Easy Paint Tutorial part 1

So over this week I have been slowly painting my brand new Chaos Terminator unit. In the end they will be a 5 man squad with 4 Combi-Melta Guns, a Heavy Flamer, a Chain Fist, and the Mark to Tzeentch. As I was painting these guys it hit me how easy it is paint guys up using my scheme. So I figured I would give some details for easy paint tips, and people can use them or pass them along to others who need help getting an army painted.

So we're gonna skip ahead to after the model is assembled. Before you go and prime the model decide if you want to have painted sand on the base. Its easy as all get out and looks much better then regular sand. So glue it to the base and then prime the model. I almost always use black primer. White is probably better for show-case painting, but thats not the goal here. the goal is to paint up a bunch of guys fairly quickly so you can hit the table with them asap. So hit the model with black primer.

Once thats done base coat it. This should not be a very difficult process. Find the color that will be on the model the most and go to town. there is no need to be clean with this as you will be going back over the model and filling in the detail afterwards. Some colors don't cover well, Yellows and Light browns. For these colors I use one of GW's new foundation paints. Here is step 1 of the Chaos Terminator, all I did was paint all the armor with Khemri Brown.



Foundations are fantastic paints, they dry quick and smell funny. But they lay down a nice color base for a lighter paint. If you want to use darker paints for your models you can skip this step of the process. Step 2 for me is to cover the model in Bleached Bone. The Foundation makes this take very little time. I don't hit the weapons because they will be silver colored and I would prefer them to be a little darker, so I want the black primer to be my base for that area. So here is Step 2.



Step 3 is where things get a little harder and more tedious. Paint the detailed parts of the model. In this case the shoulder pads are blue with a gold trim. The arc over the terminators head is gold. the chains and weapons are painted silver, with a black trim. and the arrow looking things on the weapons is painted red. I also paint the eyes. They way I do this is to slop a ton of paint all over the eye. Looks horrible, but after that I go back with my original color, in this case bleach bone, and I trace an out-line around the eye to make it look much better. I end up with something like this.



I'll finish them up tonight take a few photos and finish the Tutorial tomorrow. The Final product end up looking pretty damn good If i do say so myslef.

Awesome Weekend

So labor day is always a good time, a nice 3 day weekend. This time around we had our Fantasy Football draft and then Ellen and I spent a night down in Charlottesville getting hammered. So to start the weekend, the draft!



Ellen and I were hosting it this year. We set up our TV to be the draft board, with a PC hook up. I think it worked out really well. I finished 3rd last year in Fantasy Football, so I had the 8th overal pick. I had 3 decent Running Backs who I could use as keepers. I ended up taking Beanie wells in the 6th round and Jamal Charles in the 10th as my keepers, letting Jerome Harrison go to the draft pool. My strategy was simple get two solid Wide Recievers early, then a decent QB and TE, and then go for depth in my line up. I started well getting Randy Moss and Roddy White. But in the 3rd round I was primed to take a QB, when I saw there were enough around to not reach for one. I took a 3rd wide out in Anquan Boldin, and grabbed Rivers on the way back. This I think will end up being a strong move through the season as I essentially have 3 WR 1's. It screwed my draft strategy up completely, but oh well. In the end I took a bunch of mediocre RB's who I can only hope will pan out. I don't have a lot of depth at RB, but as long as Charles and Wells do what they did last year, it won't matter. My Final team, in draft order:
Randy Moss, Roddy White, Anquan Boldin, Philip Rivers, Brent Celek, Beanie Wells, Johnny Knox, Donald Brown, Darren McFadden, Jamal Charles, Matt Stafford, Lee Evans, New Orleans D, Ryan Longwll, and Thomas Jones.

So that was the draft, and it was a good time. We went out for beer afterwards at Dogfishead, also we celebrated Laura's birthday. So happy Birthday Laura!



So Ellen suprised me with Hotel Reservations for this weekend down in Charlottesville. We woke up early.. ish sunday morning and made the trip down. It was a breeze, no traffic and almost no trouble with the lights. We went straight to a Brewery to start the day.

So we plug in the address to the GPS and are driving about 10 miles west of C-Ville. Garmin is telling us we are less then a mile away from teh place, but all we see are random warehouse, abruplty he says to turn here, I look and see nothing. About a second later I see a small sign that says star hill. So I make the turn and we get out very confused. We walk up a ramp into a warehouse loading dock. We see a lot of Fermentation Barrels, and way off to the side is a tiny Bar with a bunch of people around it. The bartender sees us, tells us to come on up and immediatley pours us a beer. We ended up tasing 8 of their beers, and I gotta say, I'm a huge fan.



