Terrain is everything - Project Ω - Realm of Battle board gets Red Planet Ferron Proxima

We have Red Planet! the Birth of Ferron Proxima! One and a bit cans of Red Oxide Primer gets me around 80% coverage so hopefully I'll have some left over in my new can that just arrived from eurocarparts [still the cheapest I can find for spray primers, and I got a litre of engine oil too ;) ]

As you can see the spray on stone texture paint is still evident. If you compare looking at the small picture with the zoomed version when you click on it you should be able to make out what is the texture that was molded into the board by GW and what is the finer texture I sprayed on. At this stage I'm glad I did it but we've still got to see how it reacts to the drybrushing.

The skull pits currently look OK. When I've finished all the painting I'll photoshop the three options I thought of for my pits. 

1. Green - the new digestion pits I do
2. Yellow - the old digestion pits
3. Black - a lot of Ferron Proxima watercourses are contaminated by a black viscous sludge. St this point in time bio-analysis has found no reason for this contamination, no indication of what it is or if it has any lasting effect after consumption. The rivers/ponds are just thick and black...

Another close up of the texture.

Ditto.

Ditto again!

And the lighting changed but if I can capture some of this range of colours on the final board I'll be a happy man. You should also be able to make out areas around the skull pit where I was less generous with the texture spray which I think shows just how smooth the board can be. This will definitely add more grip to the table, without adding an abrasive material that will damage models, should they fall over.

Can't wait to get the next coat on and start the shade washes to pick out all this texture.

Then I get to do all the highlighting but will have to read up on it a bit because I know there's ways you can paint these that luuk unnatural, thanks to highlights accentuating the edges of the boards and not edges of the terrain features.

Gotta love how the lighting changed on this one, it's got the oranges and dark reds. Can't wait to see this completed.

Todd Sherman at sincain40k did this awesome orange/red planet board I love the colours he managed to get, a bit lighter than I'm after but fantastic. I'd originally intended to do the highlights on the cliff edges but seeing how Todd did darker edges as thrown me a little bit, we'll see how it goes.

What price a blog?

Another of my occasional rambling editorials about blogging and this time MONEY! None of us start blogging and think we can make money out of this. Sure there are bloggers that do, I think more in different fields than our hobby community but no doubt there are a few that make money through advertising, donations or affiliate schemes.

I looked at Affiliate Schemes back here: Wayland Games Affiliate Scheme there's a lot you can read there about what I believe about 'monetising' your blog. In this day and age where personally I'm using so many free apps that have adverts built in I'm less concerned about the minimal advertising I actually have on the blog. I took the decision to remove the Wayland Advert because the link it was pointing to became broken and there didn't seem to be replacement graphics/links at the time that fit the same dimension of where this advert was placed.

Additionally I was sure some friends had ordered through my link and I could see no record of it in my account. Whether they did buy through it, the link allocating my referral was broken or the system just didn't work I'm not sure, but I felt it more appropriate to add more prominence to the Followers link and blog archive as that was more important. Maybe others have had better success and can chime in on that. Of note is that it looks like Wayland have revamped their scheme recently so I may consider adding it back at some point because it's hobby related and much more appropriate than my google ads. I've absolutely no hesitation in using other's affiliate links if it helps someone out so if you do have a successful affiliate story, share your blog link and I may look to endorse it with a purchase in the future.

Donations is another way to monetise. Alex, Blog Wars organiser and From the Fang blogger discussed this in his blogpost Donations Welcome. I'm a firm believer in this but not a practitioner. I get the impression that it can be seen by some as perhaps rude but writing a blog takes time and creative effort and like most enterprises that has a value. Some folk are more than happy to donate a $ or a £ here and there but the great thing is you don't have to, the option is yours to donate or not. I remember one blog I used to frequent had a donation button that had options ranging from buying the blogger a coffee to a Bento box sushi lunch, which I thought was cute [but not cute enough to donate, ha, ha!] It's an innocuous way to do it but it still takes a certain amount of bravery to put a donation link up. I'm not entirely sure why one should feel bad about this and because it may be considered a 'taboo' subject it was one of the main reasons I wanted to write a post about money and blogging - to encourage debate and discussion and hopefully overcome the stigma of it.

When I started the blog back in the beginning my main aim was to record what I've done but also provide terrain templates and later free markers for those just starting in the hobby, or those with limited budgets that were being priced out of it. Reminding people you can build your own terrain and making freely available quality templates to populate your battlefield has always been rewarding in itself for me. Have I thought that these items should have a financial value? You bet ya! I've seen a few sites selling templates or terrain templates that are of a similar quality. Even if it's just one sale, that makes the effort financially viable. But that goes against the spirit of what I set out to do and even a Donate button, though I agree with them in principle, would feel disingenuous to what I intended for the blog.

