Hobby disasters and new ideA

Bad news folks. My plan for my epic Frostgrave board have collapsed. I followed the advice of Choco from oldhammer without a budget and bought 7 cans of spray paint from a local car store (I won't name nanes as I want this to be a product placement free zone) and used it to undercoat all of my polystyrene. I was going great guns but then I noticed something happening. The poly started to melt! The more paint I tried to use the worse shape it became. The whole loaf was ruined! 

I think it's the cheAp paint from the car place. It's ruined all my plans so I've been in a total hobby burn out all Easter. It's ruined my plans. I dumped the used spray cans in the bin and took the rest back to the car place and demanded a refund. The were quit difficult. I ended up having to argue with the manger. Add holes! 

After being put off for a whole week I got the desire to do hobby again and I found inspiration in the oddest of places. Ann Easter egg that my mum had been given by her boyfriend turned out to contain some ideal pieces of plastic. 

These are great! I advise everyone to use there old eggs in such a wAy! I can see these becoming a base to attack with my astral bears. I feel my mojo rising again! Tune in next time bear fans!!

Pile of Poly

Wow! I've had comments. Thank you Choco and Lasgunpacker. It's nice to know that some of the things that I am thinking about have struck a cord with you.

So to keep a good thing going I have collected a big pile of polystyrene that I can use to build ruins. I need to think about how I want to divide up the pieces I have. I don't want to ruin them by making trash decisions. Planning and preparation is the key to a project like this. One piece is already broken which is a bit a of a shame. I'n sure I can work around that though.

I need to think about how I'm going to cut this polystyerem up. I might use a saw. Or i might use a bread knife.

I've also found out that this isn't normal polystyrene. This is expanded polystyrene. I wonder if I'll be able to get a hold of any no-expanded polystyrene for building ruins with? Can anybody point me in the right direction?

The blogs that made me want to blog

HI everybody!

In this post I want to tell you all about the other blogs that I find so interesting and that have inspired me to start my own blogging career.

HipsterHammer is a great tumblr mixing coolness and Horus Heresy. The two guys that do this blog have all kinds of great ideas and do fantasy stuff as well as Horus Heresy stuff. The pics are very nice and I really like their painting style. The mix of info and cool is what I want to aim at.

Watching Paint Dry is blog full of great painting of 40K stuff. I like the guys style and it's something that I would like to copy. he shares pictures of him assembling his miniatures as well and the ideas s he gives me for the different ways I can assemble the 'Astral bears'. I think the title is really ironic cause I do spend a lot of time watching the paint on my miniatures dry.

Warhammer 40k Orks as the title suggests, this blog has a lot of warhammer 40k works in. As works are the ultimate enemy of the Astral Bears I like it know  what I'm up against. Luckily the author of the blog also has lots of other interesting projects to work on and these are all over the place from model cars to a blue (yes blue!) fanstasy orc army. There is always something interesting to read on this blog and always exciting new paint jobs.

Realm of 80's Chaos is a blog all about Mcdeath which is an Old Games Workshop game plus other bits of ancient Warhammer books and games. The author leads into the world of 'Oldhammer' which looks like something I want to get into. Oldhammer seems to be about people wanting to play Warhammer in the same way they did when they were kids or at least the way they imagined they wanted to when they were kids. Some of the articles are a little long so you may need to skip those ones but some have some really interesting information in them.

Never mind the Jankers i don't know what Jankers are but this blog is full of great ideas for Frostgrave and is a source of all sorts of great gaming information. The author plays lots of different kinds of games and goes to lots of game conventions so the variety on the types of games that are on display is rather large. I especially like the blog for the battle reports which are not overly showy but do display how normal people can enjoy a great game of miniatures without having to spend huge amounts of money. His idea about Frsotagrave scenery are what mad me want to start this blog!

Oldhammer on a Budget sounds like its will be a blog about not spending lots of money to join in with the Oldhammer games but it's more fun than that. The author seems to get lots of projects done really quickly and I'm in awe at the amount he gets painted. He's a doer. This isn't a guy that's obsessed with a perfect paint job. He'd rather get a miniature painted and on the table. There are some battle reports well. His house must be full of armies!

Hope you enjoy these blogs as much as I do.

The tools of my trade

I've got lots of paints from the excellent games workshop range. In fact I wouldn't buy anybody else's paints (not that anybody else makes paints for miniatures but I think some people use airfix paints).

Here is a picture of my collection

I like to keep the handy in a variety of boxes. I have experimented with arranging them in a variety of ways to make my painting easier. If use colour theory to do this.

If you have not heard of colour theory i'm surprised it is an obscure art. Basically it is a way of arranging colours so that you can instantly know which ones go together or don't.

Here is an example of a colour theory chart.

I find it makes choosing colour s for badges on my home made Space Marine chapters really easy. I have plans to paint a whole Chapter of one of my own creations 'The Astral Bears'. I think the main colour will be green, like in the image above with red trim and yellow badges. I post a picture when i get the started.

I use GW brushes as well

as i find that they are the best to use on GW miniatures. I clean them after I have used them as well. I use soap which is good at making the brushes last longer which is important as brushes are expensive. I'd like to hear your experiences of using brushes.

I'm quite enjoying blogging so far. In my next post I want to share the blogs that have inspired me to start my own.

Snow it begins....

Hi all. and welcome to my blog. I hope to be able to show you all the amazing things that I get up to with my miniatures and wargaming. There will be lots of stuff to see in the next couple of posts but first I wanted to spread an idea that came to me when I was reading about and exciting new game called Frostgrave (great name).

The idea of the game is to battle wizards in a frozen city and it suddenly occurred to me that I could build a city out of scraps of polystyrene like in the photo above.

If I can get enough of it together I will build a castle in the middle of the board and then have lots of streets running off it. All line with polystyrene. It's already white so I wouldn't have to even paint it. I can't believe no one else has though of this!

Anyway, I need to go and do some more hobby. I'll talk to guys later!

Bob