July 19th, 2008 by Missy

Yes, yes, I admit it — I’ve been slacking on the posts and on my painting. I got next to nothing done on the Varghulf yesterday, although I claim to have a very good reason! In an absolutely unprecedented show of compassion, my sister offered to watch the kids so that Dan and I could go and see the new Batman. I guess she went to the midnight release show and had such THO (Titty Hard On) from watching it that she decided that I HAD to see it so we could drool over Christian Bale together.

All I can say is.. Oh. My. God. I made Dan say things in his “Batman voice” the whole way home from the theatre. Can we say “take me now, please, Batman”? Even without Christian Bale’s complete and total sexocity, the movie was fantastic. It makes me ridiculously sad to think that Heath Ledger’s Joker won’t be making any appearances in future films.. he was absolutely outstanding.

Anyway, stupid Batman and keeping me from painting my Varghulf x.x I spent forever (okay, maybe not forever — in truth, the lure of Christian Bale Batman was too strong and I had to watch Batman Begins again) today trying to come up with something, anything to make the stupid wing bones look good, but I just can’t figure out what it needs. My first attempt was going to be a grayish color but I just kept ending up with some sort of purply.. blah. Combined with the pink fleshiness of the wings, it was making the model look very.. pastel. I don’t think that pastel is a term that can be applied to “blood-mad killers that exist only to feed”. I mean, I’m all for unconventional paint schemes and techniques / colors that showcase my femininity in my models, but a pastel Varghulf is just WRONG.

Anyway, I moved on to experimenting with shades of red, but still nothing is looking right. I do, at least, think that red is what I’m going to go with — I just need to find the right red. I’d like the very tips of the wings to be the brightest red, and then I’d like them to fade down to a brown until they finally meet with the model’s flesh. Unfortunately, however, I can’t quite find the right red.. and the right brown. Hopefully a day at the drawing board tomorrow will result in some wing bones that don’t look like complete crap. Once those are finished I will also, by necessity, have figured out the color that I’d like the flesh to be which will, of course, lead to an obvious choice for the fur.

The fate of my Varghulf rests on some teeny little ridiculously pointy (my finger still hurts, dammit) wing bones.

July 17th, 2008 by Missy

They’ve arrived, they’ve arrived! My VMC set is finally here! And not only are my paints here, Dan took me to my favourite restaurant (The Persian Room) for lunch, too! So far, this is shaping up to be a wonderful day.

He got called in to work, which is unfortunate, but hopefully it won’t take very long and then we can sit down to paint! I can’t wait to try out the new colors, but I don’t want to start the Varghulf until he gets home.  It still needs to be primed and he’s better at it than I am. I think it’s because he is able to shake the can more vigorously.. he’s so strong and wonderful <3

July 16th, 2008 by Missy

Yay for Dan being able to rebuild his mysteriously disappeared Night Goblin army!

He is the proud new owner of:

• 30 spider riders with 2 command
  
• 1 giant
  
• 1 giant spider with boss
  
• 9 ball and chain fanatics
• 2 wolf chariots
  
• 60 night goblin archers with 3 command
  
• 108 night goblins with spear and 5 command
  
• 1 new Scarsnick and Gobbla
  
• 1 old Scarsnick and Gobbla
  
• 1 ork and goblin battalion box
  
• 1 night goblin box
  
• 1 blister goblins with spears
  
• 4 night goblin fanatics blisters (3 per blister)
  
• 1 night goblin squig herder blister
  
• 4 night goblin squig herders
  
• 6 squigs
  
• 6 pairs of night goblin squig herder
  
• 20ish spider bodies missing legs
• 47 snotlings
  
• 1 stone troll metal
• 1 doom diver catapult missing 1 divers legs

All of this for the ridiculously bargain price of $280 + $20 shipping!  Guess that pretty much takes care of Dan’s second army.  That’s an easy 3000 points right there.

July 14th, 2008 by Missy

Poor me ;-; My paints aren’t going to get here until THURSDAY. Yes, I cry a lot. I am going into WITHDRAWAL here people. I.. need.. to.. paint.

The Varghulf is all ready to go (well, arms aren’t attached although they are pinned, but there are some parts I need to paint before I glue / greenstuff those) and I got my dire wolves all glued together tonight. That sucked, by the way. I love how the models look, but I didn’t realize how poorly sculpted their joins are. It seems to be a trend lately, with GW. Every new box I’ve opened I’ve just been stunned at how difficult it is to get the models together compared to a few years ago. It’s a little disappointing, actually. I’ll have to take some pictures of Dan’s quarrelers as an example. It’s just shameful how badly done those models are.  They’re going to need hours of greenstuffing to get them looking decent.

