Well, the school year has wrapped up, the Necro is less than a month away, and with the month ending we decided to close our storage account and bring all of my gaming stuff back into the house. In accordance with my earlier plan, I went ahead and inventoried ALL of my uncompleted miniatures so I could set up a priority list of projects and the like.
The horror... the horror...
I decided on a completely rough-stick estimate of 1 hour per model or stand of models, figuring that the drybrush specials will balance the big models and showpieces. I also figured I could reasonably put in about five hours a week with a new baby coming up. Optimistic, I know. So given that, I figured out how many weeks it would take me to work through my stash of models.
10.2 years.
Oh. My. God.
Note that does not include the Minas Tirith models that I need to touch up after my piss-poor painting showing at the Gathering. Oh, or the rest of my Dark Angels company that still needs to be done. My baby will be getting ready to take classes from me in middle school before I'm done!
The scale of this is almost completely overwhelming. I have no idea how to start prioritizing. I need to just cut sling load on a bunch of this stuff, but I don't even know when to begin.
I'm almost depressed. I need to get my brain wrapped around this before I can really proceed. Well, and get cracking on the improved paint jobs for the Necro.
Just don't look at the huge pile of mini boxes...
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Disappointments and new doors
I was all excited about getting the new house in time for the new baby, but it seems that something else was in store for me. My wife ended up losing her job, mostly because it just wasn't a good fit for her. This shot the house deal in the head, so we're going to be staying in our condo for a while to come.
On the surface this should be terrible, but I've been at peace with it. This gives my wife the opportunity to find a job for which she is better suited, and frees up all of the money we had slated for the house for more investments. That may end up with us having a much larger down payment available for the summer, so perhaps it is not all for ill on the housing front.
The down side of this is that without knowing that our housing situation will change, we need to get our little condo ready for a baby. This will likely preclude me from bringing all of my gaming stuff back into the condo for the foreseeable future. I'll be getting enough LOTR stuff back into the house for the Necro in July and continuing to work on Trafalgar, but that's going to be it.
Finally, spring break is wrapping up for me, and I'm finally getting over this cold/flu that struck me down last week. Thus the long delay in actually getting something done with Trafalgar despite not moving. Sigh... why did I have to be sick over a holiday?
On the surface this should be terrible, but I've been at peace with it. This gives my wife the opportunity to find a job for which she is better suited, and frees up all of the money we had slated for the house for more investments. That may end up with us having a much larger down payment available for the summer, so perhaps it is not all for ill on the housing front.
The down side of this is that without knowing that our housing situation will change, we need to get our little condo ready for a baby. This will likely preclude me from bringing all of my gaming stuff back into the condo for the foreseeable future. I'll be getting enough LOTR stuff back into the house for the Necro in July and continuing to work on Trafalgar, but that's going to be it.
Finally, spring break is wrapping up for me, and I'm finally getting over this cold/flu that struck me down last week. Thus the long delay in actually getting something done with Trafalgar despite not moving. Sigh... why did I have to be sick over a holiday?
HMS Guerriere done without rigging
Finally finished working on the Guerriere, with the exception of the rigging. I really should have done some of that before I based it, but I got impatient. I'll try to do that once I've primed the other three ships I've constructed.
The most interesting aspect of all of this was the base. I was kind of torn on this one - the directions in the Trafalgar book give a method that produces a very blue ocean, like what I'd associate with the Pacific or the Mediterranean. I wanted an Atlantic color, though, which would be more grey. So I went with a thinned basecoat of Adeptus Battlegrey over a black primer, followed by an overbrush of Fenris Grey, and finally a light drybrush of Space Wolf Grey over the peaks and around the area the hull would go. I may try white instead of the SW Grey next time, but overall I like the effect much better than the rich blue that the rule book uses.
I also finally got the other three ships built and ready to prime. I'm going to do the US ships with a black primer and the other British ship, along with the sails, in white. I'm trying to leave the masts in the British ship, while putting the other masts into a Starbucks' cup sleeve (putting the masts into the corrugation) for priming.
