Blog 11th anniversary

Eleven years today! Eleven!

No. Not this one

I don't want to repeat the same stuff every year, but it's been a long way so far and I still keep enjoying it like the first day. Of course that's because of your constant encouragement. Thank you very much to all of you for being out there. Your comments are always appreciated (no, sorry, spambots, I'm not talking about you) and your insights on what I try to carry on here is constant food for thought and ease for stress. I do appreciate, pals. Please keep coming, you are always welcome.

Those days of two posts per week (sometimes even three!) are now long gone, and unlikely to come back, but I don't really miss it per se. I mean, of course I'd like to have more free time and devote it to the hobby, but I'm good with things as they are. If I'm able to update the blog every couple of weeks I'm happy. If it's three weeks, so be it. If it's just a week or 10 days, super. I'm making no big deal out of the numbers, just enjoying every step of the journey.

What have I been up to in the last 12 months?

Well, I started with a normal skeleton, that should resemble no one you may know...

I came back to my realscale marines, recycling primaris stuff into 2nd ed like looking marines:

2023 has seen quite some colourful lizards from World of Twilight. In no specific order here you have some:

It's been the year in which I've been back to gaming too! I mean, just in 2023 I've played more than in the last four previous years on a whole!

I had this awesome game of Cursed City early in January:

And just afterwards I had this game of Aristeia! (Even with unpainted minis -shame! shame!)

I made an almost first, as I painted Squats. Me, painting Squats!

I'm also seriously commiting to this beautiful monster:

(Spoiler alert, I'm planning to bring more of this before the year ends, shhh...)

Speaking of large stuff, I incorporated this sizeable mining dump truck to my Genestealer Cult:

Oh, I got some other colourful lizards, but not from Twilight!

Went back to my Oldhammer roots with these glorious RT robots:

And from there to something purely new, as I got into Infinity!

I'm rebuilding my Underworlds boards, just got to the half of the project milestone:

I loved to go back again to Rogue Trader with this Imperial Guard platoon:

Which I painted just in time for my first WH40K2 game in 6 years (Wow):

It was glorious. I do need to play more to this.

After that I was in a fantasy-like mood and I painted these:

 Quite unexpectedly I played Aeronautica Imperialis:

And I'm closing my review with my latest progress on my current ongoing board:

I don't think I'm missing anything!

So this has been a year's work, what can you expect for next season? For now I can speak about a game in the close future (even just some days if I can write the AAR soon!), and I'm going back to the trireme, which I currently have on the bench. Apart from that, I have so many projects, as usual! Let's see which of them can be turned out into real stuff! I would be very pleased if you'd like to discover it with me!

Thank you all! Next episode of this adventure starts today!

Closing gaps

Back to my never ending vertical mining town board! I expected my progress on this area to be slow, but oh, man, not that slow!

First of all, let's just recap:

This was last time you saw it

My plan from now on was focusing mostly on the left area, but... well, you'll see.

The foamboard here is not yet glued, it's just for visual reference:

Yet to be fixed, will be the base for next urban expansion

However, this concept left me some unused space beneath that surface. I believe it was time to bring the mining element to my... well, mining town!

Nothing speaks of mines more than dead end railways coming from a cave

I used a Terrain Crate box by Mantic, which I found at quite a reasonable price. My idea is to leave here the entrance to the mines, just at the very gates of the rest of the town. Might sound odd, but I totally see this happening in places such as Logan's World or so. There can be other entrances, sure, but having this one here seemed suitable for me. In gaming terms it provides me quite a perfect spot for the Genestealer Cult to enter the board, stuff like that.

In the pic above you may be wondering what's that circle about. Well, it's related to this:

Epic, timeless butter cookie can!

Pff, I may have to digress a little.This box was originally planned for another project:

The Genestealer Dungeon!

Shame on me, the Dungeon doesn't currently have a label of its own. I may have to remedy that.

