Sunday 15 February 2015

Enemies Of The Chocolate Business

Nerds, Loners and countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to ignore my issues, not to bang on about them at tedious length. Just because there are some people who apparently can't actually be happy just being happy unless they take a day out to rub everyone else's faces in it at the behest of an industry that JUST BY PURE COINCIDENCE happens to manufacture the ultimate comfort food doesn't mean that the rest of us have to give them the satisfaction of us spending the weekend locked in a darkened room rocking back and forth and sobbing quietly to ourselves.

Seriously, fuck those guys. In the strictly metaphorical context.

You know the sort of metaphor I'm talking about here.

This is of course a rather long winded and roundabout way of saying that rather than giving in to the constant nagging bullshit in my head, I elected to spend the weekend in a slightly constructive manner and have been catching up on some painting at long last.

It's been a while since I've had a proper painting session. Not entirely sure why, since even after all this my queue is STILL looking woefully excessive. But I guess that's what I get for being broken in the head. Sometimes the priorities get a bit mixed up.


The main thing I wanted to do this weekend was finish up my Goloth assault squad. So that's what I did.


These respirator guys aren't actually the ones I was working on though. I'd actually managed to get these 3 done previously, but it's been a long while since I've actually done one of these posts, so there's catching up to be done.


It's a funny thing, but one of the reasons I was actually keen to get these guys was because some of the squad were wearing respirators and gas masks. I mean, I know it's a cheap and quick way of adding variety whilst reusing existing assets. And that's fine. But the thing is, you don't really see this sort of headgear on dudes with this sort of head shape.


Seriously, it's odd when you think about. Just because you've got a long muzzle doesn't mean you'll never want to cover your mouth. And alien lizard people are probably just as suseptible to gas attack as anyone else. So it tickled my fancy.


In terms of notes on painting them I don't really have anything new to say. I probably discussed that sort of thing last time. Although there are 2 pertinent points. Firstly, gas masks are fucking great because you're not having to worry about picking out teeth and eyes. I know I keep banging on about it, but I am really bad at eyes. Well, worse than I am at other areas anyway.


The second point being that I REALLY haven't actually missed painting whole squads of things AT ALL. I mean, this was just 10 dudes, and I broke them down into 3 sets and took months to finish them and it was STILL kinda tedious once you'd got the basics own. How I ever coped doing armies back in the day I'll never know. But it's no great suprise that my painting seemed to have improved when I picked it back up and just did whatever bit's and bobs happened to interest me at the time.


Aside from the Goloth, the main other thing I wanted to get done was these 2 things. Alien Artifacts from Micro Art Studios. I wanted these for use as objective Mcguffins for games. Specifically Ouroborite Condensors for a certain setting idea I had once. Hence the contrasting colour schemes, one for each team. I was kinda hoping to get them a bit more glowy. But I think they came out servicable. Frankly I'm more worried about wrecking them up if I go back and tamper any more than I already have.


Here we have a bit of a blast from the past. Specifically from 3rd edition 40K if my memory serves. As much as I love endlessly bang on about how little respect I have left for Games Workshop, I still will happily admit that they did do some wonderful things with plastic kits back in the day. And one of the good things they did was a set of of ammo crates and other battlefield scenery. So naturally I glued some of it together in a crude pile to make a barricade. When I found my old 40K scenery this pile was one of the things I didn't actually throw away in shame. Instead I rebased it, added a few extra details and had a go at painting it properly. I probably should have taken more time to sand and fill the joins on the barrels, but whatevs. It's still a fairly decent item overall.


This is just one of the same barrels from the scenery sprue, only I cut the top out, filled it up with cruft and glued in a flame from Black Cat. Simple but effective. I figure something like this will be good for sentry points or marking out patrol routes in a sneaky type scenario. Since I had a couple of flames left over I''m gonna knock up a couple  more for just such an eventuality.


Something else I found in the aforementioned pile was some plastic ruins. Which I also decided to fix up. Aside from actually trying to base them this primarily meant adding a random pot (from Fenris) just to add a bit more interest. But the other thing I decided to do was add flagstones.


I mean, if these are bits of cathedral or whatever, logically there should be some sort of proper floor beneath them, right? Actually, this was really simple to do as I just glued some square bases I'd gotten from Magister Militium. Just being plain plastic squares meant all that needed doing was gluing them down in a regular pattern before adding all the sand and stuff to texture the base. Cut them off across the edge of the ruin and it looks like this is just the bit poking out of the dirt thanks to the protection of the last standing corner of building.

I'm actually really pleased with these. Although I do have to take issue with the upper floors somewhat. It's not something I ever actually noticed before I came to redo them, but that second story starts at about shoulder height, if that. Which rather makes you wonder about the design of building in the 40K universe, since the only things that could live on the ground floor would be Squats. And GW stopped doing Squats YEARS ago. Because, after all, it's not like anyone has any good ideas for doing dwarves in space anyway.

Seriously, could someone remind me why we still need GW at this point?

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