Happy New Year!

Hello hello! I trust everyone’s holidays and beginning of 2016 is so far going well!

I ended up ringing in the new year this year at a the home of the Painting Sage with some friends, bevvies and boardgames.

Sir, I do challenge theeee!
Disclaimer: I have never watched the TV show for this boardgame. I have no idea what they say when they fight. Aaarg?

While I am not a Spartacus fan, I would actually highly recommend this boardgame – it was a good couple of hours of fun – and I won every arena fight I was dropped into.

Thank you thank you. You may call me the dice master.

Now I realise that in my last post I had only just started painting my green dressed girl buuuut, the ladies are done!!

Soon to be seen* on a Victoria’s Secret runway near you.
*skin grafts not included.

So I ended up not only doing each dress a different colour, but each girls un-dead skin tone a different colour.
Now that I’d done it, I kind of wished I’d just picked 1 skin tone and done them all the same. They don’t really look like a team like this, but ah well; I suppose we live and we learn ey?

I struggle to get ANY photos of Sybelle, because of her darker scheme, and her hunched over pose she has proven to be the worlds more giant pain. I sent a picture of her to a friend that asked how she was going – looked like a dark blob with hooker heels.
Great stuff Sybelle.

I ended up priming up a couple of Reaper Bones minis as well to try to practice painting with.

I am unsure if I have discussed this on my blog before – but it’s time to come clean and tell the truth.

I. Am. The SLOWEST. Painter. You. Will. Ever. Meet.

Legit – in the same amount of time that it takes my friends to paint 2 full miniatures I’m sitting back and like ‘Phew, glad that left arm is done!’. It’s extraordinary…

So I gave my self a time limit of 3 hours per mini. In 1.5 hours, I had skin:

Yaaaaarg! *cough-ehem* No but really, can I have purple chain mail? Pretty please? Can I? Can I? Can I?

I was so incredibly unhappy with this, that I stopped the project and he is now soaking in a tub of paint stripper.
Siiiiigh.
One day, I’ll get there I swear.

Why hello there, madame. Mighty fine to meet you. Have you ever considered, immortality?

I have started my Seamus! I am unsure why I went the extremely self punishing route of STRIPED pants, given that I now have to reproduce these on this Copy-Cat killer. . . but we persevere.

Thanks for tuning again! Catch you all again on the side upon which is revealed whence one rotates a coin mid-air. Otherwise known, as a flip side.

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Kick-off 2015 with Kromaster

Hello friends!!

So to ring in 2015, the Painting Sage and I decided to bust out my Kromaster Arena board game that I picked up at PAX Australia.

This is a cool little fantasy fighting boardgame where you use the characters spells and abilities to chase down and attack your opponent.

Now, to be absolutely honest, the primary reason I got this game was because it looked BLOODY cute. Like, this is adorable. But, another reason I was drawn towards this, is that I am really not one for lengthy super involved rules.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a game with depth, but if I need to spend an hour on YouTube to work out how to set up the map then Ellie’s out. You can find me over at the other table playing Munchkin.

This game has a big rule book, with mini-maps that act as a step by step tutorial! We figured we’d take advantage of the nice weather outside (once a year where I live, seriously) and have a game outside in the shade.

There is dialogue facing the other player and an in depth explanation of the rule you’re learning to the left. This was the tutorial for basic movement, terrain interaction and attack.

As things became more complex, the map got a little bigger and the characters started multiplying to work together. In the above photo I was playing “Sheep guy” and the “Hooded con man”.

You can also buy “booster” boxes with additional characters. Even though we didn’t play with these guys today, I had purchased these when I picked up the board game itself.

I love that the boosters come with their own token set. You beauty! I hate nothing more than adding things to a game where you have to “pretend this token is this”.

I don’t want to really give this a x/10 at the moment, as we only went so far as the tutorials to start – but so far this is shaping up to be HEAPS of fun. Can’t wait for a couple more rounds of this – and to try out the expansion! (Yes, I’m that person that purchases the cool looking expansion before they even know if they like the base game *ehem*).

Boardgames and Baseing

Hello friends!!!

Ok, I have a lot of pictures today, so bare with me.

My progress on putting together the base etc for my Halloween girl got slighting put on hold due to a miss-hap with some matte varnish. Now, I was very unhappy with the colours coming through on her umbrella and fan so Painting Sage suggested we seal her off before I continue to work away.

I have to say, I LOVED the sprays effect on my minis colours!! She actually looked better blended and even a little brighter maybe? Either way, she has these big crevasses in her hair (as mentioned before when I was talking about painting said hair) which undoubtedly trapped some of the spray.

This is something I have most definitely dealt with before with my own ‘paint on’ matte varnish and so I got to glossing her to pull it back.

She has now lost the effect of ‘grey’ that you see above, I just don’t have a snap of it yet!! But she has recovered well, and is sitting in the ICU waiting for completion!

Moving onto her base!

So, my plan was to have her standing at her “front door” waiting for ‘Trick or Treaters” to give them candy.

My biggest problem with this door, is that is has a far more…um…clean and simple paint job compared to her, so they might end up clashing when it’s all put together….we shall see.

For her and her door, Painting Sage had this awesome base he had made in a box and goes ‘Is this maybe what you were thinking??’. EEEEeeee, Perfect!!

So I got to priming and painting it up!

The stones have been drybrushed to give effect. I point that out, because this is one technique I don’t ever seem to understand. So this time, I had Sage show me step by step how it’s done.
I can’t believe……this entire time…..I’ve been trying to do it COMPLETELY WRONG. Ahhh well. Hahaha.

The rest of her base is slowly coming together, in the form of SCULPEY!

Oh how I love Sculpey III. You brilliant little bake putty you.
More photos soon when it’s assembled!

In other news, Sage and I had a bit of a boardgame run through after some touching up of minis was completed and we did a test run of a game he had been given as a gift/favor.

It was actually pretty fun! Albeit, I don’t think I fully understand some of the rules.

These little guys look like they are a calling out for amaaaazing paint jobs, yes yes?

So I played the green team.

Sage part way through goes ‘Oh hey, why did you choose those guys?’ and I was caught a little off guard.
When I thought about it, I realised I tend to do that, without thinking, in a lot of ‘first time play’ or ‘starter set choosing’. If I see either “beasts” or “green” as part of one of the factions or options – I will always choose those.
So at the end of the day, I chose green because of the colour, not because of what those characters could do, nor the characters themselves. Hahaha.

As you can see, it’s bascially a map of ‘Thieves roam the city breaking into chests and stabbing each other’. You have these big ‘Story’ cards that you use to adjust the objectives of different games (i.e. Obtain a scroll and keys to break into the treasury).

The other thing we did was a small came of X-Wing!

I was super hesitant about this game, a game comprised of totally ‘vehicle’ type characters didn’t really appeal to me. And just space battles? Yea whatever.

I actually quite liked it!! Although, my X-Wing ship had the turning circle of my Toyota Camry and ended up spending half it’s time trying to even keep someone in RANGE of it’s phasers let alone be on the offensive.

Well, that is all for today happy people! We shall see each other again soon.

~ El.