The Hobby Explosion. Folding Table, Terrain, and finished Lances, Nyss and Journeyman

  I live in an apartment without a whole lot of room.  Kinda sucks.  I recently built a dining table that you can see in the previous post and my wife and I are rather proud of it.  It's also about 6'' too small for Warmachine.  So I needed a 4x4 table, but instead of making a full table or buying on, I wanted one I could carry around, build terrain into, and have a really nice board.  Right now, our meta is limited to decent terrain, but nothing near the scale of WTC or some of Poppabear's endeavors.  One of these days, I'd like to get into Hirst Art's molds, but not quite to that point yet.  Besides, his are all town molds, and I need more of a desert.  Anyway, I spent all Friday in my powerless garage building this table.  It's 2 sheets of 2'x4', 3/4'' thick plywood with fleece glued to the back to protect whatever surface it sets on.  There's also pallet boards on the edges.  The hinges, well, you can see the hinges.  I screwed on 2''x4''s and cut them to the correct height, then chiseled out the hinge placement.

  So messy, yes... I know...  I'm cutting the edge boards at this point.  I glued the fleece on the day before, and that's the tan stuff you see sticking out in the first picture, and all over the back on the second.  The other option was felt, but I liked the fleece better.

  I'm pretty happy with it, and as can see, it supports some weight too without just flipping up all over the place.  So now, I've got a full scale Warmachine table at home and I love that.  Over the next few weeks, I'll be putting my accumulated terrain work into play on a large scale and fill in a desert/entrenched warzone into the table.  I've got water effects, coffee grounds, tea grounds, insulation foam, trees, all sorts of stuff.  I'm excited.  The other thing I've got to do is stain the outside of the table, install some straps to carry it and some locks to keep it closed and it's good to go.  

  You can see the basic terrain I have now.  This was stuff for A) Kicks and giggles, though I used it later at the Convergence of Cyriss event and it won me the medallion thing, woohoo.  B) To figure out if I'm capable of this or not.  I think I am.  The foam is 2'' thick high density insulation foam that I cut to basic shape with a hacksaw blade, then ran a craft knife down the edges of it multiple times.  Stab it with a screwdriver, pick out random bits and it creates the edges you see in the pictures above and below.  

  Then they got basecoated in cheap yellow acrylic from Walmart.  That's how they sat for a long, long time, and then with the table suddenly getting built, I needed to finish them.  The trenches were a pain to cut out, but a utility knife does decent, then I painted a dark walmart acrylic in there for a mud basecoat.  The trench walls are popsicle sticks glued together.  Then I coated everything in watered down glue to give it kind of a shell.  After that, they got sprayed in 3M Adhesive (the shell keeping the foam from getting ate up by the aerosol).  The rocks are a mix I've been accumulating from hobby lobby's fine collection of ballast.  I think there's three sizes in there, from the fine sand ballast, to the small rocks.  It gives it a pretty varied look.  At this point, I wash the trench walls with my regular model wash, and carefully spray a Krylon british tan over the rocks.  Mix up some more cheap acrylic for a light light yellow, and drybrush the whole thing, and I'm pretty happy with them.

  I figure I'm the only guy with legitimate trenches too.  They're wide enough for small based models, and one trench is big enough for medium based, but anything else can't quite get in there.

  Pretty slick, huh?  To top this all off, I finished my Lances.

  These took some time.  The bases are greenstuff/bark with sticks from the back yard, coffee grounds and tea grounds.  Used, mind you.  Coffee is valuable stuff.  The flag is greenstuff I modeled.  I tried to do this awhile back for a different unit, and for the life of me, couldn't build a flag.  It helps if you spray a flat plastic surface in a non-stick cooking spray.  Makes it hecka easier to greenstuff anything, really.  Rolled it out flat, cut the shapes and then wrapped pieces around an alan wrench to hold the flag in place.  The stitch marks were poked in with a hobby knife.  I'm pretty happy with how these guys turned out.

  While I was working on these guys, my wife decided to tackle the Journeyman.  We posted pictures of that the other day, but here's the completed one.

  I haven't thought of a better name for her than JediAnakinSolo's wife.  I'm just going to start calling her JediTahiriVeila.  See if anyone gets it.  If you haven't noticed, it matches my blue Cygnar not at all.  In fact, it's pretty nearly exactly what I painted my Khador.  I don't care.  I really like it and don't mind it standing out at all.  Gives it some flavor.

