VERY IMPORTANT NEWS: 40K 6th Edition; Starter Box Set Contents

Well 6th edition has landed on our door but that's no reason to stop! I have some more very important news regarding the boxed starter set contents. I think by now we are all under the impression that the set will contain Dark Angels vs Chaos... but the mix of models may well surprise you! Not only this, but it definately says a lot about the up-coming Chaos Army.

Take a look at these pictures which list out the armies;

Armies - Final send off!!

So, as the sun sets on a 5th edition and the forums and blogs erupt in over-excited rage-quitters and nay-sayers I'm staying firmly rooted and doing what we should all be doing - saying goodbye to a game edition that has been part of my life and hobby by entering into a "friendly" tournament!

A little while ago I made THIS POST, saying that you'll be treated to more Tau posting as I concentrated on finally finishing to paint my massive Tau force. Since that time you have had exactly 0 Tau posts! hmm... The Unrealistic Artist as started and finished an entire army in that time! If you are quick, you might be able to buy it too!

VERY IMPORTANT NEWS - 40K 6th Edition; June 30th 2012

I interrupt this broadcast to bring an announcement that you are probably all aware of anyway. I have just received confirmation that the 6th Edition of Warhammer 40,000 will be released on June 30th 2012.

This is earlier than I was expecting it (even with the pre-order teaser currently on the GW site).

I'm not here to bring you rumours of the actual rules... there are much better blogs to visit for that such as Bell of Lost Souls, Spikey Bits, Hogs of War or everyones favourite (though still absent from my blog roll for some reason) Faiet212. Besides, I'm only interested in hard facts.

Also, as and when you get sick of reading about 6th Edition Rumours, be sure to head over to my commisison painting blog iPaintmodels to catch up with my most recently finished commission work. Over the coming weeks I will be posting picks of a lovely Malifaux Colette Gang commission that will likely get drowned out by people having kittens about the new 40K rules! To whet some appetite, see below:

NEWS! GW UK Price Change list 2012

In a break from normal proceedings I bring you a link to a PDF courtesy of Wayland Games here in the UK which has a full list of the UK price changes to Games Workshop prodcuts. I can't speak to how these exchange up in foreign... but I don't expect it to be pretty.

NEWS! - The BBC

In a break from "normal" content, this News! post is actually actual news! hah! Who'd have thought it! The BBC has recently covered 40K in a number of online articles, partly in celebration of the 25th anniversary of 40K and partly because GW are one of a very limited stock of UK companies reporting massive pre-tax profits!

Don't be shocked by the titles!

Why are grown men still launching tabletop war?

Why Warhammer 40,000 is still popular after 25 years

Pretty fairly written as you'd expect from the BBC, but for laughs, do make sure you read through the comments. There are some real gems in there!!!

Photography!

So I think I sorted out my photography! I was able to spend some time playing around with my set up, both the fold away light box and my camera. It's taken a long time to work out where I was going wrong and what I needed to do in order to improve the final quality. Not necessarily an issue for my blog here, which tends to have lots of WiP stuff anyway, but definately key for my ipaintmodels blog where I want to showcase my painting capabilities!

NEWS! Meatspace & How to Monster the Lab

January 2012 has been very busy in meatspace. There have been 4 birthdays, one of them mine, and one of them the little oinklings 1st! So much has been happening that I haven't been able to post all the random things I've wanted to!

First up, a shout out to the Midwest Monster Lab. Last month I was the surprised winner of a Member T-Shirt. It arrived at the beginning of the year, but Mrs oink decided to intercept it and wrap it up as a birthday pressie!

In true SAS fashion, here is Sir oink himself monstering the lab! 

NEWS! 40K Movie - Exterminatus

Yes, you heard me right. I'm taking time out of my usually strict posting theme to bring you some tantilising stuff.

A 40K fan film made by some crazy French chaps and chocked full of lots of cool looking details! Just take a look at the Thunder hammer sitting there!? Cool right! This sort of stuff is great because I love realism and attention to detail so would love to see those sorts of details come to life!