Anyway, off to bed with me.

July 11th, 2008 by Missy

I’ve been anxiously awaiting the delivery of my new VMC paints (I think I mentioned before that I don’t want to paint anything else until they arrive). I’ve dutifully checked outside my parents’ front door every day (about 700 times) and today there was a tag on the door that they tried to deliver but since no one answered, they’d redeliver on Monday or the package could be picked up today after 6:15.

I was so excited, GDI >.< Anyway, I popped on FedEx’s website to see if there was any chance the package would be back at the office before 6:15 so that I could get it sooner.. and realized that the tracker said the package weighed half a pound. Now, obviously 72 paints in a carrying case is not going to weigh half a pound. So it turns out that it’s really just some crap paperwork for my dad from his old job. BLAAAAAH. I WANT MY PAINTS.

I am dying to get more work done on my army. I swear, I can’t stand waiting much longer. On another shitty note, I realized when my spearhead arrived that the Varghulf is on a 60mm base. Or is it 50mm? Anyway, it’s definitely not a 40mm, therefore I can’t enter it in the contest.

Yay. And yet another shitty note… Dan just called me. They’re cutting four classes from WAR. Hammerer, Choppa, Knight of the Blazing Sun, and Black Guard. This just.. completely unbalances the game. Empire and Dark Elves get no tank? How the hell are they supposed to hold a line against their counterparts (Chaos and High Elves) who have all four classes? And in the Orc v. Dwarf scene.. Squig Herders and Engineers are going to run rampart without their smack-ass classes to keep them in check.

Not to mention, they’re also cutting out four of the six capital cities. One of the major points about WAR that they’ve been touting is being able to capture the capital city of your opposing force, beat up his leader and like.. tear down his statues. Now only two races get that dubious privilege?

I’ll be completely honest here and say that — this puts a serious damper on my desire to play the game. Dan and I have already ordered our collector’s editions, so we’ll be playing in the open beta together.. but I rather expect that we won’t be putting in our credit cards for that monthly subscription fee.

I mean, come on.. the class I most want the play is the Disciple of Khaine, so now I get to play a healer with no tank? I realize that I can travel on over to the Orc or Chaos area and snag myself a nice Black Orc or Chosen, but I DON’T WANT TO. I want to run around with a sexy elf man in the DARK ELF area, doing DARK ELF public quests and battling HIGH ELVES.

July 10th, 2008 by Missy

Browsing around The War Store today, I stumbled across the celebrity testimonials. I was expecting to just find a couple of you know.. D-list actors who happen to play Warhammer, figured it would be amusing. What I found was so much better. It’s actually.. indescribable. You’ll have to read it for yourself to truly appreciate the beauty of it. To entice you to do so (please, please go read them all), I give you Chuck Norris’ endorsement of The War Store.

TheWarStore is the only place tough enough to handle orders for Chuck Norris

My name is Chuck Norris. I’m here to tell you some facts about TheWarStore.com. Neal is the the toughest guy in the online hobby business. I taught him everything he knows.

• TheWarStore doesn’t lower prices. Neal glares at them until they fall on their own.
• When I play 40k, I just use one miniature. But it is me, so I always win.
• TheWarStore doesn’t actually send packages to the post office. I just roundhouse kick them to your door.
• When I play D&D, the GameMaster doesn’t ask me to make a ‘to-hit’ roll. He asks me to roll a ‘how far did you kick their head off’ roll.
• TheWarStore prices just don’t beat the competition. It makes their store burst into flame, collapse, and then the rubble disintegrates.
• I play Blood Angels. I don’t have to paint them to make them look good; I just leave them around the room when I fight people.
• If I wanted, I could make GW sell to me at a discount, but I would rather buy from Neal at TheWarStore.

July 10th, 2008 by Missy

Some people take this hobby way too seriously. Don’t misunderstand — I am obsessed with Warhammer, I adore Warhammer, and I take my Warhammer seriously.. but I don’t really consider it acceptable to take the hobby so seriously that you spoil other people’s ability to enjoy the game.

Not really feeling like bitching about it, so here’s an awesome picture from a thread on DakkaDakka.

I mean, seriously — tell me that isn’t the awesomest thing ever? If someone plopped that down on the table in front of me, I would absolutely play a game with them. How could you not? I mean, except for the fact that Anya would bitch me out for killing Elmo or something.. They’re just hilarious.

July 10th, 2008 by Missy

All I ever post about lately is Warhammer.  It’s that whole obsession thing.  Anyway, my VC spearhead arrived today, although I admit that I am having some trouble being excited about it.   My paints haven’t yet arrived and I don’t really want to start anything new until I have the new paints otherwise.. yanno.. models within the same unit won’t match and I (of course) want to do my special characters with the good stuff.