Things may change, all things do but right now I'll stick to my Google Adsense adverts. Some may believe this contrary to my statement on the Donate button. Personally I see them as the least hardship to a reader, they don't take over the blog, the offers are targeted to your browsing history [although Alex at FtF finds that disturbing] and a click costs the reader nothing, except a milli-second to click and go. I've made around £48 in my four years of blogging and I've promised myself an Imperial Knight with the proceeds once it hits the magic £60 to unlock the first payment. For me it's the least obtrusive of the options and I've taken to clicking on any Adsense I notice on other hobby blogs because I know how every penny adds up.

Anyway, hopefully this will start a debate, maybe make the decision to advertise or monetise an easier one for other hobby bloggers. We all look at this hobby differently and there should be no shame should one feel the need to support their further contributions to the community with some 'fiscal stimulus'. So let me know of your own monetising successes, thoughts and opinions I'd be really interested to hear your take on the matter.

Terrain is everything - Hail the Omnissiah a new Print & Play building

It's been a good few months since my last   'Print & Play' terrain template so it was about time I added the wide version of the green marble building. If you've made the first beige or black building then it's exactly the sayellow grid leaded effect. So the building is the same, but wider with just a different colour for variety on your battlefield.

These would ideally be suited for foamboard that has the black foam core. I was going to make one but didn't get round to it, sorry. However, that black foam would make these easily playable from the off, without looking too much like a quickly knocked up bit of terrain.

To access the full STC please point your Cogitators here, be fair warned it is 13.5MB in size [I make no apologies for this, I could probably render it as a .jpg or spend hours trying to reduce the file size, I tweaked it a little bit and got it down so hopefully it's less of an issue now.]:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B97Rk-BalgZbczZQZ2FuTjNlUVk

Alternatively if you want to reduce the footprint a bit and still retain some of the proportions you could employ the standard 2 storey template on one facing to make a rectangular building instead of a square one. It's your choice but here's another 'artists' rendering and a link to the page where it's at.

Terrain is everything - Project Ω - Realm of Battle board.

And now you can see why there were no teaser pictures for this project. There's no picture I could take that wouldn't reveal what this was. Anyway, I was really lucky because I'd been planning to pick one up for a while and then one appeared on eBay, collection only but in Manchester. Working there and with a colleague who was prepared to pick it up gave me options. In the end the seller brought it in on the train as I work right next to the station. 

Now I do regret the fact I didn't make my own but Liam, Ben and Otty have the official GW boards so I felt it prudent to have something that would sync up with them. Of course winning it at auction for £70 certainly eases my conscience a bit! I'd sat on the auction, put in a bid well above that knowing full well what one costs in the real world and it ticked over onto £70 from about £68 and no one else bid, I couldn't believe it. Gotta love that adrenaline rush when you're expecting ebay snipers!

Of course the loft conversion has meant its been stored at work for the last six weeks but I finally got chance to bring it home. In that time I've thought long and hard about how I was going to paint it and one thing I wanted to do was add a little more texture to the surface so I could get a more interesting effect. I thought about adding PVA and flock like my Armies on Parade board but decided it was too rough. Eventually I decided to use PlastiKote Stone effect spray paint. I hoped this would add the texture but bond effectively before being covered in Red Oxide Primer.

So first up was masking all the skulls. Yeah I know they're almost universally disliked but I can live with them.

I'm considering making all the bone pits as Digestion pits. I'm worried the lime green will be a little overwhelming though, don't know whether to go with yellow ones like my original digestion pit, opinions welcome.

I was actually quite surprised how much texture is on the boards already but I still wasn't sure how it would drybrush for me. I've obviously seen lots of them and play on them regularly but I wanted a finer texture and I also hoped it would help mitigate all those figures that slide down the hills.

So here's the final spray. If I'm honest I'm worried the texture won't actually bond to the plastic. It may have bonded better if there was a primer on first but hindsight is always 20:20. Certainly by the end of the day it was still moist to the touch with nearly 12 hours of drying...

I got through the whole can and it does say thin multiple layers work better than thick ones. Well you can see the coverage isn't complete so it's certainly thin enough in some places, it's just the thicker areas I'm concerned with.

Afterwards I removed the generic sticky tack with the interesting result that whatever propellant/varnish is used to try to seal the texture to the board made the tack become ultra soft and sticky. I had bright blue tack all over my fingers, not good when I was about to start painting our new bathroom white!

Hopefully you can make out some of the added texture, I also did a final spray from about 2 foot away which resulted in those large spots, at the top middle and left. Some nice variety I think. Havign removed the tack I then ran a cocktail stick along all the cracks just to ensure they were not disguised by the texture paint.

Can't wait to add the Red Oxide Primer, I've got one and a bit cans, with another on order. I'll do a light coat all over with the cans in stock and then finish it up with the new one so I don't end up with four boards in one colour and the last two in another.

