Dawn of the Lead

So by now you’re very much familiar (hopefully not too intimately) with COVID-19 and the whole coronavirus thing. This is obviously a serious situation, and a very trying time for people who are themselves part of a risk group or have loved ones at risk. For me as a healthy young(ish) person it’s more a case of staying at home to avoid passing the infection around. I’m currently waiting for the surely forthcoming news of Salute 2020 being cancelled, and I assume that our long-awaited holiday trip to London is off the cards too, what with travel bans and all. Things at work have been disappointing too, with several major seminars and conferences cancelled after a lot of work put into them. Of course these are minor issues compared to being afraid for your life, but it doesn’t really help.

Despite all the risk, there are some things that are making things more palatable: both of us working from home currently means a lot more family time, and cancelled kung fu, yoga and dance classes mean plenty more free evenings. We don’t have kids, so family time is very relaxing. The cats are happy that we’re home all the time, too.

On the hobby front more free time obviously means more time for everything fun-without-leaving-the-house. Personally, I’m looking forward to doing a lot more painting than usual, tackling my Steam backlog of unplayed digital games (I started with Yes, Your Grace yesterday, highly recommended!) and shortening my reading queue too. Might as well make the most of this sudden influx of time! I have a few recently finished Black Scorpion miniatures that I’ll post about soon.

Despite the global hardships, I can’t shake a feeling of a kind of fascination with the situation. Yes, it is a catastrophe in many ways, and I definitely don’t want to make light of it. But as I wrote in literally the first post of this blog, back in 2009:

I’ve always been fascinated (in a very sane, rational and normal sense) by catastrophes, what-if fantasies, tales of desperate struggle and the end of the world. The sinking of Titanic, alternative history, Helm’s deep, Alamo, Chernobyl,  The Book of Revelation, global epidemics, thermonuclear war…you name it. The zombie genre combines all of this. Simple as that.

Obviously and luckily this isn’t the apocalypse and make no mistake – I hope we clear this thing as quickly as possible with as little tragedy as possible. There’s still something oddly unreal about this situation and watching it develop. It’s not fun, it’s not cool, but it’s interesting.

I don’t usually discuss topical, non-hobby events on the blog, and don’t really intend to. However, during the past years a wonderful micro community has sprung up around miniature blogging, and I’m frankly quite interested in how you lot are doing in your corner of the world. Stay safe, and keep painting and posting hobby stuff, we all need the entertainment!

Another year gone, what happened in 2019 hobby-wise?

Amazingly 2019 was the first ever year that I kept track of my miniature purchases and the like. Here’s the tally (“miniatures” refers to scenery pieces as well):

Miniatures bought: 62

Miniatures printed: 42

Miniatures sold or given away: 112

Miniatures painted: 57

Larger terrain pieces finished: 4

All in all I’m quite happy with the year. I finished the year with 8 miniatures fewer than I started the year with despite accumulating plenty of new ones. What this means in practice is that I got rid of old stuff that I was never going to paint – mostly WHFB miniatures from 10-15+ years back – and replaced them with miniatures and scenery pieces that are much more likely to be painted.

I painted a grand total of 57 miniatures and scenery pieces. I could have done more, but to be honest this is one of my most productive years in a while. As before, I’m a fairly meticulous painter although I’m slowly learning to be a bit more relaxed, spending less time on areas that won’t be very visible on the miniature. Did you know that when I started out as a teen, I would paint the soles of minis’ feet – despite them getting glued to the base? So..yeah. The end of the year was more than a bit stressful, with loads of work and my father passing away after a long illness, so I’m happy that I still managed to find time for painting. To be honest, painting more and spending less time on Twitter probably would have helped with the stress.

I also experimented with some new painting techniques. Nothing drastic, I just wanted to push my painting a little. While I’m happy with my painting, I feel like I’ve been somewhat stuck for the past few years. I’m currently learning to work with thinner paints and washes a bit more than previously. Who knows, maybe I’ll even try a white or grey undercoat one of these days. It’s only been 15 years since the last time!

On the project front, it’s amazingly enough still pirates. Seriously, this has been pretty much my only project since 2015, and I’m still enthusiastic about it. I do paint the occasional RPG miniature, and we did paint some Battletech pieces which I should show in a future post! Still, it’s mostly pirates and other 17th/18th century types.

