Improving Basing

How it looked before

So last post, I showed the painted Thanatar Siege Automata, and talked about how I wasn't happy with the base and letting it tell the story that I wanted.

I decided that adding a discarded shoulder pad of the Sons of Horus would help tie the theme in, I decided to change this to Death Guard, keeping it more relevant for 40K if I'm able to use Mechanicum forces in that game at some point, and I think it would mix in with the corruption and rust a bit better.

Pad in place and weatherd to match. 

Layering up bone to white, then sponging and stipping rust on to the pad gave it the look I wanted, a few washes of Vallejo Smoke dirtied it up a bit and picking out the edging in a dirty bronze.

This was then glued next to the beam and stippled with the weathing powders used on the base to tie it together.

Something is still missing from this though, looks bare. 

Despite this addition, it was still missing something, so it was back to the drawing board/ the Facebook discussion group for more ideas, I had thought of adding more discarded Astartes parts, weapons etc. but I didn't think it would help to be honest.

My friend Pete suggested grass. We chatted and I've tried it and I think it looks good,

 The idea was again, to represent the spreading corruption of the Heresy and the Chaos Gods in general, the addition of the shoulder pad helps now, its as if even a discarded part armour of a tainted soul is enough to desecrate the ground, but the loyal forces of the Emperor still stride on, impervious.


This has been a really fun project and its nice to have gotten a model and base totally finished, this is the first model I've managed to finish completely since moving house 6 months ago!

More dead grass would be
great to really sell it

Forces of Mars

Ok, so, constant distractions aside, this week, I will be working on some paining, I have a Thanatar a Knight and some Thallanxi all assembled, want to start to work on my Mechanicum army for 30K, which it looks like it might be able to grow into a 40K army pretty soon! Lots of nice teasers and peeks of Skitarii around online today

Some sort of walker, not too keen yet.

Looks like it'll be a small release like the Harlequins, I've seen a tiny photo of a Skitarii trooper that looked quite good, I'm quitely hopefuly, could also be a little cheaper than FW Tech Thralls!

Kanban: Organising your hobby

Call it a stupid New Year's idea but I wanted this year to be a bit more organised for my hobby, so I started a Kanban board. The idea comes from project management in business, you use different parts of the board to show bits of a project and what stage they're in in, at a glance you can see how far along you are with certain parts of a project.

Its a really simple but effective way of organising a project, so I wanted to show a few ways this can be used to make your hobby work a little bit more organised. Or if you want to procrastinate while still convincing yourself that you're being productive.

For this I've used Kanban Flow, a free to use website that offers a subscription for more advanced tools, but everything you'd need as a hobbyist is available to the free accounts, sign up here: Kanban Flow

Firstly, I have set up an overall hobby goals board for 2015, which I've put various projects on with overarching details about each part of the project:

Here, I've got the over all view, each task is a hobby goal, with some details of the sub tasks to complete each, across my boards, different types of task have different colours, Green here represents Terrain, Blue are army projects and Yellow are individual units or models. I have different coloumns for how far along they are and one for "On Hold" for when something, like a missed delivery ot something, is stopping me progressing right now.

I aslo set up boards for those army tasks if they're big ones:

Here is my list for the Legions of Chaos army that the Warriors of Chaos task evolved in to (must update the name of that task), These are all individual units and this time, instead of subtasks, i have coloumns, as in this fine detail view, its better at representing the progress made so far.

This is just a little glance at a tool you might find useful or interesting, let me know if you liked it.