O Captain! My Captain!

I'm back again with another rapid fire update.  This one will be a quick one as well.  Had some time last night after dinner and got the second captain of erebor painted up rather quickly.  Usually I'm distracted by 20 different things, but I cranked this dude out rather fast (faster than I normally go anyway).

For that last photo, I had to include the other captain I painted a few weeks ago.  If anything, I wanted to see how different each looked from one another.  All in all, not a bad piece of work if I must say.  Now time to break out my last box of Dwarves of Erebor and get busy.

Grim Hammers Part Duex

We're back again with some more dwarves.  Today I'll be showing off the newly painted 2nd box of Grim Hammers.  That puts the count at 66 dwarves total, with 14 more to go.  That's alot of dwarves for SBG and I'm well over my 750 point set goal I had.  Anyways, enough of the babbling, here are the dwarves.

 

 

 

 

 

So that's the latest from my Dwarf Army.  One more box of Dwarves of Erebor and three heroes and this army will be finished (until Dain and his dwarves come out).  Until next time.....

The magic of the lightbox

I know I had a question/comment in my comments section last post asking me about my light box.  Rather than explaining what I did in detail, I figured I'd post some pictures of the awesome job I did (note the sarcasm).

Without further delay, I present the worst looking light box ever constructed

As you can see, I'm a master builder here

Instead of making it nice, I opted for masking tape

Yep, that's an old white tshirt taped to the sides

And when I ran out of tshirt parts, I used a paper towel.  Ingenuity my friends.

Regardless to outer appearances, it's whats on the inside that counts

Don't bother asking me for measurements, since I didn't bother to measure.  The odd part is I did a fair bit of research on it one day and I incorporated all the main aspects of a light box that professional people use. 

I opted to go with the quickest and easiest route.  The box was made with regular 4mm foamboard that you can buy at any dollar store.  The white tshirt/paper towels over the light holes kills the harshness of the lights giving a softer glow inside the box.  I used daytime light bulbs because you want white light that doesn't distort the colors of your models.  3 points of entry for the light so your hitting on all sides of whatever your shooting.  I opted for a hole in the front rather than an open front because I wanted as much light as possible to bounce back into the box.  I always thought a white background was boring, so I printed some cool looking mountain and tossed a few trees to give it a natural look.  I also didn't attach the bottom to the box because.... well, I just didn't and have no explanation why.  The lights I got at the local hardware store for like $8 a pop along with the daylight flood lights.  All in all, I'd say around $40-$50 for this little setup, the light fixtures and the lights themselves being the bulk of it. 

If your using my lightbox as a guide... well, lets say I wouldn't if I were you.  There are tons of youtube videos out there with people who actually know what they're talking about to actually get tips from.  As far as mine goes, it looks like shit, but it's effective for what I need it to do.

Another box of Dwarves of Erebor

As the title to this entry would suggest, this is my latest work on "The Army of Thror".  This entry is also going to be laden thick with pictures due to the fact that I built a light box.  Yep, masking tape and foam board being used to it's ultimate purpose (you know, instead of its intended bought purpose as for making ruined buildings).  Well, lets take a gander at what ole' Dave has painted up this time....

 

 

 

 See?  More Dwarves...... yay.....  As you couldn't tell, I'm ready to move on to another project/army.  Dedication, gotta love it.  That puts my total up to 3 boxes of Warriors of Erebor, 1 box of Grim Hammers, 1 Captain of Erebor, 1 Grim Hammer Captain, Thrain, Young Thorin, Young Balin, and Young Dwalin completed.  So we got 1 box of Grim Hammers, 1 box of Warriors of Erebor, and the mighty King Thror to lead this mighty battlehost.  As far of my Adepticon 2014 army goes, we're done, complete, finished, the fat lady has sung, blah blah blah.

I also noticed I never posted my brighter pictures of Thrain here, so we're going to rectify that.

 

He's rockin The Rock's "The People's Eyebrow"

Hopefully my latest work wasn't disappointing.  I think tomorrow we'll crack open the Grim Hammer box and get crankin' on those guys.  Bolster my two handed hammer ranks a bit.  Let me know if the light-box was a good idea.  I'm going to take some full army pictures when King Thror and the rest of the Erebor army is completed.

Saruman (Orthanc)..... yep, the white guy on the horse

For some odd reason, I've always really loved this model.  I've had him for a long time just sitting on my shelf waiting for some brush time and after painting a few dozen dwarves, I felt I deserved to get a crack at him.  I also wanted to experiment with using cork as a basing material.  Now I've done the few rocks here and there with cork before, but I've never mounted a model on cork before... so this was rather new for me.

 

Also as of recently (as you may have noticed), my pictures seem to be giving off weird line marks in the background.  To prevent this, I bought the ebay special camera at 90% off and I'm still trying to figure out how to use the damn thing.  I also created a little light box that still needs a bit of tweeking.  So, same model, in my partially constructed light box, with my new camera....

