What I painted in December 2019

The last one for this year, but also the first full month in the new mancave, and with some regular paint time back on the schedule.

Add to that that the AHPC has begun again, and I went out full blazes to salvage at least something of the paint numbers this year.

The first three quarters of the month have been dedicated not to actually painting, but preparing and undercoating a LOT of models (for my doing at least) because it was AHPC time again, so I didn't paint anything big actually before the challenge started out.  Though I did finish these models in the time before the start:

The first batch are some farmland scatter terrain, and this second one is the test model for my Italians in North Africa 6mm.

I also completed some 28mm "statues" during this assembly and undercoating phase, a nice quick in between paintjob while glue is drying.

We moved to the AHPC preparations in order to start scoring points this year, and the first ones that entered the competition where these models:

The challenge this year requires that every participant needs to paint up a prize model to be shipped out to the winners, and I opted for Shepherd Book by Heresy Miniatures, of course from the beloved Firefly series.

I also completed my first Challenge Map entry, Reidy's Reef, which had a naval bonus theme.  So I painted up the Regia Marina fleetbox I bought past Crisis.

Not only that, but having a week off made me manage some more big entries in small scales, as my 1000 points Blitzkrieg Commander Belgians got their colours as well.  Now they just need to earn them on the battlefield as well...

So, a respectable 67 models have been finished as a result, not to shabby to end the year with!

The 2020 goals: the year of the big change

While we took a look yesterday at the achieved goals of 2019, 2020 was in the past summer still a year I had big plans.

We would have moved places, I would have gotten a mancave to paint at full speed... and then our little miracle happened (and believe me, with Noshi only having a 0.1% chance of getting pregnant naturally, it IS a miracle) and all the plans have been changed...

With the little hobbit expected to go on an adventure half of march, that means our life will be having mayor changes, and of course that will mean for the hobby as well.  My mancave is reduced to a paint corner, and I have been selling off a lot of figures for extra space as storage cabinets are now cut down as well.

So that of course influences the goals for the year as well.  My original draft, which I started writing up back in july, would contain painting no less then 1000 models and in that 8 complete armies... so no, that is no longer going to happen.

Instead, my goals will be to paint at least 3 complete "larger scale" armies this year, in the form of a 700 point army for MESBG, namely Rivendell.  The second one is a 2000 point T'au army, the Gundam SEED based one for colours, and preferably before June when the next 40k big battle takes place at the club.
The final army is my force for 9th Age and to go to tournaments with, in the form of a 4500 point Chaos Dwarf force, because well, old loves...
They all have had some work done so far though, and they respectively start out at 477, 487 and 275 points now.  Especially those Elves will be reaching the mark soonish, as Noshi keeps pressuring me to paint "her" elves up ;-)

Another army I want to paint up is one for Blitzkrieg Commander 4, namely 3000 points of the Italians in North Africa.

Add to that a "carry over" goal from 2019, namely to paint at least 1000 points of Rohirrim, and that still totals a decent amount of forces to get battle worthy.  Of those,only 67 points have been completed so far...

And I want to complete 10 pieces of scenery, not counting small scatter terrain, but "complete" pieces for the forces to battle over. Think the old LOTR ruins upwards in size to classify, which equals at least a 5cm by 5cm "ground plate".  With the added benefit that I can now print them myself...

While the homeheld Battle Companies campaign now stands on the edge of taking place or not, I am still going to try and complete every band in the book for those occassional small games as well.  I already completed XX out of the 38 so far, so that's still a big job ahead...

This will be done during the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge 10, where I set a goal of 1000 points for this edition.  Bit higher then the previous years, but I do have a nice hour or two every evening now to swoop some brushes across my figures.  The competititon started last week, and I scored 194 points so far as a result.

On the "watch" part of the goals, I will be aiming for different numbers again this year.  I'm going to try and read 20 books again, but I'll be cutting down on movies and series to respectively 25 and 10, the latter mainly due to not really anything that's going to come out catching my fancy.

On an anime level on the other hand, I've planned to watch no less then 30 anime series the coming year, because it's time to cut down on that backlog now that I have painting nights again...

The final one, attend wargaming events, is returning at 5 events for this year though, that should be do-able as I'll be picking up small tournaments again left or right...

So that are the goals for the year of the big changes, ambitious seeing the changed private life, yet not totally unreachable I think...

The Best of 2019

Here we are again, another year has passed and it's time to look at the totally subjective, my choice, best of from 2019.

As always, there will probably be choices in here one does not understand, but the mind of The Von Geekington works in mysterious ways.  

Starting of this year, it's Best Movie.  And for me, that was Bohemian Rhapsody.  As a Queen fan, I cried and I cried and I cried...

But for Best Performance, I`m going for Hugo Weaving in Mortal Engines.  The movie was a contender for best I`ve seen, but he is just fantastic (again) in this one.

