60. I´m not dead (yet)

3,5 years since the last time I wrote something on my blog... Long time. But I´m not dead, and I didn´t stop playing games, crafting terrain and painting miniatures, just the free time got short. Yeah, Covid years were the golden years for the hobby... So I had to cut from my hobby doings and sorry, but this blog had to be let down. I don´t say, that I have more time now, or that I will write regulary, I just wanted to give a sign of life (not that I expect any interest for this...). A lot of things happened in this 3,5 years, so here is a short summary of just the most important ones:

49. Painting zombies

The second easiest to paint miniatures are (after skeletons) probably zombies. They don’t need too many colors, can be dirty, so the basics of painting them are pretty easy. But unlike skeletons, where bone is bone, so the colors are pretty similar for everybody, zombies can be imagined in much greater variation. I would like to present here my interpretation, which fits my picture of them, but as said, the process could be used with other colors to.

48. Big bad blanchitsu behemoth

Grimdark is written on the flag of GW (between a lot of skulls and £-signs), but who really made this style, was John Blanche (as a GW employee), so its also called blanchitsu. What does it mean? I dont want to write an essay about its core elements (as if I could...), if you're interested in it, I would recommend to read more about it, for example here. But just a sort summary, that we can go on: its a dirty, dark, sinister looking (okay, lets call it grim) painting style.

47. Seventyfive

I know, this is not a real post, but I achieved a very important point this week: I varnished 75 miniatures! 75 ready! 75 less to paint!

There are plus 5 miniatures, which needed re-varnishing (were too glossy). But also 10 forest pieces (where varnish should help prevent the foliage from baldness). Content is coming!

43. Descent showcase

In the last post, I showed some solutions for storing and organizing ideas for complicated (dices, tokens, cards, tiles, miniatures, other thingies) board games, especially for Descent (Journeys in the dark second, and so on...). Since then, I received a lot of requests, to show my painted miniatures... Actually not, but I will show them anyway.

41. Painting eyes

Now comes just a short, but important topic about the eyes (Go for the eyes Boo, go for the eyes!).

40. Banners for Oathmark

If you imagine a view of a tabletop wargame, what do you see? I bet, that the first two things, what you think of, are the painted miniatures, and the terrain. Obviously, these are the most important. But what is the third thing? Thats a harder question... At first, but after thinking a while my answer is pretty clear: banners!

34. Sculpting miniatures...

Warning! This post can be disturbingly long!

Without a long an meaningless introduction, I just start here: A little after I started painting miniatures, I felt the need to try out sculpting. But as it looks way harder than painting (at least if the result should be more or less acceptable), I had to find something, that’s easy to do. Human figures are obviously not that, because the body proportions has to be correct, the face has to look good, and there are a lot of small details… So actually it’s maybe the worst thing to start with. But I you find the worst case, you just have to invert it, to find the best! So what’s the inverse here? It has to be big, faceless, and with arbitrary proportions. Basically a formless blub… Okay, it would be easy for sure, but I wanted maybe a bit more refined thing… Something humanoid, with hands and legs, but without undefined proportions (and face). Actually an earth elemental (or rock golem) is quite a good start, because its simply some kind of humanoid form, with rocky surface! Like this one (from DevianArt):

27. Avatars of war

Once upon a time, I was in my local gaming store, just buying my regular, pseudo-necessary stuff, and there was a sale. As You might know, the sales in the local gaming stores are one of the greatest powers on earth. There were such stuff, I never know I needed, but suddenly it was irresistible…

It was a sale of Avatars of War miniatures. They make beautiful metal and resin miniatures in the best WFHB aesthetics. They are a bit on the more expensive end of the market (12-13€/human sized miniatures), but they are really lovely especially with nostalgic googles. I always adored these minis, but as they were so expensive, and they didn’t really fit to my other miniatures (they are bigger, with more heroic proportions, and they dwarves are twice the size of an Oathmark dwarf). But now! For the price, I bought almost everything what they got (and Im still angry about the stuff I left there...). Lets take a look on them one by one.

10. Painting skeletons and rusty iron

This will be my first post mainly about painting, I want to share a really easy and quick method of making good (enough) looking skeleton warriors (with rusty weapons). Painting skeletons, as they are usually not very complicated models, you can save a plenty of time with proper technic. And what is this proper technic? Lets go step by step, and I try to enlighten, were the time saving is:

1. Introduction

So a blog… Who knows me personally will be very surprised about this. But not more than I... I´m pretty introverted, not graphoman, and I usually don’t have any urge, to share my life with the world (except with my family and friends, but sometimes neither with them). So this blog more of a documentation (like a web-log, which a blog actually is…) of our/my journey into the tabletop world, because it’s good to live the memories again. And there are not a lot of people around me, who share this passion. So maybe I still want to share and show it somehow… Anyway if you, somehow found it, you are welcome to read it!