I suppose I can’t truly blame the lack of paints, however.  Today has been a very blah day.  No real reason, I suppose, but there it is.  Ever have a day like that?  I mean, I won’t say that nothing went wrong (an incident with Katie and the complete and total lack of privacy that Dan and I have), but nothing worth how EHHHH I feel today.

I really, desperately hope that my paints arrive tomorrow.  There’s nothing like spending money to perk me up.  I should have been a dilettante, seriously.  I’d be awesome at it.

(As an aside, I suppose dilettante isn’t the correct word to use here as I don’t particularly mean someone interested in the arts, I simply mean a useless woman who does nothing but host parties and shop on her husband’s credit.  My brain is failing me at the moment, however, and refuses to produce the word that I want.  It isn’t debutante, it isn’t socialite.. but anyway..)

July 7th, 2008 by Missy

I received a wonderful suggestion on Dakka for my Grave Guard’s weapon — instead of just doing a blue glowy thing, it was suggested that I have the weapon faded from glowy into rusted. I decided that doing something like that might be beyond my current level of skill since the rusty look I am using isn’t one particular paint, it’s more of a stippling technique, and my blending technique isn’t a true blending technique.. it’s just creative use of assloads of mixes of similarly shaded paints.

So I decided to go with the same theme, but executed a bit differently.  The idea here was to have a rusted weapon (you know, been in the ground forever, etc) that is charging up with power because it is being held by the wight.  His power coursing through the blade is causing the grime of ages to crack and fall away and presumably, the weapon would eventually just be some glowing nimbus of awesome power.. but it isn’t there yet ^_^

Unfortunately, I don’t think that I achieved the effect that I was looking for.  What I think I’ve ended up with is a rusted weapon with blue squigglies on it.  I wish that I could just paint what is in my head.. it looks so good there.

July 6th, 2008 by Missy

Work progresses apace on my Vampire Counts. I’ve basically finished my first Grave Guard. You can see in this photo that I have made the highlights on the cloth more extreme, in addition to uh.. adding arms and a head and a weapon and all that cool stuff. All that is currently missing from the model are his shoulderpads (painted, but not attached) and detailing on his base. The shoulderpads are unattached due to the fact that I’m not quite sure about the weapon. I’ve gone for a very tarnished look with the model, but decided to give the blade of the weapon more of a magical feel since it’s a “wight blade” with killing blow and all of that jazz. I’m just not sure how happy I am with it. Are the colors too subdued? Should it be brighter blue? Should it be red to break up some of the monotony of the model and to further tie it in with the rest of my army (which will feature more of a red feel than blue)? Anyway, opinions are always welcome!

On to more happy news — the army that I ordered on ebay arrived today. The painting isn’t very good (not that I had expected it to be), but it should all be salvageable. The models have very thick coats of paint on them, but so long as Castrol Super Clean doesn’t let me down..

One of the Grave Guard is flat missing a head, but I should have an extra lying around from my box to repair him. Also, the previous owner didn’t bother trying to fix the fact that Grave Guard lean forward as if they’re about to topple, so I’ll need to separate their torsos from their legs and reposition, but once again — they should basically come apart once I put them into some CSC.

I’ll likely finish painting my box of Grave Guard and the models from the Spearhead before I bother stripping these down and repainting them. They’re.. passable. Not what I would ever consider to be tabletop for myself, but they’re better than fielding bases with nothing on them, so I’ll leave them be until I’ve painted up everything that hasn’t been touched yet.

My next project will probably be to paint the Varghulf from the Spearhead box. I’ve decided that the Varghulf is what I will enter into the painting competition that I previously mentioned is being held at my FLGS. Darling hubby bought me the Vallejo Model Color Suitcase with 72 delicious colors and I think the Varghulf will be a wonderful model to christen it with once it arrives. I imagine it will be getting here soon, as we ordered it from The War Store and Neal is, of course, ridiculously awesome. I am assuming that it will arrive before the Varghulf, actually.. I was going to buy a Varghulf down at the gaming store (the contest rules require that you purchase the model from the store, with your receipt as your entry form) but they didn’t have any in stock. Anyway, I ordered one from them and I’ll buy it to have my receipt, I’ll just paint whichever model I get first.. I imagine that there shouldn’t be any problem with that and the rules, since I still purchased a Varghulf from the store ^_^ I figure I’ll paint up both models, keep the one I like better, and sell the other on ebay. I’ve wondered for a while what I could get for one of my minis (especially since I’ll be taking extra care with it and I think that my tabletop minis are already quite nice). Time to find out, I suppose!