Lack of updates and excuses

What up!

Over the past few days ive been secreting myself away in an attempt to get a new job.. Still dunno how thats turned out but its all out of the way now and outside of paying attention to my phone theres nothing more i can do. Of course some of you will be going "pssh! job stuff doesn't take up that much time.." but today alone i've been for a 3 hour interview session had to take a drug test and all sorts of other funderfull activities

I am drug free unsuprisingly.. apparently they dont test for lethal doses of caffeine though.

Anyway i have done some hobby related joy recently, although not as much as i would have liked.. Especially considering that monstrous update i did a while ago.

So instead for now i give you a daft black and white picture of my WIP board for home with some fire angels looking all fire angely and stuff.

Look at how arty everything looks in black and white.. Its also really good for hiding random crap like the edge of a table from view. When the new camera gets here expect lots of boring shots of tea cups and stuff in black and white with high contrast.. because obviously I'm arty and that kind of crap expresses my soul...

Or something.

The promised big update..

Yeesh it's taken a whole lot longer than planned to get this update to exist. (the skin tutorial is still a way off..but you at least get to see the candidate for that in this post in all his silver faced glory..)

As i am currently "between jobs" I figured I didn't really have an excuse for not getting much work done on this lot anymore, so tidied my desk up (Sorrowshard can attest to that, he will recall the days of not being able to see the desk for all the crap on it.. and the maze of hobby and pain to even get to it in the 1st place) and busted out some serious hobby whilst listening to a combo of Future World Music, the original Quake soundtrack by NIN (controversially their best album) and some Scar Symmetry (before ADB's twin left the band)

Anyway thats enough talking for now, its picture time.

 
Now obviously some of that stuff is more WIP than the rest, but still they're getting there, with only a few more infantry (mainly all the heavy weapons, including some awesomely uncompetitive devastators) to go before i can crack on with the termies, libby and vehicles..

caffeine, staring and getting fuck all done

The title of this pretty much sums it up.. i would be taking pictures of stuff id done, but theyd be textbook cases of not really being able to tell what the fuck you were looking at..

I got about 7 marines into painting a tac squad, finished a couple of easy conversions.. got somewhat high off've the combined fumes of engine degreaser, acetone free nail varnish remover and mr muscle over cleaner whilst stripping parts.. did a bit of a tank, then sat staring at my desk for a while attempting to focus on something.

essentially massive doses of caffeine, 36 hours of being awake (purely for the chance to be awake at a proper time of day sometime soon) and small scale painting dont mix.

if im awake at any point tomorrow before the time i have to harass sorrowshard in going to the pub or something to that effect ill attempt to post something worthwhile.

for now you can enjoy something older that i havent really shown off on here.. but have a bizzare fondness for..

Cats: why their paws are str10 rending with 2d6 armour penetration

Fucking Kitten!!!!!!

Okay that's out of my system now..
My dear little kitty (Tao) decided that what would really be a good idea was to take a huge bloody running jump at my desk in the process destroying my Budweiser glass (one of several branded glasses that I acquired from promotional crap working in bars) and more importantly explodifying Khiros into a bajillion pieces....

Fortunately for her the only bits that suffered any "serious" damage was the right shoulder joint and the top of one of his shoulders which has a big dent in it now.. the shoulder has been repaired and the dent has been left as "battle damage" but Khiros as a whole ended up being repositioned and having his arms blu tacked into place for now until I can magnetize the mounts for other options (I have a seismic hammer in the works for him for any tournies so I can run him as an ironclad) but still.. Kitten is now banned from the hobby room, She can't be trusted to not act like a retard.

Anyway heres a picture of post rebuilding Khiros:

I shall be doing more work on him tomorrow, along with hopefully cracking on with the main body of the army and a few transports.. so with any luck (and some serious amounts of caffeine to knock me into a regular sleeping pattern) tomorrow should bring some fancy fancy updates.

