the body. I then used a Krylon Camo beige for the car as the weathering effects I will use will show up nicely on the model. I did some basic painting on the bed, grill and rear bumper, but the rest is the beige paint and finally reassembled the truck.

New paint

Looks very clean

Some big wheels you have there!

After putting the truck back together and looking at it, I thought that a flat beige color for a real truck would look awesome, I know the current Rat Rod look is to use flat black, but man, I could see using flat beige and blacked out chrome would look nice on the real thing.

So next up is going to be rust and weathering effects from various manufacturers for the demo class, I will post after the class. But I think I found a new stripping fluid for metal models in the future. Now time to strip more cars!

TK

Carmageddon!

Well,

Back to Gaslands cars tonight, here are a few cars that will be going under the knife for some modifications.

The luck chosen!

 First up is drilling out the rivets in the cars, I do this using my drill press and a new 7/16th drill bit. Makes very fast work to taking out the rivet heads. Now I see Hot Wheels restorers online that tap out the post to use self tapping screws, I just use super glue to reassemble them, I also glue the wheels in place as I don't want the cars rolling around the board while using them.

Clean removal of the rivets!

Two cars are actually from my grown sons car collection, the Green Super Bird and the White Chevy 4x4. I noticed on the 4x4 a date of 1983 on the car, so I did some searching and come to find out that this car is rather rare. I guess the cars after this had the Hot Wheels logo in the rear side window, well this car doesn't have this. So searching Ebay, this car goes anywhere from $10.00 to $35.00, wow, I bet some collector is going to have a heart attack when they see what I am going to do with this car!

First rare car I guess.

 Interesting when I took it apart, I did not know the doors opened, it has a spring inside to allow this to happen. Not I am not sure if i will keep the doors on or off for my build.

Spring for doors that open!

The second car is this Plymouth Super Bird, I really like the paint on this one and will keep that as is except for some light weathering. I did add guns to the roof which I then carefully masked off the paint to prime the plastic guns.  I also did not like the wheels on the car and swapped them for the wheels off the El Camino with Jet engine. I had to cut down the axle to get them to fit, but I like the rims on it better then the plain old looking Hot Wheels stock wheel.

Super Cool now!

Since I robbed the wheels off the El Camino, I needed to add wheels back to this car. So I used the wheels off the Implements of Carnage set and added guns and the Rue bar ram to the front. As my buddy Mike loves dual wheels on his build, I decided to do a duel set of rear wheels. it does make it look meaner from back with those jet engines back there.

Dual wheels for you my friend.

Looks tough and strong with dual wheels.

 Okay, off to the paint shop, will post more once completed, stay tuned Gaslands Fans!

TK

Battle for the Western Woods

So,

Robert and I got in a game of Flames of War on Sunday. We play Mid War and did a Eastern front game with me taking 100 points of Germans vs his 100 Points of Russians.

The Battlefield

 I had choose to be the Defender in Counter Attack and per the scenario I had Ambush and immediate reserves. First off the Reserve rules are funky, I could only take up to 60% of my force or 60 points. problem was it meant that I would have six tanks on the board to face off against Roberts force. I deployed to the left protecting a objective in the woods. The company commander and 2IC took up in the woods with two Panzer IV's while the 4 Panzer III were deployed in the wheat field.

Panzer III's hiding in the Fields of gold.

 Robert tried a different tactic, he rushed across the open ground to get right up in my face! 10 T-34's tried crossing the river and all but four made it across.

Crazy Russians crossing the river!

 If I remember five tanks fell victim to the German guns and the Russians were only able to knock out on German tank.

First Blood Germans.

 The remainder of the Russian tanks swarmed the company commander and he was killed in the volley leaving the objective open woods.

German commander falls

I shifted the panzer III's to counter, meanwhile the Russians sent two KV-1s toward the center objective. But the following turn my reserves showed up in the form of a lone 88 gun. It took a turn to get it in place and when it fired it killed on of the KV's

Germans barely holding on!

next few turns were close shooting in the woods and the Germans knocked out the remainder tanks there, the 88 opened up on the KV killing it outright.

Was a very close game this time and if the KVs had not went for the center objective and pushed towards the objective in the wood, the Germans would have lost the battle as the two Panzer III's could not hurt them and their high armor. Was a great game and was very interesting to see it play out.

TK

Whats up with all this Gaslands???

I have been thinking a lot about Gaslands Refueled of late and it has captured most of my hobby time and imagination. I keep purchasing more Hot Wheels, thinking about different tracks I can build and what new cars I can come up with. I am even dreaming of it, which is strange. And it seems I am not alone in this as most people that come to the game have the same thing happen to them. So, what is it that causes this? Drunken Samurai and I were talking about it last night before we played Kill Team. Here is what I am thinking the reason for it is.

First off, it’s a fun simple game, I mean the rules are complex once you start digging in, but overall, they are very simple set of rules. Movement is dictated by templates (very much like X-Wing), it does use specialty dice ( once again like X-Wing and other games now a days) and the templates are in the back of the book to photo copy and there is a dice chart for using regular 6 sided dice. Everything is in the book.

Secondly, no one is telling you what you must have in your list! Most big game companies will be more then happy to sell you unit X or Z for your game that you must have. Gaslands allows you freedom to build or use whatever you want and since Osprey only makes rules, you can choose any models to play with. There is freedom in that aspect as you can and are encouraged to do your own thing. That right there is huge as I think that is partly why games like Gaslands resonate with older gamer's.

