Paint it Black

Yep, the most overused title in the miniature painting hobby. This is actually really important, having made several display bases, nothing cramps your style while doing the final details like pink or white foam poking through. So this rather large undertaking I vowed to paint it black early and paint it black often.

I’ll paint some more black on these but first I’ll probably put down the timbers inside the trenches. After that is done I’ll do the sand. I don’t want to sand all the flat surfaces and I can’t use as much cat liter as I did on my GT display base, it looked good but it isn’t game-able. This table needs to game-able, that means wider than usual trenches, modularity, less than perfect fits, and lots, and lots of little pieces that can be re-arranged.

Someday I’ll get my other table’s worth of terrain here in Vancouver. I plan to make a lip to connect the two. I was thinking of doing a ruined village after this, something vaguely French and World War One. I’ve also considered Spanish Adobe style buildings or even an Ork Village, but lately seeing the stuff Pardulon is producing if I ever have the money to drop on a gaming table again, plus the time and energy seeing this one is barely started, I might do a shanty town. Maybe only a 4*4 Shanty town…

Here’s some pics. I plan to work on just one tile at a time after this, plus I plan to work on my army for Astronomi-con Vancouver. Note I tested the biggest GW base, the one used by Imperial Guard weapons teams, they fit in the biggest trenches. I plan to make some machine gun nests and some of them will be big enough to accommodate these 80mm bases, but not all. I want my table to favor lone models on a single 25 mm base. Painting even six tiles took up my painting table, all my counter space, and my stove…

Trench Table Beginnings

One of my long schemed for mega projects is a dedicated gaming table more befitting of my tendency to play almost exclusively Warhammer 40,000. Of course by play I mean occasionally attend a local tournament, say two a year, with one or two in-store games. I think you play more when you can host, and in order to host you need a reasonably sized place and table plus terrain.

I have over a table worth of hills and forrests plus some rocks and the odd building, but with the success of one of my tournament display boards and the amount of stuff you can buy online, I decided to build a really nice table and I decided to make it a modular trench table. I did a lot of research, I collected a lot of resin scatter terrain and bits I would need to build my table, but time and energy proved ellusive.

Recently unemployed I’ve worked on my dream table, but I discovered my hobby foam cutter couldn’t handle the big thick foam I wanted to work with and it was hard to make long perfect cuts. I bought a jab saw along with a couple metal squares, but I had to give up on perfection. Working on terrain pieces takes a lot more space and makes a lot more mess than painting another squad of plaguemarines.

Undaunted I’ve pushed on. I was originally going to make one or two squares at a time, but in order to get a decent fit and to better lay out the scatter terrain I ended up cutting and carving almost one entire defensive line before I painted anything. My plan is to paint the white and pink black. Then I plan to line all the trenches sides and bottoms with little bits of wood. This is historically accurate and although this table will probably get used mostly for 40K, there is no reason it can’t serve for World War One or even World War Two in a pinch.  I plan to paint up some Germans and Van Doos someday.

I painted one test dude, you can see him making sure the firing platforms are the right height. I made my trenches deeper than most and wider than I intended. The first square I did was the angle one and three inch wide openings and then drawing the lines looked too narrow. I want to be able to fit 40mm bases in my trenches along with the planks and firing positions and some scattered stuff. I’ll make some narrower trenches eventually, but the two initial defensive lines will be bigger than scale to make it easier to game.

Almost all the scatter terrain will be loose and thus can be rearranged along with the tiles. I’ll make a dozen or so extra tiles eventually, but to start I’m make 24 carefully planned tiles. I need to switch shortly to finishing up my Astronomi-con Vancouver army, so this table will not be at Astro Van this year.

All the resin terrain shown on the tiles so far was made by Snapdragon (Moondragons.com) he stopped making them due to injury so I bought rather more than I needed, just before he went out of production, as I thought it would just make things look better. Other companies I’ve ordered from are listed here.

My Top 10 old hobby posts

Although I decided to start a dedicated hobby blog, I also decided not to import all my older hobby related postings from my personal blog into WordPress.com, instead I give you this top 10 list for the benefit of anyone stumbling upon my work for the first time.  Greatest hits particularly in the top ten format are popular with websurfers so read on McDuff:

10: Painted Goblin Command

9: Night Goblin Command

8: Painted Nurgle Miniatures

7: Four More Finished Models

6: Still Painting Test Models

5: Freshly Painted Miniatures

4: Chaos Space Marine Havocs

3: Phantom of the Rock Opera

2: Painted Nurgle Forge World Dreadnought

1: Top 10 Diseased Sons Chaos Space Marines

Second Test Post

It seemed to me that before the posts were appearing in reverse chronological order. I’ve never seen that before, WordPress is always adding new features which is another reason I have a WordPress.com blog, but also a self hosted blog that I can test things out on.

I dug up another photo which probably hasn’t been widely seen, instead of an Ork Nob it contains three OOP (Out of Print) Chaos Terminators. I’ve got a lot of painted terminators that I never use, I plan to rebase them. I have some of the Forge World Nurgle ones on my table which I’ll get to in a couple months, they seem to always get put off, as mainly they are just for fun figs. Nurgle terminators are too expensive pointswise to use regularly in small scale Warhammer 40,000 games.

