Pirate Ghost Ship model kit
I am slowly coming back to miniature painting, and I thought that buying a simple but model kit could be a nice start. After going to a naval museum I thought about maybe some ship, and decided to buy the Revell Ghost ship model kit. It is far easier to assemble than any normal boat (with the sails and cords/ropes) and the "glows in the dark" feature peeked my curiosity.
The model is advertised as "easy-click system", and while most of it can indeed be built without glueing the pieces, as they just snap in, there's a few ones where I think it would very easily go off, like the union points between the (plastic) ropes and the masts. So I just glued everything.
It comes with a glow in the dark paint can, and in theory you don't need anything else, but I decided to basecoat the whole ship with black, and bronze for the brown plastic parts. The special paint is curious, feels like a mix of glowing pigment and glue. You'll have to apply multiple layers, and the ship eventually gets the greenish color, but must also be careful as a too big and non spread chunk of paint will stay when dried. Also the stickers are not water-based, but simple plastic children-like ones, which is sad as I couldn't properly hide them despite applying a few layers of glowing paint over. I should have cut them with scissors to leave just the real skull and crossbones part, but didn't thought about it.
Overall, I really like how the finished model looks. It was a fun assembly, a simple but long painting process, and it really glows nicely in the dark "after charging" with sunlight.
Glowing photo taken from the official Revell site as my camera is crappy and can't take good photos in the dark. While not as incredibly green, it does glow a lot and looks very cool.
You can see these and a few more photos at the photo gallery.
Tags: Painting
Moving more old miniatures
After moving some old miniatures, I've decided to move most of my remaining painted miniatures to my family's country-house. I mostly only keep painted from now on my Deathwing Terminators (+2 full squads) and some Genestealers including the big patriarch on the throne. I'll decide what to do when I finish painting other minis when I'm able to finish painting anything.
So, I've moved some really old miniatures, like the Rogue Trader Dark Angel Space Marines:
And an old Land Raider:
But also some newer miniatures, like this plastic Dreadnought:
Or the Ork Stompa I had already photos of:
And non-Warhammer miniatures, like this (already pre-painted) Metal Gear Gray Fox ninja:
This small Aliens APC (also pre-painted):
Or this old Aliens Queen:
As usual, you can see a few more photos and all the archives at the Warhammer 40k gallery and the Assorted gallery.
Status Update: July 2019
I haven't forgotten the blog, but some relevant things have happened in real life that make harder to write content for here:
- Our role-playing group is mostly dissolved. Part of if no longer lives in Spain, and of those who live, it became so hard to be able to meet that even playing some boardgames became almost impossible.
- I am spending some days most weeks out of home, so I have way less available time to paint miniatures.
- I am in general dedicating less time to play videogames, so I try to rotate between genres, but RPGs usually require lots of commitment.
- I am reading, quite a lot more in fact, but I had a long stack of pending articles to read before being able to spend more time with books, and again, I have to leverage between books that could be reviewed here and from other areas (mainly technical, but not limited only to those).
That said, I have played quite a lot of Diablo III on my Nintendo Switch (I've got 5 level 70 characters, around 400 paragon levels, and one of the characters is already doing the set armour special quests). I also finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (awesome game, I'll replay it sometime in the future), and I am onto some Final Fantasy: I am playing FF-X HD on PC (finished it on PS2 on its day, but as I loved it wanted to play it again), I have installed and started playing FF VII on my laptop (but oh boy, the random battles do get annoying at first), and I tried really hard to finish FF XII HD... but despite nice graphics and the awesome gambit AI system (basically you can spend more time fine-tuning the combat behaviour of the characters than actually battling) the story is so dull and the voice acting so rough that I gave up. I have the savegame for the future but it felt so boring I am not sure when I'll continue. Not having the gaming PC with me all the time also doesn't helps, although enables me to divide by platforms. I am for example finally going through my PS3 exclusives.
About miniature painting I would love to spend more time, but in the short term I only foresee moving more old miniatures to my mother's countryside house after taking some photos.
About reading, I have started another Horus Heresy book and the 2nd volume of The Dark Tower so is a matter of time only.
