New Year, new beginnings (for real this time)

A very belated Happy New Year everyone! Once again I must apologise for my erratic blogging and late update. Truth to be told, I’ve been idle when it comes to hobbying for a long time since my last post. With me and my family moving house again, the search for a job (which isn’t over yet), a holiday to Queensland and one to New Zealand and especially a pain in my left shoulder that prevented me from painting for more than a half hour at the time. And without a goal or project to work towards, I’ve found myself being immersed in video games whenever I had a moment not doing anything else.

However, while looking at new posts at G+, I unexpectedly came across some reposted blog articles of mine. After talking a bit to the one who posted them (thank you Fred Jackson), I let myself be convinced to make get my blog going again. It would definitely be a good promise to myself for the new year. But for this I needed a project …

Shortly after I started searching for miniatures games to play with my two eldest sons, I came across the recently released ‘Rangers of Shadow Deep’. The thing with playing a game with my boys is that it kind of feels like playing to myself, with me making all the decisions and someone else moving the pieces. While this is fine at first and certainly counts towards the father-sons quality time, it isn’t sustainable for me personally as it lacks a challenge. So, when I found out that the Rangers of Shadow Deep was cooperative, I decided to buy the PDF and was happy to see it didn’t disappoint.

If I use 15mm, I can change the ranges from inches to centimetres. While this isn’t perfect when it comes to scalability, my sons could use the metric system, which they are familiar with, instead of the odd imperial one and it also takes up far less space for storage. After rummaging through the small miniatures pile I found out I had quite a few 15mm protagonists, but no heroes.

One of the things I wasn’t entirely happy with when doing my World of Twilight ‘Lost Boys’ project, though I won the best force award, was my green stuff work. So I also decided to learn myself some new skills with a very cheap airbrush (to get rid of these overly expensive spray cans and try out something new) and making some extensive conversions, as well as sculpting.

Also, my friend Richard (you can find his blog here: http://fanplasticlittlemen.blogspot.com/) in all his kindness, decided to part with his Casanii and send them to me. As I’m a sucker when it comes to making every single model unique, the Rangers of Shadow Deep project would be great training to get them done in the future. Once more: Thank you very much Richard!

Here are the first miniatures I painted this year, many more are undercoated and silently waiting for their turn in the que. Sorry for the bad quality of the pictures, they're taken with my Phone and the lighting outside isn't the best

 

 Some treasure tokens for the game and a trapdoor. The one on the 30mm lipped base sat, only partially painted, in a carrying casefor many years. Not sure if I'm going to use that one but it kind of felt good to complete that one too.

 

 Cocoon markers I made for the scenario with the spiders using cotton earbuds.

 

 These rats came with a Skaven beast master set. I had to remove all the tubes and Skaven iconography but they're the perfect size (see below).

 Some Khurasan zombies, I really like these as they are exactly how I see zombies.
Not carrying weapons or whatsever, just some ragtag walking corpses.

And last a small child, to be used as a survivor if a scenario calls for it.

 

I'm probably going to add some grass to the bases later. Unfortunately, the kinds I got here a bit tall for 15mm so I'll have to bring back some from my stock in Belgium when we get back from our holiday there later this year.

 

Thanks a lot for reading!

 

Wouter