I also learned an important lesson in construction of these ships - build them one at a time, and don't do it when you're distracted. The masts and sails are just too similar to each other - I ended up putting the wrong sails on masts something like four times while building the USS Essex and my British sloop, and when I finally finished I found I had actually SWAPPED MASTS, and trimmed the mast to fit already. Well, crap. Fortunately, they don't look TOO crazy off, since it is going from a ship-sloop rig to a small frigate rig. But from now on I build one ship at a time, no more.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Moving on in several ways
On Thursday my wife and I got the long anticipated news that the house we had put in an offer for had finally cleared the lenders hurdles (it is a short sale - the two banks are probably taking about a $250K loss on the sale). It's exhilarating and a little stressful - we want to close by April 10th so we can move over Spring Break. We've got to budget our time in the next couple of weeks very careful as a result.
One thing that we're doing is "pre-moving", or staging a bunch of stuff that isn't vital to daily operation into a storage unit we've rented. Naturally, this includes almost all of my miniatures stuff. For one thing, I don't trust movers with it, and it also gives us a chance to look at all of the things that we don't regularly use and make the decision as to whether or not we actually want to bring it into our new house.
Stacking up all of the miniatures and related material that I possess is a truly daunting task. I've already moved about half of my stuff (that which is still in the original packaging for one reason or another) and I've still got a pile that blocks the doorway. While I'm fortunate enough to have a room in the new house that will be a dedicated "hobby room", which I'll be using more than my wife, I'm committed to keeping the volume of stuff I have in there under control.
When I left the Army, I went to work for a company that, prior to employment, gave their prospects a personality test. It was a pretty intense test - I take tests fast and it took me about 90 minutes to finish this thing. Later, I had a chance to look at the results. It pegged me pretty much exactly - I look at the big picture, seek to understand how things work and then apply those concepts to the execution of tasks. But I have a focus problem - I tend to get really excited about a particular project and dive into it, but completion is a real problem - sometimes I can get so caught up in my desire to understand the task that I don't actually DO the task. I also have a bit of "ooh, shiny!" syndrome, where if something else catches my attention I will jump onto that, abandoning the earlier project(s). Thus one of my biggest challenges is actually FINISHING what I start.
That is one of the reasons I started this blog. Taking stock of a project, publicly committing to completing it, and feeling a compulsion to post SOME progress is a very good thing. Of course, sometimes life intervenes, and I need to try to keep my motivation going to actually FINISH the projects.
For the time being, I'm going to have to put pretty much all of my projects on hold. The only minis I'll keep out of storage for the next few weeks are the Trafalgar minis, since I only have five of them and they are really easy to move, plus I'm finding that painting them goes really quick - when I actually do it. Everything else goes into storage.
When they come out of storage, I'm going to try a new tactic - giving myself a self-imposed deadline to complete projects. The idea is to encourage myself to finish my projects while eliminating projects that just aren't that important to me. When I pull these models out, I'm going to inventory them. ALL of them. I'm then going to divide them up into projects of about 20 hours each. I'll then prioritize my projects. That's going to be a heck of a project in itself. But once I've done that, I can get started. Each month, I'll try to FINISH one of those projects, from cleaning and building to table ready, including basing. If I do manage to finish a project, great - I move on to the next one.
If I DON'T finish, though, I get rid of the project at the bottom of the list. eBay, Bartertown, give it to a friend, whatever, that project goes. To deal with my problem of taking on additional projects, if I add another project to my list, then the project at the bottom of the list goes. While eventually I'm hoping to be able to avoid that and just add it to my list without dropping others, I know that with the volume of projects I have right now it will be a long time. Maybe once I get down to less than a year of projects.
Another problem is actually being able to PLAY with these projects. So I'll include terrain projects, and if I don't have the terrain I need to play the game, then I can't do any of the minis for that project until I finish the terrain. This way I'll be able to play any of the games for which I'm actually painting.
