Time to kick off the posting year
July 1, 2023As you may have noticed, the blog has been getting more and more quiet. In fact, this is the first post of the year, and it’s out in July. I’m still alive, but just haven’t had the time or motivation to write – or sadly comment on other people’s blogs. There’s been a lot going on this year, mostly fun things luckily, which has also been keeping me busy. So, what’s been up? A few choice picks:
Dublin and the UK in the spring
Following last year’s lovely Ghost Archipelago event, we redid it this year with Stargrave. It was a super fun event and it was such a great time hanging out with fellow miniature geeks, even going out for a park run of all things. There’s a lovely event report on the LEADPLAGUE blog. I painted up a crew for the event of course, said crew being rogue trader Delphea Scallak accompanied by Wolger Krant’s ogryn mercenaries.
After Dublin, I was off to London for Salute – via Manchester and Nottingham. In Nottingham I visited Warhammer World, and helped Annie from Bad Squiddo and Ian from Fenris with their Salute prep. The photo shows our trio heading off to London, accompanied by a great soundtrack. It was really interesting to get a behind the scenes look at how a trade show comes together – and how much work goes into all the packing and setup!
Salute was good fun as usual. I did a bunch of shopping and ran some unabashedly political participation games as part of Bunny Badger Games.
House
We bought a house, which feels like a very adult thing to do. It’s really lovely and I have a dedicated room for painting, an isolated space in the basement for my printers with their smelly chemicals, enough storage space for all of my hobby stuff, and a garage for things like spray painting etc. NICE. I didn’t have any photos of the house handy, but here are the printers and the painting space!
On a much more sad note, a few weeks ago we said our goodbyes to one of our cats, Piku. She lived a good life, but with her health failing, we decided it was best for her to let her go. We buried her in the garden and there will be a lovely memorial spot for her there. Rest in peace little buddy, we miss you a lot.
What’s next?
Today is the first day of my long summer holiday. I’ve no idea yet if it will see the resurgence of this blog or not, but at least I’ll have loads of time for hobby stuff! With zero plans apart from house and garden work, it should be a really relaxing summer ahead of me. Here’s hoping!
2022 recap
December 31, 2022Another year done! As you’ve probably noticed if you read the blog with any frequency, it’s been very quiet on the writing front with only a few blog posts during the whole year. As usual, nothing dramatic – my enthusiasm for blogging tends to wax and wane, and for the last years I’ve had less and less time and enthusiasm to put into writing in my spare time alongside my academic work. What I do regret a bit is spending less time reading other people’s blogs, though! Although Salute didn’t happen this year, I did have a great gaming trip to Dublin for some Ghost Archipelago, which was definitely one of the high points of the year, both in hobby terms and overall.
For hobby things, this hasn’t been a bad year at all, although towards the end of the year my time has been taken up by digital gaming, primarily Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, Cyberpunk 2077, and Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. I heartily recommend all three – you can find me on Steam under the nickname manatic if you’re up for some Darktide!
As usual, I made some resolutions last year. How did they pan out? Weeeeell….
Learn some freehand
No. This was something that was carried over from the previous year, and again didn’t materialize. I haven’t given up though, surely I can do this one year! Keeping this one.
Paint at least 100 miniatures and other pieces
Another thing that’s starting to be a staple. I nearly met this, but my painting output sadly stalled a bit towards the end of the year. I did manage 75 miniatures and terrain bits and two larger pieces, so this was well within my reach. There are five nearly finished models staring at me while I write! Still happy with this number, and I’ll keep this goal for next year too.
Build a 1000 point 40k force
Nope. This just didn’t happen. I did paint a lot of stuff related to the 40k universe, but my interest for army level 40k turned out to be a very brief thing. Never say never and all that, but my minis found much more use in Kill Team.
Try solo gaming
Yes! I did and I liked it. I played a bunch of Five Parsecs from Home early on in the year. It’s a great game and I only stopped playing because I had to clear away the terrain from my usual gaming table, and then the table got cluttered and I needed to paint some stuff for the next scenario and it just sort of never happened. I think I just might get back to it in the next few days before work starts again.