It's a short, supposedly only about 9 minutes, but judging by these pictures you might need to bring a change of pants.

News! This might be important!

So far this month I've been doing a bit of painting. The models are for a commission project for which I am but one of the painters helping to get one guys old copy of Heroquest up to date with nice new models! If any of you own or remember Heroquest you'll probably agree that is no bad thing!

I've also been doing some gaming (as you might recall) but otherwise I've had my desires for continuing my terrain put to a firm stop. The weather has meant I've been prevented from testing the Stone Texture Spray on any Cities of Death tiles and this has been top of my to do list!

News! iPaint

Thats right, iPaint. Well, technically this month I've not done much painting at all, but that's because I'm working to bring a new commission service online! I'm calling this iPaintmodels... because iPaint models for people! You can head straight there at any time by using the iPaint tab at the top of this blog!

As this venture is for me to do in free time and not a professional painting service to provide me with a main form of income, I will only take on commissions for projects that I can feel passionate and enthusiastic about whilst avoiding any projects which are likely to suck the life out of me!

News! Painting Charts (& Painting Hard!)

So the keen eyed amongst you may have noticed that this month I have painted a few tanks. 10 Leman Russes of various flavours to be exact! In fact, it's so many tanks that I haven't even managed to finish posting Gallery pictures of them all yet. Nevertheless, you can see the finished products HERE.

I've updated my Imperial Guard Painting Chart.

You can see the Tank Company in the bottom corner pretty much turned to green when compared to the last time. I have a game coming up this month against a friends Blood Angels, it will be a 3000pts standard battle, and all these tanks will be rumbling into action! Whilst it can be nice for you guys to see the changes from one month to the next I'm now sticking them onto a dedicated Painting Chart Page so that I can upload and link to it more easily and frequently. This is replacing my "Armies" Page (which I've pretty much stopped using) and will be a way for me to show progress on any and all of my armies as things happen. It will also help you understand just how fickle and easily distracted I get once you see the number and size of Painting Charts I will have up!

In any case, this month I've painted hard... real hard... this hard:

In the last Painting Chart I was designating the Tanks as from 4th Company... For whatever reason, that I have not quite yet fathomed, I now think I'll prefer them to be from 5th Company. I'll probably change my mind again once I get to the point of designing the decals for them all. Yes, that's right, I am going to design and create my own decals at some point too, so expect some posts about that in the future.

Painting Charts are, I suppose, quite a new thing bounding about, the first instance of such a chart I've come across was from Admiral Drax, and he has always kept us updated on his army progress by showing us his charts from time to time.

The idea is absurdly simple. You plot out each unit and model in an army and then colour code them to display whether they are finished, are in progress, yet to be painted or even if you stillneed to purchase them! The good Admiral was kind enough to share his template for this, which I adapted to suit my own needs. Others have also adapted the principle to their own needs and to display things in a way they find easiest to read.

However, the charts are not simply a way of tallying what you need to paint, as mentioned you can display all kinds of information on them. Most obviously is that they make you take an inventory of all the models and units for an army! This might seem ridiculous for gamers who are just starting out and have a small army... but when you've been collecting for as long as I have you will soon find that you have more models than you realise, some you might have bought and shelved before forgetting about them as you got distracted by the next new toy! If you think I'm bad, Mordian7th has an entire closet (which is American for room!) full of all sorts of modelling goodies!

So, the idea with the Painting Chart Page is to display the charts for each of my armies in a user friendly and simple way. It might take me a while to get them all up and running as the process of inventory taking can be time consuming. But this will then serve as a place where this information can be shared, updated and linked to.

NEWS!

Holidays are over, I've enjoyed the mediterranean sun with my wife and baby. So it's back to the grind stone. I must admit I had a little "Hobby Burnout" and so to help overcome this I am in the process of arranging a 3000pt megabattle with a friend (after all, the best cure for a hangover is to stay drunk!). He is coming to the end of painting his monster Blood Angel Army, and I need something suitably audacious to compete! I've decided to field a full Leman Russ Armoured Company! The list is available to download for free along with the update to Imperial Armour Vol. 1.