Anyway, this project was abandoned when I started to build the vertical board. In my mind it all will be part of a campaign involving the Cult, first played on the surface and later on through this underground Space Hulk or whatever. I may have everything ready by 2030.

Ahem.

Enough digression. The cookie can. It was meant to be a pit in the Dungeon, hence the texture. For my current purposes I may have to remove it (it's just DAS clay). But what purposes are those...?

Unexpected!

Right, instead of building, I'm hollowing spaces! My idea is to place a round bazaar, with ladders, stalls and stuff. It will communicate (with a false door; I'm not cutting through the tin can) with the front part, providing a point of access close to the entrance of the mine.

So first thing now is to make the access for the railway. I had to make the full thing, because it will be inaccessible later.

Lost opportunity to place a LED light in the background

Now, more logistic issues. The hole on the foamboard is so tight (it has to be!) that the cookie can cannot fit in from above:

That's due to the ledge on the lower part

So I'll have to place the tin can from below, or else I'd had to add a lot of work all around the edge of the hole.

This way

Soooo... I first have to build the whole bazaar, then fit it into the board from below and place some supporting pieces beneath it. Whoah, easier said than done.

Well, then this is the board. You may notice some additional work on the center building (close ups later):

Ready to receive some spray colour

After receiving some colour!

 

Well. The thing is that I still haven't done the bazaar. "Oh, what a lousy blog post then" I hear you say. "This is all you got?" you rightfully claim.

I say NO.

 

There's still plenty of stuff to do here, don't fear.

I need another kind of digression in order to move forward. Please look at the next pic, it will be relevant for so many projects (I hope):

 

A humongous, absurdly oversized toy crane

It finally broke. I had nothing to do with it, promise. But the moment I had been waiting for a few years finally arrived. The Suberlings kindly donated their broken toy so it could have a second life. Trust me, I'm cannibalising every bit I can use!

For now let's see...

Hmmm... So what? What's this stuff about?

A cardboard piece and a textured sheet. Now it looks different

If it looks dirty enough, no one will look for errors

It is a bridge! It will cover the gap over the first section, the on on the right, from the center building to the spaceport on the right:

You thought I had forgotten about that part?

This has been a hard decision. For quite some time I planned about building a barge suspended by a wire. I mean something like this (but well done!)

I hope you understand what my deranged mind envisions here

The thing is that it's quite a logistic mess. I had to provide anchorage points to distribute the weight and it all had to be detachable so I could take it away for storage. I believe it's feasible, but it's a hell of a work and I wasn't really doing it for all these years. But when I saw this crane thing and took a couple of measurements, I knew I had it sorted. I may still do the barge thing in the future, but for now I have a practical solution that allows me to move forward.

 

Now there's a full way from the spaceport to the floor level of the board

You can see I've painted the doors and added a few details here and there.

For example the doors and the carpet on this middle bridge in the central piece

Or the tiles on the rooftop piece here

In the (long, distant) future, this will represent a lift to the upper module

Now that we've come this far, let's move one step ahead. The tiny details. I have these air scrubbers from Antenocitis:

One base is missing. It will appear some day in a box, for sure

Windows is still a thing in the Dark Millenium

I also got these fantastic consoles/control pads/whatever from Antenocitis:

The ones on the top, the electric breaker box and stuff may resemble the Jurassic Park ones

I haven't placed them all, but I've painted them and will add them here and there as I need. Here you can see a couple of examples:

I think they add a nice touch and calm my horror vacui

Well, you wouldn't expect them all to function correctly, would you?

This is how the board looks now when all the gubbins are in place:

Pleasingly dirty, weathered and inhospitable. As it should

In retrospective, not having the bazaar was a good thing, as in the end it forced myself to end the central-to-right area. Now I can focus on the left front.

Still a lot of work to do, but I'm happy with the way this is looking so far. Hmm, I'm going to make a few numbers and plans. See you!