A final note is that right about the the time this was bought the new Imperial Sector Battle Board came out. Of course I was very interested in this but aside from the ridiculous low price I managed to get my Battle Board I didn't go with the City one for a number of reasons. It's not as versatile for one thing, there are only a couple of tiles and there are no variations in height. You pay a premium for the detail and although it's lighter and more compact I just think it's style over substance. If  there had have been some raised plazas or a dais, nothing they haven't already tried on the Forgeworld boards, it may have been different. There's plenty of examples in the Dawn of War video games they could have referenced and they could have found a way to have it positioned in a variety of ways just like this board. Such a missed opportunity in my book.

Blog Wars 8 - The Reckoning

Alex at From the Fang has finally got round to releasing tickets for Blog Wars 8 so I've got in there sharpish and booked a ticket. PeteB is also interested but his transition from Eldar to Space Wolves means he may not have a fully painted force by November 8th in which case he may just come along for the experience.

However, I have persuaded both Ben and Liam to join in. Liam's got his ticket and will be 'forced' to play with his Dark Eldar. they're absolutely stunning, one of my favorite armies of his to look at that is. Playing against them is a frikkin nightmare.

And Ben will be taking his Necrons. The list building rules for BW8 are a little unique and certainly not without quite a few limitations. This has forced us all to be economical with our army choices and hence Liam's Dark Eldar and Ben's old standbys being dusted off.

I will of course be taking my nids, for their third outing at Blog Wars [hopefully the Dark Angels will be ready for Blog Wars 9]. I will definitely be taking my Skyshield, it means I won't get a Quad Gun, so I'll struggle a bit with anti-air but I did promise Alex I would take it seeing as it didn't get a run out last time. I'm struggling a bit with my list because there is only one Combined Arms Detachment allowed and you must take a Special Character, unfortunately most of the nids are HQ choices so that means I lose a second Winged Tyrant to replace it with Deathleaper :( I can't even add a Leviathan data slate as Formations aren't allowed [I could have taken the Deathleaper Assassin Squad, although the Special Character has to be in your CAD...]. 

It's quite frustrating really, but I'm in full support of Alex running it this way, it's his tournament and he has to run it as he sees fit and by the looks of it keeping track of all the possibilities in 7th is a nightmare so why shouldn't he make it simpler. However, 7th is an embarrassment of riches and it's a bit tough to go back to 'meat and two veg' after haute cuisine! Still it means being creative and I may run a few interesting oldies but goodies for the giggles. On the plus side I am going to get a Deathleaper model so I'm no longer using Death as my proxy ;) Of course that means I have to paint him and he's not on my list :(

'nids part 153 - Project Z?! Gets some fixing

With hobby time at a minimum thanks to my home improvements any progress is good news, although if I'm honest this is very little at all. It needs doing though. Project Z is requiring a lot of remedial action to fix certain elements together and cover other gaps. I'm not entirely certain I'm doing a good job of making it any better, clearly my patchwork of Milliput and Liquid Green Stuff is not doing it any favours.

Hopefully the paint job will hide a multitude of sins but I can still do a bit of sanding to try and eliminate some of the obvious seams. Stupidly I haven't even washed this model yet. I think once that happens I'll be able to move on with some more construction work...

...and reveal this beast in it's entirety.

Oh yeah, and with the extra Milliput I mixed up I managed to start another thing on my To Do List:
Tyranid Bastion Crater. All I was really doing was reinforced the mounting card edges and a couple of tentacles. I will be adding some large chitinous plates at some point, and some suitably gross fleshy bits to show where the ruptured Bastion once stood. It'll also make a decent bit of terrain, hopefully.

'nids part 152 - MOAR Genestealers!

Apologies again for the micro-blog but by now you know the reasons. Things are moving forwards but not in a productive sense. Instead I'm just 'pushing peas around on my plate'. What i have done is get the Genestealers dipped ready for eventual painting. I have 11 of the new Stealers I won on ebay, they're the ones on the left alongside the 10 my Kendo buddy Tom Widdows surprised me with.

You can also see that after four or five years I finally decided to get some new Dettol. I'll strip these with a toothbrush in a few days.

 

And then transfer these from their inky black bath into a fresh Dettol one. I've had them in there for a month now but the Dettol has become saturated with past paints and the original Behemoth colouring has done no favours. Essentially they'reall covered by thin slime akin to used motor oil. I'm hoping fresh Dettol will strip them a little more and failing that a burst of Fairy Power Spray will make them acceptable.

 

I'm actually looking forward to adding some extra bits to all these Stealers. I'd question why I was doing this, they're not on my list and with my only recent success with Stealers being the Maufactorum brood, which I have sufficient models for this is really a pointless exercise. I do like the idea of having a full Manufactorum and Broodlord Hunting Pack. It's not a list that I think I could take but it is interesting and then I could add my Genestealer Cultists, By no means is this about making a Genestealer Cult army but it certainly makes it viable, even if gaming wise it wouldn't be.