Oh and seeing as I'll have to paint some skin, I'll get on that face tutorial and if I can find the spare parts, a combi-flamer one.. Dont hold me to that though, apparently I get distracted FAR too easily when it comes to crap like that.

The adventures of Bromhardt: Brom Returns.. for about the 50th time

Sticking with my not starting posts with "So" or "Thats right!" im finding myself in a more talkative mood.. I still plan on using an abundance of fullstops in quick succession, and most likely will find that I outside of a few things, I will continue to ignore the rules of grammar.

I've been attempting to improve my images over the past however long its been and have been gradually getting them as good as i can with a 5 megapixel auto focusing piece of shit that my girlfriend insists is in fact a camera.
(i miss my old one.. rest in peace camera that got crushed into a bajillion pieces during the trauma of moving house.. rest in peace)

pictures like this were "quick shots" with the old beast.

Nowadays getting a picture to not look like ive taken it whilst drunk is hard enough.. but getting something that is good? essentially no chance due to digital noise, a mediocre ability to focus on anything that isnt 17 feet from the camera, no white balance, an inability to determine whether or not the camera is going to automatically darken or brighten up the image and potentially the most retardedly placed "macro" switch ever..

At this point i must take the time to thank my girlfriend for having no interest in the hobby or what i write about it.. because otherwise i'd be signing my own death warrant for bitching that much about a camera that is on loan.. but she lives in ignorance of my hate towards it.

I am getting off topic (as per usual) so in my attempts to make this thing workable i have made a new makeshift filter for my lamp out of a shirt.. hoborific as that may sound, it works.

The Inquisition I is an in joke.. But justifiable due to the Fire Angels fluff. Hurrah!

Now in comparison to the other shots i've put up recently you may be thinking "well thats not much of an improvement!" but where as before i was spending a rather daft amount of timing staring at my monitor attempting to photoshop him into looking like he did in real life (with some serious over exposure issues.. check out the crux in the last pic of him..) where as the newer pic was just a matter of altering the background and checking the levels.

now in keeping with my photo related crap.. I need to find a new place to upload my pictures to, the adverts on photobucket make me sick.. i listen to music through my pc.. so photobucket interupting it (with no mute option) with some godawfull music of their own whilst idiot children and lobotomised adults grin their way through an advert for toilet cleaner is not appreciated.. i think a flickr account or something may be in order.. bleurgh.

Trying your hardest not to start a post with "So"...

I can't use "thats right" either.. i use that one too much too, and I'm not counting this as the intro because that'd be cheating....

Um......... got it!


After far too much time thinking about how to start this post without repeating myself for the bajillionth time i almost forgot what it was i was going to say, how dumb is that? But whatever the case onwards we go..


Now obviously if i was to start reviewing the current marine codex, id be woefully out of date and stepping on other peoples toes out there in the big wide world, however if we review the current state of the game as a whole then we can discuss smaller issues as we go. In the current edition of the game what is commonly known as MEQ is seen as the average & the thing to beat.. the fact that in reality GEQ (guard equivilant) is what the game designers initially had as the average apparently doesn't matter anymore..
Think about it, guard, eldar (both types) tau & the "average" nid are all rocking this type of statline, crons have now lost their 3+ and orks are in many ways closer to GEQ than MEQ.. str 3, crap at shooting, low armour etc etc.. but due to the predominance of marines alone (not even equivilant stuff) we have ended up in a world where all some people see is marines and nothing else.


Now i know my local gaming club isnt "the whole wide world" and as such is only one example.. but at the moment our club has a diverse range of players with me and one other person being the only "pure" marine players (i only run marines, sure they may be templars, chaos, deathwing, fire angels etc etc.. but if it aint a marine im not playing.. and the other guy only has a grey knight army atm)
out of those players i can quite happily state that all of them even sorrowshard have a marine army of some sort without exception.. and this is where the problem appears.. despite all these people playing with non marine armies (Xenos are in vogue atm.. because it makes you "different" and "cool".. much like all those morons in skinny jeans and 3d glasses without the lenses are "different" and "cool") secretly the all have a marine army that they probably bought based on the fact that marines are fucking badass.