Clear some backlog
Nope. A few old minis found new use in Five Parsecs, but for the most part I was printing up new stuff and painting (or not painting) it. With some late Kickstarter stuff coming in and the printers seeing active use, I built up more backlog – yay! I did publish an academic book chapter on the subject, maybe that counts?
Experiment with something new
Not to the extent I would have liked to. I did play around with some blood effects and bought some fancy colourshift paints, but have yet to use them. I think I’ll try this one again!
Resolutions are always fun, right? I’ll keep some of the previous ones (Learn more freehand, Paint at least 100 miniatures, Experiment with something new) and let’s throw a few new ones into the mix:
Complete a project
I’m intentionally leaving this vague to make it easier to complete. Here, project can mean anything deemed to be a project: a squad for Kill Team, a collection of walkways, a set of object markers…anything, as long as it doesn’t get stuck in a half finished state.
Learn awesome drybrushing skills
I’ve been looking at (but not watching) drybrushing tutorials by Artis Opus on YouTube for a while now. I drybrush a lot, and updating my technique seems both useful and viable, so I’ll try and pick up some new pointers for the new year.
Come up with ways to use the stuff I have
I guess I’m not alone in that I keep buying useful new tools, fancy paints, texture effects, and whatnot – which then end up sitting unused because nothing suitable for them comes along. I want to flip that around, and come up with things that allow me to use all that great stuff.
With this, I want to wish everyone a great new year! Let’s hope the new year brings us a more peaceful world, with war limited to pixels and toy soldiers.
The sweetest imperfection
May 15, 2022Wow, really hasn’t been an active year for blogging, has it? While DotL has been very quiet, I’ve been busy with hobby stuff – and I’ll hopefully eventually post about it.
Much of this year’s gaming has been Five Parsecs from Home, a solo game that I’m happy to recommend, which I have been printing and painting models and scenery for. However, this is more of an editorial style post than a regular From the painting desk one. Why is this? Because I’m doing something profoundly different!
By “profoundly different” I don’t mean a new technique or a fancy new tool, but a fundamentally different approach to what I usually do. I’m a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to miniatures stuff (and various other minor things in life). Very small things can bug me far too much. An irritating mote of dust stuck to a miniature’s varnish. A slightly off painted eye. A mould line that I didn’t clean up neatly enough. Support marks on prints. A slightly different colour tone on two miniatures’ bases when they should be the same…you get the idea.
In general I don’t mind this, it’s just who I am after all, but it can cause some practical issues now and then, such as when you’re in need of a table full of new terrain. Sticking to my usual working habits, a table full of scifi terrain would probably take me months, and even that would involve compromises. That’s really not good for actually getting a game in – a couple of months is plenty of time for a budding project to run out of steam and result in half-finished reminders of that one cool idea you had.
Solution? Live with these minor imperfections. This is obviously nothing groundbreaking, and I’m sure it’s something every miniaturist thinks about at some stage. Sometimes you’ve done something as well as you can no matter if you’re happy with it or not, sometimes you just want to finish something so you can do something else that’s more inspiring or interesting. I’ve done this in the past too, and obviously I don’t put 110% into everything I do, sometimes I just want stuff that’s finished. This time, however, I’ve been doing it to a different extent than usual.
With this scifi scenery, I went for terrain that looks good on the table. I wanted it to look nice for gaming, but it does not have to stand up to close scrutiny or close-up photos – which this post will feature to illustrate a point. What this means in practice is that I printed at a much higher layer height than usual (0.2mm compared to my usual 0.12mm), only bothered to do minimal clean-up, and no imperfections such as failed or rough bits have been fixed. As I don’t want to bin things that can be used, these are basically stuff that I’d normally label “test prints” and give away for someone who can stand them being a bit crappy, or spend a lot of time fixing them with putties, sanding, and things like that.
The same goes for painting. These models have been hit with spray primers (one of which completely malfunctioned, covering the model and my spray booth in dry paint powder – no matter, still used the model), lathered in quickly made washes, and given a couple of coats of drybrushing using large brushes and craft store paints. Some very basic detailing and weathering, and that’s it, done!
