So I was perusing YouTube and came across this video

Army Painter Development team or something like that.

Three of the four YouTube channels I watch regularly and all got sent AP speedpaints and of the three not one of them mentioned reactivation. I am in no way saying it was a set up, lots of other people got sent the paints too. I just find it interesting to see where this goes…

its fine though Vallejo are bringing out their Xpress range in November and they Don’t reactivate.

Since my initial problems with reactivation I have probably used my AP Speedpaints three times, only using the odd colour and now that I have a nice purple in my Dipping inks and I can get one in Contrast too then I think they will remain on their shelf.

Well today was our first games day of two and quite a lot of us couldn’t make it for one reason or another so Sean and I had a quick game of Dragon Rampant…

Here are my undead forces in their nice movement trays.

Anyway I moved mine off the table and as it would be a faff to take Sean’s off and put mine on then we went with his. His undead forces were 34 points and my borrowed living came in at 32 points. I was holding a defensive line so most of the initial turns were his. This changed when he got in range of my crossbows. They fairly disrupted his left flank wiping out two units. The elves in the graveyard were less effective. They quite often failed their activation rolls and needed to wound on 5+ I threw an awful lot of 1,2,3 and 4’s.

Sadly he brought up his cavalry and I was forced to engage with my own…

This cavalry melee took most of the game with each of us pushing the other back, but never doing enough to remove a casualty. As this was going on my foot knights took on his command unit who had crossed the table.

His right flank pretty much crawled across the table as it was there that most failed activations took place.

I was beset by cavalry in my centre, a command unit on my right and a large force centre left. I did manage to hold the cavalry off, losing a miniature. I really thought that all was over when suddenly my dice rolls changed and over three turns had totally destroyed the cavalry. My spears wiped out the horde to their front and somehow my foot knights, now down to two miniatures, held on.

In the end the undead lost half of their units and a narrow victory was claimed by the forces of good,

Here they are arrayed for their victory march past….

It was actually a really tense game as I had to overcome a modified roll to attack the undead… quite a few times I failed. Thankfully the scary bit only happened when you were trying to get up close and personal… shooting was not affected!

Oh woe is me, Henry has eventually given up the ghost!

Henry has served us well for twenty years. Perhaps we could have used him more. But we are now heading out to find his replacement!

Well okay … I see a dead person, a dead horse, three dead goblins and a hobbit that is having a lie down!

These are for my extremely stalled diorama.

I wanted casualties and now I have some. I am off for two weeks so perhaps I may make some progress.

Geek club is still going strong and as such the kids are flying through the miniatures. We have had one incident of a pot of black Contrast being dropped upside down in the box without the lid on properly !

I have managed to paint something…

I am thinking of seeing if any companies would sponsor the club. It will save them using all of my gear.

Well, I thought I had better let you know that I am alive and kicking… I have been a bit quiet of late for a number of reasons

Number one being that my school is having a mini inspection today and tomorrow so my mind, shall we say is elsewhere. Initial feedback seems positive so even though I was overdosing on cold and flu plus, I am pleased. Somehow I managed nearly 10,000 steps today even though I went to bed as soon as I got in.

Feeling gradually more crap over the weekend didnt really help, not to mention preparing a pile of scientific experiments for the kids in class today

Friday I went all, literary and went to see a talk by Dr Cat Jarman, who wrote River Kings. All about Viking trade… well worth a read if you can get it where you are.

Earlier in the week we tried the New One Ring. My two eldest and Joe made characters…I will probably get used to it, but there are enough similarities and differences to be a bit annoying, for me anyway.

Geek club carries on, with them all finishing off their second figure and in some cases making a start on their third. I will hopefully get photos tomorrow.

Well, today I was browsing YouTube, in between watching the state funeral of her late Majesty. Anyway I attached Dana Howl’s video on the new contrast paint colours. I have bought one of them… the new black. Interestingly she calls them Contrast flat… aka they aren’t really Contrast… but anyway I found this video purely by chance.

Vallejo xpress colour

I have never seen this guy before and was pleased that he said two things… First being he is biased.. he helped design them and secondly he wanted these paints to be as good as Contrast.

So as you can imagine, I will be giving these a go when they come out. There will be twenty five in the range with some similar to Contrast colours, but the majority in a different colour. The big test for me is will they reactivate… I don’t think so as he said if you get pint (or paint – thanks Guru) where you don’t want it, then just recover it with the white.

I might see if they will send me a couple of bottles to try out… wish me luck.

So the other day I started getting failures in the centre of the build plate. This causes a lot of swearing on my part as I then need to empty the vat, clean it and remove the resin that was stuck to the FEP.

First off I changed the resin, just in case there was something wrong with the first lot…. Still failures!

Next I re levelled the build plate, still getting those failures!

I checked that the lights were working… no problems, I oiled things… still issues. Then in one final attempt to get it to work I put the newly done vat onto the machine and voila- success!

This is what success and failure look like side by side. I go ad to peel the funny star thing off the FEP.

I eventually got two German cruisers. I have binned six! The little gunboats came out fine every time. I have a lot of them now.