If you've seen my recent Painting Chart you'll have seen that I only have a couple of the stuff in a painted state! Well, that just won't do, so I am about to embark on another (over)ambitious painting-fest! With the added bonus of first needing to add stowage to most of the tanks too! Here's the list as it currently stands, following some very recent tweaking. You can keep up to tabs with the list HERE.

HQ
Command Tank : 180 : Vanquisher, Hull Lascannon

Command Tank : 190 : Exterminator, Heavy Bolter Sponsons, Hull Heavy Bolter, Ace Gunner

ELITES
Leman Russ Executioner : 230 : Plasma Cannon Sponsons, Hull Heavy Flamer

Leman Russ Executioner : 230 : Plasma Cannon Sponsons, Hull Heavy Flamer

TROOPS
Leman Russ : 165 : Hull Lascannon

Leman Russ : 170 : Heavy Bolter Sponsons, Hull Heavy Bolter
Leman Russ : 170 : Heavy Bolter Sponsons, Hull Heavy Bolter

Leman Russ : 190 : Plasma Cannon Sponsons, Hull Heavy Bolter

Leman Russ : 190 : Plasma Cannon Sponsons, Hull Heavy Bolter
Leman Russ : 190 : Plasma Cannon Sponsons, Hull Heavy Bolter

Leman Russ Annihilator : 165 : Hull Lascannon

Leman Russ Conquerer : 165 : Heavy Bolter Sponsons, Hull Lascannon
Leman Russ Conquerer : 165 : Heavy Bolter Sponsons, Hull Lascannon

FAST ATTACK
Banewolf : 130 : Hull Heavy Bolter

Banewolf : 130 : Hull Heavy Bolter

Devildog : 120 : Hull Heavy Flamer

HEAVY SUPPORT
Laser Tank Destroyer : 180 : Slick Loader

3000pts

The keen eyed among you will notice that I have filled my 6 troops selections, but have no scoring units! Win!

The bad news is only 3 of the tanks are painted, with another 3 painted but awaiting re-painting to my improved scheme. The good news is I love tanks!

NEWS!

Some of you may have seen it already, but I have launched a new style Gallery Page as a result of the ethos of "more pictures, less words!". I'm not ashamed to say that I'm pretty proud of it at the moment, because it looks like a proper gallery with lots of pictures. Despite the pitfalls of trying to work with tables in HTML, I think I've got the thing sorted and you can click on any of the pictures to head into the relevant post for more info and pics. I'd like to hear some of your thoughts on it here, so that I can make any improvements if necessary before working out if, or how to roll it out for the other pages too!


You can see the gallery page HERE, and catch up on the gallery at any time using the tabs across the top of the web page.

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In other news, the 40KOnline Tournament has come and gone. I'm not going to bore you guys with battle reports etc. as there are more than enough other blogs to get on with that sort of thing anyway. Regardless, you can head over to see Col.Gravis or Rathstar... two fellow bloggers who were also at the event held at the awesome Triple Helix Wargames.

It is enough to say that fun was had by all... and for many of us a fair share of bad luck and despair! I will post up more pictures of my own army in action, as well as some other pics I grabbed of some interesting armies for a different sort of tournament report.

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Finally, now that the tournament "deadline" for the Imperial Guard army has passed I can dedicate more of my hobby time back towards the terrain! After all, that was the original drive behind this blog and I wouldn't want to lose sight of that. With that said, it seems as though the Imperial Guard have proved to be quite popular, so I will continue to provide updates of further work (when I finally post up a painting chart for the guard you will realise why I'm not going to concentrate solely on getting the entire lot finished)! Speaking of painting charts, head over to see Admiral Drax, he's got a great painting chart!


Well, that's all the news for now. I do want to say that I have some more terrain oriented posts in the pipe line... however, if people want to continue seeing more army based stuff then feel free to drop me a comment! Speak to you all soon!