The afternoon before christmas eve I made a long car-drive to the Netherlands to pick up a Christmas gift for my oldest daughter. I decided to kill the time listening to music, snapping some pictures of the snow landscape (which you can see below) and thinking about 2010...

These days blogs are full of plans and resolutions for the new year: people make plans for armies and projects they want to complete in 2010. And what will be up to? Honestly I don't know yet.


2009 was a year with very little painting time: my youngest daughter was born in December of 2008 so having two kids consumed most of my spare time last year. The time I had left for painting was mainly consumed by some lower quality paint work, such as my Ultramarines. The plan was to start playing Warhammer 40k again somewhere in November, but my army is still too small for that. I decided to keep on building my army until it's big enough to play a few games with more unit options, rather than having to field 1 HQ and 2 Tactical squads in my first games.


I finished only three showcase level pieces this year, of which only one is actually a serious attempt. In April I did the Infinity figure 'The Shrouded' (which I still didn't show on this blog I just noticed). This figure had been sitting on my desk for over a year, and I decided to finish it as a competition entry for the Red Devil painting competition over at MiniArtCon 09. The figure had some strong points, but some bits, like the armor were rushed and had too many mistakes on them. After the summer I finished two more showcase figures: an Infinity Naffatûn and a Confrontation Drune Red Karnagh. I'm very pleased about the Infinity, but it was rather an experiment: I used a lot of contrast and a zenithal lighting way of highlighting. Because of that it isn't as smooth as it was supposed to be, but it still looks good in my opinion. The Drune on the other hand is really a piece which is worth of participating in a painting competition. I'm very proud of it.

In 2009 my theme was "I paint what I want to paint", meaning whenever I wanted to quickly slap on some paint on a figure which is meant for gaming, do something experimental or paint up a showcase quality miniature, I simply did it. That's why 2009 was also full of projects which were left behind halfway and then picked up again afterwards. I had a great time painting, although it was so limited, but when I look back at 2009 I'm not completely happy about what I have achieved. It's basically a mishmash of miniatures and half-finished projects.


So for 2010 I will need to get things straight. I'm not 100% sure, but I think I will pick up serious showcase quality painting again next year. I have a lot of ideas in my head and a huge list of great miniatures I want to paint. But this will mean my Ultramarine army will have to wait a bit longer for their first battle.

Anyway happy holidays and I will probably be back early 2010 with a blog post on my plans for the new year, I just need a bit more time to think about it. I've also made a top-10 list of great painting related things of 2009, I'll publish these whenever I finish them. And I hope you enjoyed the pictures :)

And what are your plans for the new year? Please let me know by commenting.

Just finished the armor of one Terminator, the other four need some more layers.

I'm pretty happy with the overall textured look...

As mentioned in previous posts (this one for example) I'm painting up a unit of Deathwing Terminators for the online painting competition at Bolter & Chainsword. Basecoating and shading is done on the unit. I've used quite some bits from the Dark Angels upgrade sprue together with some icons made with my green stuff press mold technique.

The guys at Massive Voodoo are hosting which is probably the craziest online painting comp ever. The requirement? Sculpt and paint a ball!

No I will not participate :) but I'm really looking forward to some end results. I guess we'll probably see some super blending and special effects. Oh yeah the first prize is a crate of beer :)

Part two of the tutorial is done... both videos are posted here.

This little thing is all painted up, and I'm quite happy about the way the colors came together.

As you might have read in the first post about this bust, it's actually a test figure for a unit of Deathwing Terminators. The unit is already fully assembled, primed and basecoated. So expect more Deathwing real soon.

I'm getting more and more involved in the YouTube community the last couple of days and it really makes me want to create more videos.

I've wanted to post an overview of my desk for a while here now, but doing this with pictures and text will take up a lot of time, so I did a quick video on the subject.