At 1pm i was quite buzzed, and the Guy took us on a tour of the facility. He was pretty knowledgeable, and answered a wide variety of questions about brewing and beer in general. For Instance the reason Bud and Miller have no flavor is that they use Corn instead of Barley for their beer. Its cheaper and has no taste. The tour and tasting were free, so we bought 18 beers and a Pint Glass.

Next we headed over to the Blue Mountain brewery. It was meh... the 6 beer samplers was like 4 lights and 2 IPAs. The food there was pretty good though, but all in all it was pretty meh for beer.

We went and checked into our hotel after that and passed out, likely from a lot of beer early in the day. We then went out the Corner, its a hip spot for all them college kids. We went to a Burger Bar, which had a create your own burger from. So we did, and it was pretty solid. We then went for a walk and went back to the hotel.

Monday we woke up, got breakfast at the waffle house and hit a vineyard. We tasted like 13 wines. We also took a tour of the place and grabbed a couple bottles of wine. Then we hit the road.


All in all it was a pretty kick ass weekend. I like these 3 day weekends, got another coming next month =P.

Ramos vs Lady J + Painting Contest

So last night was the painting contest at Huzzah Hobbies, I made my way out there pretty early so I could get in a game against Bill, we haven't played since our Demo days and I wanted to see how his game is goming along. We played 30 stones, lists looked like this

Ramos, Brass Arachnid, Joss, Johan, 3 Spiders
Lady J, Peacekeeper, 2 Death Marshals, Judge, Austringer



I got a mission i've never done before, Deliver a message, he got Escape and Survive. I had to give lady J a message which required a (2) action while within 2' of her. He had to keep 75% of his dudes alive for 4 pts, 50% for 2, and they all had to be more than 8' away from his deployment zone. We each took a scheme we could do, Bodyguard for me, Claim Jump for Bill, and one we could not, Exterminate for bill, chosing constructs, and something where I needed a guy to hit a point in the back corner of all 4 board quarters. Well my army is pretty slow, so that failed badly. We both moved up to the middle of the board and got ready to engage, he used his peacekeeper to reel in Joss, who then powered up and slapped that thing around, its pretty tough though so it lived. Ramos threw an electrical creation out and it started buzzing through the Peacekeeper. Lady J moved up fast and got in my face, my Spider swarmed up and went over to say hi, they did pretty well too dealing 6 damage. Johan also showed her what for, but took a riposte when I flipped the black joker. Turn 3 started and I won the Init flip. I looked at the board and decided to let Joss die to the Peacekeeper so I could have my spider swarm deliver the message to Lady J. Then since its a melee expert 2 it started attacking her. I wasn't drawing any books so i was really liberal with my fate hand cheating anything that I could since I knew I was going to ditch my hand at the end of the turn anyways. He took first blood when the Peace Keeper killed Joss, I responded having Johan kill the Judge. Lady J killed Johan and dropped the Spider swarm to 2 hp. Ramos electrical fired a Death Marshall down and the Electrial creation buzzed the last wound off the Peacekeeper. He finished my spider swarm with the austringer and last death marshall hitting it.



Turn 4 started the board was looking barren. Ramos had high tailed it away from Lady J and was desperatly trying to make it to another board edge so he could live. He was popping out spider constructs and those were harrassing the Austringer. Lady J shot the Brass Arachnid dead, and we looked at the board. Ramos was deep on his side of the board. The Austringer was dead from the mini spiders attacking him, and the Death Marshall was pinned to a piece of terrain he needed for claim jump. So we called it there so bill could throw his guys in for the painting contest. It ended 6vps for ramos, 2 for Lady J. The score doesn't show how close the game really was. had we played it out I would have had only ramos alive as he ran over and anihilated my poor little spiders with the lady. Still a great game.

So after the game ended, Everyone got together and voted on the painting contest. There were two levels, the Intermediate and the Expert level. On the Intermediate side the crews were:

Lord Chomp Bits, accompanied by Teddy, Candy, and Kade, an evil little kid theme force
Marcus, A Waldegiest, A sabertooth, a rattler, and a Jackalope
Last was Seamus and his wonderful horde of zombie ho's

The Seamus Crew took second, which was cool, but Honestly they weren't as good as the Marcus crew in my eyes. But the real winner was the Creepy Kids and Chompy. Our very own Laura Schier(soon to be Kelmelis) painted this crew up, and I did of course vote for it. There was an entry in the Expert side that I would have said should be in the intermediate side, and even if they were I would have still voted for the creepy kids and Chompy.

