Media - darkroom - Page 29 | virtualwolf.org

A photo looking down a hallway of a small scruffy blonde dog lying on a green blanket, staring directly at the camera.

Beanie has very carefully manoeuvred his blanket out of the office and into the middle of the hallway.

Posted on 26 February 2024, 21:30

A photo of our dining table with a Warhammer Quest game set up on it. There's lots of cards and dice everywhere, and in middle are a bunch of variously-shaped tiles connected together that look like a bunch of alley at night, plus a couple that look like the inside of buildings. There's four hero miniatures in the middle (one heavily-armoured warrior woman with a sword, a vampire hunter with a long leather coat and a big hat, a steampunk dwarf, and a priest with a rich red robe and a big staff) plus four groups of hostile miniatures at various points on the board (two groups of three rat swarms and two groups of three bat swarms).

A photo of two painted miniatures standing next to each other, one is a heavily armoured warrior woman with short hair holding a large sword, and positively LOOMING over her is the Vargskyr, which is a massive hunched over demon/bat hybrid thing twice the height of the warrior, with red skin and brown fur down its arms. It has blood around its mouth and dripping from its claws and there's a pile of skulls on its base.

We continued our Warhammer Quest campaign today with @wobin by defeating the mighty Vargskyr!

It was a very interesting variation on the standard journeys: instead of the hostiles we faced being randomly selected from the encounter deck, we started out with all six corpse rats and all six dire bats, divided into two groups, plus the Vargskyr itself. The Vargskyr didn't start on the battlefield and they represented it striking stealthily from the shadows by making its activation involve rolling the D12 and whichever of the lychgates (the red door things on the edges of the tiles) was on the die, the hero closest to that would just straight up take a damage, no saving throw or anything. To actually get it to come out in order to damage it, you had to get to the "mysterious objects", which are the skeletons and the columns with the raven on top, at which point it'd pop out and absolutely wallop the hero that activated it, then vanish as soon as any damage was done to it, and you'd have to get to the next mysterious object, and so on.

It started out looking VERY rough, almost everyone was at half health quite quickly, but thankfully we were able to rally and once we got through the initial hostiles that started on the battlefield we had some very lucky rolling where the hostiles didn't respawn when it was their turn to activate. After that it was a case of getting enough damage onto the Vargskyr which we were able to do (and once all the mysterious objects were gone it'd remain on the battlefield so we could really wail on it).

So now we're all at Level 2, so there'll be more hostiles to face, and the Vargskyr will actually potentially come back as one of the hostiles drawn from the encounter deck when we play our next regular game! 😬

our house darkroom gaming games workshop warhammer quest

Posted on 24 February 2024, 21:07

A photo of a bunch of pastries and sweets (croissants, big cookies, etc.) sitting on an office desk.

I'm in the office today for a team event, we ordered in a bunch of pastry-type stuff for a celebration in the morning and were originally planning on going to the beach but changed that plan yesterday after seeing the weather. So we managed to get a reservation to go indoor go-karting, got on the train at Wynyard and weren't even at Town Hall when the organiser got a call from the go-karting place saying it was cancelled because they were flooded. >_<

work darkroom food

Posted on 20 February 2024, 13:52

A half rack of deliciously-blackened beef ribs sitting on a wooden serving board, along with a small wooden bowl of chips.

A large shallow bowl with salted caramel mousse in the middle, with some pieces of honeycomb on top and three pieces of mint leaf, along with, uh... ground up something-or-other in the middle (I'm not actually sure what it was).

Yesssss, beef ribs followed by honeycomb salted caramel mousse at Meat & Wine Co. 👌🏻

darkroom food portrait mode ribs bella vista mousse

Posted on 18 February 2024, 20:37

A photo of a game of Warhammer Underworlds. There are two rectangular boards with hex tiles on them, the art on the boards looks like the inside of a cave, and there's two pieces of scenery in the two blocked hexes, one is a giant set of yellow crystals and the other is a massive horned skull. Closest to the camera are the four vampires of the Crimson Court, they have pale blue skin and red cloaks, with blood dripping from their weapons and the corners of their mouths. On the other side of the board are the Gorechosen of Dromm, a three-fighter warband consisting of very large meaty-looking warriors in large red armour.

Another game of Warhammer Underworlds, @yayKM took the Gorechosen of Dromm again and after last game I realised that horde warbands really don't work against the Gorechosen so I went for the undead majesty of the vampires of the Crimson Court.

It wasn't looking great for the vampires at the end of Turn 2, but a couple of lucky rolls on my part meant the game ended up with none of my vampires dead, all three of the Gorechosen wiped off the board, and I ended up winning 14-8.

our house darkroom gaming warhammer underworlds direchasm the crimson court nethermaze gorechosen of dromm

Posted on 17 February 2024, 16:04

A photo of a small scruffy blonde dog lying in a dog bed, with a blue blanket that's balled up in part to the same height as his head, and his head resting on top of the ball.

We got this furry little scruffball ten years ago today!

