Done!

Aaaaaaaaaand DONE! Got my December pieces done just under the wire. I'm in with 267.75 square inches of campaign terrain. I think I will start my January terrain tomorrow, so I don't run into this crunch again! But, I have to say, deadlines work. That's 267.75 square inches of terrain that I would not have had were it not for our campaign.

Washed and Ready to Base

Went ahead and drybrushed the rubble tan, washed it with some GW Badab Black, and then washed all the models and some of the rubble with GW Gryphonne Sepia cut 1:1 with water. It's a little thin, but better that than too thick. I'll probably leave it like that, go ahead and glue on the bridge over the pipes, and flock the base.

Over the Hump

Okay. That's an awful lot of white to have left after painting on it for four or so hours, but I have brought it up to a basic rust "drip" wash. I'll let that dry over night (hopefully!). Tomorrow, I'll dust the rubble with a tan drybrush, then start some GW washes-- some Badab Black on the rubble, and 1:1 watered down Gyphonne Sepia over the whole model.

Crazy, Am I?

It's-a primed. IT'S-A PRIMED!!

OH POOP!

The glue isn't dry after five hours!! I probably can't do any more work tonight!! OH NOES...
Update: A hair dryer seems to be working to really speed up drying the watered down Elmer's white/PVA glue I used. I wonder if I could accelerate washes with that...

Ready to Paint NOW

Weeeeell, last time I kind of forgot about the rubble, which is actually a somewhat lengthy process, waiting for all the glues to dry. I usually paint the piece first, and then base it, including the rubble. I wanted to do it before painting this time so I could primer over the rubble and help it adhere to the base. So, actually painting the pieces has been pushed out a bit. It is going down to the wire here, folks! I had wanted to try out some more interesting weathering techniques on these, but that will have to wait. I won't be able to work on these tomorrow night, since it is New Year's Eve and the family has plans, so I've got to bust my butt getting this stuff done. Still, I can't make the glue dry any faster than it does. I took my lunch today and got the debris all glued down. It can dry, and I can start working on it again when I get home tonight. Hopefully, I will be able to finish by tomorrow afternoon! My confidence is currently high, but it waxes and wanes depending on how I think about it...

The Workbench

The Workbench is a blog worth checking out. He has some very nice pictures, sculpts his own figures and has painting tip videos. Very nice.

A Year of Frugal Gaming

One Man's Mission to Spend Less and Game More... Best of luck to you! If you can pull it off, you're a better man than me. I haven't bought anything hobby related all day, I'm doing pretty well so far...

Sweet Uncharted Seas

Craig of the d6 Generation has some really sweet pictures of his Uncharted Seas set up. Everybody seems to like this game. I'm trying to stay away, but the siren call is hard to resist...

Ready to Paint

I've got the main piece ready to paint...I added some greebles and random pipes...some of which are on the far side and perfectly not pictured! Ah well, a few hours well spent. 2 points I can count on, at least! Decent terrain is, indeed, fairly time consuming...time for some Rowan's Creek!

Trucidos Terrain Work in Progress

Here are pictures of the current state of my December terrain for our Trucidos campaign. It's down to the wire for me, but I have a few more evenings left to finish. I'm glad December has 31 days!

Good Horse Painting Reference

Junior General hosts a few stock horses in his paper figure collection, which serve nicely as quick and easy horse painting guides. He has Bay, Chestnut, Black, Brown and Dun, Buckskin, Palomino, Gray, Dapple Gray, and Roan, and Pinto. Thanks to Kaiserliks.

Two Hour Wargames Fanzine

Two Hour Wargames has a free fanzine, Insight. It looks interesting.

Cool Christmas Light Lava Board

I liked this idea for a lighted lava board. There's not much detail, but it looks like he's sandwiched painted fluorescent light panels between insulation foam, and run Christmas lights underneath to make his lava glow. Hot! A great use for those old Christmas lights you're going to have to take down soon...Merry Christmas!

Green Stuff Press Mold

Now this green stuff press mold article looks really useful. I've done simple, one-sided versions of this in the past, but this is the most developed version of it I've seen. Epoxy putty is a lot easier to work with than RTV silicone and liquid resin.

Tabletop Terrain

Tabletop Terrain can suck up a lot of your time, even if you don't play the games covered. There are a lot of nice terrain ideas there, and don't miss the tutorials. He uses Ultracal 30 for his Hirst molds, may have to try that.

Spitfires, Check Your Six!

Brian has some nice game reports of our recent Check Your Six games up at Repple Depple. My Spitfires flew over Paris with ace Johnnie Johnson, and defended the Nijmegen bridges, escaping by the skin of their teeth. CY6 are some fun rules!

