Raggy's Gaming Adventures

Exactly one year ago today, I posted my most successful blog post today; an initial review of Contrast Paints at the time of writing, it has something like ten times as many views as my next most popular post. Being an opportunistic attention seeker. I figured I would play off of that and build out another post on this 'wonder drug' for our hobby.
Rereading the original post, I am kinda surprised just how down on them I am. I had only done limited testing in a less than ideal environment but I was very much wrong in my conclusions. So why have I u-turned so hard on my initial thoughts?
CONTRAST IS EVERYTHING!
Any competition painter will, at some point, have been told that their piece needs more 'contrast'. This is a statement about the need to push colours to extremes of light and dark, warm and cool and complimentary colours. The reasoning for this comes down to what appeals to the human eye, which looks for differences between elements to draw the eye. This is a core …

This is a difficult time for many. Some folks are busy and working harder than ever, helping to ensure the rest of us can stay safe and at home. Some of us are out of work and a few are able to work from home. Everyone is adjusting to a different life and many of us feel like we have nothing but time... and yet it can still be difficult to get yourself motivated to knock out that painting backlog.
Here are a few tips to hopefully help you get you some painted minis!*
Make sitting down to paint as easy as possible. This is huge. The lower the 'hurdle' to over come in getting started - the more likely you are to do it. This is probably the biggest hurdle I faced when I started getting back into painting. Some ideas:If at all possible have a small area with newspaper brushes and water and your current project. During this time, you're spending a lot more time at home - it might be worth just having a piece of your dining table dedicated to painting when you're not going t…

Welcome, welcome! For those of you reading in the distant future - the world is currently being ravaged by the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic. The result is what seems to be the prelude of a massive depression and a lot of people stuck at home either unemployed or 'working from home'. For many it seems like the perfect time to branch out and try their hand at making some money from their hobby. For myself - it felt like a good time to share some advice.

There is an old adage - "How do you make a small fortune in the restaurant business? Start with a large one." For commission painters the outlook is somewhat bleaker - "How do you make a small fortune as a commission painter? YOU CAN'T HAHA!"

I may be painting it a bit bleakly but that's the basic reality. Almost every commission painter you can think of makes their money through something else. They either have a day job, teach painting (through classes or patreon) or have some other way of paying…

Well it's 2020 and my #nyna (New Year, New Army) is Gloomspite Gitz. As mentioned in my previous post - I'm not dropping my Death Guard boys but I have a fieldable army there and can slowly add the few models I'm still missing but this is a chance to start on something new (well fairly new...)

Back to the Gitz - I picked up a sizeable Squig based force over the last year and set them aside for this project. I did however work on a few test pieces here and there. As always when starting a new project it is important to really have your painting scheme nailed down. I used my Zarbag's Gitz warband for Underworlds to test out and refine the schema I wanted to use. I actually did much of this on my YouTube livestream and it's still available:


In addition to having this reference, I also took notes on the process that I wanted to utilise. The method by which you take notes is highly individual and varies a lot from person to person. I know some folks that love to use an …

I have talked in the past about my reticence to strip models. Particularly my own. (In summary - if you want to paint a model again that badly - you can probably find somewhere online that sells it, there's value in holding onto examples of old work). Even with second hand models - I often find you can paint over the previous work as long as it's not too thick... sadly an eBay rescue I picked up the other day was too far gone for a simple paint over and so I was forced to explore the options available to me. In the past I was in the UK, stripping lead models and I got to mess with Nitromors - the big daddy of paint stripping. Unfortunately it's potent enough that it'll take plastic along with paint into a sorry goop and so I needed to source some alternative. I tapped into the CK Alumni community for some advice and was pointed in the direction of this gem of a video:


I can't express how much I value controlled testing of hobby products like this. They are very di…

Welcome to the final post of my Death Guard series of posts. It's taken far too long to post this up as I struggled for the longest time with how to go through the photos, get them all tagged etc etc. In the end I've pretty well figured I'd just cheat. To those of you that are visually impaired, my apologies - the photos are less well annotated than I usually aim for. The reason is just the sheer number that I've chosen to include. The intention is to give folks a sense of how the project progressed through the pictures. I will however front weight this with some of my thoughts.

This is my second ever painted 'army' and the first where I've 'fully painted' (ie painted all the models I have and intended to paint). I know I will pick up a few more models for the army (I'd like to have one of each model available and maybe enough to run three crawlers, haulers and drones - I may even grab a few of the Forge World models). We'll see how far I g…