Xenos players.. this is you if you hate on Marines on the internet.

 So using the popular armies makes you uncool in the interwebs.. cept dark eldar of course.. because theyre xenos and get a free pass..

Now Marines get a bad name of late.. because of MEQ.. the reason MEQ exists is because Xenos players went "my armies shit.. t3 is shit, str 3 is shit, not having a 3+ is shit" and so gw changed some stuff.. then you all hated on it because it was MEQ and anything similar to a Marine is shit because theyre "easy mode" and dont have a learning curve.

News for you bucko Marines.. PROPER Marines none of this Grey Knight bullshit (they offend me) have a learning curve.. when everyone out there is busting out str 6 ap 3 stuff en masse you end up in cover with less models, worse transports and fewer guns.. or in combat with stuff that goes 1st, with more attacks and higher survivability because of invuns etc.

All the Xenos players out there who hate on Marines, need to remember.. Without them we dont have a game, you'll all be playing games where there arent any xenos armies, theres just space ninjas or steam punk communists..

Now on the flip side of this.. GW need to realise that things like the Grey Knight codex are offensive.. that ruining the internal balance in the game by making an undercosted army break the unwritten rules of the game is retarded.. I look at the current state of 40k and I worry, I worry that a game thats background is awesome, that for several editions has provided me and my friends with a whole crap tonne of fun and that has some really cool people working on things for it (the guys at forgeworld, ADB, Phil Kelly and Jes Goodwin to name a few) that by 2013 it'll be ruined by this +10 attitude that certain people have.

Should Marines seem awesome? yes. Should Marines make up 50% of gw's general sales? if theyre still awesome then yes. Should the game become broken in favour of awesome marine chapter no.666 in an effort to make a generally less popular codex sell. NO..

6th ed needs to come, and it needs to come fast and save the game as we knew it.. balance needs to be restored.. and not in a master yoda "balance means wiping out the badguys" way..

In closing the Jedi Council were all retarded that none of them went "hang on, thats not what balance means!! KILL THE CHILD!!!!"

Lights, Camera, Action? No nevermind we dont have a camera yet.

So after much thought (and instant retrospect that i have started a fair few of these with "So".. note to self use a different segue in future) i have decided that i need a better camera.. not just in the "oh im taking pictures of pretty models i need them to be shot with the greatest depth of field ever on a bed of satin and made out of pure platinum with diamond encrusted bases"

But because i used to study stuff to do with cameras and music production and essentially just got lazy with both and am on a self improvement binge (dont worry i wont be turning into a pacifist hippy vegetablarian with no shoes) and want to improve my skills as a photographer and get back on track with music..


Except really its all about taking pretty pictures of models to show you and hope that you'll love me..
Now i've seen some pretty fancy rigs out there in the world of the internet, but im suspicious of all of them, are these people with all the gear and no idea? or are they technosavants that need to be beaten to death with a blood soaked bath mat whilst screaming incoherently about how they reminded me of an albino kid i once knew..

om nom nom

The camera above is going to be my weapon of choice (besides a bath mat.. or an angry kitten hurled at your face) chosen because im not made of money, its got a decent sized sensor, fully manual controls, the ability to add a whacking great big macro lens to it after i sell my kidneys and/or soul.. and finally because the canon eos 7d costs more than a few cars.. WITHOUT A FUCKING LENS.

