The muster is called, the host assembles, and the peasants showed up as well!

After reappearing with a shameless plug for my first book, it's about time I got back to writing about slapping paint on unsuspecting miniatures. Writing, to be sure! I have not been sitting on my hands for the past months—quite the opposite: I have a finished projects backlog to write about. This is a marked contrast with my usual the pile of shame too unfinished to write about. Anyway, on to a lot of painted miniatures (not all at once). Here's my completely finished (cough—not quite—cough) Bretonnian muster.

If they had a mighty keep inside the Mighty Fortress, they wouldn't need tents to sleep in.

 

Square based and unfazed: my Dwarven army will stomp through The Old World again

My Dwarven army is finished and ready to stomp through The Old World again. To be fully honest I took them out for a spin already (most of them bare-based and some unpainted (heresy, I know)). But having them all lined up and fully painted is just a wonderful sight I wanted to share (and brag about, I'll be honest here ;). Without further ado, here's the lot:

Owning a fully painted army is a Warhammer dream well worth chasing.

Finished my Nighthaunt (army)

My Nighthaunt army is finished. I had to keep focus over the course of this weekend and Monday night (and lost it on a few side projects), but I've managed it. This occasion marks one of the scarce moments I can say I painted every model I bought for an army (excepting one, but  the second Lord Executioner was part of a discount set and bought as conversion fodder so he doesn't count). Now this is what I call a nice start for the new year. Let's open up with a model that came out rather well due to a happy little accident.

Blood for the Blood God? I think not!

What I did during the Christmas holiday (spoiler alert: paint Nighthaunt)

Another year has past and I got so involved in enjoying a holiday I actually forgot to blog the easy and obligatory years retrospective. Maybe I'll get away with it later this month (or maybe not). For now it is time to wax lyrical about my (almost finished) shiny new Nighthaunt army. Lets start with one of my favorite modern miniatures.

Sometimes you just need to give into the urge to add blood...

My 40K armies on parade

After unpacking my Age of Sigmar armies I've spent rather a lot of time creating my dream hobby space. A bit more on that later. In the meantime with the final Billy bookcase assembled I could start unpacking my 40K armies. While unpacking these I got a bit worried that it would be a lot less then my fantasy collection. I've always had a soft sport for fantasy. In the end it turned out to be a good thing I upgraded the living room table in the interim as you can see the troops getting squeezed closer together towards the end of the table (please ignore my irresponsible misuse of the space at the start of the table).

As I got to the back of the table, I discovered I had quite a few more troops then expected.

My fantasy armies on parade

The long awaited move has almost been completed and I'm in the process of building my own hobby Walhalla. While deciding on display cabinets, workspace, lights, decorations and paint racks I took the unpacking of my miniatures as a quick opportunity to show my painted armies on (a private) parade. First up is my Fantasy collection as my 40K turned out not to fit on the table at the same time. Seeing it all together makes me rather proud of my painting production and the quality is getting better all the time too. So to shorten down a long post. Here are a bunch of (badly lit) shots of my Fantasy armies.

The entire lot as they turned up out of their boxes including my two actual Armies on Parade wins (bronze and silver) of which I am (perhaps a bit too) proud. 

Warhammer list building from Fantasy Battles to Age of Sigmar

The first wargame I played (somewhere in the eighties) was based of AD&D rules. My brother bought it at a gaming convention where we were both impressed by a (static) wargaming table featuring a bearded man (who filled his day yelling 'don't touch' at us kids). The AD&D game was chosen because the ready to use counters looked practical and more affordable then the metal miniatures. I remember the game was awful but I can't for the life of me recall its name

Undaunted by this bad experience my brother decided to invest more pocket money in the book featured to the left here,. Yes the start of the addiction for me was Warhammer Fantasy Battles 3rd edition. The book not only contained comprehensible rules for playing wargames, it also featured all the information you needed to play in the back. Points cost per race, special attributes and so on. The AD&D game taught us you could skip dropping pocket money in miniatures by grabbing the lid of a shoe box and making your own cardboard warriors. Our first Fantasy Battle featured four players (no GM) battling with 20.000 points each....

....I'm going to assume that the older readers have by now wiped the coffee of their screens ;) I don't think we ever got past round two, but we did enjoy the spectacular scenery (a grey 110mm diameter PVC pipe serving as a tower and green and brown crayoned paper serving as area terrain). We had some ways to go and the first step consisted of mail ordering miniatures.

My Skaven army takes on a Von Carstein castle

My birthday came up and with my painting station filled with Highborn Aelfs and Grudge of Drong terrain I thought it was high time to buy myself a present at the local GW. I should've worn blinkers... Instead of getting the last few required Aelfs my eyes fell the Skaven releases I missed in the past few years. Pulling my attention back to this force. I hoped to get back to Grudge of Drong, but I have to interrupt with a short sidestep by presenting an overview of my Skaven Army as it stands today, with a bit of style by having them do a fictitious storming of a Von Carstein castle.

A Skaven horde: not the best view for any proud castle owner to wake up to.