Garruk's Reavers! And A Return to Blogging...

Blogging... I haven't heard that name in a while...

Hello again dear readers!

Well, that is if I have any left after my rather long hiatus away from posting! A lot has happened in my life in the space of time since my last post. I have been working very hard to publish papers and get my thesis written up for one thing, and I have also had a wedding to plan... and actually get married!

Me and my (now) wife, Serena, tied the knot on the 27th of December 2017 and we are both very happy :). 

Between work, future job hunting,  marriage and spending time with Serena I have't had as much time to put into the hobby. So out of all my hobby outlets, it was blogging that suffered. However I have been very busy bustling away in the background painting miniatures for myself and others. So I have plenty to show you!

I am aiming to get slowly back into blogging with some drip feed regular content. For now I am aiming to post on a Monday and Thursday and then I will add extra posts as and when I can. Hopefully there will still be something to interest many of you, though I have resigned myself to the blog viewership and traffic being of a considerably reduced size.

Anyway, that's enough of my excuses for being absent!

Recently I acquired the Shadespire and as a break from my other projects and in a bid to do some overdue practise on skin tones, I painted Garruk's Reavers. Here's some close up pictures of them mostly finished!

These guys were painted over a couple of evenings and I was mostly trying to have a go at different skin types, rather than just rely on the same old formulas over and over. I'm quite pleased with how some of them have turned out, though I think I am most pleased with some of the scar tissue more than anything. 

I need to tidy bits of them up and maybe add some blood splatter, though with the simpler paint style I have gone with I don't know if they will look better without it. Does anyone have any thoughts on that?

It's good to be back, I hope you are as pleased as I am.

Peace out,

Rob

I Twitter therefore I.... have no Idea What I am Doing

Hi gang,

I've recently set up a twitter account for 30kplus40k to share my posts on there. I'll also be using it as a way to post very small updates of what is just on my desk at any one time or what I'm up to without writing full posts and clogging up newsfeeds.

However I am going to confess I have very little working knowledge of Twitter and so any help on how to best work it and share that I actually have the damn thing would be welcomed heartily :)

You can find me at https://twitter.com/30kplus40k if you want to follow me, and I would be very appreciative if you could share that around into any Twitter hobby circles that you think would be interested!

Peace out,

Rob

Blog News/Admin - The Impact of Real Life

Afternoon all,

Today, as the title suggests, is one of the more dull posts I'll put up! The Blog has been doing very well the past few months with a solid 20-25k views a month and a good latent view count. By latent view count I mean how many views I get on days that I don't post. 

The blog has really helped me cut the chaff from my none-work and social activities, discarding half-hearted forays into other hobbies, as I realise like many of us do that 40k or Fantasy or even now 30k is our first and one true love as a hobby. 

I thought very much that I would be bored of blogging after a few months and/or be terrible at it in the sense that nobody much would like to read my crap or see my hobby. Thankfully that hasn't been the case (I think and hope!) and I've enjoying pushing the blog on and I will continue to keep pushing the blog on as far as an Amateur such as myself is able to do. As much as I would like to make the hobby a profession (so say we all) my skills sadly lie in other areas. 

Which neatly segues us into the Impact of Real Life. As many of you will know I am a researcher at the university of Bristol in the UK and I have been studying for my PhD for some time and the time is rapidly approaching where I will have to actually start writing my The Damn Thesis of Doom. 

Obviously this is going to be quite the endeavour and will take up a good chunk of my time, thus the rate at which I blog will go down. I average around 22 blog posts a month currently and I expect that to go down to around the 10-15 mark, as much as it might be good for productivity to drop lower, the blog is a keystone of my sanity so to hell with stopping!

I expect this'll bump my views down, but I haven't spent £30k plus of my own cash to let that worry me too much at this stage! Additionally a fair amount of the hobby work I will post is likely to be commissions that will help me live whilst writing my thesis as in addition to taking holiday to write I may well have to take some unpaid leave that Commissions can help pull the slack up on. 

Anyway, that's an overly wordy update on my life an the blog as it goes!

Any suggestions for improvements to the blog are always well appreciated indeed. I would be very keen for someone to help with the design of the blog as I dislike the current 'myspace' feel of it aesthetic. Though that may be an inherent Blogger issue, I am a dummy in these situations so can't really say!

Oh and finally Greg, I have a tripod for my camera and I am buying a bigger light box with some varied back grounds... Always working on the photography I promise you :P

Peace out,

Rob

30k Thallax Update and General Blog Thoughts

Good afternoon fine cats,

Today I have a quick update on painting progress with my Thallax which has been a bit slower than I hoped, mostly because I got up at 1pm today.. the shame the shame... the wonderfully comfortable bed... And I also have a few thoughts on my blog at the current time. Firstly some blog stuff. 

Blog Housekeeping

Mostly today I wanted to acknowledge that particularly in the realm of comments I have been very tardy in terms of replying to everyone, this is simply due to work commitments really draining me as of the present and a few minor health issued which are refusing to remain dead and buried. This coupled with trying to make swift progress on painting for tournaments and the like has been quite the limiter on mental fortitude regarding sitting down to write replies. 

I don't for a second think any of you wonderful people who do take the time to comment are fussed by my rate of reply, but I do like to give everyone proper time and thought as some of your comments are very important beyond encouraging me with factual inaccuracies in my review posts being pointed out as well as great hints and tips around model painting, tactics and army composition for example, factoring directly into my hobby. Therefore this is just by way of an apology!

I also wanted to point out that some time in the past week I surpassed 1000 comments as well as 1'000'000 Google+ views and thank you all for that as well! 

