Game night this week had me and Al duking it out at Guild Ball again. And yet again the cheating Union scum beat the Butchers 12 – 8. Although I did get the satisfaction of knowing that all of my points came from taking out Union players. So in theory if I actually think about the game and try and score a goal or two they may not be as bad. One real positive for me though was that I think I’ve started to get to grips with some of their synergies. In particular getting Ox, Boiler and Princess in the right place and then using them in the right order. When I get this right Boiler can hand out some serious damage. We don’t have a game next week so I won’t get chance to do any more tweaks before Vengeance so I will just have to go with what I have and spend the next week reading up on the rules so that I’m as prepared as I can be.
On the hobby front it has been Wild West Exodus all the way this week. I’ve been continuing to work on Marie Laveau and I have to say I’m really happy with how she is coming along. I took the colour scheme out of the concept art book and think it works really well on the mini. My biggest concern was with the skin tones because I have a bit of formula for painting skin which tends to be on light side which just wouldn’t work for this piece. So I had to re-think things and I like how it’s turned out. Maybe a little but more highlighting, but overall I’m happy.
I’ve also been working on the Female Dark Council model which again I’m really happy with. A lot of this has simply been done by adding a few layers of washes over the pre-shading I did with the airbrush. This isn’t the best work I have ever done but overall I think it’s worked out quite well, especially for a gaming piece.
A lot of time this week has gone into making base inserts for my Confederates. My thinking here was to go with something that, in my mind at least, represents an Appalachian forest. Nothing specific but something that would allow me to match the colours of the scouts to the colour of the bases. So I’ve cut out some plasticard disks that fit into the WWX bases, and then used green stuff to add some texture, which in this case was a cracked earth effect. To help with the forest feel I used some resin ‘fallen tree’ parts from Secret Weapon to add some extra detail to the bases. Once everything had dried I cleaned up the green stuff and made sure everything would still fit into the bases.
With the bases built I had to re-think my plans when the post man turns up yesterday with what I thought was going to be some gamers grass. But what actually turned up more of a basing mat. My mistake but this is exactly what I was looking for. The only snag may be that whilst it looks good on this scale it may not work on the scale of an individual base, but I’ll give it a try. Even it doesn’t work on a base it gives me a good template to work from.
I know that building the bases before painting a model seems a bit odd, but in this case I want to be able to try and match the colours of the Scout’s cloaks with the base they will be mounted on. This is because in the rules they get benefits from cover and I wanted to try and tie this rule in with the model itself and this seemed like the easiest way to achieve this. I’ll just have to see how it actually turns out when I get round to painting up the scouts.
I’ve also spent some time this week pretending to web developer. In an attempt to ease the process of uploading pictures onto the site I’ve been trying to sync the media folder on the site with my PC. That way when I add new pictures they are automatically available on the site. Nice idea and things seemed to work ok when I tested it. But once I started to add images I actually wanted to use on the site I just got a string of PHP errors. Which meant absolutely nothing to me. So it was time to ask Google for some help and there were lots of solutions out there, but I couldn’t understand any of them. Anyway I’ve managed to find some really basic instructions that I managed to follow without killing the site and at the moment things seem to working. Although I think I’ll need to give things a couple of weeks before I’m happy that I’ve actually solved the issue and not just masked it in some way.
And that’s it for this week. Hopefully my coding escapades won’t have killed the site and you will still be able to read this. Have good weeks gaming / hobbying and I’ll see you all again next week.