Thirdly, it’s got to be the cost. Heck right now you can get the main rulebook for less than $20.00 on Amazon and as stated above, you can photocopy the templates from the book (or download them from Osprey) and use regular dice with the chart in the book. That leaves a few cars that you can either purchase or raid your kids toy box, and that it! How many other miniature games can you purchase that can have you playing for less then $20.00???

Now most folks will buy cars and much like myself, they start with Hot Wheels. Most Hot Wheels you can get for a $1.00 or less, which leads to you purchasing 5-10 cars at a time. I will admit, I now have more cars then I really need for the game. It seems that buying Hot wheels triggers collecting Hot Wheels! I now have a few “cool” cars that I will not use for the game, why you ask? Well I do not know! All I can say is that there are many cool cars out there and I seem to find new cars each day! Its funny, when I see a car that is more than $1.00, I ask myself if I really need it. I have no problem spending $30.00 on a single model but spend $3.97 for a car is crazy! It makes no sense but that is what goes through my head looking at cars.

Fourth, customization and conversions, Gaslands allows you to do some cool conversions on cars. I have been playing GW games for years and I have always loved converting my models, but as of the last few years, GW has moved to models that go together only one way. There is less and less options to convert models or it takes way too much time or money. (Who wants to chop up a $30.00 model?) But with Gaslands and Hot wheels, I can afford to convert to my hearts content. And there are companies out there that are offering parts for conversions like Northstar Miniatures cool Implements of Carnage sprues. You also have access to 3D printed parts as well, the sky is the limit to what gamer's have access to for the game.

So, with those four things, I have a better understanding of why Gaslands is so popular and why it has taken hold of me the way it has. The last time I felt like this was with Lord of the Rings years ago and all I really want to play or work on is Gaslands. It doesn’t mean I will not play other games (playing Bolt Action this weekend) but I keep thinking about Gaslands and what I can do with it.

TK

Rough week

Ms. Sidney

Well,

No new hobby related work was completed this previous week, seems that real life thought I needed some stress in my life. Its funny how we take things for granted sometimes. I am glad that my hobby usually allows me some escape from the day to day rat race called life, but this past week I lost my hobby mojo.

So where to start, well as some know I am slowly taking commissions again for Saguaro Painting Service and recently I took on a commission for a decent sized Team Yankee commission of about 30 vehicles. For this commission I had to do assembly and it seemed that I was never going to get anything completed because the stack of plastic was not going down. Now this is usually not an issue for me, but this one just seemed to be taking a long time. To make matters worse, I am trying to get this commission completed by the end of the month, oh and one more thing the wife and I were supposed to go out of town for the weekend for Valentines, which would cut down on painting time.

So, I pushed forward, but then on Wednesday, our 16-year-old Black cat Sidney started acting very strange. She had recently lost some weight, but we thought that was normal for an older cat. But then she stopped using her litter box, which was a clear sign something was wrong. So, a trip to the vet was in order on Wednesday night and the vet told us that it would be $500.00 in tests, now the vet was very compassionate and told us we needed to go home and think about two things, one if we do the tests, it could be nothing or it could be something major. In his opinion it looked to be something major due to her symptoms she was having. So, the wife and I had to talk about the other option of having her put down. Well we decided with the vet that the quality of life for treatment, her age and the cost, the best thing was to let her go and make the tough call. She was scheduled for her last visit Thursday night.

So, my wife leaves for work around 6:00 am on Thursday morning, as she was getting of the freeway, I very large section of rolled up carpet padding came off a truck in front of her blocking her whole lane which hit her car. She knew right away that damage was done as she heard something crack and her something dragging. Luckily, she was able to keep control of the vehicle and was just around the corner from her work. The hit caused major damage to the driver side front bumper and front fascia of her car. Her work employees were able to “fix” the car to make it drivable for her trip home and she quickly made a call to our insurance and started a claim, I am thankful that I have a low deductible to pay.

Then as I am driving in to work, my brother text me to let me know that his wife’s father was just diagnosed with stage four terminal lung cancer and they were trying to process that! It seemed that we were being tested and I did not know how much I could handle for one day! All this bad news coming all at once was a lot to take in. I was pretty much numb at work with all the info I had received and was glad to be off on Friday.

My wife made it home and thankfully my son, daughter in law and grand baby came over that night, my son wanting to go with my wife to the vet to say goodbye to Sidney.  It was tough but was the right choice, it was made somewhat easier by the fact that our grand daughter was over and was a happy baby that night. We still have three cats and they of course spent that night looking for Sidney, which hurt us as they did not know what was going on. So, we showered them with lots of cat treats and played with them more than usual.

We decided that we would not go out of town and decided that we would just have a quiet weekend at home, we needed the time to adjust and comprehend everything going on around us. Sunday, I went to my local shop and many folks knew of my rough day and had very kind words. But one friend in particular was very sympathetic, and we had an awesome chat, shed some tears and made each other feel better.

And that’s what is important in this hobby of toy soldiers, the human contact we have with each other. Even though I did not play any games, my friends were there for me on a tough day, they listened and comforted me. To me, gaming is very special, out of all things I can buy, build, earn, time is the one most precious commodity that I can not get back and for my friends to take time out of their games to talk to me to make me feel better is an awesome gift! I am thankful for all my gaming buddies (you know who you are) that helped me this past weekend.

Sorry for the ramble, just had to get this off my chest.

TK