Saturday, September 8, 2012

Hobby Update: A Return

It's been a pretty busy month.  Life is slowly starting to resume some pattern of normalcy.  I like what it seems to have in play and am looking forward to more.  As the pattern becomes more clear, hobby time has begun to appear in a regular fashion which feels pretty good.  Here is a sample of what that time has yielded.
One particular model has dominated my focus.  I have been working pretty diligently on the Nightbringer while rotating my attention between a few other units at the same time.  Rather than scrapping the current paint job and starting over, I decided to keep working on smoothing out the colors as they were.  The results have been generally positive, though I don't think I've had the same success as with the Manticore, nor do the colors run to as vibrant a finish as I'd like.  That said, it's a solid paint job in my opinion, and I'm ready to toss him on the field.
To do that, I had to build him a base.  I kicked off with a GF9 60mm magnetic base.  Because I plan to have a lot of other big models in the army, I wanted to make sure the Nightbringer would stand out.  It's a pretty easy effect to achieve in a Necron army where he towers over the basic troops, but on a disply board that has a Coven Throne and a bunch of other big creatures, the Nightbringer is so slight of build that he may not stand out as the centerpiece.  To save on glass material, I glued down a trio of 25mm bases on top of each other, then put the Nightbringer on those.  This bought me about an inch of extra height.  From there, it was a matter of adding rings of glass and building them up to the appropriate height and picking out a few things to add as detail around the base.

One of the aforementioned rotating projects includes a herd of old school/out of production metal Khorngors.  One of the reasons I like this project is that they're a return to painting some grittier fantasy models.  They'll get a little highlighting and a little shading, but they're line troops that are supposed to be dirty, with a bunch of natural browns, so I'm not sweating them too much.  They've been sitting in the queue for a while, but once they got in, they got done very quickly.  By far, the most effort consuming part was making the bases.  With everything else in the army, I just glued the model straight to the surface of the marble square.  The Khorngors were never going to be so simple.  The bottoms of the hooves are angled, providing minimal contact points, and the metal makes the models top heavy.  Basing them entailed snipping the metal strips for the slottabases into nubs, then drilling a pair of holes to sink the nubs into.  The end result is imperfect.  I have a few gaps to fill and hoofs that don't sit squarely.  Overall though, they seem to work just fine.
Finally, for those of you interested in nerdetry and sports at the same time, I recently completed a mock auction for a fantasy football league (the American version).  If you've only done a draft before, I'd encourage you to give an auction a chance.  It's extremely entertaining.  I'm pretty happy with my team:
QB: Michael Vick
RB: Lesean Mccoy
RB: Matt Forte
WR: Percy Harvin
WR: Marques Colston
FLX: Brandon Lloyd
TE: Cody Fleener
Def: NY Giants
K: Alex Henery

I have a pretty high ceiling for scoring from week to week.  My running backs should have consistently big numbers, and each of my receivers should yield solid weekly results, with chances for big plays.  My big worry is injury.  More than one of these guys has a history of getting hurt and my back ups don't inspire confidence.  I suppose that's the risk of paying to have nice things.  Resource management becomes tricky.  Finding value becomes important.  Patience gets put up against scarcity.  In a lot of ways, it's like many of my favorite games.  Except that I only get to play it once a year and don't know the result for four months.  Oh, and it's absolutely infuriating sometimes.

Hobby Accoplishments
-Finished the Nightbringer
-Finished the Khorngors
-Wrote down five of six missions for campaign project

Hobby Goals
-Get all six missions typed and finalized
-Finish the Death Company in the next two weeks
-Prep league format for two weeks from now
-Prime Banshees and Coven Throne
-Airbrush two coats on second Possessed squad

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