2015 Hobby Resolutions

This post comes a bit late in the year, but most of my effort is being put toward finishing up my current batch of Grey Knights. 

I wanted to make a hobby road-map of sorts for 2015, as I have a ridiculous amount of small (and not-so-small) projects lying around from 2013 and 2014, and clearly not enough focus to complete much of anything.

My intention is to keep it short, and focus on a few things at once so I don't get distracted. Additionally, I will associate the completion of certain landmarks on my road-map with incentives, typically the purchase of new kits or other hobby-related stuff.

So, without further ado, the list:

Phase 1:

• Complete painting 5x Grey Knights
• Complete painting Vindicare Assassin & Jokaero Weaponsmith
• Finish plasticard rock basing for the remainder of my Tyranids (+ 5 GKs)
• Finish putting together 5 GKs
• Finish Magnetizing odds/ends of my Tyranids

Reward: Hive Tyrant kit

I hate to follow the masses, but this is the simplest way to eventually get myself in the Win column.

Alladin's Morning Coffee Musings #7 - 2014, A Year in Review

It's been a while since I've updated, though I have been meaning to for a while now. In fact, I have various bits of half-typed posts littered about, that I will hopefully get to publishing. This is the first!

Now that the craziness of the holidays are behind us, I have finally found some time to get back on here and do some updating.  The last few weeks have been predominantly hobby-free, unfortunately. Part of it has to do with all the family stuff that goes on this time of year, and part of it with my newly rekindled obsession with comic books. Without getting into too much detail, I dug out my old books & read them again for the first time in 15-20 years, then re-bagged them in nicer bags for future display in my office/hobby space. I should have stopped there, but then I went out and started buying all sorts of new issues and back issues of old series I never completed. The good news is that I have basically scoured all the local comic stores for back issues, and can stop obsessing over it for a bit and get back to the tabletop gaming side of things.

Alladin's Morning Coffee Musings #6 - Alladin's State of the Hobby Union Address, plus Random Pictures of Doors!

I haven't done one of these in a while, and though my coffee is now thoroughly stone-cold, I think it still technically qualifies.

Notice: Above-mentioned coffee looks nothing like this.

Forwarning: This may be a long one...

Well, that absence was longer than expected - Alladin's Morning Coffee Musings #5

Hello again!

I am back to this blog after a 4 month "break." To quickly bring things up to speed, hobby life was going quite well back in early February; I was making fairly quick work of my Tyranid assembly, until one day we received notice that our landlords were moving back into the house we were renting from them. Basically, we now had 2 months to find another place to live. Deciding to test home-ownership again after 2 years of renting, a torrent of house-hunting ensued and we found a nice place that fit our criteria and happened to be located right around where we wanted to live. *It doesn't hurt that I am now only a 3 minute drive from the FLGS that I mentioned in previous posts. I tell my wife this had NOTHING to do with my location criteria... ... ... ... ...*

As I was unable to continue commuting to work, a new car had to be purchased in this timeframe as well, and when you add this to all the other things one needs to do before, during, and after purchasing a house, 4 months seems like a blink of an eye. And now that the boring stuff is out of the way, lets get back to the hobby!

Today's special: Aluminum & Lead

Today I put the finishing touches on my brand new Light Box (Mk.1). I opted to go with a white background for now (for lack of a colour printer), using a pretty ghetto backdrop of 8.5"x11" pages glued together with double-sided tape.

Ta-Da!!!

Saving Money vs Supporting Local - Alladin's Morning Coffee Musings #4

Today I want to talk about a subject in our hobby which, turns out, I feel somewhat strongly about, and that's who we give our hard-earned cash to (and what we get from it).

We all know our hobby is an expensive one. When you can now easily spend $100 on a single plastic model, or $500 just to get a workable starter army (Games Workshop economics - obviously other game systems may be more or less affordable), it becomes clear that a dedicated hobbyist invests significant disposable income into his or her passion. And since we live in a capitalist society (most of us, anyway), there will always be an enterprising person or company trying to find ways of separating us from our disposable income in a more efficient and expedient fashion that benefits both us (cost savings) and them (sales volume). This, of course, is not limited to our hobby; it is simply the world we live in. 

The point is that we have choices on where we spend our money, with some choices offering significant cost savings. Depending on your end-game, however, I feel that the decision you make can have significant ramifications in the long-term enjoyment of your hobby.

Huzzah! 2014 Resolution Complete!

Well, I am now officially part of not one, but two Blog Networks/Exchanges!

Thank you Natfka at Faeit 212 and the group at Tale of Painters for adding me to your respective blog lists. I now have much more impetus to put out useful content now... and I guess this means I can now stop having conversations with myself and my loyal group of "Team Edward" referral bots!