And in general, my life is quite busy right now so no boardgaming or role-playing, we'll see if later this year that changes.
Tags: Boardgames Offtopic Painting Videogames
Moving some old miniatures
To make some room and fit all my miniatures in less shelves, I took the (hard) decision of a) selling a few miniatures and b) moving some old painted ones to my mother's house. These last months (years?), mostly due to friends either moving out of the country or just all of us having a very busy life, I've stopped playing and keeping boardgames (with a few special exceptions), so it was reasonable to also "get rid" (in a safe way) of some miniatures. I decided to take some photos first and uploaded here to my galleries section.
The galleries that have been updated are Epic 40,000, Warhammer 40,000 (newest one as there are multiple galleries) and Assorted/Miscellaneous.
And this are some samples of the photos I've added to it. As you will see, nothing incredible and most if not all painted when I was young, but still so full of memories I wanted to keep some photos of them always available.
All my Epic 40,000 painted miniatures. I had already only kept at most 2 units of each from my Eldar army and from the Space Marines and Orks armies. Now I'll only keep the titans and gargants I have pending painting.
Miscellaneous fantasy heroes and monsters. Some from HeroQuest and Advanced HeroQuest, others from various sources.
And then, some Warhammer 40,000 stuff, mainly some old Rogue Trader era tanks from my Dark Angels Space Marine army:
But also other minis like an old metal Tyranid:
Scenery...
And an old Leman Russ fully-armed
Space Hulk Deathwing, Dawn of War III and August painting progress
The end of July and beginning of August has been busy, but I managed to squeeze some time to play and even paint. I'm slowly shifting towards more painting and less playing but summer vacations mean no painting either. Anyway this is what I've mostly been doing (apart from farming Zelda components to max out almost all clothing):
I'm playing again Space Hulk Deathwing main campaign, and I have to test the cooperative mode now that has been improved. The game came out a bit unpolished and I paid the hype price, but still the atmosphere it's impressive and I'm enjoying the second run (with graphic options almost maxed out as framerate is better).
I bought Dawn of War III with a heavy discount, and how lucky I was, because the game has been somewhat a dissapointment... The multiplayer component is great, even skirmishes against the computer. You have three elites who level up, three battle doctrines (modifiers for unit types or special general weapons) and basically looks like the best representation of Warhammer 40,000: Big battles with dozens of units (a lot more than DoW 2 and also more than the original DoW), amazing graphics, imperial Knights and the Eldar & ork equivalents (well, almost, a Gorkanaut instead of a Stompa... meh, sounds like a GW-imposed choice), bases and many, many nice looking and intense battles. On that regard it is a great game, and with a decent graphics card it looks amazing, just like the miniatures. But on the other hand the campaign is... a waste of time and effort. It is a forced, badly written and dumb story that looks made only to let you know how every unit of the game works of the three factions. And even that is in my opinion wrongly executed, as you forcibly have to switch faction on every mission (each mission is tied to a faction, that is), and some of the missions are really boring. Combined with decent voice acting but poor dialogs (between predictable, silly and sometimes absurd) and some nasty gameplay bugs that force you to repeat the level if you encounter one... For the first time in the franchise I haven't finish the campaign, as I got tired when I hit another bug just in the final level. It is too uninteresting. It is a pity because it could have really had been great, and after the previous games I can only guess that there were budget constraints on the development because it looks only really polished on the multiplayer part, and there are almost no NPC factions/units (on the later levels it is quite noticeable they even reused 3D models instead of adding more variety). I don't regret the buy as I already poured in around 20h and will probably play some CPU skirmishes in the future, but it is a wasted opportunity of delivering a great game, bringing instead a "just nice" one. Still, some of the videos have really cool images:
And finally, apart from small progress on painting Nagash (I'm on the 3rd layer of bone colouring, and I expect at least one or two more), I grabbed two of the Betrayal at Calth models and did some dark washing on them to prepare to paint them. I'm not going to go for anything really hard so will just highlight with Mephiston Red and maybe some touches of orange. And I should definetly finish the basing of my Imperial Knight, it is only missing that and the decals to be finished...
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