Discussion Question

My friend Art asked an interesting question this weekend. I'm posting it here to solicit discussion, so please post a comment! This will also be a good way to tell if people are actually reading this.

If your house burned down and your miniatures were destroyed, what would you do? Would you re-start your same army (or armies)? Would you try to re-build them exactly as they were? Would you just start a new army? Would you quit the hobby entirely?

The Second Floor Dungeon

I played a game at the Dungeon II in Alsip this weekend. It was my Space Wolves against my friend Jason's Chaos Space Marines. I lost, but it was a fun game. I'm still learning how to use my Blood Claw bikers to there fullest potential. They seem more useful in a fire support role rather than a assault role, but that +2 berserker charge is just too good to pass up. I took out my first Land Raider, so I feel good about that.

There was also some guy there doing demos of WarMachine. I've always been curious to try this game, but have been ambivalent about the miniatures. They're kind of cool, but they also have this cartoonish quality about them that I'm not too fond of. I suspect that this game was created with players of Magic, The Gathering in mind. There are way too many spells, cards, and special rules involved for my taste. Do even get me started about the insane amount of math involved.

All in all a good night at the Dungeon. I picked up another blister of flamers, didn't break the soda cooler like last time, and even got some bits off Mike, the manager. Unfortunately, I didn’t face my usual arch- foe, Art Olsen, but there is always next time...

Oh right! This Blog is about my Thousand Sons. Well, there are completely ready to prime, I'll probably do this tomorrow. I tried gluing together some of my flamers last night. Again, I think that I'm just used to gluing plastic together, because I find gluing metal parts to be so tedious. It just seems to me that super glue's drying time increases exponentially the more you use. Yes, I know that's obvious, but I've been using a lot to make sure I have strong bonds. When I use Testor's plastic glue I have to use less, so it dries faster. It took me ten minutes to glue one arm on one flamer and another five to glue one arm on another. I ended up just proping the arm up with a spare base and walking away.

I plan to do a whole lot of painting this week, but it will mostly be my front room walls (Living room walls for you non-Chicagoans).

Plugging along...

Well, my five minute a day routine has been working pretty well. The only thing I have to do now is drill out the barrels on my bolters. Then I'll be ready to prime.

But before I go into that, let me say this. One decision I had to make when I started this project was whether or not to glue on the bolters before I painted them. With my Space Wolves, I glued on the bolters before I primed and painted them with the rest of the model. This made it a little difficult to paint in the details on the chest. If you've ever painted Space Wolves, you know how much more detailed their chest plates are than normal marines. This time around, I decided to paint the bolters separately. Thousand Sons also have detailed chest plates, so I want to make sure I didn't have to paint around a bolter to get to them.

It's a little difficult to glue the model together w/out the bolter, though. When I put together my Space Wolves, I glued the bolter to the trigger, or right, hand hand and let it dry. Then I glued on the left hand. Everything fit together pretty well. It took me a while to figure out how to put the model together in a different way. If you're not careful, the two hands don't line up and the bolter ends up crooked. The best way I figured out is to glue on the right hand, let it dry, hold the bolter in place, and then glue the left arm on while holding the bolter in place on the other arm. We'll see how this all came out when I glue the bolters in place (which won't be for some time).

Allow me to rant now. It's not hard to drill gun barrels out. It drives me nuts when people don't drill out their gun barrels. Yesterday, I was looking at some guy's miniature gallery. He was a pretty decent painter, but none of his barrels we're drilled out! It just ruined the look of his army.

Wow, I feel a little stupid about getting worked up about something so minor.

Anyway, I'll be at Dungeon Games in Alsip on Saturday night. I'll be playing my Space Wolves, though.

Five Minutes a Day

I lead a very full life. It's sometimes tough to find a large block of time to devote to just sitting down and work on miniatures. I really enjoy painting, but I enjoy time with my son and my girlfriend even more.

I have for a long time recommended to my fellow miniature painters (usually people who had some excuse for unpainted armies) that if they have a workspace set up, they could sit down at anytime to paint, even if it is for only five minutes a day. The idea is that they only need to spend a few minutes a day, and whatever they did will add up in the end.

I decided to actually take my own advise and spend at least five minutes a day working on my Thousand sons. Some days it was hard and all I could do was exactly five minutes. On some days it was impossible, like when I went out of town this weekend. Other days, I was able to squeeze fifteen or thirty minutes. Working on this Schedule I now have four Thousand sons glued and ready for priming, the remaining pewter helmets trimmed and filed, and one flamer ready for gluing. This may not seem like a lot, but if I had waited to try and find a spare hour or two, none of it would have happened.