The Best Series is a recent addition, as Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance is just totally awesome stuff.  Beautifully made, it was worth the 37 year wait...

Best Book this year is actually a rulebook, in the form of Games Workshop's Battle Companies 2.0, as this allows me to play Noshi in my favorite fantasy setting during the evenings.

Best Toy well not really a "toy", but whatelse could it be then the Ender 3 Noshi gave me this week for christmas.  A new world has opened, and it will make the hobby a LOT cheaper to boot!

Best Anime is a special this year, in the form of the Date a Live franchise "Encore", it was such a beautiful and yet gut wrenching special...

Best Game: well, what else then Battle Companies, for the same reasons as listed above for Best Book to be honest.

For Best Videogame I am going for Harem Heroes, a cellphone hentai game, and about the only thing I actually played this year for more then a week... videogaming has really fallen off the bandwagon in this busy and hectic year called 2019.

Best Wargame Figure: Big gun, number one!!!!  Yeah, it remains my all time favorite, and with my resurgence into fantasy ranked battles, I obtained one asap.

Best Music: that has to be the opening of Deadman Wonderland, unfortunatly the series hasn`t been continued so I`ll have to get the manga's someday.

Best trade: well, that is a hard one, because I haven`t really been trading around a lot.  In the end, I`m going for some painted Fellowship figures I traded with Geert from the FHL for some Rohan Outriders, plastic Lothlorien elves and some plastic Dwarf rangers though.

Best Convention or Event: no, not Crisis, as I couldn`t emerge myself in it this year as it was a second hand dump edition for me personally, so that makes I`m opting for WarCon, where i could "live" the full experience.

Greatest Disappointment: without a doubt the resin models of the Dragon Empire by Titan Forge.  Brittle, bend, not worth the money for my tastes...

And there we have it, my year 2019, as seen through my multicolour glasses... now let's be amazed at what 2020 will bring my way!

The Haul Report 210: Thank You Santa... and mailman

Hohohohoooo... merry christmas and may you all received joy, love, and some great gifts.

I can definitly say I did...

Because Noshi got me nothing less then an Ender 3 printer.  Many a piece of scenery will now be printed, and gone are the days of setting aside heaps of hobby budget now for terrain!

But she had some more in stock for me, as she bought the full series of standard FunkoPops of the Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance for me.

At the in-laws, I was treated to some great hobby goodies as well, together with vouchers from Games Workshop whom will be used to buy Warriors of Dale!

 Secret santa also arrived, as you could read a few days ago as well.

But that is not all, as it was a great haul week as well.  My order from Wayland Games came in, not only delivering the new War in Rohan supplement, but also some blisters Numenorians, as well as some more Abyssal Dwarves.

From my regular "eBay dealer", all the needed Ruffians for a battle company arrived in the mailbox.

I went to De Sleghte this week, with the last remaining value on a gift voucher.  Adding to that their action at the moment of buying three novels, paying two, makes I got these 4 lovelies for a measly 3.10 euro.

Oh, and Ray, if you are reading this, I bought this from Baccus especially for your Challenge in the challenge!

Also now technically part of hauls, are the prints this brand new Ender 3 above is churning out.  To that end, I already made 2 so far to test the machine, one priestess that fell out to small and as such becomes a statue for 6mm gaming, and Jen the Gelfling in 28mm from The Dark Crystal.

And of course, for printing, one needs filament... so 2 rolls ordered and received.

A very epic week indeed!

The 2019 Won Give-aways

Yeah, I keep doing them Nemesis.

Facebook, Instagram, YouTube... all those subscriver giveaways that pop up, and often don`t require more then a like, share and comment.

So for that small effort, why wouldn't I risk it to actually snatch up some free loot, and 2019 hasn`t been a bad year at all, with 5 prizes finding their way to my mailbox.

It all began this year with a set of Gothic Fences, which I`d won through the Facebook page of Tabletop Scenics.

Then in march, I snatched two at the same day actually: from KiriothTV I won a 10 GBP voucher for Element Games, while at the same time, I won Axel's pretpakket from the 80s Geek blog, a good selection of (in)famous B-movies and great comics.

During the summer months, Spikey Bits celebrated their anniversary, and there I gained a set from of Secret Armoury Mud special effects kit.

But perhaps the biggest win this year was when Archonia gave away a Myth Cloth of Capricorn Shura's God Cloth, a set quickly reaching a 100+ euro value...

So a good year it was indeed, for in the end minimal effort, tell me why I shoudln`t keep doing this ;-)

On the Painting Desk 124

Surrounded.  Surrounded by plates of all sorts with a wide variety of figures on them...

Yup, the AHPC has launched and while I managed to get some first entries in, lots of work awaits me.

I aim to get a good strong start, because as the Challenge progresses, so does the planned arrival of Lord Ipsqueek, and I HOPE to get my objective just before his coming.

