Crikey, my office has been closed and we’re all to work from home ‘until further notice.’ People have been panic buying at the supermarkets. O and I have been panic buying in the toy shop and got a 5,000 piece jigsaw in case we have to go into total lock down.
I’ve also picked up some hobby stuff. I haven’t hobbied for a long time. You can find out why here but it’s not hobby related. Thanks, by the way, to the people who have read that separate post and especially anyone who got back to me. It means a lot.
Anyway, what that means is that despite having had this blog for nearly two years I’m kind of at a place where I’m starting again. I’ve got my 40k army (you can find all about that here), my 30K army (here), and my Necromunda gang (here). They’re all finished and ready to play. I also have quite a bit of grey plastic; half an AoS army (here) and half an AT army (here). I’ll bring those things to my new home soon but I don’t have anything to paint them with. My airbrush, my paints, my hobby tools, they’re all gone.
So what’s this post about? I guess this post is about testing how far my skills have degraded through not being used and also about making some small, tentative steps back into hobbying.
Where to start? With some models right? Ok cool. There’s a FLGS in my new town with actually quite a cool little GW section. I want something manageable. They stock Underworlds stuff. I’ve made a SCE gang for Underworlds before, it’s a good chance to practise NMM and get a whole new game system under my belt in one go. So I picked up these golden bois…
They look pretty cool, as I said I can practise my NMM on them as a way of seeing where my skills are at right now and it’s a small discrete force. In the box there’s quite a lot of value (in GW terms) for GBP20.
The cards are straight in the bin because I don’t speak Spanish (before anyone accuses me of being an ignorant cunt, they’d probably be straight in the bin if they were in English because I don’t play this game (or any other game at the moment)). The models are really nice. Step one, as always, is to give them a double dip bath in soapy water and a scrub with an old toothbrush. These were really shiny straight out of the box so I felt they really needed it.
I picked up some basic hobby bits so I could get these built and painted (I’ll do a separate post on the painting).
The clippers that GW makes now are legit. They cut really clean and they angled so they get really close too. I don’t think I’ve used any better ones. I used a little bit of the glue on these guys – it’s not great but it’s just glue. I make some Revell models with my kids and this is the sort of glue I use for that, it’s fine. I’ve got some liquid green stuff (out of shot), a box and cloths for a wet palette and some spray undercoat. The loser out of all this lot is the knife. It can fuck right off to be honest. It’s not a hobby knife, it’s the kind of knife you use to lay carpet. My FLGS does have the GW one in stock but it’s GBP20 and I had this one lying around. Next time I buy any models, I’ll buy the proper knife.
The kits are easy build which means they don’t need glue.(I only used glue on two parts) and actually go together nicely and look really cool. I think the easy build concept is slightly weird if I’m honest. The models still need clipping out, cleaning up and scraping – the glue is kind of the least difficult and dangerous part to be honest.
There’s just one problem I have with the easy build kits (I’ve only ever had easy build SCE so it may be unique to the golden bois) and that’s joins across the shoulder pads:
The shoulder pad is such a large, flat area that the join between the two pieces just stands out like dogs’ balls on a goldfish. Anyway, I’ve filled them with LGS and they’ve actually come out pretty good:
Noooice. Ok, three golden boys filled and scraped and ready to be undercoated. Once they’re undercoated, any mould lines show up much better so I do one layer of undercoat, scrape them back then a second layer of undercoat. I won’t bother photographing that, I’m bored just thinking about it let alone writing about it or you reading it. I’ll update when I’m ready to lay some paint down.
Any comments, let me know.
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