Unfinished Armies

Unfinished Armies should have been the title for my blog. I'm jealous! I always love to see painting desks, and his reminds me a lot of mine. His modeling skills, however, put me to shame. Guess I need to work on my quantity...

Tiny Tin Toys

Tiny Tin Toys is a nice little blog. It's first post was in September...and it's last post was in that same September. I hope it gets updated again, but I'm afraid it's yet another gamer's flash in the pan blog. Still, I liked this post about creating custom markers for his army. Very nice, plus he linked to this Coding Horror post about how Quantity trumps Quality. I'd seen that post before, but forgotten about it, and I'm glad to have stumbled across it again, as I do agree with it. My children are very, very tired of me constantly harping about how they have to actually keep doing something before they can expect to actually do it well, but I forget about it myself. When I haven't painted or done something hobbyish for an extended period, and finally get back into, I can really feel that my skills have weakened.

Aliens Board Game in Flash

Oh, yeah! Play the old Aliens board game with this flash version.

Amazing Vehicle Weathering

Ultrawerke once again shows you how it's done.

Trucidos Game 1 Report

I faced off against Chris's Tyranid's for the first game of our Trucidos 40k Campaign. Here is the tale of my inglorious defeat...

Outlander

Now this movie sounds fun-- Vikings vs. Aliens. There are some decent looking trailers here.

Figure Design 2.0

Wargames Factory is really blowing my mind. Their Liberty and Union League takes ideas for new products from the public and gets pre-orders as votes, a la Eureka's 100 and 300 Clubs. But they don't just stop there. Since they are designing the figures digitally, they are posting renderings of the figures and changing them in real time based on potential customer's comments. That's pretty awesome. I committed to 10 sprues of their zombies. I already have 20 West Wind and Foundry SWAT figures and a couple of civilian survivors...time to start looking for some zombie rules and scratch build that mall terrain I've always wanted...

The Trucidos Campaign, Game One

The opening shots of the Trucidos Campaign have been fired. Last night we played 500 point 40k games on 4x4 tables, which I'm pretty sure were everybody's first 5th edition games played to completion. In typical fashion, I came out of the gate firmly in last place! You can check the website for current standings and little fluff bits we're writing for campaign points, plus I'll be posting a more detailed game report tomorrow if I can scrounge up the time. Long story short-- I blame the dice!

Plot Aid Card Deck

So, I've always been somewhat enamored with solo games and solo campaigns. I do play solo games, especially just in terms of learning new rules or trying out some new figures. Solo campaigns, on the other hand, have seemed rather daunting. This plot aid card deck from Table Top Titans seems like a nice, general tool to prod your imagination along in something like that.

MiniWarGaming

MiniWarGaming is a video-heavy blog with some useful terrain tips.

CWC Yom Kippur Retooling

It's not all giant monsters, failed super apes and 40k here at Little Lead Heroes, folks. I have also been working on some manly historicals, too. Figuring that Cold War Commander was a decent set of rules, I went back over my Yom Kippur figures and rebased some elements to make them more distinctive. I also filled out a few gaps in my armies.

More Godzilla Art

This time it's my son, who has recreated the cover of Godzilla 2000. We haven't watched it yet, and he's been begging me the last couple of days to watch Rodan, but I imagine we'll get around to it before too long.

Baron Vega's Solo Wargaming Page

Baron Vega's Solo Wargaming Page was always a nice collection of solo wargaming information, but it appears to have died. I have a mirror from 2005 I saved here.

Godzilla vs. Dr. Serizawa

My daughter drew this for me today-- the dramatic finale of Godzilla, King of the Monsters! Dr. Serizawa has just detonated the Oxygen Destroyer to kill Godzilla and save humanity, then cut his own lifeline, sacrificing himself so that all knowledge of the terrible device would die with him and never be used as a weapon. Plus, his wife can now honorably marry the man she really loves.

Someday...

Miltoon Soong got a new gaming table...

Oh No, There Goes Tokyo...

My oldest boy has strep and my girl has a cold, so I tried to think of something fun I could do for them as they are quarantined at home. Having been playing MPoc with the boy a bit recently, we camped out a safe distance apart on the couches and I popped in Godzilla, King of the Monsters!

Fast and Dirty

I've been meaning to take a look at the Fast and Dirty SciFi Skirmish rules for a while. It looks like there's been some recent work on them, and it's probably a good time to do so. They also have a Yahoo group.