Next step is to put together a decent light box set up for future photography taking - I am quite underwhelmed at the photo quality of the first part of my Step-by-Step tutorial, and will try to get a better solution before I do any more tutorial work.

With that, I'm out!  40k Fist Bump!

Searched for "40k Fist Bump" in Google Images. Got this pic. The Internets are so cruel.

The Nature of the (Hobby) Beast - Alladin's Morning Coffee Smoothie Musings #3

Good morning to all my loyal followers referral bots!

Today I will ramble a bit about the nature of our great hobby and how it affects me. Specifically, about how our hobby elicits a surprisingly strong hoarding complex in me, whereas in most other parts of my life I act quite the opposite.

I got back into this hobby about a year and a half ago. I still had some remnants of my old stuff, but I was essentially starting from scratch. Today, I am faced with a closet almost overflowing with hobby-related product. How is this possible? Why do I keep spending? I wish I knew the answers to these questions. Don't get me wrong, I am thrilled to be back in this hobby, and I do keep to a fairly strict budget, but they don't call it "plastic crack" for nothing.

2014 has Arrived! New Year, New Start.

Happy New Year Everyone!

Well, recently I started implementing a few changes to the blog, changes that will allow me some more freedom to interact with the community as a whole. I am in the process of setting up a new google+ account, whatever that is. This will involve porting all my pictures to date to the new account, and then re-uploading them to each post. Not a fun way to spend a free night...

My intention is to start signing up to other blog alliances, which should give me more exposure to the gaming community. According to Blogger, my biggest source of traffic is currently vampirestat.com (? Not really sure what that's about - I accidentally clicked on the link but it looked scary so I closed the window stat. How stat? Vampire stat.) so hopefully this will change soon, I don't think the people clicking through from vampirestat.com are getting the content they are looking for...

Painting Tutorial #1: Introduction & Materials

After a pretty long break from painting, I got back into it recently and started the long task of getting my force painted up. Until now, I had only primed a few models, and had been honing my painting skills by painting the interior of my Rhino/Razorback. Looking back, I DID paint a test figure earlier this year using an old metal GKSS figure, but I found it was a bit too bright for my liking and put off painting the rest until now.

In any case, I have decided to put together some tutorials to help others in their path to improve their painting skills.

Introduction (Part 3: Finally. Enough already!)

(continued from previous...)

10 years or so have passed since my last hobby-related activity:

After moving into this last house, we determined that we needed to "scale down" and get rid of any unneeded clutter - our next move would be back to the big city, where prices are high and square footage is low. When I got to the box with my miniatures, my wife and I had a conversation that went something along the lines of this:

"I think I'm going to get rid of my miniatures, I haven't touched them in forever."

"No hun, don't do that!" (Prior to making this statement, she had only seen my miniatures once before, many years ago, and had no particular interest in them aside from the fact that the painting skill was impressive to her untrained eyes)

"Really? Why do you want me to keep them?"

"I don't know, you worked so hard on them..."

Introduction (Part 2: The Boring Middle Part)

(continued from previous...)

3 years later:

Tyranids: geek love at first sight. Invited to one of the aforementioned friend's house one weekend, I was introduced to the world of WH40K. I saw everything: Eldar, Leman Russ Tanks, the Carnifex! (back when it was the crown jewel of the Tyranid army). All of them were fairly poorly painted by anyone's standards, but were still so unequivocally beautiful to my virgin eyes (except some Dark Angels, which were literally dipped in dark green house paint, pulled out and left to dry. The figures lost so much detail that the only way anyone would know they were GW figures was if their owner told them, and only then if they actually chose to believe him).

Introduction (Part 1: Introduction to the Introduction)

Hey everyone!

Welcome to the inaugural post of my first experiment in blogging. I have created this blog as a point of focus for my various hobby gaming interests. I don't actually expect many people to end up following my blog (at least not until I have something tangible to show for my grandiose ideas), but will nonetheless try to keep it interesting for the poor souls that wander in unexpectedly.

First, a bit about me, in the context of the hobby at least. I am relatively new to the hobby, although my interest spans back quite a few years. About 18 years ago, I got my first real look at the hobby when I picked up a unit of WHFB Empire Pikemen (or something similar) to use as pieces for a board game project in 6th grade.

I was fascinated with the detail in the models and the potential to make them look even cooler with an awesome paint job. Although I considered myself fairly artistically inclined in those days, try as I may I simply could not understand my complete inability to replicate anything remotely resembling the paint quality depicted on the box (Hint: I was using bottom-of-the-barrel brushes and old Testors paint applied without a primer).

This setback, combined with my predilection for getting easily distracted by other shiny things, brought a fairly hasty end to this superficial initial foray into hobby gaming - a toe dip, if you can even call it that. This absence would last about 3 years, when I found myself in a new school with new friends...

(to be continued...)