Progress Report: Monthly recap

Wow, it has been a month already since the last post.

This has been a very busy month and not much progress in terms of painting. Why?

First: Diablo

Diablo 3 releasing patch 2.1 has been one of the time sinks that has kept me far from the Man Cave. I have spent too much time squishing demons, undead and anything else that moved into a fine paste. For those curious about it, most of the time has been leveling a Season character, a Witch Doctor. It has been quite fun but in retrospect, that time could have been better spent painting or at least split between the two activities.

Second: Trip back home

We travelled to our place of birth in sunny Gran Canaria, Canary Islands (Spain) to visit family and friends for a week. Extremely hot weather now that we are used to the usually cold and rainy British weather. Main highlight of the trip has definitely been having the opportunity to play a couple of roleplaying sessions with some of my best friends and meeting for the first time some of their usual crew. A wonderful bunch of people (miss you guys!). 

We were playing with the Pathfinder rules (basically Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 with some changes and improvements) set in the Moonshae Islands of my beloved Forgotten Realms campaign setting. Both sessions were great as David, my lifetime buddy and fellow roleplayer did an amazing job running it and coping with my overly destructive character, a beast of a barbarian with an oversized giant sword that hited like a truck, specially when enraged.

All in all it was an enjoyable trip but completely exhausting because of the amount of people we had to meet with. Our schedule was very tight, often meeting with different people for breakfast, lunch, having a coffee mid afternoon and dinner.

There is still hope for painting however

A new store called LVL UP (link to their Facebook profile) has opened in Bournemouth. They have a playing area and a very helpful and friendly crew. They try to accommodate a lot of systems by having days assigned to them and on Fridays they are organising a Warmachine/Hordes Journeyman League. 

It is a league format designed for introducing new players to the game by starting with the starter box for your faction and gradually increasing the amount of points. It is very nice to have this sort of events locally (I am a reasonably new player as well). It is specially good that in Journeyman Leagues you get game points for playing games against different people and also hobby points for painting your models. It definitely suits my competitive nature as now I feel a lot more compelled to paint in order to score a few extra points every week. 

So far, Sorscha has been undefeated as her feat is a bit overpowered in such a small format. She will probably decrease her effectiveness as the games get bigger. 

So, anything painted at all?

Yes, of course. As I tried to score some hobby points on the first week I have managed to finish the Juggernaut from the starter box and I have started working on Sorscha (I intend to finish her later this week).

Juggernaut

I am going to start giving some positive and negative feedback to myself in order to encourage improvement. From positive to negative it would be something like: 

1. I am really proud of how the Ice Axe ended up looking. Fairly easy to do as well: VMA (Vallejo Model Air) Steel as a base colour in the axe, followed by some drybrushing of VGC (Vallejo Game Color) Glacier Blue and VMA White. After that, a gentle dose of Gloss Varnish was applied and before it dried some Crushed Glass from Secret Weapon Miniatures (the same product I use for the snow in the bases) was sprinkled over it. I then sealed it again with some more gloss varnish using the airbrush.
2. I also like how the base ended up looking. Maybe I should strive for a more transparent look on the snow in order for the rest of the base detail to be clearer. 
3. Chipping and weathering are ok. Still not 100% happy with the end result but I managed to use pigments without causing a disaster as when I was painting the Destroyer. Some more practice and also experimenting with alternative ways of doing it is in order.
4. Oil washes. I need to improve my usage of oil washes. I think they are way better than acrylic washes and I have managed a way of wiping out the excess without leaving traces of cotton buds everywhere. However, it is still a bit of a messy step and I feel that controlling a bit more where to put the wash instead of washing the whole model would definitely help. It basically killed most of the previous work in highlighting different shades of red which I was fairly happy about.
5. White parts and to a lesser extent red ones are still a bit too dark after washing and weathering but better than in the Destroyer.

I recently got some of the new Vallejo Game Air paints which will probably streamline the red layering process a bit. Some experimentation will be done in the next Warjack to be painted (as Sorscha is currently in progress but is too small to actually be able to do layering with the airbrush).

That's all for now. Let's hope this doesn't end being a monthly instalment and I post a bit more often than that.