All in all, this should be a real eye-opener for me. It is way too easy to just shove all of the extra models I have into a closet and forget about them. If I have them all on a spreadsheet with a running total of how long I think it will take to finish them, I think it will help me to keep my hobby sane without turning it into a job. After all, a hobby is supposed to be fun, and if I'm feeling obliged to do it because of the ridiculous quantity of minis that I have on hand, I need to do something about it.
One thing that we're doing is "pre-moving", or staging a bunch of stuff that isn't vital to daily operation into a storage unit we've rented. Naturally, this includes almost all of my miniatures stuff. For one thing, I don't trust movers with it, and it also gives us a chance to look at all of the things that we don't regularly use and make the decision as to whether or not we actually want to bring it into our new house.
Stacking up all of the miniatures and related material that I possess is a truly daunting task. I've already moved about half of my stuff (that which is still in the original packaging for one reason or another) and I've still got a pile that blocks the doorway. While I'm fortunate enough to have a room in the new house that will be a dedicated "hobby room", which I'll be using more than my wife, I'm committed to keeping the volume of stuff I have in there under control.
When I left the Army, I went to work for a company that, prior to employment, gave their prospects a personality test. It was a pretty intense test - I take tests fast and it took me about 90 minutes to finish this thing. Later, I had a chance to look at the results. It pegged me pretty much exactly - I look at the big picture, seek to understand how things work and then apply those concepts to the execution of tasks. But I have a focus problem - I tend to get really excited about a particular project and dive into it, but completion is a real problem - sometimes I can get so caught up in my desire to understand the task that I don't actually DO the task. I also have a bit of "ooh, shiny!" syndrome, where if something else catches my attention I will jump onto that, abandoning the earlier project(s). Thus one of my biggest challenges is actually FINISHING what I start.
That is one of the reasons I started this blog. Taking stock of a project, publicly committing to completing it, and feeling a compulsion to post SOME progress is a very good thing. Of course, sometimes life intervenes, and I need to try to keep my motivation going to actually FINISH the projects.
For the time being, I'm going to have to put pretty much all of my projects on hold. The only minis I'll keep out of storage for the next few weeks are the Trafalgar minis, since I only have five of them and they are really easy to move, plus I'm finding that painting them goes really quick - when I actually do it. Everything else goes into storage.
When they come out of storage, I'm going to try a new tactic - giving myself a self-imposed deadline to complete projects. The idea is to encourage myself to finish my projects while eliminating projects that just aren't that important to me. When I pull these models out, I'm going to inventory them. ALL of them. I'm then going to divide them up into projects of about 20 hours each. I'll then prioritize my projects. That's going to be a heck of a project in itself. But once I've done that, I can get started. Each month, I'll try to FINISH one of those projects, from cleaning and building to table ready, including basing. If I do manage to finish a project, great - I move on to the next one.
If I DON'T finish, though, I get rid of the project at the bottom of the list. eBay, Bartertown, give it to a friend, whatever, that project goes. To deal with my problem of taking on additional projects, if I add another project to my list, then the project at the bottom of the list goes. While eventually I'm hoping to be able to avoid that and just add it to my list without dropping others, I know that with the volume of projects I have right now it will be a long time. Maybe once I get down to less than a year of projects.
Another problem is actually being able to PLAY with these projects. So I'll include terrain projects, and if I don't have the terrain I need to play the game, then I can't do any of the minis for that project until I finish the terrain. This way I'll be able to play any of the games for which I'm actually painting.
All in all, this should be a real eye-opener for me. It is way too easy to just shove all of the extra models I have into a closet and forget about them. If I have them all on a spreadsheet with a running total of how long I think it will take to finish them, I think it will help me to keep my hobby sane without turning it into a job. After all, a hobby is supposed to be fun, and if I'm feeling obliged to do it because of the ridiculous quantity of minis that I have on hand, I need to do something about it.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Ah... report cards behind me
I have finally sent off all of my report cards, so the mass of grading is behind me. That means I can spend more time on my hobby! Well, not really, since I'm juggling trying to buy a new house for my wife and unborn child, buying rehab projects to fund said family and house, and preparing for the move, not to mention other business related things (you mean I need to have bookkeeping?!? And pay taxes?!?!?).