Apologies all around

I just realized that my comments section was set up so that only registered users to Blogger.com could post. My bad. I've fixed that, so comment away! Seriously, I'd love to know that people are actually reading this.

More WD, (no) pictures

Well, there may be no articles about Thousand Sons in White Dwarf 312, but there are two pictures of Thousand Sons armies (See pages 100 and 128). The one on page 128 isn't the studio army, either.

I was disappointed to see that in his "In & Out" list for 2006 Eric Sarlin, the US editor considers Blogs "out" and Internet Comics "In" for 2006. I guess I should get drawing. Also out for this year, drybrushing. That's fine because stippling and blending are in.

I'm trying to avoid ranting about how poor the writing has gotten in WD, but man, who edits this stuff? The articles out of the UK studio seems fine, but the stuff written in the US is just unbearable. Like the article "Sisters of Battle" about women who play 40K. Great idea; terrible article. "A word in your ear" was actually pretty good this month, but that column has stunk since they started it. Don't get me started about "Dirty" Steve and Echoes from the Warp. Ugh.

OK, no more ranting.

So last night, I had every intention of going into Gamer's Paradise and only buying White Dwarf and some paint. I told myself that I should only buy miniatures after I've finished the ones I was working on. Unfortunately, the powers of chaos would not have it. They were having a "buy one get second one half-off" sale, and they had only two blisters of Tzeetch flamers left. I'm so weak. I walked out of the store with White Dwarf 312, two blisters of flamers, and three pots of paint (Midnight Blue, Regal Blue, and Ultramarine Blue). The flamers are nice models, I'm just not sure which arms go with which bodies. I picked up the Midnight blue, but I think it may be a little too purple for Thousand sons. I'll probably just use it on the Flamers.

What's a painting Blog without pictures? Well, you're looking at it. I've had a couple of requests for pictures already. Unfortunately, I don't own a camera. I do take pictures, but usually with a disposable point and shoot. This isn't really a problem, because there isn't much to see right now. Down the line, I'm going to start looking pretty stupid if I don't get some pictures posted. I do know a couple of digital camera owners, so I'll see if they can hook me up.

White Dwarf 312

I just picked up the new White Dwarf last night. I haven't finished reading it, but so far, no articles on painting Thousand Sons.

More on this as it develops...

I might as well start with what I have so far. I only have one box of Thousand Sons and an extra chaos sorcerer. I also traded with a fellow Adeptus Windy City member for some metal Dark Angels Veterans (Which I plan to turn into more socerers, Thanks Jason!) .

I started putting together my Thousand Sons and I have to say they are an incredible pain. Maybe I'm just used to working in all plastic. The pewter/ plastic combo seems like a good idea, but sometimes it takes a lot of filing to get them to fit together. It also seems like the quality of the plastic Chaos Marines isn't as good as the regular Marine plastics. I think this has to do with the fact that they are a lot more ornate. Plastic doesn't do as well with super-detailed stuff. Some of the detailing seems a little fuzzy around the edges.

So far, I've glued all the legs to their bases. The sight of eight body-less pairs of legs on my desk lead my girlfriend to ask me if I was building an army based on the Dr. Seuss story "The Pants with Nobody in Them." I've heard more than one person say they were afraid of that story as a kid (Which is funny in itself since the point of the story is to not be afraid of the pants). Maybe I should build an army of just legs and play off the childhood fears of my opponents. After all, the Thousand Sons is an army comprised of suits of armor with nobody in them. Hmmm, maybe they can summon some Star-Bellied Sneetches.

I've started this blog to document my progress with the new Thousand Sons army I'm starting.

I've been working on a Space wolves army since the last codex came out. The problem is that I started putting my space wolves together before I started playing on a regular basis. The result was that I have an army that I'm really happy with aesthetically, but one that doesn't play very well. (seriously I have like a 10:1 win-loss ratio- I know this has a lot to do with my skill as a general, but army selection is a big part of that). I paint at an incredibly slow rate, so I've been spending a crazy amount of time trying to get them to where I want them.

Bottom line is that I'm a little burned out on SWs. So I figured I'd sell my soul to the dark powers. Tzeech and the Thousand Sons specifically. I'm a little shocked to hear that some people think that it's a hard list to play. I looks like I pick another army simply because I like how the minis look.

OK, what's the problem, why are they so hard to play? The list I've been kicking around in my head would be a lord on a disc, two squads of TSons (w/ sorcerer ACs), one squad of flamers, one of Screamers, a defiler, a predator w/ all las cannons, and a dread w/ las cannons and rocket launcher. I haven't added the points on this yet or decided on wargear/ gifts, etc... I was thinking of dumping the disc and giving my lord a squad of chosen.

I'm more of a painter than a player so any help in the strategy department would help.