Tag Archive for Hobby Tools

Tournament Inventory

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So many of us have been there before.  It’s the biggest local tournament of the year and you’ve been preparing for it for weeks if not months.  The first round pairings are announced and you confidently walk over to the table and begin unpacking your figures.  You then get that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach as you frantically search all your foam trays in futility.  You forgot to pack that Warlock you just finished basing last night.

 

Goatvahna. Never leave home without her.

 

So just in time for the Southern Ontario Open, here’s a handy checklist for your Warmachine and Hordes inventory!

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…Exploding On The Highway Like a Slug From a .45

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Speed Painting 101

A common question I receive from friends is “How do you paint so fast?”.

It’s not uncommon for me to hammer out a full 50+ point army in roughly a month’s time.  How do I do this?  It’s likely a combination of experience and technique.  I’ll just run down some quick pointers and then there’s a 52 min video of me painting a Bull Snapper model from start to finish.

 

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Wear a smock or something if you’re going to speed paint like this guy!

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2013 Year In Review

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I call 2013 the Life and Death of a blog.  Because really, I tried to get it up and running and recruit lots of people to blog, write and talk about what they are doing with their hobbies, but that hasn’t really worked out like I thought it would.  Turns out blogging is like work, and we all try really hard to avoid work at all costs.

 

However we here at HH are not to be deterred.  I am gonna look at the design of the blog, look at getting some more articles up and running, and see about motivating (with a whip) some of the guys whose content I know was well-written and well received by the small audience we have out there.  That being said, let’s talk about what I did accomplish in 2013:

Hey, I know a guy who lives in that city…

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NFL(GS) Game Tape

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Professional sports teams review old game tape for hours in order to improve their own skills and abilities as well as to learn their upcoming opponents’ play style.  These are athletes that are at the top of their game and studying game footage helps to keep them there.  What exactly are they looking for?  Well you can’t control what your opponent will do but you can investigate what they’ve done in the past and possibly learn strategic tendencies and tactics and from that info, you can learn how to counter it.  You can also study your own gameplay and determine what you can improve on.  So if you’re looking to get to the top of the Warmachine/Hordes competitive scene, why wouldn’t you review old games?

 

Enter the NFL(GS) Game Tape (Notable Friendly Local Game Store).  Alright, admittedly competitive Warmachine is not a professional sport but it is a competitive tournament environment where knowing the play styles of the major competitors and the typical models you’ll encounter across the table is essential to success.  More important is learning how to improve the strategies or positioning of models a typical player can make during a game.  Can you learn to recognize that your plan to out-attrition your opponent will fail and you should switch to assassination mode? Maybe reviewing the game a few times can help! As such, following in the footsteps of Matti K from endgamegaming.net, I have taken it upon myself to record a “game of the week” for the local players at our local gaming store, Heroes World.  Several of the players here will be going to Templecon to test their skills against the field and while only one of our local players has aspirations at seriously competing for the Warmachine Masters crown, I felt it would be good to let a variety of players assess their own games to see where improvements can be made.

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In Play 1, Knowshon Moreno wants to charge into combat but doesn’t know eEiryss is going to shoot all the Focus off of Peyton Manning. After studying the game footage, the player realizes he should have done Play 2, and sent Moreno to charge Eiryss so she can’t shoot Manning.

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Blending In

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Wet Blending Master Class

There tends to be a natural progression when it comes to miniature painting that almost everyone follows.  You first learn how to base coat a model, keeping it clean and all your colours inside the lines like a kindergarten kid learns how to stay inside the lines in their colouring book.  Then you progress to drybrushing which provides a nice quick and easy way to add some depth to your painting.  The next progression tends to be layering, where you lay down your shadows first then progressively build up layers of lighter tones in increasingly  smaller areas until you have a gradation from shade to base colour to highlight.  The next level in the painting technique progression is what this article covers: Blending.

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Blending in. Yeah… Not so much.

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Another Cog in the Machine

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Not a whole lot to say right now, I am buried under a big pile of loot from Lock & Load 2013 that our buddy Boots brought back from Seattle for me.  Aside from the June release of the Stormblade Captain for my beloved Cygnar, I have a huge heaping helping of new models from the Convergence of Cyriss with which to entertain myself.

 

Maiden of Gears

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Puppy with which to Pound!

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More painting with Ragnarok, posted by me because teaching a painter how to sign into a blog and post his own article is proving to be a challenge!! – NB

Saturday the 25th of May, a not so local (but still very awesome) hobby shop, The Hobby Kingdom,  ran their annual Most Extreme Annihilation Challenge event (which is loads of fun!). This event awards style points for many things like amazing army themes (including the option to come in costume to match your themed army), or extra points for an epic way of slaying an opponent’s Warbeast/Warjack. The style points I was most interested in were the painting points! Nothing like the anticipation of a fun event to get one out of a 6 month painting funk, like most hobbyists I go through painting phases. And I usually need a push to get out of a funk phase. Thanks to the MEAC2013 I was inspired to paint a Warlock I have wanted to get to for a long time! Kaya the Moonhunter and her trusted companion Laris. This blog will take us on a journey of how I got the pair of beautiful models painted.

Just a quick disclaimer before we get going. I have not yet updated my paint collection to the new GW colours so all the paint “names” I will be using in this blog will all be the old and outdated names. Please refer to this page for the GW paint name conversion chart:

CITADEL CONVERSION CHART

So let’s get started ….

With Laris:
After cleaning and assembling Laris I primed him using GW Chaos Black Primer.

L1

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Would you like fries with that?

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The idea of the add on sale or accessorizing a purchase is nothing new.  Buy a new outfit?  Well naturally you need new shoes/ tie/ belt etc to go with it!  Burger joints try to sell you fries with your order, or upsell your purchase with an apple pie or larger drink.  We’re so used to it we barely notice and often ignore it… but today I want to suggest (sell?) to you a way to accessorize your games and up the enjoyment factor to 11!  (Well it’s one more than ten, right?)

Dice!

Six-Sided Bliss!

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Tools of the Trade

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Have you ever heard the expression, “It’s a poor craftsman that blames his tools”?  This may be true of many trades but it does not apply to miniature painting.  In fact I believe that quality tools can make one’s miniatures better than what they could be with poorly maintained or mediocre brushes and other tools we work with.  This article aims to provide you with the details and hopefully impart some knowledge on the more commonly used tools of our trade.

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