Just Frelling Typical

So, some of you may have realized that I like super apes. I was tooling around the Reaper site today, and saw that they produce a new super ape, Ape-X, Super Villian, in their new Chronoscape line. Naturally, I ran out and bought one. It's not evident from the picture, but Ape-X includes four separate hands-- the fist and chain gun shown, plus a wrecking ball/mace and a drill. Now, this excited me because I have been looking for a chance to do some swappable bits with rare earth magnets, which is all the rage lately...

Merry Nerdmas

"This is how the fate of the world should be decided!

More Pew Pew!

I somehow managed to miss this Armorcast coolness. I have to have some, even if I only mount them temporarily...

My Christmas List

Juuuuust in case you were wondering what to get me for Christmas...

Monsterpocalypse Essentials

This thread on the Monsterpocalypse Forums links to a lot of good information, but the most useful I found was this thread on unit cards. The figures themselves have all the info you need on little icons. They can be hard to read on the Unit figures, and it requires a lot of cross-referencing to figure out what they all mean. A few people have created their own unit cards with all the rules for each figure in one place. This made a lot of difference for my son! Now, I just need to get him to play longer than twenty minutes at a time...

The Coolest Necrons Ever

These are the coolest Necron figures I've seen. Also, it includes some very interesting rust techniques I will have to try.

Iron Mitten

Iron Mitten is an interesting blog with the coolest campaign reports I've seen. I also loved the Death by Decal cartoon. Funny and cool stuff!

Fact Follows Fiction

The chainsaw bayonet.

This Week in Wargaming

I just started listening to This Week in Wargaming. I like it. The presentation isn't pretentious, and the audio is very listenable. I will be following this regularly.

Barrel of Monkeys

Mik pointed out the other day that I hadn't posted pictures of my Barrel of Monkeys Superbot. Created and piloted by a super-intelligent group mind made up of cute, tiny gibbons, the Barrel of Monkeys can often be found teaming up with Harangutan and the Super Simians.

Home Sick

Home sick today. Was already taking the day off, just happened to have the cold I've been fighting the last week flare up and ruin it. I don't even feel well enough to paint. I did manage to get a little basing done, though... Dangerous stuff, a gamer trapped in his gaming room, nothing to really do but think...think about all those new projects he could be doing...

Doc's Projects

Doc's Projects is a nice 40k-focused blog. I was very interested in this recent entry on bases, although he doesn't list Iron Halo or Scibor Monstrous Miniatures. He also has lots of nice pictures, so browse around.

Chicago Terrain Factory

Chicago Terrain Factory has a lot of informative articles. There's some nice pictures of his Hirst Arts projects, info on resin casting, and more. I really like his tournament markers.

40k Trucidos Campaign

Some of the local boys and I are starting a little 40k campaign. There will be my Necrons, Mik's Dark Angels, Tyranids and Imperial Guard. We're all adults with families, so we're trying to keep it fairly low commitment with one game a month, for six months. We are also trying to incentivize terrain building by offer campaign points based on the total square footage of terrain you make each month. Hopefully, it will go well and be fun for everybody!

Okay, Okay, I Give In...

I'm going to have buy into some Weird War 2 stuff after seeing Slugger Murphy. Maybe I'll turn my Hellboy stuff into a Weird War 2 game...

Overheard at the table

After delaying the start of our Monsterpocalpse game a bit by trying to explain some of the more advanced options, my son says excitedly, "Can I do--", followed by, dejectedly, "Oh, nevermind, you'll probably have to read more rules..." However, he sure didn't mind knowing those rules once he started Swatting my units with his Zor-Maxim!!

Scorpia

A quick little one-off I just painted-- the Superfigs Scorpia. After more than a week away from my painting table, I was ready to paint, and I tried some new stuff on her, notably the stone floor on the base, and using non-metallic metals on her wrist weapons. I think that turned out pretty well, although it's not very noticeable since the weapons are pretty much the same color as her outfit. Think of her every time you visit Union Station in Kansas City, MO!

Boromir and Kermit's Hobby Page

Boromir and Kermit's Hobby Page is chock full of interesting content, including a custom Blood Bowl board. I've got to get around to updating the blog roll soon...

American Akira

Check out the trailer from the upcoming remake of Akira. On the other hand, this fan trailer is pretty cool.

A Couple of New Things

Gaming Terrain is a very new blog which looks like could be interesting to following. Also, I stumbled across a forum I hadn't seen before, Mini Art of War.

Thirty Years War in Plastic

I've thought about doing 25mm Thirty Years War for a couple of years now, sort of covering all the wars of Germany. I now see that Warlord Games is planning an ECW and TYW line in hard plastic... I will definitely need to pick up the productivity to pull that off...