You can click on the photos below to enlarge them.
Wrong printer settings resulted in funky random lines on the surface. Also, the windows are just blotches of paint.
Layer line central! Printers aren’t good at shapes like the pipes here.
These buildings have detachable roofs…
…that warped horribly after painting.
My printer had a rough day with this file, resulting in some gnarly texture and print artifacts.
Spray can malfunction left the inside gritty and chalky. I decided not to do anything to it, as I don’t usually play inside buildings anyway.
At first this felt horrible, but as it was a very conscious experiment, I decided to plough through and just live with it. What do you know, at some point I started to be more and more happy about them! Are they perfect? No! Do they need to be? Also no! Placed on they table they look really nice actually, and of course everything is subjective – I would’ve died for terrain this cool as a kid! This isn’t an “oh, woe is me, my super high standards are simply unbearable” kind of thing, but more an issue of my own personal flaws features and idiosyncracies and dealing with them in a healthy and beneficial way. I know this may not seem like a big thing, but believe me, it is!
Local planetery enforcers about to get destroyed by a genestealer. Doesn’t look at all bad to me.
I’m sure most of us have feelings of inadequacy at one point or another in this hobby: with the internet full of amazingly skilled people, while inspiring, it can also be disheartening at times. Learning to let go of excessive perfectionism or self-criticism that needlessly holds back hobby enjoyment is, I think, a great way of getting more out of our toys. For me, it meant putting together a bunch of very adequate terrain in a fraction of the time it usually would’ve taken, which means more time left for other things, more terrain to actually use in games, and more joy from completing things. Most of all, it allowed me to enjoy this awesome hobby even more than before. Importantly, this isn’t a “you should do this as well” post. Lavish attention on your models to your heart’s content if that is what makes you happy!
As an interesting final note, I started this post months ago but haven’t gotten around to finishing it. After digging the models out of storage, I found myself thinking that they actually look pretty nice and much better than I remembered. This made me happy – it seems there’s been an actual shift in how I view these things now, so…go me, I guess?
The hut in the first few pictures is a micro hab unit by Saucermen Studios, available for free on Thingiverse.
The buildings with the detachable roofs are stackable buildings by Rocketship Games, also available for free on Thingiverse.Â
From the painting desk #79 – Fembruary 2022
February 27, 2022Wow, late February and it’s the first post this year. Better late than never!
The Fembruary challenge, a brainchild of Alex from over on Leadballoony, is one of my favourite things in the online miniatures scene – heaven knows our little corner of the hobby world benefits from more representation.
I’ve been painting a lot this year (apparently instead of blogging), and these three models are my entry to this year’s Fembruary:
First up is a rogue trader type character, the leader of my Five Parsecs from Home gang. Dubbed Nura Aleh by the wonderful Realm of Plastic 40k name generator, the mini is a 3d printable one from Studio Sol Union, kitbashed with a printed head from Knight Soul Studio. I think the combination makes for a pretty cool whole. My vague background story, based on the Five Parsecs random background generator for the character is that she’s a former or renegade inquisitor. For the clothes I went for a gold/purple combination – a tried and true combination and nicely a bit flamboyant.
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The second model is another member of the Five Parsecs gang, the wasteland nomad mercenary Esma. The model is an old, OOP Infinity Ariadna scout sniper by Corvus Belli that I picked up years back at the local RPG convention if I recall correctly. I’d always considered the character to represent a woman, yet when I started to paint it, I realized that there were no gender identifiers there – which is actually kinda cool. A female model does not have to be super strongly (and stereotypically) coded as a woman with breasts, high heels or the like. For the paintjob I drew inspiration from the background, a wasteland nomad didn’t really speak to me of ostentatious clothing, so I went with very muted tones.
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The third and final mini is my rendition of a Vindicare Assassin for my 40k army. Originally a Tempest guardsman sniper by Velrock Art, I removed the cloak before printing. The sculptor has intentionally made modifications to the minis wonderfully easy, as the cloak was simply a single element that could be removed using Meshmixer. This was a bit of a tricky model to paint, as it’s very, very black. I went for a few different tones, painted some sharp highlights on the bodysuit and made the armour and knee and elbow pads a bit more dull. I gave the hair an auburn look for a spot of colour, and painted the eye lenses red for a bit of extra contrast and menace. Overall, I’m pretty happy with it!
