This morning I was off to my Union Branch meeting. Well I thought I had better show willing as I have changed unions. I came home replaces a few more bits of floorboards and sliced some shields for the Knights.
After lunch my good lady and I hurtled off to the South end of the island to visit Jarlshof. This is a Historic Environment Scotland site. It shows that a settlement has been there since the Neolithic…some 4000 years.
The name Jarlshof was basically made up by Sir Walter Scott. He had visited Shetland around about 1814. His book ‘The Pirate’ has a location, which was basically the ruined 16th Century Manor house, which he named… you guessed it Jarlshof…the house of the Jarl.
In reality in 1814 the only bits to be seen was the ruin. In the late 1800’s a massive storm rolled in and eroded the sea front and voilà…dwellings appeared from under the sand.
On ‘Out and About in Shetland’ I am uploading a number of videos… they are taking FOR EVERRRR!
So as you know a while a go I wrote a post about the kids in the Geek Club writing to companies that I have spent a lot of money in and they basically ignored the kids.
Anyway before the summer I wrote to The Army Painter on behalf of the kids. I got a nice email back saying I should apply for a sponsorship (I cannot remember the full name). It said give as many details as I could, which I did. Basically five kids in my little school club. It said on the form that they have loads of such requests and to be honest I really thought we were maybe a bit small.
After the summer break I got an email from Peder saying they were going to send us some paints and some brushes. They duly arrived and the kids loved them. Obviously as a teacher you never miss an opportunity to get kids writing. Today we got a lovely email from Peder thanking us for the lovely letters and addressed all of the kids by name. He even said he was sending us some more paint. So according to me and the Geek Club, Peder is a totally Top bloke and The Army Painter are a totally Top Company.
I just wanted to share a positive story…
I am really happy with the Speedpaints 2.0 and after getting the set for my birthday I am probably going to try the metallics and some other colours have caught my eye.
Here is my Speedpaint knight from a couple of weeks ago.
So as you may or may not know, I have horses and used to do reenactment riding… here I am….
So as you might understand I sort of know one end of a horse from the other. So I was a bit perturbed when I got sent this picture of one of GW’s mounted blokeys from the Cities of Sigmar range. The lad who sent it was all excited about it… my first thought was WTF is that. Now I know it is fantasy, and I know it technically may not be a horse but seriously that head!
I actually wondered if it was an optical illusion, but if it is it affects all of the range and also from different angles…It also has super long legs. Disclaimer here… the rest of the miniature is really nice… I just don’t get what went so wrong with the Shetland Pony head on the Shire horse body… GW horses, although stylized were pretty good from what I remember. Second Disclaimer… if I tried this it wouldn’t look like a horse, but I am not trying to sell things.
This evening I printed off a horse and rider from Highland Miniatures…
This is one of the Knights I painted earlier on…
And a couple more
Appropriately sized heads.
So was I ever going to buy into Cities of Sigmar… nope… this is not GW bashing … well okay it technically is, but the foot soldiers and even the dogs are really nice, it is actually just the mounts that I have an issue with.
I really want somebody to come on and say woah Steve, they ain’t horses they are the lesser headed Quaga as bred by Sigmar himself. If they do I will happily apologise.
I recognise the skill in what someone produced, I really just wish they had looked at a photograph of a horse in Gothic Plate.
Last night I grabbed the only miniatures I had handy that were undercoated and were surplus to requirements…
I chose four colours and tried to match them as close as possible across the three ranges
I painted a strip of miniatures in each range. To make my life easier I did it in purchase order. So from left to right we have Contrast, Speedpaints and finally Xpress. These were all done neat. I will do thinned tests at a later date.
The results were quite similar for each range. I honestly thought there would be a huge difference based on the head colours.
I think using 6mm miniatures didn’t help either… time to find something else methinks.
years ago I was at a mates house and his dad loaned me his copy of the hobbit…yeah, that was nice of him, I hear you cry… interestingly it was a first edition of the hobbit and it is different to the later editions…
The one that always stuck out to me was that Gollum offers the ring to Bilbo if he wins the riddle game, which is sacrosanct to Gollum. He couldn’t find his ring and was extremely apologetic to Bilbo, Bilbo who had already found it and said nowt about it!”I don’t know how many times Gollum begged Bilbo’s pardon. He kept on saying: ‘We are ssory; we didn’t mean to cheat, we meant to give it our only pressent, if it won the competition.”