The biggest change in my hobby in 2019 was the introduction of 3d printing. I had always looked down on it a bit: layer lines from FDM machines were ugly, resin printers too expensive. Basically, I had locked my opinions in around 2015. However, when I started looking into it, I realized that times had indeed changed, progress had been made (quelle surprise!) and people were producing some wonderful pieces on their printers. My enthusiasm sparked, I bought an Anycubic Photon which turned out to be a great idea. Before I knew it, I was down the 3d printing rabbit hole. It wasn’t too long before I found myself wanting something a bit bigger for printing terrain, but surely an FDM printer would be too…yeah I bought one. As of December 23 2019, I’m a proud owner of a Lotmaxx SC-10 printer as well. It’s been running pretty much non-stop since then, and I’ll show some of the results in a later post.

The 3d printing stuff has brought a feeling of novelty to the hobby that I realized I’ve been missing a bit. There’s something in the tinkering and tweaking that makes me happy, as well as the possibilities afforded by new technology. All of a sudden all sorts of weird and wonderful things are within my reach – I can print my own ships, buildings and sea monsters, how cool is that?

Last but not least, I got to combine work and play in a fun way. As you might know, I’m a games researcher at Tampere University, and we had the wonderful idea of doing some research on miniaturing. More on that later as well – I’m actually about to become a published research on the miniaturing pastime. How cool is that!

For the past x years this blog has been going on fairly sporadically. I post far less than I used to, and sometimes there are long (, long, long) gaps between posts. I’m hoping to remedy this a bit this year! The blog isn’t going anywhere and I’m still quite motivated about it and a huge thank you for that is in order to the regular group of readers and commenters – you know who you are!

I’m not usually one for new year’s resolutions, but on the hobby front a few are in order. So, in 2020 I want to:

• Blog at least once per week two weeks
• Paint at least 100 miniatures and scenery pieces
• Get rid of at least 50 miniatures I don’t have a use for
• Complete at least one major model or terrain piece
• Learn at least one new painting technique
• Give something back to the miniaturing community
• Get at least a few games in
• Learn to master my printers

These should take my hobby in the direction I want it to go: more activity, interaction with the community and honing my own skills.

Here’s to another year of hobby goodness, stay tuned and my sincere thanks for stopping by!

It’s a new year, yes it is! Another year behind us, and this blog is still going – not as strong as it once was but still happily plodding along with no signs of stopping. Must have been one of the most quiet years of the blog, averaging a neat one post per month. I’m not stressing over it, but I would like to blog more. Maybe that’s a new year’s resolution of sorts. I did paint a bit and do some other hobby stuff, although not as much as I would’ve wanted to. Home renovations, Emmi moving in and a new job in another city did cut into my hobby time quite a bit. Anyway, less grumbling and more positivity, so what did I do?

Painting numbers stayed low, but I did enjoy the things I did paint! I haven’t shown everything I’ve painted on the blog as they’re waiting for a suitable time to get a couple of photos. There were pirates, obviously:

Click for a larger version

Click for a larger version

And vampires, of all things:

Click for a larger version

Click for a larger version

The things I haven’t featured on the blog yet? Terrain pieces, a battlemech, some animals and a few more pirates and civilians. Any of these tickle your fancy, dear readers, and I’ll be happy to bump them up the blogging queue.

I did get in on some Kickstarters and was happy with all of them! I got a Spanish fort from Slug Industries, some lovely ruins from Fenris Games and some samurai animals from Bad Squiddo’s onna-bugeisha Kickstarter. All of them are obviously still unpainted, but I’ll get around to them. The fort I’m definitely planning to tackle in 2019, hopefully the rest too!

As the years go by, other people in the hobby become more and more integral to enjoying it. There’s a small, regular crowd that frequents this blog as I do theirs, and a shout-out is in order to the wonderful people running sho3box, Leadballoony, The Raft, Azazel’s Bitz Box and Imperial Rebel Ork – as well all the rest of the wonderful people who drop by to comment. Your contribution and interest is one of my main motivators for doing the whole blogging thing, so a heartfelt thank you for that. Meeting some of you in person have been hobby-related highlights of the year for me.

I visited a couple of conventions, too! By now Salute is a regular feature of my year, and this will happen next this year as well. I went to Crisis in Antwerp for the first time ever this year, and can heartily recommend it! It’s a great show and Antwerp is lovely too, so we turned the trip into a nice little romantic getaway. Check out Thomas’ post on Crisis 2018 for a great recap of the event. If you want a great convention in Europe without the bustle, hassle and high costs of London (for Salute), I definitely suggest giving Crisis a try.

All in all it was a very nice year! I’m surprised that the pirate project is still alive – it started in 2015 for crying out loud – and still my main focus.

