Testing, testing...

...is this thing still on?

*Ahem*

Sorry for that folks, not entirely sure what happened there. I was all set for a good year of blogging, but life intervened halfway through, as it has a tendency to do. Holidays, illness, promotions, marriage proposals, work etc. came along and somewhere along the way blogging fell by the wayside.

I do have some stuff to show from the last six months though, which I'll be posting up in a bit. Not as much stuff as I set out to complete this year unfortunately, but I'll talk about that a bit more in another post. For now though, roll the pictures!

A Tale of Duelling Gamers - June Progress

Just a quick update on the ToDG progress so far - not a lot has been done, in all honesty, as the month has played out busier than expected so far, especially with the World Cup going on! I've managed to assemble all the Wildwood Rangers (the first ten of which are shown below) but at the moment, painting is yet to commence on them.

In the spirit of showing more WiPs though, I will show a bit of the painting that has been done. I've had 15 Glade Riders in the wings for a while, and I've finally made a start on painting their horses.

Fifteen horses in a variety of shades!

This one is slightly further along, with all the leatherwork painted...

With just under two weeks left to get the Wildwood Rangers painted, I'd better crack on soon or end up facing a repeat of the first month, and miss the deadline!

Phalanx 2014

Just a quick post to say that we will be taking our Battle of Kirkburn Bridge game to the Phalanx wargames show in St Helens tomorrow, so if there's anyone in the North West reading this - please pop over to our table to say hello and have a chat! 

Check out the Spartans' website for more details of the show: http://spartans.org.uk/#&panel1-1 

A Tale of Duelling Gamers - Here We Go Again...

Into month three we go then, so what have I got lined up this time around? 

Well, I have two boxes of these:

which will be used to make twenty of these guys:

So that's twenty Wildwood Rangers to build and paint. A big step up from last month, but not quite as big a target as the Eternal Guard back in April! I'm looking forward to putting these together as the models are pretty darn cool looking, and I have plans for a "darker" variation on my usual colour scheme to reflect the Rangers' more sinister nature...

Amount Spent: $94

Number of Figures: 20

Price at Current UK exchange rate: £51.94

GW UK Retail Price: £47

Price Paid: £40

Here you can see some of the incongruity between UK and Australian GW prices; a single Treeman in Australia costs $2 more than two boxes of Wildwood Rangers, but somehow in the UK the two boxes of Wildwood Rangers work out as a whole £10 more expensive than the Treeman! 

Anyway, as we're now at the halfway stage of the Tale, I thought I'd do a quick round-up of the spending so far as well:

Amount "Spent": $388

Number of Figures: 51

Equivalent at current UK exchange rate: £214.34

GW UK Retail: £157.80

Actual Amount Spent: £136.50 ($247.09)

You can see that even at the halfway stage, I'm a good few bob better off than buying at normal GW prices, let alone Australian GW prices. I've saved just over £20 compared to buying everything brand new (and that's quite a skewed figure as it is, given that two out of the three months so far have featured brand new models that haven't popped up on eBay yet...). Compared to my Australian brethren though, I've saved a massive £78/$141 on their GW prices...

A Tale of Duelling Gamers - Enter Treeman!

Here we go then, the finished product for May's portion of the Duelling Gamers challenge. Although one model seemed like a hugely underwhelming target for a whole month, in hindsight I'm glad I didn't give myself more to do. I'm not used to painting big models like this, and certainly not this "type" of figure where the colour scheme is completely undetermined. Really, the only model I have to compare to this is the Screaming Bell for my Skaven, but that was easy to paint, relatively speaking. Everyone knows how to paint metal parts, everyone knows how to paint wooden beams, everyone knows how to paint rope and chains, which is essentially all the Screaming Bell is - the colours are already "pre-set" in your head, because you know what they're supposed to look like. But what colour is a living, walking tree supposed to be?

I'll admit I went in rather rashly and began painting before I'd actually thought about *how* to paint the Treeman. I undercoated white (as usual), basecoated all over with Rakarth Flesh (as usual, for my other forest spirits, anyway), washed with Agrax Earthshade (as usual) and then....