However, I am taking some time out today to help plan a Indy GT for the Bay Area, which we're looking at holding on the USS Hornet, an aircraft carrier turned museum in Alameda (that's in the East San Francisco Bay Area). We've got some great ideas, and having experienced the GitD, I have some other insights into GT organization.
Anyway, I've also got some more work done on my Trafalgar fleet, though it's not photo ready yet. Once I've graded my tests that I gave on Friday I'll get some work done there.
Time to fly!
However, I am taking some time out today to help plan a Indy GT for the Bay Area, which we're looking at holding on the USS Hornet, an aircraft carrier turned museum in Alameda (that's in the East San Francisco Bay Area). We've got some great ideas, and having experienced the GitD, I have some other insights into GT organization.
Anyway, I've also got some more work done on my Trafalgar fleet, though it's not photo ready yet. Once I've graded my tests that I gave on Friday I'll get some work done there.
Time to fly!
Saturday, March 14, 2009
First ship for Trafalgar!
I am really excited! On Thursday, I received my shipment of four 1:1200 Age of Sail ships from Langton Miniatures, and I could hardly wait. Well, school was interfering, and so today I finally got a chance to put one together. Here is a French built 36 gun frigate that will be used to represent HMS Guerriere, the first British frigate that .
I've still got three more ships, incuding the USS Essex, a ship-sloop, and an oceangoing schooner. But I am thinking that I'll paint the Guerriere before I get rolling on other models.
I'm really excited about playing Trafalgar, so I'm going to getting to work on these ASAP.
I've still got three more ships, incuding the USS Essex, a ship-sloop, and an oceangoing schooner. But I am thinking that I'll paint the Guerriere before I get rolling on other models.
I'm really excited about playing Trafalgar, so I'm going to getting to work on these ASAP.
Monday, March 9, 2009
Crazy insane-o list idea
I was really happy to get Gandalf the White as a prize for getting 2nd General (is that like 2nd breakfast?) at the Gathering, and I've been vaguely considering how to actually use him in a list. Well, my wife and I were watching The Two Towers tonight, and I had an idea hit me - what if I were to take all of my pre-existing notions of what makes a good army and just throw them out the window? Go with an entirely themed army with a completely different philosophy - mobile destruction!
So here is a random possibility - "Dawn of the Fifth Day"
Gandalf the White on Shadowfax
Erkenbrand on horse
Captain of Rohan with heavy armor, shield, and horse
4 mounted Rohan Royal Guard (3 w/throwing spears)
9 Riders of Rohan (4 can shoot bows)
1 Rider of Rohan with banner
600 Points
Total models: 17
Total Might: 8
Bows: 4/14 29%
I have absolutely no idea if this list would work in the least, but damn I think it would be fun. Screw all this surrounding your opponent, outnumbering him and outmaneuvering him - this list is all about charge into the teeth of his line, blow the Horn of the Hammerhand, break through with a Heroic Combat and lay waste to his squishy bits! With a horse mounted Gandalf-bazooka! The only thing I'm really tempted to do is put in ANOTHER mounted Captain of Rohan instead of some riders.
This will require some thought...
So here is a random possibility - "Dawn of the Fifth Day"
Gandalf the White on Shadowfax
Erkenbrand on horse
Captain of Rohan with heavy armor, shield, and horse
4 mounted Rohan Royal Guard (3 w/throwing spears)
9 Riders of Rohan (4 can shoot bows)
1 Rider of Rohan with banner
600 Points
Total models: 17
Total Might: 8
Bows: 4/14 29%
I have absolutely no idea if this list would work in the least, but damn I think it would be fun. Screw all this surrounding your opponent, outnumbering him and outmaneuvering him - this list is all about charge into the teeth of his line, blow the Horn of the Hammerhand, break through with a Heroic Combat and lay waste to his squishy bits! With a horse mounted Gandalf-bazooka! The only thing I'm really tempted to do is put in ANOTHER mounted Captain of Rohan instead of some riders.
This will require some thought...
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