Not to get too much caught up in the past, what’s in store for 2019 hobbywise? In no particular order:

• Building and painting the aforementioned Spanish fort
• Painting the little boats I just bought from Games of War
• Painting more pirates and 18th century civilians
• Finishing a few unfinished buildings
• Building some jungle terrain pieces
• Getting in some solo gaming (I just realised the other day that I miss it)
• Blogging a bit more
• Focusing less on the buying side and more on the painting side – one can always hope

That’s it, dear readers! Have a great 2019 and thanks for your support, friendship and other warm, fuzzy things.

By now we’ve all heard several variations of “2016 was the worst year ever” comments. Enough of those! We all know the horrible stuff that has been going on for the past year, but this isn’t a blog about all that. Instead, a quick recap of the year’s hobby-related things and a cautious look forward!

Miniature output this year has been decent-ish. I think my total comes to around 30+ minis, but it could have been much higher. At this rate I’ll have all of my unpainted lead and plastic nicely painted around age 70 or 80 – assuming I don’t buy anything new. Apparently my painting output in 2015 was 33 miniatures, so this seems to be a fairly standard rate. I’ve also cleared out a fair bit of old lead that I know I won’t get around to painting. If someone else can get fun out of them, they shouldn’t sit in a cupboard tucked away in a box for years and years.

Reaching goals definitely happened. In my “Looking back on 2015” post I was planning on the following for 2016:

• Painting up pirates, 18th century civilians, navy types and colonial soldiers (✓)
• Building a second terrain board as well as a few different extra pieces (✓)
• Modifying and painting a bunch of houses (✓)
• Basing and touching up loads of palm trees (✓)
• Building and painting plenty of scatter terrain (✓)
• Most likely sneaking a few RPG miniatures in as well (✓)
• Salute 2016 as well as visiting plenty of awesome sights and people in the UK and Ireland (✓)

Seriously, I managed all of that! In a hobby that for me is characterized by unfinished and discarded projects, periodical slumps and time and motivation constraints, I’m super happy to have reached my hobby goals for once. Salute was great, and meeting Paul of sho3box fame was definitely one of the high points of the hobby year.

The UK and Ireland trip was excellent in general, and I got to spend time with some wonderful people who I’ve met through this hobby. I spent an evening in the pub with Annie from Bad Squiddo and Dameon from Hasslefree, had a browse through boxes of Roy Duffy’s brilliantly painted miniatures and got to visit Pete “the Mouldmaker” Brown’s workshop and see miniatures cast. Good stuff!

Project-wise my pirate thing is still going strong. This is an actual surprise. I started the project in May 2015, and to my surprise it still hasn’t died. I’ve built terrain, I’ve gamed, I’ve read a ton of literature on the subject…what is this madness? Not that I’m complaining. The project has also seen me drift somewhat towards historical gaming. It’s a scary thought, so I’m painting the occasional undead pirate, ghost and crab man to keep me on the right track. The pirate ship that you may recall is still not finished, and it definitely should be. That brings me to…

Hobby plans for 2017

• Finish the pirate ship. Started in 2015, if it’s still unfinished by the end of 2017, it’s going in the project graveyard, and that would be a crying shame.
• Paint a dragon. More on this later.
• Keep up steady work on the pirate project. There’s still plenty to do and I’m enthusiastic, so this shouldn’t be a problem.
• Play games. Much as I love the modelling part of the hobby, I’ve found that the occasional game keeps me motivated.
• Increase miniatures output. Nothing drastic, but maybe I’ll aim for 40.
• Update the blog somewhat steadily, as always.

Next year might present some challenges to hobby activities due to (generally positive) real life things taking up time and concentration, but I’m definitely hopeful!

As I’ve mentioned before, my warmest thanks to all of you readers, both regulars and occasional visitors. Your feedback and engagement does wonders for my blogging motivation, and I’m happy to see people enjoy what I’m creating.

Have a great 2017, everyone!

Fireworks photo by VasenkaPhotography, used under CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)

He sees you when you’re sleeping
He knows when you’re awake

Merry Christmas, dear readers!

The gingerbreadator (and photo) is by my dear friend, the incredibly talented Katri Lassila.

Not a single post since July, so it’s time to close down the…no, it’s not. While a super busy fall (and summer) has robbed me of nearly all of my miniatures gaming inspiration and brought about one of my unspiration periods, or funks as they say, I have no intention of getting out of minis. It’s been a lot more severe for a change – I don’t think I’ve read a forum or blog in months! So, on the off chance that some of you’ve been wondering where I’ve gone, I’m right here! My work assignment is ending in a few weeks, and I predict that will bring about a new enthusiasm for painting little lead men. Fear not, like the zombies this blog draws inspiration from, it’s quite hard to kill even if it tends to stand around doing nothing every now and then.