I painted them quite a while ago, I’m not even sure they’ve all hit the gaming table, but they probably have by now.

Update December 2019

It is now many years later and I’m editing all my old blog posts to improve the taxonomy. I did rebase these models but based on the new Death Guard Codex many of them are unusable. Nurgle err Death Guard terminators can no longer have power weapons. Plague marines can no longer have flamers. So basically every squad in my army needs updating with new models and probably champions. Plague marines can also not have bolt pistols again. I will have to look into the regular Chaos Codex but first I need to get back into the habit of painting regularly and and actually play something, even if it is Warcry.

Looking Good

So as I mused, I’ve started a dedicated miniature painting blog for my various hobby projects. Hopefully I’ll get off my ass in the next few days and paint something fresh for the masses. I still need a job, so look at my resume!

I’m not going to move content over here from my personal blog, I’d rather spend my time creating new content and painting new miniatures rather than just import old text and pictures. Plus I don’t like broken links, I remember when people cared about broken links, now people just trust in Google.

So what will be here? Everything I do hobby related basically. Nurgle.muschamp.ca isn’t going anywhere, but it is a huge hand coded site, to an army that I’m going to use less as I paint some new stuff, I’ve ran just about every Plaguemarine squad possible. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve matured and I stay out of online pissing matches when I can, I still contribute to the odd forum, mostly the Bolter and Chainsword but occasionally the Waaagh or elsewhere. I’ve been at this a long time, I have WIP threads that are years old, but I’m not sure if my efforts get viewed by that many people, so hopefully Google will find this stuff and it turns out to be of use to someone.

One thing I have imported by hand into WordPress.com is links. I’ve been collecting links since 1994 or 1995, my biggest collection is pretty out of date, but more recent useful finds, were added to the sidebar for the benefit of all.

What you will also find here is some well painted miniatures and occasionally tutorials and advice on how to improve your painting. Back when I was employed I bought a lot of paint and models, so I try stuff out, rather than stick to just GW paints and models. That said most models I paint are for Warhammer 40,000 or 40K as it is known online. One of the more famous things I’ve put online is the Diseased Sons homepage, so additions to that army along with the Nefarious Fire and new incarnations of Waaagh Musk will appear here.

I’ll continue using Flickr for finished models in higher res, but I’ll probably put most of my Work In Progress or WIP photos on WordPress.com, previously I used Muschamp.ca and I still may use it for somethings. I pay for the bandwidth on Muschamp.ca about 10 bucks a month, I get about as much free from WordPress.com maybe, but they throw the odd ad around my text and pictures. I’m happy with the theme I picked, it is new and gritty, and called Greyzed. Thanks to the Forge Web Creations for that, apparently they are from South Africa, small world nowadays, especially online.

We’ll have to see if a more focused blog on WordPress.com rather than self hosted leads to an increase in popularity, as measured say by number of comments. I always got traffic from the search engines, often from very strange keyword referrals, but I’d like a more social and interactive site, though that said it is just a hobby blog, if I get busy with my new job it will languish for a while.

As you may have noticed, I have a tendency to ramble, which is why Muskblog is an unfocused mess after being updated very regularly for years. This blog will be focused on miniature painting and the hobby, if I want to rant against bad service at a restaurant it won’t appear here, neither will pictures of my sister’s dog, or any baby photos, or any thing else that will pollute the purity of Musk’s Miniatures.

I own a lot of miniatures, a lot of them are painted, but a lot of them aren’t. Even if I never buy another model, I’ll probably never get them all done.  I’m going to have to have a liquidation sale someday. I own a lot of older GW miniatures that I either bought back in the day, traded for, or got on say eBay. I don’t have any immediate plans to sell anything, but at some point it is a good idea. I’m building something of a dream table for wargaming, but it has gone slowly. I got hundreds of dollars tied up in resin and other stuff like foam, plasticard, and balsa wood. I kinda wish I had some of that money back right about now seeing as how I’ve been unemployed for over two months and I’ll always be paying for my MBA.

I promise this is the least focused and most off topic post that will appear here. I need some text to test the theme further and make sure tags and categories are working well. There are links to a lot of photos of my miniatures on the sidebar, but lets see if I can’t dig something interesting out of iTunes to see how the theme handles images.

I don’t currently have access to a good digital camera, remember I’m unemployed.  I do have an iPhone 3GS which takes surprisingly good pictures of miniatures in my lightbox setup.  I also know a number of pro and semi-pro photographers, maybe I’ll con one of them into using their 1000s of dollars worth of equipment to take photos of my minis.

I also might submit this hobby blog to various specialized blog networks, that seem to be all the rage in online hobby circles.  I’m not sure how much more traffic they’ll add, but now with a focused blog and hopefully a month or two of good original content I’ll be eligible to join one or two.  In the mean time we’ll have to wait and see who’ll be the first to link to this blog and leave a comment besides me.