Hello everyone, Corvus again. Yes I know I should be posting more here, looks like I saved up a lot stuff again for another big post.

But I have a good reason this time :) I just got back from my summer holiday. First my family and I spent a nice 10 days in Italy, then we went home for a couple of days and then spent another two weeks at the seaside in The Netherlands (like we do every year).

As you can expect after my previous post the Age of Sigmar box has taken up all of my hobby time last month.

I took the sprues with me to Italy together with a knife, cutters, glue and some other assembly gear. I managed to assemble all Sigmar models and three of the Chaos models. As usual with the more recent GW plastics assembly was a breeze and fun to do.

Then in the last two weeks I spend a couple of nights painting the basic rank & file Sigmarites. Progress seemed slow (only the armour is finished now), but I guess the hardest work has been done already.

Here's what I have so far:

The partially painted Sigmarites, the blue has only been basecoated.

The Chaos characters assembled:

Other Sigmar models, assembled and primed:

This little sheet displays my color choices. So the turqoise is going to be my main color for the shields, shoulder pads etc, while the violet is going to be the secondary color.

But the rest of the project will have to wait a bit since this guy is now waiting to be painted: Belial of the Dark Angels, which is a commission job.

And in between I'm still doing quite some behind the scenes work. The plan is to create a new website and overall look for Corvus Miniatures at some point.
The new logo looks like this, I hope you like it :)

It's that time of year again (yes time flies): Scale Model Challenge is upon us! Just like the last two years I will have a table at the club area together with my regular partners in crime: Maartje, Pascal and Geert. Please don't be shy and stop by for a chat!

In case you missed it, check out my 2013 and 2012 reports and the SMC website.

And did I mention Infinity? Yes! Lately this fantastic line of figures seems to have gotten even better, so I could resist picking up some of the more recent sculpts. These guys are called the Morate Vanguard Infantry. Going for a good gaming quality paintjob here, with the emphasis on contrast. I hope you like them!

Just got home from Painting Crusade 2014 with two trophies! Bronze for my Brood Master and gold for my PC-IX figure which I finished yesterday evening and which was entered in the special edition category. You can see a quick smartphone snap of the figure below, expect good pictures soon, as well as a full report on Painting Crusade later this week.

With 2012 being so packed full of with highlights it would have been very hard to beat that in 2013. When I look back now, I indeed think the year wasn't that remarkable. But don't get me wrong, I think this year I really enjoyed painting more than ever. I spent a lot of time on various projects, all of them with very good results.

Competition-wise I won three trophies: two at Painting Crusade, one at Scale Model Challenge. Both these events are already marked in my calendar for 2014!

A lot of time was put into the miniatures from The Hobbit boxed set. The project still isn't finished, but when it is, I will take decent pictures of all figures. I already previewed some in the last update post. Thanks to the project 2013 was the year I played a wargame again for the first time in quite a while, a trend that might continue in 2014...

Actually I painted quite a few miniatures which aren't shown on this blog... I really didn't put that much in the blog as the last couple of years. That shows in the stats:

When I take a look at the montly statistics there have been quite a few breaks, espacially the summer months June, July and August with zero posts. Summer holidays have something to do with that, together with some commissions and the tedious work on the horde of Goblins from The Hobbit set. September and October was somewhat better, but November and December only had two posts...

For me blogging is just another way to motivate myself. If it will turn into a job like "I must write one blog post every week" then the fun and motivation will go away very quickly I'm afraid. Like I said at the start of this post, I had a lot of painting fun in 2013, but that didn't really show on this blog.

Because of that, and also because I didn't feature any big events like the German Games Day this year, I'm back at the same visitor number I had in 2011 (this confirms my initial statement that 2012 was quite exceptional :), around 22.000 that is. The chart below also shows that there was much more activity here in the first half of the year:

But now for some good news, the audience of my Facebook page and YouTube channel keeps growing. On Facebook I now have 512 followers (338 in 2012). YouTube audience almost doubled: from 1150 last year to 2250 now.

To conclude this post I'd like to look forward to 2014, which in a way will be a continuation of 2013. Two major competitions are on the calendar: Painting Crusade and Scale Model Challenge, painting wise it will again be a mix of some showcase projects together with some gaming quality stuff. The main target will be the same: have some fun :)

Hello everyone, first of all happy 2014! I hope you got some great painting time in 2013 and that this year will even be better. I'll be posting my traditional year statistics post soon, but first something else:

I've been neglecting this blog a little bit over the past few weeks, so let's grab this opportunity to take a look at what I've been up to lately. As you can see on the picture below there's a bit of everything on my desk now, especially gaming-quality stuff.

I've been doing quite some work on the Hobbit set lately. I've even played a few scenarios :) I expected another boxed set to come out with the new movie, but alas only new models and a new manual, so my Unexpected Journey will probably end when I played the last scenario.

Here's the finished scenery:

And then some quick shots of some of the finished Good models. When everything is painted I will post a big showcase with decent pictures. I would also like to say that I recorded the entire painting process of Gandalf on video. I'm currently editing this so expect a painting tutorial video on him soon!