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To wrap up this post, a shot of the trio in more fitting surroundings.
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2021 recap
December 31, 2021Another year done, time to look back! It’s been a pretty nice year hobby-wise, actually, despite the blog being sadly very quiet. Highlights of the year in terms of gaming-related things were definitely Cheetor (of sho3box) visiting us in Helsinki in the summer for all sorts of shenanigans including a couple of nice Ghost Archipelago games, as well as getting to go to London for Salute this November. Getting into 40k was a weird surprise too, but a welcome one too!
So, how did I do in terms of my resolutions for this year?
Finish at least one stalled project
Yes! I finished the brig’s rigging, finally bringing this project to a close. Seeing as this was the model that prompted the resolution, this was a resounding success. Another piece that kind of goes into this territory is finally painting up the A.T.A.C APC that I reviewed way back in 2013. Instead of my Colonial Marines, it ended up being repurposed as a Chimera for my 40k project. I’ll show it to you eventually, promise!
Paint at least 100 miniatures and other pieces
Yes! A total of 105 plus two bigger finished pieces (the brig mentioned above and the crab ship). I’m really, really happy about this one, as it basically means I spent more time on the hobby and loosened up a bit as a painter. Citadel’s Contrast range has helped a lot, as I’ve developed a more relaxed style of painting that still gives really nice results.
Paint something I feel is out of my reach
Yes, sort of. While I didn’t tackle an old classic or one of those super pretty Hasslefree pieces, I did print and paint the crab ship, which is a huge centrepiece kit covered in detail, exactly the kind of thing that would typically remain printed yet unpainted for years and years.
Blog regularly and participate in our lovely little micro-blogosphere
No and yes. For the blog this must’ve been one of the most quiet years so far, but I did keep up to date on the blogs I’m a regular reader of – for years now. I want to streamline my photography process, because this is where most stuff stalls. I’ve painted more than in years, yet blogged less than in years, so there’s a bit of a disconnect there. Some kind of semi-permanent setup would probably help with this.
Paint something just for the fun of it
Kinda sorta! The crab ship (that seems to come up a lot on this list) was a kind of a spur of the moment thing. I don’t really need it, nor will it see gaming use in years if ever, but it’s a cool model. Same goes for the lizard beast – while it was painted with Ghost Archipelago in mind, there’s not a direct equivalent for it in the game and I just wanted to paint something bright and tropical.
Learn some freehand
Hard no. I’ll push this resolution up to next year, as it’s something I still struggle with. I’ll get there eventually!
New year, new resolutions!
Learn some freehand
Not giving up on this one.
Paint at least 100 miniatures and other pieces
Another one I’m bringing over to the new year – it has been a welcome goal, not too stressful yet concrete enough.
Build a 1000 point 40k force
A very concrete task, this one. I currently have a couple of hundred points – maybe 500 once I finish a tank. At the 1000 point mark I’ll see if I need/want any more.
Try solo gaming
I’ve got the rulesets and the interest, but for some reason I’ve yet to get a game on. This is something I want to rectify.
Clear some backlog
Stashed-away miniatures, I guess we all have them – whether we think of them as a pile of shame, a pile of potential, or just the more neutral backlog – and I want to cut into mine. I want to paint some of it, get rid of things I’m unlikely to ever paint, and so on.
Experiment with something new
I like to develop my painting skills, or at least let them evolve. Next year, I want to try something new: a new kind of paint, a new technique, a fancy modelling material, something. I might like it and make it a part of my repertoire, or I might not, but without experimenting I’ll never know, will I? Not a bad approach to life in general, I think.
That’s it, six resolutions for the hobby year, let’s see what happens.
On this note, thank you everyone for the past year – the world may be messed up in a lot of ways, but there’s a lot of good out there and in us as well. On that note, I wish you all a happy new year and a better 2022!