Oh and there was definitely no ‘we hates him forever!’
Funnily enough, not that I can remember, Tolkien failed to describe Gollum, and as such various illustrations appeared… now anyone who has seen the Peter Jackson films will forevermore see Gollum looking like this…
However Tove Jansson, a Swedish illustrator ( of ‘The Moomins’ fame) drew him like this…
Bilbo meets Gollum at the lake
So as you can see, there is a bit of a height difference… this discrepancy led Tolkien to do a bit of an edit in relation to the size of Gollum.
First Edition…”Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum. I don’t know where he came from, nor who or what he was. He was Gollum — as dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes.”
Later editions…“Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum, a small slimy creature. I don’t know where he came from, nor who or what he was. He was Gollum—as dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes in his thin face.”
You probably already knew all of this, but it might be interesting if you didn’t… why bring this up now…well I heard on the radio yesterday that a charity shop had been given a first edition and the owner nearly binned it ad they thought it wouldn’t sell.
Be warned, this is probably going to be a rambling, stream of consciousness post. Plus I started writing it a couple of weeks ago now and have edited loads. Hopefully it still makes sense.
So, as you probably know, I print and paint as well as paint purchased miniatures and terrain. As part of this I watch many, many YouTube channels. Quite a lot of them tell me to do x or y to improve my painting. Some go as far as to tell me to try something new.
The question I want to ask is ‘why’?
Now before I start, this is a personal question and I am not telling anyone what to do/not do.
I have been painting miniatures for about 35 years. Over time have I improved… yes of course I have. Over those years have I tried new things, again yes.
I am now in a happy little groove, some may see it as a rut. I love my Contrast paints and pretty much use them all the time. So much so I have ordered a set of the Vallejo xpress range. So in reality I am trying something new 😉
Now what about this question. I recently watched Dave on MS Paints asking a question about why miniatures look terrible..
He made an interesting observation, if your miniature does not look like how you envisaged it from either the box art or your favourite YouTube influencer then you have a 180 degree shift in feeling from good… to crap in a heartbeat. I actually watched a video that auto loaded the other day it was a guy painting yellow and as we all know, yellow is a sod of a colour to paint. Anyway he did a close up and there was paint (shall we say) where it shouldn’t have been and it actually made me happy. It was almost like … Yey someone like me. I didn’t read the comments as I was actually worried the keyboard warriors would be in pointing it out.
I am of the opinion that good enough is good enough for what I want. If I entered competitions then I may feel different. I am an amateur, my painting style is that of an amateur and I will probably happily carry on in this vein until I find a different way to do things.
Just to show that I have made improvements over time, both of these were painted quickly for a game.
I suppose what I am trying to say is that to my knowledge I am not deliberately going out of my way to improve. It is happening in a more organic way. Funnily enough I have almost stopped watching painting videos on YouTube.
I am actually in awe of the skill of some people. They take the same amount of time to paint an arm as I take to paint a squad (or possibly an army). The final miniature is exquisite whereas mine are definitely at the other end of the scale… I go for the one metre rule… or maybe ten metres with 28mm.
So if you have got to the end of this, you deserve a medal.
Well some of you may remember that a while a while ago I posted that I was in chronic pain. The Doctor was investigating and narrowed it down to Poly myalgia or fibro myalgia. Well after draining about an arm full of blood over the last six weeks he has decided on the former, which thankfully is treatable.
So I am now on about an 18 month to two year course of steroids. I started on Wednesday and by Friday the pain had pretty much gone. Because I am a pillock I did too much yesterday so today I am taking it easy 😉
So, because I am going to be on steroids long term then I am going to also have to go on other medication to counteract some of the side effects.
So there you go folks, a huge thank you to the people who got in touch it really did help me realise that that there was a light at the end of the tunnel.
Well if you remember I was commenting on the fact that we had written to a load of companies to ask if they would be willing to support us. Of the nine letters sent, one, with sadness, said they couldn’t help. Which is absolutely fine, I am just pleased they replied.
However, the big news is… I wrote to Games Workshop and lo and behold they replied within the day. To cut a long story short they are sending me a school starter pack.
So a big shout out to them. The caveat is that it is their way to hook kids in. I recognise that and accept it. But at least they are supporting us.
Bogenwald 