What's still left to do:

Like I already said I played the first few scenarios. The dice rolling, measuring, moving miniatures, it felt great to play a wargame again after quite some time.

So good actually that I'm seriously considering getting back into 40k. I have an Imperial Fists army in mind. Considering my painting speed this will probably take quite some time to complete, but I'm going to try it nonetheless.

Here's a test model I've completed a while ago:

The army will probably consist of models I like to paint, instead of making a very competitive one. I will of course keep track of the progress of this project here on my blog.

One last thing I'd like to share is that I recently cleaned out the cupboards and drawers of my painting desks. There's a lot of stuff that I don't need any more, so this will be sold on eBay. I still need to sort out all the pictures and look up posting costs, but when that is done then there will be many interesting deals available for everyone. Here's all what I've put aside:

See you in the next post!

Today I took part in a small painters gathering at Gert's place. A good mix of paints, miniatures, coffee and cookies :D

The first painting competition of 2013 is already over: Painting Crusade in Brussels. I managed to bring home bronze for my display of Dark Vlad and Toxic Kid in the confirmed category, and a silver for my Toxic Spring figure in the special category in which you could enter with last year's exclusive figure.

A picture report is in the making. I also did quite some filming so a short clip for YouTube will also be made, hopefully later this week.

Special thanks to Gert to be my companion for the day, and congrats on your bronze as well ;)

Here's a picture of the minis and their trophies and this year's special edition figure.

The CMON Annual finally arrived. I quickly skipped to page 98 to see my own work first :) A review will come soon.

My package from CMON was intercepted by customs. Apart from the import taxes I had to pay extra, those guys at the customs office messed up packaging the book again properly, so one of the corners got damaged :(

2012 was a great year for me, mini-painting wise. I have built up a lot of experience and motivation which I will certainly put to good use in 2013, but that's something for another post. First let's take a look back:

Site stats

The audience of my blog keeps growing! The number of visitors has increased by 50%: 33 000 visitors as compared to 22 000 in 2011. The number of people who are following this blog with Blogger has gone up from 240 last year to 328 now.

The four peaks in the above graph are caused by event reports: Painting Crusade IX late February, Games Day Germany in August and then Scale Model Challenge and Crisis in October and November. The Games Day report was the most popular, but the number one page in 2012 is, just like the year before, the Cloud Backdrops. About one in ten visitors go here. I'm assuming there are a lot of non-miniature painters also using these backgrounds for photography purposes because in the top 10 search keywords there are 6 which are a variant of "photography background". The other four keywords which lead most people to the site are "corvus miniatures", "fantasy miniatures", "mantic elves" and "han solo". Especially that last one is a realy surprise for me. Of course I painted the miniature in 2011, but there's probably a ton of other pages about this Star Wars character... very strange!

The other social media platforms where I am also active gained a lot followers as well:

• YouTube: 1150 subscribers (350 in 2011) +220%
• Facebook: 338 followers (186 in 2011) +80%
• Twitter: 225 followers (125 in 2011) +80%

In total there were 60 blog posts. It has been very quiet in May and April with 1 and 2 posts respectively. The various Scale Model Challenge reports made October the busiest month with 10 posts.

Achievements

After several years without any important victories, 2011 seemed to start a wind of change with a golden trophy at DUZI that year. And I succeeded in continuing this positive change in 2012, with two silver medals: one at Painting Crusade and another one at Scale Model Challenge. Another victory was achieved in the BaneLegions painting competition at WAMP, where my Ulric The Defiler took the special "Best Mood" prize.

I also painted my best rated figure on CoolMiniOrNot last year: Dark Vlad with a current rating of 8.8. It even appeared in the top last 7 days, which is quite an achievement in my opinion.

Events

It was a busy year in which I visited six events. You can read all the reports on this page. I also actively took part in two events: Conflict and Scale Model Challenge, where I did painting demos. I got to meet a lot of interesting people in the community and made some new friends.

Best of...

I started 2012 with a new feature on my blog, called "Best of" :) I expected that it would make it a bit easier to compile a best off list at the end of the year, but that really didn't help. There's not really something in the list that I would call "best of 2012".

Release wise I think this was a mediocre year. I remember Eden: The Game by Taban Miniatures being on of the highlights of the Crisis show I visited, and of course Games Workshop did another great job with some of their plastic kits (and the boxed sets), but apart from enjoying seeing jaw-dropping releases by for example Studio McVey, there have not been any must-buys for me this year.

On the other hand there are two miniature painters which have never ceased to amaze me past year: UK Slayer Sword winner Karol Rudyk, and his fellow countryman Łukasz Grzyb (C'tan). Both of them have put up a great show and their dark, high contrast and detailed way of painting is really an inspiration for me.

2013

I had to resist writing "but in 2013...." several times in this article :) I will do some talking about this year in another post, writing down some of my thoughts and an event calendar probably.

All there is now is to thank you for being around for yet another year and I hope 2013 will be even better!

-Gerrie