  To top it all off, she ended up wanting to do something crafty or artsy last night, but couldn't decide on anything for a bit, until she sat down and saw the unassembled Nyss in front of her.  I have six already basecoated (in horrible colors, according to her), but had just got the units to flesh it out to a full Nyss unit.  She decided to tackle those.  Four assembled Nyss and a wife with hands glued together amidst green stuff, and we went ahead and started painting them.  She picked all the colors, pretty much ran the show until we got to the base.  The orange, white, light blue, all of it.  I think the native american skin tone attempt was more my idea because neither of us like the fluff Nyss shades.  Cylena, we wanted to be different, so she's african, and we think it turned out pretty well.

  The original plan for the fall leaves was to be crushed eggshells, an idea I saw on... rayofpaint's blog, I think?  So she'd been saving up eggshells for me for month now, and I crushed them all up, and we ran to walmart for more acrylic for terrain and food coloring to dye the eggshells.  On the way in, I had the idea to stop by the spice rack.  Pffft.  Throw your eggshells away.  We bought crushed red pepper flakes from the Great Value brand and mixed it into some our ballast mix at a 3:1 ratio.  I really like how they turned out.  A couple of these guys (3 to be exact) have a little tree with them.  The trees were from a package of them at hobby lobby that I found on sale.  I green stuffed it in, and scattered the CRPF over the top.  Kind of my beta for forest terrain on the table.  I like how it turned out, and I think we'll see more of that in the future.  Overall, I really liked my wife's choices of colors and intuition on these guys, and a 10 man unit gets painted waaaaaay faster when you have two people doing it.

  That's all I've got today folks.  See you around later this week and hopefully we'll have some table progress.

Realizing my wife may become a better painter than I am.

  Yesterday's batrep at the FLGS was without pCaine for the simple reason that my Lances were on the painting table.  Since eKrueger was who I ended up fighting, that probably worked out in my favor.  Still, I want to get them done, and the bases are already there, it's just the models left.  I think basepainting is the hardest part.  That's when nothing is shaded, there's not even a wash, it's just getting the base coat down.  It's probably the easiest part of the whole process, physically, but it's so boring.  Nothing looks all that great at first, and especially on a model as decent sized as the Lances, with all the detail, that first coat of tan on three models takes forever.

  I've been needing a Journeyman for awhile now, and have been proxying pStryker for far too long.  I finally grabbed the female model and told my wife that if she wanted to, she could paint that one.  She painted Megalith with me while I painted a Woldwarden awhile back, and it turned out quite well, and she doesn't talk about being artistically challenged anymore either.  She asked if she had to stay within my paintscheme, and I told her it was up to her.  She dug through my paints and decided the Journeywoman was going to be rolling with Khador equipment today.

  Not bad, at all.  I'm very pleased with my wife's 2nd attempt at painting.  He primary hobby right now is jewelry, and the piece that our journeywoman is standing on is a pendant thing that she didn't like the color of, so I built a green-stuff pillar under it, and based colored it orange.  She ran tan across the whole thing, added in silver to the jewelry piece and picked out a couple of points with red.  She then basecoated the model itself in I think four different colors.  Everything turn out pretty well, and I'm especially proud of the cloak.  It doesn't go with my Cygnar scheme at all, but I'm pretty ok with that.  The model's a fantastic model with solid rules, and it's probably going to end up in my lists a lot more simply because she painted it.

  Mine's turning ok too.  I think.  I'm still running a kind of Ft. Falk color scheme, though I had yet to use any of the brown.  The Lances have a lot of different parts to them though, and I finally threw some in.

   There's some rough edges in there, but a lot of that will go away with the highlights.  Right now, I'm pretty excited with how they're turning out.  I worried a lot about what to paint the horses, but then realized that they aren't blazers and you really can't see but a tiny bit of the horse.  So they're all three Mustangs.  The third one isn't pictured.  He's kind of different, and I want to see how he turns out before he gets posted.  Hoping to have a completed status on these guys here soon.

  I managed to drybrush my Boomies while these guys were drying before the wash.  I need to highlight them yet and seal them and get the tartan lines painted and they'll be done.  Idk what I'll do after that.  Stormblades could use finishing, ATGM could use finishing...  There's a lot to do.  Finally getting back into a painting rythm though, so that's nice.  I think Jonas Murdoch will be my wife's next paintjob.  We'll see.  But overall, pretty productive painting last night.