July Round up

The fact that I'm writing up July's news round up on the 4th of August really sums up my blogging activity at the moment. Somehow I have lost momentum and I'm struggling to get back into it all. I have a ton of work on my hobby desk and I have finished a couple of projects but I find it hard to find some time to make some nice articles of it all.

I'm working on my Waaagh almost daily but the sheer numbers and the level of detail I want to put in every model makes it a slow process. In July I finished 10 Boyz and 2 Nobz, I have acquired some new models and assembled and based those.

My blog is still attracting a lot of people thanks to Google. People look for something that happens to be on my blog and they then stick around to have a look at all my other stuff. The Linked-within widget is priceless! I also had some of my articles linked on some forum so all and all it wasn't a bad month considering I only posted three articles for the whole month.

I got a lot of nice feedback on my Boyz and Nobs but my video on "Zagstruk"hardly got any hits nor comments. I guess I took a chance of actually putting my first video together but no one is interested. I have therefor seized recording the project.It's too much work recording and editing, time I can better spend working on models. Too bad but lesson learned.

In august I hope to complete Zagstruk and his 10 men Vulcha squad and I'll get some conversion work done on an old War buggy.

Cheers,
Seb

June Round Up

OMG OMG !!! I really can't believe how fast May has come and gone. It almost seems as if i was hibernating and the whole month went by me.

So what have I been up to last month?
- Well I painted up a small number of Orks for my Tale of 4 gamers challenge. I painted a bit of a mixed bag, 1 Killa can, 4 Boyz and 4 Grotz. I have to admit that because I had spent almost 3 weeks on painting the killa kan I had to opt for the easy way out and quickly painted some smaller models so I could achieve my target for May.

This might need some explaining. 3 other gamers and me set up a "tale of four gamers" challenge in which we have to paint 10 points every month. We broke down the models into different brackets because for example 1 guy is painting Grey knights and I'm doing Orks. If we would use the points for units I would have to paint about 40 boyz whilst the Grey Knight player only has to paint 10. We broke down the models like this:

- 25mm bases: 1 point per model
- 40mm bases: 2 points per model
- 60mm bases/bike bases/small flying bases: 3 points per model
- vehicle / large oval/large flyingbase: 10 points per model

This way every player has to invest about the same amount of time every month to reach their targets.

My greenskins for May

 I have also fielded my greenskins in a couple of 200pnt Kill Team games. I came out on top vs the Grey knights but the dark Eldar were too fast for me and almost tabled me. I also had a game vs Nids and lost that to.

As part of our "To4G"challenge I also had to write a battle report on my game vs the grey knights.I will be using that batrep as a prologue for my Fluff and I'm thinking of posting it hare too but writing in English isn't my strong point.

Anything else happened in June?
Yes, I bought my first finecast model, Another lovely greenskin. I'm not telling which model yet because I'm saving it up for next month when I'm doing a "special" on him and his unit.More later...

So what's in store for this month?
Well, I have to paint up more Boyz but I've started well. I'm painting them in an assembly line fashion now and things are going faster. I have good hope I'll finish my 10 Boyz + nob well before the end of this month so I can start on some ork Kommandos as a treat for myself.

May Round Up

Another month has come and gone. After a very slow blogging month in April I picked up and started posting again although I didn't post as many articles as I would have liked. I only managed to post 10 articles but I must say that I think there were some great articles. Unfortunatley none of my articles got picked up by the bigger blogs out there so no new followers and hits that way.

The articles I really liked and think would be usefull to every wargamer out there this month were:

Painting a Cracking Crackled Paintjob.I found a new product in a scrapbook shop that creates a stunning cracked paint effect so I wrote this article about it.

Undercoat tutorial, not just for beginners. In this article I show some of my undercoatd techniques. Even if you've been a wargamers for years you might still get some usefull tips from this article.

'Ard Boy conversion and 'Ard Boy paintscheme. these are two articles that I had a lot of fun with. The first one is an article on turning a normal Ork Boy into a proppa 'Ard Boy and the second article is me painting up the 'Ard Boy from the first article.

So with these articles and the help of google I managed to get 2.106 pages views and 9 new followers. Last month I said I'd like to get to 70 followers and I nearly made it with the 69 followers i have now. So I'd like to thank all new followers for signing up and hopefully june will bring me a few more followers,...let's aim for 75 followers.

For next month I have some good content lined up. A lot of it will be Ork stuff since that's the new army I'm working on now. Last month I assembled and undercoated over 100 infantry models and they need to get painted. I will also resurect Fantasy Friday and put together 1 or 2 tutorials so stay tuned.

Seb

April Round-Up

It's the third of May today and I'm finally finding my way back to this blog. I have almost been going mad under the sheer ton of work I had to do the last 2 weeks. Therefor I have had little time to touch any brushes of found the time or inspiration to update this blog.

You could say I took a two weeks vacation but now I'm back. I still have some work to do but that should not be as time consuming as it was before.

So what have I been doing over the past 2 weeks that is slightly hobby related?? well, as I said before I'm setting up a "Tale of four gamers"that should run for a year. I'm starting a new army or should I say WAAAGH! so this is a great opportunity for me to see this through and keep my motivation up. I was just going to start painting whatever took my fancy and so slowly build up the numbers but now I've had to rethink that strategy because I have to play Battles with my Orks every two months.This means I have to have some sort of bigger plan and strategy behind my purchases. I have to make sure my small army list (starts with 200 kill points) expands so that my list will be both legal and usefull when I slowly get to an army of Apocalyptic scale....