I washed his blankets today, @yayKM made his bed all nice and flat, and he had to completely ball up the blanket and make a headrest instead.

beanie our house dog darkroom

Posted on 16 February 2024, 23:46

A photo of a small scruffy blonde dog sitting the back seat of a car with his lip stuck so it looks like he's either smirking or sneering.

Beanie had another chemo drip treatment today, he didn't need to be sedated at all and the vet said he got bored half-way through the process and ended up mostly asleep!

He's going to get another CT scan in three weeks to see how things are looking, and possibly another dose of chemo if it's necessary.

beanie dog darkroom cancer north ryde

Posted on 13 February 2024, 15:44

A photo of a Plague Marine from Warhammer 40,000. He's in huge khaki green standard-issue huge Space Marine armour with bronze-coloured edging in places, but because he's one of Nurgle's chosen he's all corrupted and mutated: there's a GIANT mouth with huge teeth right across the entirety of the chest and abdomen of his armour with a metal pipe coming from his shoulder and going into the side of the mouth, and the two very large knives (honestly, they're more like short swords) he's wielding have skin-coloured spines growing out of them in places.

A photo of three Plague Marines in a line. They're all in the same general khaki green armour, but the one on the left is fairly dull-looking without too much highlighting since it was my old regular-paints painting technique where the highlighting was done with drybrushing. The one in the middle has come out a brighter green because the underlying primed colour is brighter and also it's the newer "Militarum Green" Contrast paint so the primed colour has a lot more effect on the finished product. And finally we have the one in the previous photo with the two knives that has much more emphasised shadows and much punchier highlights thanks to the zenithal highlight and manual highlighting.

After our last game of Kill Team I figured I should probably paint up my Plague Marine who has the double plague knives because he's a beast in close combat and against Genestealers my ranged Marines weren't super-useful. I re-primed him using a zenithal highlight and got him fully painted this weekend, and am very happy with how he came out! There's zero drybrushing except on the sand on the base, it's entirely Contrast paints and manual highlighting.

I also realised that I've been painting Plague Marines long enough that I have essentially the three stages of evolution of my painting technique. On the left in the second photo is one of my first Plague Marines from nearly six years ago now, using regular paints which looks fine but takes so long. In the middle is my second batch from eighteen months ago where I was using Contrast paints to greatly speed things up, but still had a plain white undercoat and the highlighting was still done by way of drybrushing. And on the right is this latest guy, with the full zenithal undercoat and manual highlighting!

our house darkroom kill team games workshop painting death guard

Posted on 11 February 2024, 21:49

A selfie of me, a white man with a short red beard and receeding hairline, wearing head-mounted set of magnifying eyeglasses. The headset itself is white and the lenses are a single piece of almost sunglasses-shaped hard plastic that attaches to the front of the headset and can be moved forwards or backwards. My eyes look freakishly large because I'm looking directly through the lenses at the camera.

My eyesight is definitely still very good, but I do need extra magnification when I'm painting eyeballs on my miniatures because they're so damn tiny (the best technique is to paint the whole eyeball black, then put a white dot at the very left and right so you just have the black in the middle looking like the pupil). I've had a magnifying glass on a arm attached to the side of my painting table for a few years and it helps but even with that I've been finding it tricky, it doesn't quite magnify enough without ending up with the end of the paintbrush awkwardly close to the magnifying glass.

A friend has a set of those headset magnifying thingies, so I looked at a bunch and bought a set for myself from VisionAid. It's got a couple of LEDs in it and there was the choice of a USB-rechargeable one or a 3x AAA battery one, so I went with the latter since I'm very unlikely to need any additional lighting given how brightly lit my painting table is. The handiest bit is that it comes with five different magnification strengths and you can easily swap them out, change the angle, and move them closer or further away from your eyes.

our house selfie me darkroom portrait mode painting

Posted on 11 February 2024, 14:57

A photo of two fully-painted Space Marine miniatures with bare heads standing next to each other. The left is holding her boltgun in front of like she's standing on guard, and the base is a sort of desert rocky-looking texture/colour. The one on the right is a much deeper richer red, far closer to the colour of blood, and she has a pistol held in one hand and is in the middle of throwing a grenade with the other. Her base looks like really thick mud and it's splattered half-way up to the knees so it looks like she's been really tromping around a battlefield.

Earlier this week I painted one of my converted Space Marines as a test to make sure the colour scheme worked, and man am I glad I did only one as test because I hate it. 😫 Despite deciding to paint them in Blood Angels colours and using the Contrast paint called "Blood Angels Red", there's FAR too much orange in that colour, I don't like how the backpack came out with it being black, and I don't like the base either (I DID do an absolutely bang-up job her face though, particularly the eye).

I did a second one and finished it tonight (the one on the right) using my trusty old Flesh Tearers Red, painting the backpack the same colour, and using the muddy terrain texture, and it looks SO much better. Definitely going to use that for the rest of them.

our house darkroom kill team games workshop painting space marines

Posted on 10 February 2024, 21:51