Now for the Main Event! I was in a time crunch because I was going straight to my parents for a family dinner after the painting contest. But thats neither here nor there. The entries!

The Ortega Family, all 5 of the crazy gun slingers
Lady J, 2 Death Marshals, An Austringer, and the Judge
Viki, Viki, Taelor, Johan, and I want to say a gunslinger (I might be wrong, sorry Jay)
Kirai, Datsue-Ba, Ikiryo, a Seishin, and an Onryo


Anyways the real deal was that Jay managed to get his crew fully painted, and damn did they look awesome, as is the usual with a Wookie painted force. So Everyone looked over the Crew, and I was pleased that it took people a while to vote. Jay even complimented on how much better I was getting at painting. Finally after what was near a half hour, Chris began to announce the winners. Jay took Second which elated me as it meant!



So my Kirai crew actually managed to win it for me, Chris is ordering me a pack of Wyrd bases, I chose the Victorian set, they will be used to Base a small guild force that i'm starting up, its mostly the Ortegas. If anyone saw the final vote tally I would be interested to know how close it was, im betting it was 1-2 votes. So here they are the Award Winning Kirai and Crew

I kinda feel lied too

There were these signs all over 50 and 66 all week telling me that there would be massive construction and major delays this morning. I needed to take an alternate route because this construction was so huge that 66 would be undrivable. So i left early instead, since I have no idea how to get to work on a different route other then the metro. I wanted to leave myself some extra time in case of delays, but I got to work 20 mins early and hit 0 traffic. It was almost a let down.

Bonus!

Some Gaki





And Killjoy

A Couple of Games

Last night I went out to Huzzah and got in 2 games against Chris. He is one of the new guys who joined the game thanks to i believe Bill's prodding.

Game 1: 25 stones, Pandora vs Nicodem
This game went about as I expected. He chose body guard and my strategy was to kill Pandora. I did everything I could to nickle and dime that bitch down, but she just wouldn't die. I dropped her down to I believe 2 life, but Candy Ran in and saved the day with a nice heal flip. I killed Candy for her trouble, but the game ended with Pandora alive and me losing 4-2. I also had a body guard, but he managed to get his second scheme of kill my highest stone model.

Game 2: 25 Stones Kirai vs Perdita
I wanted to try out a Gaki spam, so I took some of them along with some Seishin and Datsue-Ba. I went nutso with Kirai this game. All the little strategies and tricks she has have been slowly clicking for me, and this game was pretty bad for chris. Papa and Fransico both move up and make some attacks. I send Datsue-Ba and a summoned Onryo into them. I manage to kill Francisco, who was my grudge match foe, and the I swapped Datsue out for a Gaki. The other two ran in there and the bunch of them went nuts on Papa eventually killing him, and a gaki, and an onryo, and wounding the other 2 Gaki. Forgot the Should have lived since papa would leave a corpse for me to eat and so would Fansico, but meh that would have been even worse. I then super summon Ikiryo into melee with Santiago and Nino. Santiago is made short work of. Nino books it, and Perdita kills off my Gaki. Then Datsue-Ba goes to work, followed by Ikiryo on Perdita, I end up killed her off and we call it there. It was a pretty nasty game. Im looking forward to my next go with Kirai now.

Onryo

As promised here are the Onryo!












And lastly I finally finished painting a box set of models. My others all need 1-2 models to be painted to be fully finished. I'm quite a lazy ass in that regards. But here is Kirai and her Spiris of ass kickery.

A bit of this and that.

So this weekend I took some time and worked on my Onryo, I was not happy with their colors so they took a while. They ended up looking great once I finished them, but I forgot to take a pic so they will be up tomorrow.

Saturday I played in a Game of Thrones Rp game. Its using the D20 system, which is similar to 3.5 D&D but not the same. The systems is odd and there is a lot I don't get about how to play it, but the first session was ok and I'll go back to give it another whirl.

Also Ellen and I watched the second disk of Warehouse 13. Im a huge fan of this show and I fully recomend it, its got a little sci-fi feel to it, while having a cool historical twist. Pretty fun show.

Ok this is the big thing I wanted to talk about, Ellen and I went out to movies for the first time in a while last night. We saw, Scott Pilgrim vs The World, and I gotta say I pretty much loved that movie. It drew a lot of its inspirations from early nintendo video games; sound effects, music, and even some of the visual effects. The whole thing just had a great video game feel to it. All in all it was a really fun movie and one that I want to add to my collection when its released on Blue-Ray or DVD.