Azadi Death Front #1 – Getting into 40k
December 19, 2021This might sound like an April Fools’ thing, but I’ve started a small project for…Warhammer 40k. Wait, what? After not having touched the game since the 90s, I tried a small scenario with some close friends a while back (using my Colonial Marines as Imperial Guard), and realized that it was actually pretty fun! This, combined with the fact that I had long been eyeing the Azadi Death Front models from 40 Emperor, and the realization that a 40k army doesn’t have to be an ultra massive endeavour, have led to me starting a small 40k force. While I haven’t played the game, I have enjoyed many of the different 40k digital games, and quite like the fiction too. The Imperial Guard (or Astra Militarum in silly trademarkable lingo) has always been my favourite. This shouldn’t be a surprise, given my love for Aliens, Starship Troopers and the like. They’re the underdogs, the meat that gets fed into the grinder – albeit meat with pretty sweet tanks.
The ADF models are a really cool force of all-female troopers, inspired by Kurdish YPJ soldiers. I don’t really want to mix real-world politics with my toy soldiers too much, but I love both the look of the minis and appreciate their real-world counterparts. Headscarves, sneakers, harem pants – what’s not to like. A bit of extra representation in the grim darkness of the far future isn’t a bad thing either.
Illustration by Alberto Luna, ©40Emperor
Now, I’m not a fan of batch painting, which has been a major detriment to any army-based miniature gaming thing since my WHFB days. However, I happened to have a very free weekend – back in October when I started this post(!) – so I printed out a whole squad of troopers, gave them a blast of black primer, and got to work. It was a fun weekend’s work, and I watched a bunch of films and series from my backlog (Wandavision is fun, What if…? is fun, Predators is still fun, AvP and AvP: Requiem were still not good but better than I remembered, and I quite enjoyed Alien: Resurrection much to my surprise). At the end of it I had an actual squad to be used in 40k, with even a few extra models thrown in. For me, finishing 12 models over a couple of days is a huge thing!
I wanted to try some new techniques, so I did a bit of OSL on the plasma gunner, and some heated metal effects on the support weapons – which I think turned out pretty nice! All of the scarves are different, and allowed me to break up the uniformity of the squad. I want them to look more like a a militia/rebel force than a super uniform military unit, and I think that works decently well too. With the bases I went for a kind of a rocky, sandy Afghanistan look – not quite desert, but dry, dusty and barren.
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After the squad, I’ve painted a Sisirk war walker, the ADF’s equivalent of a Sentinel, some Heresy scifi troopers with 3d printed female heads (to represent Tempestus Scions), a custom Hero Forge Astropath, and I’m nearly done with a Chimera alternative too! This doesn’t mean that I’ve neglected all my other projects: I’ve painted a bunch of gothic horror monsters, some graveyard pieces and monster hunters, too! I’ll show those off too, possibly, eventually, maybe.
As regulars have probably noticed, the blog has been very quiet for the past few months. As usual, there’s nothing dramatic involved, luckily! I’ve been really busy with work, took some time off to go to London for Salute 2021 (happy I did, as next year’s event is cancelled), and so on – “the uze”, as Cheetor would say. As I’ve mentioned approximately a hundred times by now, as a lot of my daily work is writing, whether research articles or grant applications or professional communications, there’s not usually a lot of energy for spare time writing. I’m thoroughly enjoying reading your blogs, though, and I’m not about to leave this wonderful little community! I’m on holiday for the next three weeks, so I ‘m fairly certain the blog will pick up a bit again – it usually does towards the end of the year!
Projects, projects, projects
August 22, 2021Most of the miniatures stuff I post on this blog relates to my pirate project, which has been ongoing now since 2015. However, there are more projects going on, so I figured I’d write a post detailing all the stuff going on. Before I get to what I’m working on at the moment, a few words for context.