I will tell you more about the rules and my 3 "opponents" in a later post. I am really excited about this project and the guys I'm running it with all have their own speciality in the hobby.(as a teaser I will give you one word...ehmm.. no two words "Golden Deamon")

Over easter Maelstrom ran a special promotional offer which I abused greatly. I ordered a ton of Orks so I'm excited to see them arive. I had to make sure I have a steady supply of plastics to convert into greenskins. I can't risk running out of models half way through my "Tale" and then have to rely on companies and the mailman to see if I can reach my monthly targets. It's been fun thinking about my new army because I have to plan short and long term.

Mayday Mayday !!!

On the Blog side of April it was really dissapointing. My job had me working a lot or going to bed early so the last two weeks I managed to post 1 single article just to make sure you knew I wasn't dead.Still I managed to get some decent figures considering I only posted the first half of the month. I still had 30 visitors a day on average even though nothing new was posted. Also I managed to get 60 followers which was my monthly goal.

So what's up in May? I will post more frequently and get back on track. a post every 3 days should be possible. I'm also going to show off more Fantasy figures on the ""Fantasy Friday" and I am working on a couple of tutorials which I think are great and very helpful. So let's see if I can get 70 followers by the end of this month..

Seb

February Round up

Well, that's Febraury come and gone... Time flies. Yes I know that february is the shortest month in the year but it seems as if my painting progress has stood still. I did manage to get some time on my painting chair but not nearly as much as I would have liked.

Work and a little vacation time got in the way. Now the time off has been great, it's always good to get some time away together with your family but work has really been bogging me down. I now have to do the work of three people and just heard that because of cut backs there won't be any replacements or new collegues soon and things will continue as they are. Not a good prospect because I get home knackered and can't be bothered with much more then my dinner and some tv.

But Hey, let's look on the bright side. I did finally get my Space Marine Assault Squad assembled and ready for undercoating but I want to make a little tutorial out of creating flying bases for them and really want to do that well and want to take my time for it.

I also managed to get the hazard stripes on my drop pod, finally. And I'm redoing the battle damage on it. When I looked at it again I remembered why the damage didn't look so good. When I painted the pod I was so bogged down by it and wanted to get it done so I kinda took a short cut and now I realized that I need to do that again so I'm working on it.

My new army the space orks didn't see much brush time although I did get my first Nob finished as a sort of trial version and I'm not unhappy with the colorscheme.

Last but now least on the hobby front I did manage to score my first massacre in warhammer fantasy with the 8th edition. I squared off against a 2000 points lizzardmen army and the poor guy had no luck at all with no less then 6 salamander misfires in a row so they did nothing all game. In the end the only thing he had left was 1 wound on his Slann.

And then the blogging news. I have been really bussy and tried to get as much spare time into painting and modelling that I kinda neglected the blog and it showed. I had about 130 views less then in January but then February had a couple of days less as well. I didn't get much links from other sites and blogs so most hits were from my followers (thank you) and passers by thanks to the kind people that have my blog on their blog roll. I also seem to get a lot of hits from Google. It seems my blog get's first page when you look for "Space marine scout snipers" or "Painting battle damage" so that nice.
I'll try to push out a little further in March and want to see if I can pump up my followers number to 45 and get some links on other blogs again because that really helps.

Seb

January Round-up

That’s it, the first full month of blogging is over and it’s been a blast and a real eye opener. After reading a few interesting blogs myself  I thought it would be fun to start my own blog. The idea was to upload my recent projects and keep track of my ongoing hobby progress.

First I posted some content of which I think it was interesting for anyone to read. A real mix of different subjects. Then I joined the FTW blog group and my Battle damage tutorial was an instant hit and thanks to Ron Sawakowski who posted a link of my tutorial at the top of the FTW blog my own blog got a lot of traffic and before I knew it I had some followers of my own. It was a great feeling that people found my blog worth following and a special mention goes to B.Smoove of A Gentlemans’s Ones who was the very first follower.

I continued posting content, mostly of my Space marines but I also visited many blogs and started a bloglist to keep track of interesting blogs. I have collected a huge mountain of unpainted plastic and my new year’s resolution was to paint up everything this year before I would allow myself to buy something new. Unfortunately I found some inspiring blogs with Orky goodness. Digital waaagh,  A Gentleman’s Ones , Musings of a smurf and Porky’s expanse to name but a few and these blogs gave me the green itch and so I ordered a 40k Ork codex, some nobz and a gretchin unit which I finished recently because I couldn’t resist painting them up. The new year not even a month old and already I had succumbed to the “new model itch-syndrome”….nice.I uploaded my progress of the Gretchin unit. First the bases and later the completed models.

I also took some advise of N++ from wargaming tradecraft he posted a topic on organising your blog to make it easier for the reading public to navigate their way around on my blog and so I took down some pages and will I get them sorted out soon to make them more user friendly. Therefor some of my pages are currently under construction and unavailable. I know I’m only a month in but you can never start improving your site too early.

And then now some numbers…My blog has had 1.575 pageviews already. An amazing amount and largely due to my FtW membership. I’m planning on joining more blog groups but only want to join those that I value for their content and members instead of generating more traffic to my blog.

The top 3 subjects on my blog for this month were:

-Tutorial Painting battle damage = 280 views

-Heavy Bolter conversion = 198 views

-Space marine scout snipers = 95 views

Right now I have 27 followers but I hope to add some more next month when I’ll upload some more content which I think should be interesting. Special mention goes to Papa JJ, Porky and B.smoove for keeping commenting on my blog. Your input and feedback is greatly appreciated!

Thank you all for reading and stay tuned for more warpaint goodness.

Seb