Stuck. I had no idea where to go from there. Eventually, after plenty of trial and error, I stumbled on a scheme that I'm more-or-less happy with. In the end, I think I probably spent more time thinking about how to paint the Treeman than actually painting him. 

In the end, I don't think he's turned out too bad, and I think he fits with the established colour scheme of the rest of the army (as much as is possible for a living, walking tree anyway). The only part I'm not entirely happy with is the strangleroots shooting out of his hand; they need something more doing with them to really do them justice, but I'm not confident enough to attempt the (seemingly) complicated blending I'd like to do, especially on a deadline!

Anyway, that's another month over and finished on time (he was actually finished a couple of days ago, so I wasn't painting right up until the deadline this time!) 

One thing I have realised though, over the course of this month in particular, is that I'm completely rubbish at posting blog updates. In fact, with the ToDG going on, I've even stopped updating on other non-ToDG subjects as well, which isn't good. 

I think part of the reason for that is that I really don't like posting WiP pictures. I love seeing other peoples' work in progress shots, but I'm rubbish at doing it myself - I hate the thought of posting the inevitable "here's another picture showing how little I've done in a week" updates. Why would anyone want to see that I've managed to paint another colour on a bunch of unfinished models? And so, I wait until I have a finished product to show which, as you might have guessed, takes me a while. Combine that with the fact that I tend to paint whole units at a time, rather than break them down into smaller batches (like the other ToDG participants seem to do), means that blog updates are few and far between.

All of this isn't intended as a criticism of those people who *do* post WiP updates, by the way. Like I said, I love seeing other peoples' work in progress, and seeing the evolution of models from start to finish. I just can't seem to bring myself to do it for my own blog! 

But all that is (hopefully) going to change. For next month (and, if it works, the months thereafter) I'm going to get over my irrational "fear" of WiPs, and post some of my own work in progress shots in an effort to increase the number of blog updates across the month, and hopefully give readers (if there are any!) more to keep them interested!

And on that note, I'll end! Stay tuned for the next update, coming to you sometime this weekend!

A Tale of Duelling Gamers - Take Two!

The second month of the Tale of Duelling Gamers is now well under way, and I've finally managed to get my hands one of the new Wood Elf Treeman kits for this month's purchases. 

The kit can make either a Treeman Ancient, a regular Treeman or Durthu (a Special Character Treeman). I spent last night putting it together, using a mix of parts from each in order to come up with a unique model. This uses Durthu's legs and waist, the Ancient's torso and right arm, and the Treeman's left arm, right hand (including Strangleroots) and head combined with the antennae from the Ancient. 

Amount Spent: $96 AUD

Number of Figures: 1

Price at Current UK exchange rate: £53.32

GW UK Retail Price: £37

Price Paid: £37

Tale of Duelling Gamers - April Review

Here's the finished product then - thirty Eternal Guard, painted up in my winter colour scheme to add to the unit I've already painted. I still have a few Eternal Guard models left to paint, but I couldn't fit them into my budget for April. I *did* try and paint them alongside the thirty for the ToDG, but it quickly became apparent that I'd struggle to paint thirty in time, let alone the forty models I'd originally planned...

A nice big block of shiny spear points, ready and waiting for their new army book!

The ten models that got left by the wayside. Maybe next month boys...

All told, I'm actually pretty happy with these - despite missing the April deadline by just under 24 hours, the reality is that I basically painted all thirty models is the space of about nine days. Of course, if I'd started working on them *before* the week before the deadline, I'd have had more time to paint them and probably wouldn't have missed the deadline at all, but we live and learn I guess! 

So what does May have in store for the Tale of Duelling Gamers? Well, the new Wood Elves army book is out tomorrow, along with the new plastic Treeman kit. The Treeman kit has certainly divided opinion, but I like it. So much, in fact, that I plan on picking up two of them...

That answers the question of what I'll be painting for the Tale of Duelling Gamers May edition; at $96 AUD, a single Treeman weighs in at just under my monthly budget ($100 AUD) so I will only be required to paint one single (albeit big...) model this month!