After doing pirates for so many years and investing a lot of time and effort into them, I find myself in need of diversions every now and then, and obviously pirates aren’t the only thing that interest me. However, I’ve had enough projects stall in my lifetime to know pretty well how my head functions with these things: push something too far in the back, and it might be a loooooong time before it gets back into the spotlight. Unless you’re a very long-time reader, you probably don’t know about my Underworld project (2009–), or my Aliens board game project (2012–). You might have seen my Pacific Rim project (2014–), although I don’t blame you if you haven’t. These three projects have been sitting quiet for twelve, nine, and seven years now, respectively. I’ll eventually get to them, I’m (genuinely) sure, but once the momentum is gone it can take a lot of time to build it up again. The Underworld project just kind of drifted away, the Aliens thing stalled – I think – because Prometheus killed a lot of my fanboy enthusiasm for the setting and it hasn’t fully recovered to date. With the Pacific Rim thing, I wasn’t happy with the board, ended up binning it, and also found that I’m not a big fan of painting machines, which is a bit of a drawback in a project focusing on giant mechs. A huge backlog of miniatures doesn’t help here either: there’s always other stuff to paint, so a lack of enthusiasm can push stuff way back in the painting queue, and life is too short to paint too many things you’re not excited by.
I’ve solved the problem above by tying pretty much all of my current projects together! They all have more or less overlap potential, which obviously helps, as I don’t have to “abandon” a project to work on another, which reduces the risk of projects slipping into oblivion. With this preface, here’s what I’m currently working on and how they tie together. I’ve listed the main project branches with their subprojects.
Pirates are a bit obvious, aren’t they? However, while this is nominally about pirates, in actuality this project is more Hollywoodish 18th century in general. In addition to pirates, there are sailors, civilians, merchants, redcoats, highwaymen and so on. This sprawling thing forms the backbone of my projects. A lot of the buildings and other terrain are made with this in mind. There are several subprojects to this:
Undead pirates are exactly that. This subproject should probably be called something like Nautical horror or something along those lines, as in addition to pirates there are crabmen and other monstrosities.
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Barbary corsairs are historical pirates with an Arabian/North African feel. As with my other pirates, I’m playing pretty fast and loose with history here.
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Pirate hunters is a finished subproject! It’s a trope-laden group of special characters, fit for all sorts of hunting duties.
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Blackpowder horror has obvious overlap with the stuff above, yet it’s still a theme of its own. It’s the Headless horseman and all sorts of other things that go bump in the very dark nights of the 17th and 18th centuries. All of the humans and terrain are perfectly compatible with the pirate stuff, and vice versa. The undead and other monster pirates are a perfect fit here as well. Whereas my pirates are situated somewhere in the Caribbean, this project has a more haunted New England vibe.
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Monster hunters is a subproject, although currently the main focus of this theme. I already have some vampires and werewolves, but more are included in this subproject. The main focus, however, are the gritty humans who hunt these monsters. Pretty much any of the pirate hunter characters fit in here as well. Some of the minis I bought way back in 2009 for my Underworld project will find new use here.
Click for a larger version. Picture © Velrock Miniatures
Lost World stems from our upcoming Ghost Archipelago game. Dinosaurs, giant gorillas, ruined temples, jungle beasts, mysterious tribes – the works. This theme has a jungle vibe to it, and is kind of a catch-all project, what can’t you find on a mysterious island? Pirates are a no-brainer here, with their tendency to end up on mysterious islands and get eaten. Switching the regular pirates to Barbary corsairs brings this more towards an Adventures of Sinbad kind of thing.
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Arabian nights is my early stages project of Persian and Arabian mythology viewed through a pop culture lens. It’s flying carpets, mysterious spirits, and evil sultans galore. This project is very much fantasy. While quite timeless, it’s still much more swords and shields than gunpowder. The buildings and other terrain for this project are a perfect fit for my Barbary corsairs, and many of the human characters work nicely in either setting.
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As you can see, these different but connected projects allow me to paint a lot of different miniatures as the mood strikes me, without really abandoning any of them. Want to do something bright and cheery? I can paint some colourful jungle creatures or maybe a djinni. Dark and moody? Undead and hunters, maybe some graveyard terrain. Historical? Covered. Fantasy? Covered. High adventure? Covered. Horror? Covered.
With these projects and subprojects occupying my time, I have zero fear of running out of steam in the foreseeable future. I hope this post illuminates how I organize my different projects! It also serves as a pretty good guide for what you can expect to see on this blog.
Dawn of the Lead 