If you have followed the blog for a while you’ll have seen an occasional birthday cake pop up. I use my ‘hobby skills’ to decorate my son’s birthday cake. This year he asked for a minecraft cake, which had to include Steve and a tree.
Obviouly I cheated and used a Minecraft Steve toy, but the rest is just icing. I had fun painting the TNT with food colouring.
I didn’t make a cake for my lad’s 7th birthday, so its nice to be able to this year. I still think the BB-8 cake was my best effort.
I mentioned painting some Crimson Fists in my last blog post. I figured I would show off the complete squad. I have slowly been gaining the new* Primaris marines as I really like how they look, better proportioned than the older ‘firstborn’ marines. My go to Chapter would be the Dark Angels, since their first codex release in the mid 90s. However I felt like doing something completely new for the ‘new’ marines. The Crimson Fists sprang to mind for a few reasons, I like blue, they have some iconic artwork** that has branches across the many editions of 40k, and they have a background reason to have a purely Primaris based force which is what I was thinking of building.
Continue readingIt’s that time of year when I traditionally* look back over last year’s posts and see how I faired against the hobby goals I set myself at the start of that year. I would also set my hobby goals for the coming year too.
However, this year I really don’t feel like it, it is bound to be a disappointing result, the amount of hobby time and completed projects** have been sorely lacking through 2021.
I can remember starting a few different projects last year, and I have a couple of others that I want to get finished from previous years (eek!). But I know I have not achieved either. There is a surprising number of models built over the last year but not painted knocking around in my house, or more likely built and primed, with maybe even a coat of paint or two. There is also a surprising number of draft articles behind the scenes here at Splayedpaintbrush Towers*** that never made it off the drawing board.
So what’s the point of this post? Well I suppose it is just to remind myself that this is a hobby blog about my hobby. The definition of a hobby is an activity or interest that is done for pleasure or relaxation. In others words, I build/paint/play with models for fun. This purpose of this post is to remind us all that it doesn’t matter that project X didn’t get finished as long as you had fun whatever you did do. Sure it’s good to finish a project, but it’s also not worth getting down about either.
Thinking back over 2021 hobby wise, now that I have got to typing this article up, I do remember enjoying a number of things in particular. Some of which made their way onto the blog, some didn’t. So instead of counting successes as finished projects, how about I just list some of the projects I had most fun with last year.
Continue readingI traded some models recently for yet more AT stuff from a mate, because I just can’t resist these awesome titans. My idea behind these was to paint up some already built models quickly to enable a couple of forces to get on the table.
Did you see there mistake I made there? That’s right I said “paint” and “quickly”. If you’ve looked at more than maybe one article on this blog you’ll know that wouldn’t end well. So where did that simaple aim go wrong? What am I up to with Tritonis Titans?
The first snag is that the titans I had acquired were not in the best examples of assembled titans. I had two Reavers, both of whom had awkward or absurd poses and a Warlord that could do with a little TLC. This was not my mate’s fault, he’d got them built second hand too. I think he’d sorted out the Warlord, and made the best of a bad job with the Reavers, but I’ve taken them apart as much as possible to try and re-assemble in more reasonable poses. While doing this i came up with the idea of making custom armour plates for the titans.
overtaken by the dark tideIts the beginning of September, so obviously this is where I tell you all about the massive success in completing the month 1 pledge of my #ATClashOfTheTitans challenge, by Battlebling Store and Maximal Fire Podcast.
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Well…yes, about that, I’m a little behind with my pledge to complete my Warbringer. However, check out what distracted me!
Motorised Radar dish anyone?#ATClashOfTheTitans is a challenge organised by BattleBlingStore and Maximal Fire Podcast to encourage people to paint up their Adeptus Titanicus backlog, or inspire a second Legio to get painted up. Essentially a community challenge to build and paint up some titans. This is running from August through to the end of October.
I’ve got a backlog of titans, hell my backlog has a backlog. So I figured I’d try and ride the #ATClashOfTheTitans motivation train and hopefully get some of my partially built titans finished.
My August challenge is to get the Warbringer titan finished. Its been sat gathering dust on the shelf since April last year. Seriously, I had to brush the dust off before taking this photo:
The green armour is the only part completed. There is a lot of work left in the model yet. Dusting it off is all that’s happened so far, 11 days of August left.
If all goes to plan I’m hoping to have an Arcus Battleline Maniple completed by October, at least a minimum strength maniple anyways. An Arcus Maniple consists of a Warbringer and from two to four Warhounds. If there’s any more motivation left in the pot I might get some knights painted too.
What’s the community part of it? Well, Maximal Fire and BattleBling are encouraging participants to post their progress on social media channels using the hashtag: #ATClashOfTheTitans – as you may have already guessed. Maximal Fire also have discord server (link) and on Wednesday evenings a ‘hang out and hobby’ chat group runs to basically hobby with other folks from around the globe. If you’re joining in the challenge, it may be worth you buying a BattleBling Clash Pack, its got a cool little certificate, some scenery and a clash plaque, but it also puts you in the running for claiming prizes from the BattleBling prize pool. Wednesday sees BattleBling pick out their favourite post from the #ATClashOfTheTitans posts which they’ll award a prize to that person to reward them for their progress.
The clash pack is available from the BattleBlingStore on Etsy.
…and June’s…
…and May’s.
Crikey, I’ve been a bit lax recently on the blog. Life has simply got in the way a bit. I’m still working from home – unbelievably it might be May 2022 before I’m back in the office – and my hobby area has been overtaken by my office. After sitting at ‘work’ all day the last thing I feel like doing is sitting in the same place to do some ‘hobby’. That’s not to say I don’t want to do any hobbying, its just that I can’t face sitting in same place any longer. Working from home has its advantages, but i’m now sick of it. The other thing is that I’m a dad again, we recently adopted a 1 year old daughter, this certainly makes life busy lol.
So what hobby have i done recently?Yesterday my Wave 1 shipment of the Infinity Defiance Kickstarter arrived. I think the UK is probably the last country to get their hands on Defiance*. So this isn’t going to be a proper unboxing post, there are probably a whole host of those across the internet by now. This is just going to be my first impressions as I have a gander inside those boxes.
Rule of Cats #1 – no box, package, or container can be opened in a household with a cat without said cat observing the operation.
And its a nice big box too! Not too big to arouse suspicion, or too much interest from wife and son, but enough to get the official eyeing rolling of ‘not more models’. A good reason to split shipment into two waves right there 😉
Oh my word, where is the year going!!? You may have noticed that my last post was back at the start of Feb and this post is technically still in March- maybe, probabaly, just…depending on time zone. I admit it, there is no plan for this post and frantically rambling to generate some content for March. So just what I have I been up to over the last almost two month?
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A local Infinity gaming group has started running online painting competitions to keep the Infinity hobby alive during the eleventy-third* UK lockdown. Instigated by the local warcor, Lawrence, via the FB group as a good attempt to keep up peoples’ motivation, and morale too. They are a good friendly way to get some minis painted. There’s about two months to get a model painted up for the comp. I used the Sphinx as my entry for the second painting competition – I didn’t complete an entry for the first competition.
Shasvastii infiltration imminent… MORE INFO…
Splayed Paint Brush 