Oath of Moment: Anvil of War

My name is Tanya and I have a bucketload of shame. I have many models, shelves full of them, but almost nothing is painted. I know, I’m a monster. As someone who doesn’t play tournaments and barely gets to play due to living in a relatively isolated community, painting has always taken a backseat to my other nerdy endeavours. I’m also a very relaxed gamer; I love to play but I do not care if my opponent needs to proxy some stuff, or his/her models also aren’t painted, and certainly I don’t care if marines are in mix and match power armour. Seriously, let’s just play! I’m a busy woman: I am training to play my first roller derby game, I am a full time pawn broker, and I have other hobbies too(like RPG night once a week, and squeezing video and board games in every once in awhile). That being said, I want to work on painting more in 2016.

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Unfinished Projects: Embracing the chaos of my mind

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If you have a hobby, you have projects. Honestly it doesn’t matter if you’re into miniatures, rpg’s, fishing, music, ridiculous cars or quilting, you always have things you want to be working on if you just had the time. Now the nature of our modern lives means we never have the time we think (or want) to move this stuff forward, which creates a backlog of unfinished, sometimes only dreamed of projects. This is the chaos of your mind. That disheveled area were wild ideas are left to roam. Now there are two methods of dealing with this chaos, especially in gaming.

  1. Complete each project you start methodically, focusing all attention and thinking on one thing at a time. Don’t even consider other creative endeavors until you’re at a finished stage on the previous item. When people ask what you’re working on, it will be the same thing as last time and you always complete what you start.
  2. Keep those dreams alive. Embrace your hobby wobbles and tangential flights of fancy filling your life with mental explorations of those things you’re passionate about. Love the chaos.

So if you can do method 1, congratulations, you’re probably a robot. Seriously, look at yourself hard in a mirror, try and remember the last time you got sick, have an expert ask you cross referenced questions about empathy with a Voight-Kampf machine, because you might not be human. If you can seriously tell me you never think about something new till you’ve finished the old, I don’t fucking trust you. This article is for the rest of us. Those that fall more squarely into method 2. It’s about the rich landscape of the mind and how planning projects, dreaming of armies/systems/terrain and games is an important part of the hobby that should be acknowledged and celebrated. Continue reading

Prodos Games – Warzone Miniatures review.

I don’t know much about Prodos’ Warzone IP. My only knowledge of the company came from their Aliens Vs Predator Kickstarter, so a couple of years back now. I was impressed that (what I assumed was) a small company managed to grab itself rights to such a solid project. It was a ballsy move, one that made me think that these guys were ones to watch. I didn’t back, but a few of my mates did, and that’s how they came to be on my radar. I went to Salute 2014 and spent a fair bit of time at their stand, admiring some of the initial sculpts for AVP. They really had gone all out on this project, the miniatures looked awesome and the small amount of gameplay stuff out there was very cool indeed. Continue reading

Weekend Painting Workshop – June 7th & 8th – Cardiff

FlyerFrom time to time I bang on about these. If you’re looking to pick up some new skills, or hone some existing ones, there is absolutely no better way to do so than painting with other people. GrotFighter

Liverpool painter John Harrison has been running weekend workshops for coming up to 4 years now, and has brought over some of the most talented and well respected miniature painters in the world to deliver classes in Liverpool, Cardiff and Cambridge. I’ve not met a single student who has come away from one of these classes feeling like their money had not been well spent.

John has two classes that he runs himself a few times per year. The first is his beginners class. This lasts a weekend and comes highly recommended. But the class he is bringing to Cardiff next month will be focussing on vehicle weathering, which over the last few years has reached something of a zenith in miniature painting. The more tutorials people see, the narrower the gap gets between high end historical painters and tabletop focussed gamers. While many of these techniques are on display in books, and in YouTube tutorials, there is no substitute for sitting down with an experienced painter and watching them go through them in the flesh.

TheButcherHaving gone through the weathering workshop late on in 2014, I can confirm that it covers a lot of innovative and exciting techniques to make your vehicles look in a very poor state indeed. This includes, but is far from limited to the use of oil paints, weathering pigments and chipping fluids.

If you have the weekend free, and weathering is something you are looking to expand upon, I can suggest no better way to spend your dosh than this workshop. Very, very highly recommended. Places cost £95 for the weekend, and are strictly limited. It will take place at popular gaming venue and online store Firestorm Games, in Cardiff. Get in touch with John via the event page on Facebook for more details and to book your place.

Painting Buddha Legends – Kirill ‘Yellowone’ Kanaev

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In around 2011 I thought I would start getting serious about painting. I was amassing a fairly big collection since coming back to the hobby in 2005, and had played a few games but I hadn’t really met anyone who I enjoyed gaming with outside of my long time mates from over in Manchester. So I had hundreds of miniatures sat there doing nothing, and since I had always admired painters from my childhood, I thought I would start trying to push that aspect of the hobby instead. I came across Miniature Mentor, which is an excellent, but seemingly dwindling resource offering video tutorials from some of the worlds most wonderful painters. The site, especially its beginner videos is a perfect first step. For its flaws however, the best thing about Miniature Mentor is how it blew open the door and inspired a lot of tech-savvy painters to take that blueprint and improve it. Enter Painting Buddha.

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