Other than that I think I my life and therefore blog time should settle down significantly in the first half of April after I have moved house and completed a couple of very time intensive experiments, so I am greatly looking forward to having more structured posts as well as posting at regular times again!

Thallax Progress

In more blog focussed and less serious news I have made movement on my Thallax! Below is how you last saw them:

And here we have them after the metallics have been added, the black under layer for the red face plate, as well as screaming skull highlights on the yellow and using it as the base layer on the skull of the chest piece. I lightened the yellow a little too much and so added some seraphim sepia to blend it back to a level I'm happy with, though I have a few "tide marks" I need to correct:

Nuln oil wash is now needed on all metallics and then highlights plus colouring of the cables that will be red with black. Then the face plate and black cables will have blood for the blood god added to them and these guys are done!

Tonight I should have time to blue tack up all the arms and guns for undercoating and washing and hopefully get over half way done with them tomorrow. I also have plans to start basecoating the final 6 Death Company and start yellow highlighting the three Castellax.

Peace out,

Rob

Blog Recommendation - St Andrews Wargaming

Hi Folks,

Similar to other fellow bloggers I'd like to shout out some good blogs that I follow and enjoy reading each week when their juicy content appears in my notifications. Instead of giving you a list of bloggers I thought I would dedicate a post to each blogger with a few of my favourite articles from their sites. 

Today I'm going to start with Mike at St Andrews Wargaming! Mike and I started our blogs at almost the same time being only a few days apart, and it has been great to see his content explode with loads and loads of interesting and varied things cropping up on his feed. Its also been nice to have a brother in arms finding their way through the sometimes odd world of blogging and sating the hobby appetites of the many!

I also got to meet Mike, amongst some other bloggers who will be covered in this segment, at Blog Wars X at the beginning of November. I really enjoy putting faces to names and vice versa so it was good to have a proper chinwag and see his Ravenwing in top form as he reached Table 1 in the tournament.

Below are a few posts from his blog that I particularly like with a description about why you should too!

Medusa IV Campaign

The Medusa IV Campaign something that Mike has designed and is running for his local club. It involves a tiled map with starting territories for each player, with players grouped into factions. The players can assault other armies or tiles in phases and this determines who battles who on the tabletop with the winners and losers each having corresponding effects on the tiled map.

You can tell just how much effort has been put into this being designed and run and it looks absolutely fantastic. I wish I was able to play in it! Thoroughly recommend you give it a read, it is very reminiscent of an older way of doing 40k.


Zone Mortalis Board

Mike is an avid terrain collector with an eagle eyed eBay fixation for the older cardboard 40k terrain, I believe he almost all of them now! But the post I really wanted to pick out is his home made Zone Mortalis Board. I've put just one picture below but you have to go through all of them to see how awesome it is, especially when you consider the cost of buying an equivalent sized board!

Painting camo on Tanks

In amongst his vast armies lies a big old bulk of the Imperial Guard/Astra Militarum which you can see below. As you can see the armies looks great, but what stands out for me in particular is the quality of the camo on the tanks and valkyrie. Fortunately for us, Mike put together an excellent tutorial on how he achieves this, and it is a fantastically clever time saving and simple technique that I intend to make full use of at some point on tanks as well! Here's a link to the guide.

Battle Reports

I can't really pick one out here as he has done so many. But the style of battle reports you will find on this blog would have fit perfectly into the old white dwarfs we know and love. The diagrams have unit keys, blast markers, arrows to indicate  movement, they have the lot. The level of detail Mike can write down in shorthand is impressive and I have witnessed it first hand, this comes through in his reports which never skip and beat and are always great to read! No link for this one, just head over there and find all of them!


Next Time...

I hope you enjoyed this little segment of going through someone else's blog. There are lots of blogs I have in a list that I intend to do this sort of post with, to really give you a glimpse of the flavour of other people in the hobby that pour their blood sweat and tears into their models and their blogs which is worthy of attention.

Let me know if this worked for you, or you'd rather a put up a post with a link to various blogs together. I've enjoyed going through blogs to find all the posts that really stuck in my mind so I'm keen to continue in that vein but if people don't like then I shan't :)

Peace out,

Rob

Space Wolves - I'm going to be a contributor!

Hi Readers,

No doubt many of you are aware of the Space Wolves blog run by Adam Smith. If you aren't then you can find it on my blog roll down the right hand side ---->> hint hint nudge nudge. Adam has made a massively popular and extremely excellent blog which centres solely on the wild kin of Fenris with battle reports, tactica, conversion guides and more. He recently put out a call for other contributors to help him keep up the good work, and after a few exchanged emails I have been added as a writer to his blog roll! I plan mainly to contribute tactica articles written from the enemies perspective. I.e. I will describe counter tactics for my armies when facing Thunderwolf cavalry for example and then show how I space wolf player could counter this, either through deployment, duality, redundancy or tactics.

This is very exciting for me. As I progress through my current career path as a bio-medical researcher, I become more and more aware of the ceiling to the progression you can make. This comes in the form of limited grant money, limited fellowships, limited lectureships and basically limited everything! This makes competition for all these jobs extremely fierce, and whilst I have a pretty damn good CV, so do many others. Incidentally if anyone is curious I can post a link to some of my academic publications should you want to see what I do?

With this in mind I have decided to focus quite a bit more effort on writing for this blog and writing for other blogs as much as I can. I feel this would be a good string to my bow should I wish to go for any editorial jobs within science or even if I wanted to take a completely different route all together. I hope you'll jump over to Adam's blog and see all the great things he's got to offer, and if you have any general advice for increasing my reach, getting on to other blogs, or even would be happy for me to write on your blog please do chime in and let me know. All advice is taken kindly with great thanks :). 

That's all for now folks!

Peace out,

Rob