 

I'm not sure which pictures I like better.  I might print out a background tomorrow at work and give it a go again.  I think the green kind of saturates the picture, but also adds a cool soft color.  I still need to add another light on the right side.  Either way, the model still looks pretty cool, and I'm definitely digging the cork base.

Thrain, before the madness

Now that I got that little rant out, I think it time to show off a model.  So as the title suggests, I painted up Thrain this past week.  I never took pictures or anything until yesterday.  So, without further delay (or ranting), here is the big guy before the capture and torment.

This guy was a challenge for me.  I'm not used to painting gold, and I learned a bit about its properties.  Flow improver tends to separate the pigment from the water.  I found that using just a little bit of water rather than flow improver helped thin the paint to a workable medium.

I had some issues getting his hair to look like that on the GW website, where he has lighter patches here and there.  I'm used to just painting hair a bit differently.  Its something I'm going to have to work on.

This weekends tourny (no pics) rant

After a long weekend of playing some SBG with my new Erebor force (which is basically done at 750 points, minus a few things to add to customize my force a bit more), I got a good handle on how to play them.  Lump them up together and smash the opposing force.  Pretty easy concept.  With my lowest defense being a 6, the survivability of the force can withstand most things, mainly arrows which I thought was going to be a problem.   So for a 3 game tournament, I won 2 and lost 1.


This is going to be a rant/bitching, you have been forewarned.

I have to say that the loss was one of the worst games of SBG I had ever played.  It had nothing to do with my force or my opponent honorably smashing me via tactics or even bad luck with the dice.  I can accept those conditions with a smile and still have a good time.  What it did have to do with was the fact that my opponent cheated his ass off.  Lets go into details shall we...

For starters, his dice were medium green with faded white to clear pips.  Judging by my painting, anyone can attest to my ability to be able to see.  From across a 4 foot table, 80% of the time I couldn't make out what his results were.  6's looked like 4's or 2's,  3's look like 5's, and 1's could've been anything.  Also, they were the only dice he had  (had about 25-40 of them too).  For anyone who plays war-games, different color dice is a must.  It allows for clear understanding of what your rolling for when multiple things are happening.  Basically, what he was doing was rolling a slew of dice and then assigning them how he wished.  I conceded the argument on the fight value (I've always assigned what dice are what regardless, but that's just me, plus the rules were on his side there), but he was also doing this to wound when he's got a str 6 and a str 1 creature.  That's clearly against the rules.  It clearly states on pg 43 "Regardless of how a model directs his Attacks, you must resolve all of one model's strikes before rolling for the next attack".  Can anyone tell me where it says "Roll a slew of dice that no one but you can read, and assign the best results where you want to cause the most damage"?

Next was the 2-hander rules in the errata which clearly states that if you have a model armed with a 2-handed weapon, you can still use a 1 handed weapon so you don't have to incur the -1 penalty to win the fight and you don't get the +1 to wound.  Since he never read the errata (even with it being out for almost a year), he wanted to argue it with me.  Since I didn't have a print of the errata on me, I conceded the point which allowed him to crush my flank with the help of another botch rule (see the next paragraph).  When I got home, I quickly printed up the errata, highlighted that part and shoved it in my rulebook.  It'll be a cold day in hell before I screwed due to someone inability to read and my assumption that people actually read erratas before playing in tournaments.

I think the icing on the cake was his interpretation on how unmanned wargs work.  Apparently, he believed that if you have a warg with no rider, they still count as cavalry which equates to a +1 attack on the charge and a knock down with double strikes on winning combat.  He also equated the rule to include his warg chieftain.  Unfortunately, the rules are once again against him, stating on page 49 of the main rulebook, sub-titled "What is a cavalry model", first line states "A Cavalry model consists of a rider and its mount", meaning that if you don't have a rider on-top of that beast, cavalry rules do not apply unless otherwise stated.  Unfortunately, wild wargs don't have a special rule of knock down on the charge like the spider queen or Shagrat.

By the time his wargs got into combat, we had been arguing rules for 90% of the game, and I personally just didn't give a shit anymore.  I wasn't having fun, and I just wanted to lose to get the game over with.  If your opponent isn't going to play by the rules, than whats the point of playing?  We weren't playing for prizes or any trophies, so I basically said "fuck it, I don't care", and just basically gave it to him.

The game did teach me a few valuable lessons.  Bring my big rule book, highlight certain things in said named rulebook, make sure I have a copy of the errata on me at all times,  refuse to play against an opponent who's dice you can't read, never assume your opponent is playing honorably, and bring the game to a screeching halt when you need to educate your opponent no matter how much he complains.

After the game ended, I remember I've had issues with this guy in the past with him making up his own rules and still playing with dice no one can read.  I've now made a mental note of not to play him anymore.