The Freeboota

Many moons ago, I was a member of the 40k Radio Freeboota forums. During that time, they were gathering material for The Freeboota e-zine, so I shared my Magnetising the Valkyrie tutorial with them.

Well, for various reasons, it's been about a year since I submitted it and after leaving the forum, I sort of forgot about it. That was until a few weeks ago when the editor dropped me a line to say it was coming out soon.

Anyway, the e-zine is out now, and if you're interested, take a nose for yourself. Just ignore their comments about my licking, I'm not a deviant, honest.

Click here for The Freeboota

Also, I actually dug out the painting station and did a little painting yesterday. I've only undercoated Harkers Squad and one of my Starstreak Hydras. It was a small amount hobby wise, but a big step for in getting my mojo going.

Blog Wars!!!!

My hobby mojo has taken a severe beating over the past couple of months, but whilst surfing FTW I spotted just the thing to give me a kick up the backside and get my hobby mojo moving again.

BLOG WARS!!!!

No, it isn't an almighty slanging match between all the various bloggers out there, it's a tournament being organised by Alex from From the Fang that he's setting up for 40k bloggers. So, I've signed up and committed myself to attending it. Hopefully, this commitment will get me off my backside and back into painting.

So, to all my fellow bloggers, check it out, come along if you can and get ready for a botty whooping!

Who am I kidding, it's been that long since I've played, I'm going to have to relearn the rules! As long as I roll some dice and have a laugh, I'm happy.

It's Old Stuff day

With it being 'Old Stuff' day today (Thanks to Rob over at W39,999), I thought I’d dust of my laptop and dig out some of my favourite blog posts from the past. This turned out to be more challenging than I originally thought it would. There’s just so many posts that I love, so many models and conversions that I want to dig out from the archives. So, instead, I’ve decided to highlight the posts which seem to have attracted the most attention in the past, my tutorials.

Firstly, I think that they’re good posts, secondly the blogosphere seem to like them based on the comments they’ve received. More importantly, I think rather than showing off my models, I’d like to use today to highlight these tutorials to all the new visitors to my blog who’ve probably never seen them. So here you go guys, my blast from the past ....

Newbies guide to blogging - Way back at the start of last year, I thought it would be a good idea to put together a post about what I thought you needed to do to be a successful blogger. Based on the comments, it looks like it hit the spot.


Getting your blog listed - One of the biggest struggles for newbie bloggers is making sure that their blogs appeared on the top of the various blog rolls out there when they posted them rather than appearing halfway down the list and getting missed. Luckily, I have a friend who works for Google who gave me some invaluable advice, it’s a must read for newbie bloggers.

Making Eldar cityfight scenery - I get a lot of comments about my Eldar cityfight scenery, a lot of people just don’t believe it made up out of sweetie tubs and cardboard, so here’s a simple tutorial on how you can make your own out of stuff you can find around the house.

Making heavy foliage - This one’s a relatively simple tutorial on how to make various types of foliage, from woodlands and jungles to exotic alien worlds. There’s also a bit on making area terrain bases to make playing your games more easier.

Magnetising the Valkyrie - Another oldie going back to the days of the Valkyrie release, this tutorial covers magnetising the base, wings, back door, bolters, wing points and nose weapon mounts, so just about everything really.

Plasticard bases - This one has to be the simplest tutorial on the web, I just did it to give people who kept asking me about my citiyfight bases a page to look at rather than retyping them method over and over again. Ironically, this is the most visited page on my blog, I think I’m missing a trick here - lol

Green stuff guides - Not so much a tutorial, but more of a guide to all the different greens stuff tutorials I’ve found on the web whilst getting into sculpting.

Sculpting cloaks & capes - Although it’s not really an oldie, I still think it deserves a mention because it’s my first and only green stuff tutorial and to be honest, trying to find green stuff cloak tutorials that aren’t just sticking a blob of green stuff on that back of your models is pretty hard, so I thought it’d be a good idea to share it.

Well, that’s it for the tutorials and ‘Old Stuff’ day, hope you found something of interest guys, I’ll get back to rehydrating my paints!

My wife the tattooist ...

As some of you may know, my lovely wife has recently taken up tattooing. Over the past six months she's actually become pretty good at it. Although she's still a long way off becoming a professional tattoo artist, her work is becoming better with each tattoo.

Recently, I've convinced her to give blogging ago as a way of sharing her work and getting support and feedback. Unfortunately, there's no From-The-Warp for tattooists that I can find, so that means no followers and no comments and we all know how that feels.

So, if any of you bloggers out there have a thing for tat's, nip over to her blog and say hi ....

http://kay-elles-tattoos.blogspot.com/

Thanks in advance guys!

The Big 300!

Thanks Guys!

The Great Paint Drought

The image above is quite appropriate for this particular post. If you're regularly follow my blog, then you'll have noticed a decrease in posting recently. Work, Kids, Wife, Blah, Blah, Blah, you've heard them before and no doubt if you've been in the hobby a while, then you've experienced your own painting droughts at times.

For me, it's been over six months since I last dipped my brush within a paint pot, so I'm definitely suffering a painting drought. That doesn't mean I haven't been busy with hobby stuff. Actually, I've been busy with lots of different things. I've been reading quite a lot, at the moment it's a Ciaphas Cain books. I've finished the first two and I'm just loving them. It's strange to go from Commissar Gaunt to Commissar Cain, but I'm finding it quite refreshing to the doom and gloom of the Ghosts series. I've also been working heavily on the first of my campaign pdf's for my campaign focused blog, which hopefully should be ready for publishing next week.

But I digress, recently I've tried to jump start the painting side of my hobby and I've hit a bit of a problem. Unfortunately, after six months of not painting, the above image is quite adapt when it comes to describing most of my paints. Yep, they've dried up!

Quite a few are completely dried up and literally have solidified and cracked in the tub, some have just turned to a very thick sludge. So, I've got myself a load of glass beads from ebay and started the monumental task of sorting through them all. Some will be thrown, some will be revived, but hopefully, I'll have the majority rescued in the end.

I'm working on the ones I use most often to start with so that I can actually do some painting whilst I'm going through the rest. In the meantime, I'm working on a storage and maintenance plan to make sure this never happens again. Any tips would be gratefully received guys!