I got some additional questions and remarks after posting my "testing out green stuff press molds". So I decided to make a tutorial on this. I wanted to make a video for YouTube for a while, so this was a great excuse :)

I've uploaded part 1 already, still working on part 2 (filming is finished). Click the image below to go to the video on YouTube:

Crisis 2009 was held on Saturday 7 November at the Metropolis Conference Center in Antwerp, Belgium. Here's my report with highlights from the show itself and the painting competition.

Crisis when I arrived, the usual busy atmosphere.



Here are some shots of the Smart Max booth, with their miniature line Smog. Their booth was very dark, difficult to take good pictures or even look at the minis. Anyway this is good quality stuff, large scale, and quite expensive too.






At the Freebooter stand it was business as usual. The eyecatcher this time was the new undead figure "Monsieur Mort".



Otherworld miniatures was at the show for the first time. A nice range of good quality metals. I also decided that their skeletons were the best I've ever seen. I almost bought them but then decided to spend my money at the next booth...




Which was the one of Black Scorpion Miniatures. I picked up their set of four undead pirates together with the captain. It cost me 10 EUR, now that's what I call good value!




Of course their was plenty of room for large demo tables.


This was one of the nicest tables I've ever seen, actually it was some kind of board game instead of a wargame. This Victorian town and the miniatures (mainly vampires) was painted entirely in gray, and very detailed.



Two shots from the Warhammer 40K demo table by XHammer, a gaming club from Antwerp. They won second prize with their table, well done guys.



Now onto the painting competition. This year it was held in another room than usual, which wasn't a good idea in my opinion. In the past the room was close to the toilet area and the room with second hand stuff, so everyone spotted it easily and visited the competition. But not this time, there weren't even signs pointing to the new location. And on top of that the doors were closed during the judging which started at 13.00h and ended at 17.00h. So most people didn't even have the chance to see the competition. Isn't a painting competition about attracting new people to the hobby? Or to show off the quality of painters which visit the show?...

Here's an overview of the single fantasy category, usually the toughest one.



Some single figures from that category.






Two masterpieces by Brenda Gosman, who went home with the best of show award once again. Well done Brenda :)




My Red Karnagh Drune :)



Diorama category.



Bust & large scale category.




Single SF category. Judging in this category was quite harsh. Actually there was only one prize: a Space Marine of which I don't even have a picture... First up my very own Haqqislam Naffatûn which earned 117 points (13 short for a bronze medal).



An entry by Sven Wichert.



Guido Gunther's entry, he told me he painted the figure in 3 hours... smooth blending nonetheless.



Other entries.



Michael Holzapfel's entry in the 15mm or smaller category, which won a well deserved prize. It's really insanely small if you see it in real life.


Well that sums it up once again. I had a great day, just like every year and got a lot of inspiration. See you all next year.

Work continues on the Deathwing test mini... right now the red areas and the lenses are done. I've also basecoated the Crux Terminatus (the symbol on the left shoulderpad) in black green, I'll highlight this up to a medium green later on. Actually I've painted it in a traditional grey first, but that really didn't suit the beige armor at all.

I might also give the red areas a wash of dark red to shade everything a bit more.

After reading September's White Dwarf magazine I was full of inspiration to paint a Blood Angels terminator. At the same time I got this crazy idea to create a 28mm bust simply by cutting up a miniature.

So it was decided that an Assault on Black Reach would be sacrificed for this experiment. I used my Dremel to cut everything right above the waist line and assembled the mini. After that I've put the figure aside and continued to work on other projects. Maybe 28mm busts weren't the best idea :)

But I picked this figure back up for the Bolter & Chainsword painting competition, known as the 'Golden Bolters'. I decided to paint up a unit of Deathwing Terminators as an entry, but I needed a figure to test the paint scheme on which I had in mind. So my Terminator bust was great for this purpose!

It also allowed me to try to attach some of the green stuff moldings I've created earlier. Works great in my opinion.

For the painting I'm going for a gritty, dirty look. I'm going to achieve this through a 'streaky' way of painting. I got a lot of inspiration from Tim Davis at The Vanus Temple, although my approach is different and I'm going for a slightly higher quality.