Releases

Steampunk fairy by Guild of Harmony. Way too much fiddly details on there to suit my taste, but the sculpt itself is very impressive.
Jabba the Hutt by Knight Models. Not something I'd buy because of the scale (70mm) but still a breathtaking piece!
Helloween Witch by Kabuki Models. Sexy :)
Flytrap Factory, a new manufacturer from New Zealand, takes a very strong start. Check them out if you are into mouslings :)
CMON Annual 2010, I'll get this

Paintjobs

Impressive Kingdom Death conversion on a truly unique base concept, by SuoU.
Black Templar squad by Flameon.
Khador Army in 300 style.
Sardar Tillius by emuse.

Inspiration

Abandoned Chinese theme park "Wonderland".
Industrial Decay Network: a collection of artistic pictures made inside old factories etc.

CMON

What a joy to paint!

I just noticed almost all non-metallic areas are done, so the most time consuming parts are done :)

About a year ago I installed my current painting studio. Time for some cleanup action :)

I'm also going to return to my old habit of working on one project at a time. This is what I call focus :)

That's Nurbald the Sculptor by Rackham. Gorgeous figure, a real joy to paint. I decided to paint the legs separately, you can see them mounted on the left of the picture. I superglued them on toothpicks for easy painting.

Nurbald is going to be a practice in contrast and choice of colors rather than smoothness :)

Here's an overview of the hobby area, on the left you can see a bit of my photo studio and next to it is my display cabinet, which is not shown on the picture.

After my last complaint (read all about it in part 2 of my story) I got promised by GW customer service that before sending another replacement to me, it would be inspected by someone from QA (isn't that their job?) and another person from customer services.

This time I got the miniature delivered in an envelope (previously it was a box), with the addresses written on them by hand. Let's take a look at this "supposed-to-be" flawless figure:

My first reaction was probably the same as yours. How can a figure without a head get through QA????

But then I took a closer look at the envelope, and the head was in there. The blister was opened, so there had been an inspection for sure. But the contents of the envelope got severely battered during shipping. There were a lot of indentation marks on the blister plastic, the paper inlay was even ripped where the head was, so this envelope was probably placed at the bottom of a pile. Besides the head one of the "antenna thingies" on top of the figure also broke of. Good idea to ship this in an envelope GW! Time to check out the casting quality.

The areas which were really problematic on the previous two figures looked okay now: the chest area and the worms on the base didn't have a bubble on the tip of every pointy bit. But a further inspection quickly revealed several big bubbles on the arms. The hair also was damaged by bubbles.


Two other major defects included a part of the base being evaporated by a big bubble, and one of the vials on the mechanical hand having a similar problem.

The cloak had two identical problems to the previous figure: the cloak which is very thin in places, and the corner near the bottom suffering from a bubble. The spine area on the back was also severely damaged during shipping.

This figure also had a small bit of mold material on it, which you might have read about elsewhere. It was hard to picture since it was in one of the recesses in which an arm should be glued, but it appeared as a small pink speck.

I have decided not to ask for a replacement this time. I think I've seen enough of this product to get a good image of its quality. And with this last one they made two very severe errors: bad packaging and sending me a figure with obvious flaws while promising to send a perfect one. I'm now going to try to get my money back, but I'm afraid the only thing I will get back is a voucher of some sort. I'll keep you guys up to date!

vote on CMON

The Chaos sorcerer is almost done. Working on the metallics now. Metallics aren't my strong point, I'm happy about what I did on the shoulder guard, but the metallic symbol on the belly plate lacks contrast.... might get back there and mix in some non-metallic colors, such as light grey.



That's the cool thing about this hobby, after 10 years I'm still struggling to get things right, but at the same time it remains challenging to try out new things :)



With the Chaos Sorcerer I'm not sure what I'll do next. My initial plan was to paint some more GW minis, but my experiences so far with the Finecast rubbish I have received will probably decide different. I also want to keep my schedule free for some upcoming projects, of which I can't say anything right now.

I took a look in my unpainted miniatures drawer, and I'll probably start this figure soon:

by the way if you're a fan of the classic Rackahm line, I discovered the following site: listing every single release:  http://rackhamminiatures.yolasite.com/.