I had holidays this week for well, the holidays, and as such did get some serious glueing, undercoating and washing time in, so now I can start working on finetuning a couple of entries, and lay the foundations for some fresh ones to boot.

Brushes overtime time!

It's alive, ALIIVEEEE! The first night with the Ender 3

So yesterday I called in my little brother in law to help me build the christmas present: an Ender 3 printer.

Now, this guy is an engineer and had whole courses at high school with those machines, so I let him do his thing and in the meanwhile tinkered a bit with Cura and files.

Once the machine was assembled, I could as such start doing my first test prints.

The first model, from Thingyverse, was a 28mm priestess, but I scaled her to small (it counts in the footpiece and such) at 28mm, so she will be relegated to "statue duty" for games of 6mm or 10mm, for which she is the ideal size.  Never the less, she came out very nice for a first run.

A second effort in learning to scale is a Jen from The Dark Crystal movie, normally an 11 cm high model, but I scaled him down to 32mm

This gave me a nice sized figure, especially once I cut of his base (needed to get the supports removed between her cloak and the legs) I had a nicely sized model somewhere between an MESBG size hobbit and a human.

Now to see how these paint up in the coming days...

AHPC10: Reidy's Reef: The Regia Marina sails in

So it is time to start my exploration towards the island core in this year's Challenge Island map.

And I decided to make landfall on Reidy's Reef, to follow from there the route known as The Path of the New Shiney.

For this first challenge, the hobby thme has to be naval in kind, and so it is the perfect moment to launch the Regia Marina fleet.

An added benefit to this is the fact I can claim the "New Project" bonus as well, as I bought the models as recent as beginning of november on our Crisis show, where Nemesis and me decided to try this game out.

But to that end, I painted up the complete starter box for my beloved Italian faction, consisting of the Corvette, the two transport vessels, 4 MAS boats and the aerial support of the single CR42.

Now, I do apologise, but I have no clue how to "score" this submission with the three large 6mm scale boats and the various crew all around the decks, so I have to leave this unfortunate job to the Minions I`m afraid...

But the adventure is a go, see you in the centre!

The 2019 Goals, what was achieved

So the year has gone by, and that means it's time to look at some goals.

Now with my RL calendar being overhauled seriously as we found a new place about half a year before we planned to, that means it was a struggle to actually get a lot of it done...

The first goal achieved this year was completing the Analogue challenge, where I kept the whole challenge in it's Middle earth theme this time, and in the end coming out at 753 points of my projected 750, so that was a good one.  And it helped me complete quite a nice amount of Lord of the Rings figures on the go.

But then it all became more of a struggle, as I just didn't get around painting figures in serious big batches...

For example, the Crisis figures where nowhere finished, and that is not counting those that joined the ranks with this years edition of the show.  The same goes for the Blood Bowl team, started during AHPC 8 LAST year, and still haven't gotten much progress in the past year due to circumstances, and won`t porbably as I MtO the Chaos Dwarf team in the meantime.

Talking the three Middle Earth forces, while both Minas Tirith and Mordor reached their goals, the Rohan force is trailing far behind though, and will carry over into 2020 (amongst many other forces I'll put on my agenda, check back next week for those!) in a fresh effort to get 1000 points painted of the noble horse lords.

But all in all, I did manage to paint 217 MESBG figures this year, the plastic batches doing a great job in boosting numbers, albeit I fell seriously short of the 300 figures goal.

On the read and watch department, I'm a bit on a split mind.  Gutted painting time means gutted watching time, but none the less the numbers in the end did turn out okay, even though some serious binging took place near the end of the year...

The result of this was that finished 21 books, so that is rather nice, with a 1 to 3 ratio of them being various rulesbooks, but that was a goal I could mark off halfway in the november already.

The anime and series counters, clocking off respectively at 12 and 16, started very strong, but then it all dwindled down around the middle of the year.  But the resurgence near the end of the year did boost the numbers a bit again.  Nevertheless, I failed to reach my set goals by a long shot...

You see, in that middle period, with renovations and the pregnancy dominating most of our time, we just sat down for the occassional movie, and as a result 33 have been seen, the "objective" being reached half of november this year round.

For the wargame events, I ended up at 5 events and tournaments participated, mainly divided amongst february on the one hand, and november on the other, but in between it was a rather calm affair.

Not so calm on a paperwork level, I ran the course of two leagues / campaigns to and end this year, coming in 2nd at the long Dux Britanniarum campaign on the one hand, and ending in the pack at spot 12th in the 40k league, which for me was seriously hampered in playtime due to above mentioned reasons, as I only got around half a dozen games in at the end... and then sold my army in october.

So 2019 has been a mixed succes for my goals, but with 2020 I`m going more ambitious again never the less, check back in a few days to see what I have planned for myself!