Hobby -- Week 3/7-3/12

 

Organization

After buying and setting up the new shelving unit last week, and reorganizing my hobby space, I bought some "acrylic nail polish storage racks" on Amazon to store my paints, which were getting out of control. These had a wide enough shelf to store both Vallejo, Citadel, and Tamiya paints, which were great. I'm really happy everything is now organized and I have more space to work, instead of my desk being so cluttered. Next week, I think I'll buy some lights. The new desk location has more space and access to the pegboard wall, but lacks good light for painting. I'll either pick up some Ikea desk lamps or a big garage overhead light. We'll see which is a more effective solution.

Snow Bases

My friend wanted a quick basing tutorial on how I did my Age of Sigmar skeletons' snow bases, so I'm going to post it here as my virtual noteboook so I remember how to do it in the future.

I used Vallejo's texture paint and some large(ish) pebbles sifted out of a huge 50 pound bag of sand I haave in the basement

Vallejo texture paint - the color is unimportant, since we're going to prime it anyway to make sure the rocks have a good surface to take paint

Primed with Krylon brown spray paint -- it's cheap and is brown for some basic mud texture

To paint the pebbles, I used a motley collection of cheap ass acrylic paints. These were from Michaels for about $0.99. Any cheap acrylic will do. Don't waste your good model paints on this

This how the base looked after the rocks were basecoated and washed with Citadel's Agrax Earthshade

Vallejo's German Camo Medium Brown was used to get the first drybrush done to build up some contrast on the mud texture

The second drybrush was done with German Camo Pale Brown

After a few passes with the drybrush, this base is ready for snow texture

These are the basing materials I used. The Army Painter tufts and snow texture were cheap. I wouldn't be using this on a real 1/35th scale diorama, but it works well enough for wargaming bases. The tufts were attached to the base first. The snow will cover them and blend them into the ground texture.

The white paint, gloss varnish, and snow flock were mixed into a paste and spread out on top of the base. Make sure to get the snow on top of the grass tufts!

This is how the snow looked after the first pass, which is good enough for me to simulate late winter/early spring melting snow. If you want your army to be fighting in larger snow drifts, you can go back and hit the base with two or three passes to build up some larger texture.

Wood Elves

My biggest passion project is a Wood Elf army. Wood Elves are my favorite interpretation of elves, since they have a natural dexterity, grace, and skill, combined with their innate magic and their simple but elegant life close to nature. I've always wanted a wood elf army for Warhammer, but I only started playing once Age of Sigmar came out, which saw the Old World destroyed. Recently, I've been browsing some Facebook groups for the old Warhammer Fantasy Battle, particularly 6th/7th edition. I like the emphasis on lore and gameplay, without the game being dominated by characters like the HeroHammer of 4th and 5th edition. I bought a lot of the Out-of-Print Glade Guard on ebay. I paid a decent bit, but after doing the math, I paid less on a per-model basis than I would have if I had bough Primaris Space Marines new-in-box, so I can't complain too much.

For roughly 45 bucks, I got 40 archers, 4 leaders, 2 banners, and 4 musicians. I'm just glad to get some minis. I really like the GW ones because they have my favorite Wood Elf aesthetic. Unfortunately, I hate GW as a company, and these models won't ever get printed again. Maybe I'll pay way too much for a new-in-box regiment. Oh well. . . I'll be happy to get these guys cleaned up and painted. I usually paint miniatures in sub-assemblies, but since these came pre-assembled, I have to work with what I got. These are going to take a lot of time to delicately work around all the assembled parts and paint them. They're less than optimal, but it's going to be a labor of love.