Last week my second daughter was born. Her name is Feline and she's doing very well. Here's a picture of her together with me and her big sister, Fiona.


Needless to say there won't be many updates in the next few weeks. Anyway: happy holidays!

Antenociti's Workshop is an online store selling all kinds of high-quality materials and tools for scenery building. From grass flock to ruins, they have it all at a really good price.

There's also an extensive articles section on the site, and two articles have caught my attention last week because they tackle two common problems when trying to create realistic looking ground.

First there's an article on ground covered by grass and how to make everything look very realistic: http://www.barrule.com/Workshop/Extras/extras%20-%20Groundwork%20-%20The%20Art%20of%20Flor(a).html

The second article is about creating realistic looking dunes and sand cover: http://www.barrule.com/Workshop/Extras/extras%20-%20modeling%20realistic%20sand.htm

I will have to read more of their articles in the future, because the level of realism achieved is fantastic! Of course I will post the links here.

I mentioned this little side-project in my latest desktop shot post, and here are the details. I've bought this boxed set about a year ago on eBay, but I never opened it. A few months ago I assembled and based the figures, and now I finally started painting them. I'm not really planning to use them for gaming purposes, and a very high-quality paintjob would take up a lot of time so I'm going for a very good gaming standard.

This picture was taken last week when I primed the figures and stained them using a dilluted mix of sepia and black ink.


After that I painted the skin area on all the models. Right now I'm focusing my work on two figures: Aragorn and Frodo. Here's what I have so far:

I'm working on several projects at the moment... so it's time for another desktop shot to give an overview.


In front of the paint bottles are some more Space Marines. They're tacticals with special weapons. On this picture they are only basecoated, but I finished the armour of four of them yesterday, and the others' armour is also nearly done.

At the bottom left you can see the latest addition to my Space Marine force: a Drop Pod. It was a joy to assembly, a bit tricky in times but I think it turned out OK. I used two colors of primer on the pod: black for the inside and the bottom, and white for the outside. At first I wanted to leave the pod in a few pieces to make the painting easier, but in the end I decided to assemble the entire thing in one go. This allowed me to put some extra glue on here and there and create a really strong structure and I avoided the painstaking process of assembling and touching up already painted parts.

In the center of the table (on the two bits of foam) is the Infinity mini I mentioned earlier. Actually this is 60% done, so I should really post a WIP here before it's done :)

And then the group of brownish figures in the center is my latest side-project: the Fellowship of the Ring. I don't play the game, but I'm really intrigued by it and the figures are great. The Fellowship box has been lying around my desk for almost a year now, so I decided it's time to paint this up finally. I'm going for a very good gaming standard. Right now I'm working on the skintones. A WIP post will be dedicated to these figures really soon.