American Barbarian

I'm a big fan of G0dland, so it was a great treat the day that I happened upon a web site featuring the story of American Barbarian (http://www.ambarb.com/). Why? Oh, because it's written and drawn by Tom Scioli who did the art for G0dland. His work with Casey on G0dland was very interesting as they made a comic that looked like it might have grown legs and walked off Kirby's drawing board, but was taught to walk backwards and learn some cool beatnik lingo.

I'm still reading through American Barbarian and am loving the nods to He-Man, Thundarr, Star Wars, etc. Tom has thrown a lot into this work and mashed the energy button to an even higher bar than G0dland (if that's possible!). Part of me is thinking about tracking down the hardcover compilation, so I can finish reading the series all curled up on the couch. The user comments on each panel are a lot of fun to read though, it's like a fan developed dvd commentary track.

Why are you still reading this? Go read some ambarb.com all ready!!

Things to throw your Money at

ADOM II (Ancient Domains of Mystery) is now part of the crowd source movement. I've been following Thomas Biskup's blog off and on for awhile now and I'm always amazed at the ideas he has for making this second version of his beloved roguelike even better. For those not familiar with roguelikes, they are early dungeon crawl adventures. Diablo (and many other games) were based on these old games.

Check out the project here:
http://www.indiegogo.com/resurrect-adom-development?c=activity

More things green

Getting a little behind on my picture taking and blog posting. I've made more headway on getting minis ready and looking to score a few more here soon. I had a good lot of my blood bowl minis on a table after priming, and was wowed by how many I've amassed!

Below I have some pics of my first venture into customizing Blood Bowl minis from Warhammer products. The plastic Warhammer kits take a bit more work due to assembly and filing requirements. The filing is especially dreadful as it's easy to slip while filing the plastic and wipe out some of the fine detail on those pieces.

Anyways, the major change was adding a shoulder pad and belt attachment to the ogre with some green stuff. It turned out okay for my first time. I'm considering adding a helmet to him later.

I've also been working on a Dwarven Deathroller. I'm waiting to get farther along on that one before showing the pics.

Ogre gets shoulder pad

A little rough, but not bad for my first time

Strap attaches to back of belt

"And now for my pretty side!"

Now appearing on a Human team near you!

Island of Blood Rat Ogre, whatever that means!

Felt like I was getting in the groove with the fur detail on the back.

Added a club like tip to his tail for fun.

Teams that go Green

Wood Elves. The bane of many a BB player. I'm not really fond of them, preferring my team of High Elves to the W.E.  I can see why people would like them though. Anyways, to get back into the hang of painting I decided to use these guys as my test batch. One, because I have 16 some Linemen to experiment with! Two, I'm going with the simple green and yellow paint scheme. Good practice to get more comfortable and return to finishing off my beloved Undead team.

The following photos are my experiment in progressive layers of paint. I've begun using Vallejo game color which works nice. Everyone raves about the dropper bottle tops (so nice!). I think I watered down the paint maybe too much on the first try. I ended up doing four layers before I called it "good".

Close-up. How's that green look? 'Panda sez "Good 'nuff!". After all the Goblin Green, I mixed up a wash of Sick Green and applied it. I think I went a little too crazy on the wash and will use it more sparingly on the next batches. I might tweak these ones later with some highlight brush ups to provide more contrast.

Here's a random shot of my alternate Treeman. It's a Mage Knight Wood Golem. Removed the clicky base and mounted him on a 30mm round base. Tried adding some more paints to spruce him up, but I'm not crazy about the colors. Might end up stripping him and repainting from scratch.

With this post, I'm pretty much caught up with my progress to date. I have a Human team that is probably going to get completely repainted. I have a High Elf and Skaven team that just need finishing highlights. I want to nab a few more minis to fill up Skaven roster before going back to finish them. I might post pics of both later.

TIny Terrors

So I've been bitten with the Blood Bowl once again. I've managed to get together a few friends for some fantasy football bashing and am working on building a massive army of pigskin carrying mayhem makers.

One of my favorite looking teams has been the Undead. After a long time of searching, I finally gathered enough pieces off auctions for a decent team.

A bunch of cleaning, pruning, and basing with sand:

Post- priming, adding a dash of red for color:

Work on the bases continues with some grey drybrushing. Going for a graveyard/gravel sort of theme for this team.

After this photo, I noticed quite a few spots that got missed with spray primer. I picked up some brush-on primer at the shop and used it to fix the few spots. But that also meant a step backward as I'll have to touch up spots that the primer went over the color. Wish I had fixed that before starting the colors, but I guess I'm still early enough into painting that it isn't a huge blunder. I'm also glad to have the found the brush-on primer, as painting on bare metal spots has been very troublesome for me in the past. 

New Beginnings

Pretty sure I started a blog somewheres before. Oh well, time to start anew. I'll be rambling about a few of my favorite things I'm sure. Maybe someone will even read them! Interests include arcade games, computer games, tabletop games, rpgs, coding, comics, movies. My favorite genres are superheros, sci-fi, and fantasy.