Ahem... i appear to have gotten distracted by camera porn... now my main wondering with this camera's "standard" lens is how it will fare at mini photography when pushed.. im not going to go into every last boring detail, but essentially the essence of a good shot of a model is to make it look as much like it does to the naked eye with as little editing as possible.. now if anyone happens to have a properly badass DSLR if they feel like trying out a 14-42mm lens equivilant on a low ISO with multiple diffused lamps, a decent background to sit the mini on and dick about with the zoom, focus and anything else thay can think of to make the model look as good as possible.. please.. give it a go.. if not for me then for the sake of the 1 other person in the world who probably cares.

Idiot moves & gold paint

So.. I was looking through my lovely (if somewhat battered) copy of Imp Armour: volume 9 and thinking about painting up my thunderfire cannons techmarine.. i mean sure he usually dies in the 1st turn of every game because Sorrowshard has turned my club against him..

Despite this.. and the fact that the gun is currently proxied by a whirlwind turret on the track section of the thunderfire cannon (worst kit EVER) i thought it'd be a change of pace to do gold.. plus i needed to determine if my techmarines were going to be metallic or an orangey yellow colour.. i need to get round to emailing forgeworld about the picture.. though im leaning towards orangey yellow atm.

Now i guess you're wondering where i'm going with this.. but its pretty simple.. i own several gold paints.. i own tamiya ones that are quite nice if a little on the yellowy side, i own gw ones which i barely use, and i own a lovely pot of vallejo liquid gold which is amazing and goes on like a dream... (examples of it are all over termie brom with 0 highlighting as of yet)

But try cleaning the fucking stuff out of an airbrush afterwards.. never again.

NEVER AGAIN!!!!!

when in doubt, shout, be bald and carry a weapon the length of a small car

Thats right! two updates in one day.. i bet you're all going into some form of shock by this point.. or more likely bypassing my speaky parts to look at pictures..

so heres a picture:

Brom is looking mighty fine (imho) and a whole lot better than the old one (which can be seen somewhere else on here for comparison) plus.. ive almost figured out how to make my pictures the right size too.. so all in all its been quite a productive day i think.

Oh and in closing, photoshop is your friend, i missed it when having to work with gimp (which has a suitable name for something which is pretty much wank) and am glad its back on my pc.. my pictures look all sorts of swish now, despite my messy bases and lack of anything close to a finished product in a while.. i wonder if a blog can be sponsored... *emails adobe and monster*

Procrastination.. the end of an era.

So as depressing as it is, ive ran out of stuff to distract me from getting on with my army.. sure i could paint a land raider, or a dev squad.. but seeing as i need to paint a land raider and some basic marines.. that type of procrastination isnt even that useful to me..

these are sad times indeed.

as such i plan on putting out some fancy(ish) pictures of stuff with paint on over the next few days, and might get round to that combi flamer tutorial i mentioned once.. many moons ago.

oh and a skin tutorial, because i like painting skin (in a non perverse way) and have had a few people asking questions..

for now i present the closest i got to wasting some time.. repainting something for an older army.. which is still productive in its own way.. stupid lack of stuff to sculpt/model!

i do miss my old deathwing, but tbh they look like ass, so need redoing.. of course whether they beat out the templars or not as my next project post fire angels is still up for debate.. but my faith in Mr Kelly for templar author is high..

intelligent and witty titles escape me once again... but this time with psykers

so the hobbying progresses.. brom looks shiny, and now he has a librarian mate to order about..
He's essentially my "real" hq choice for everything what with captains not being as good and the such..

i was never a fan of the fat face on the termie librarian, and the space hulk on just doesnt look "fancy" enough for my tastes.. so here we have a hack job librarian that i actually like.. hes going to be rocking vortex o doom and nullzone i think, because being able to shoot a mini vindicator shell up people is always fun, and messing with invuns is pretty much the reason librarians are taken in the 1st place.

Much needed update..

So as i said last time i was updating termie brom.. and i thought id actually post some pictures of him this time..

sheild is still being worked on, but overall how much cooler does he look than the last one >.> who knows maybe this influx in pictures and awesome might get some comments or some new members.. now you must excuse me i'm going to go whore myself out over the internet.