Media - darkroom - Page 5 | virtualwolf.org

A photo of a backyard in-ground pool. There's a man standing in the shallow end with a large splash beside him where a kid has just leapt in, and another kid swimming towards where I'm standing taking the photo. It's sunny and there are hedges on one side of the pool and the pool fence is visible behind it.

A++ chill NYE today. We went over to a friend's place, had a barbecue, splashed around in the pool for a good hour and a half, then had a second barbecue!

Posted on 31 December 2025, 21:34

A photo of the box of the Voidscarred Corsair squad for Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team. They're basically punk space elf pirates, all wearing elegant flowing blue/green armour and sporting mohawks.

I DON'T HAVE TOO MANY MINIATURES, YOU HAVE TOO MANY MINIATURES. 😤

After playing that game of Kill Team the other week and discovering that the Heavy Gunner with the Wraithcannon is actually quite good in the current edition of Kill Team (I had constructed this squad during the last edition when the Wraithcannon was hot garbage so didn't construct it) I figured I'd get another box of Voidscarred and try swapping the Fate Dealer (sniper) out for the Heavy Gunner and make a couple of regular Warriors that I can swap out for some of the close combat specialists. It turns out Games Workshop appear to have stopped printing them entirely so I quickly snapped up a box from the usual place I get my miniatures from.

our house darkroom kill team games workshop aeldari new miniatures corsair voidscarred

Posted on 30 December 2025, 16:52

A photo of my rather messy table in the back room that has an airbrush sitting on it along with miniatures in various states of assembly. The new light is a wide panel mounted on two-segment metal arm that's attached to the left side of the table and hangs nicely over to the middle where I'll be doing the airbrushing.

I finally got sick of how dodgy my old lighting setup in the back room was and ordered a proper one, which arrived today!

With the old one it was a bit cramped at the right because where the "arm" was is around where the airbrush sits, with this I can attach it all the way at the left edge of the table and it reaches out nicely. My only complaints about the new one are that 2200 lumens is actually not as bright as I thought it was, and the LEDs in this are quite blue compared to the old switchable light. It's not a big deal though because I'm not doing any colour-critical airbrushing, I can pretty much count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've done anything except black and white.

our house darkroom painting airbrush

Posted on 29 December 2025, 11:26

A photo of a quite ornate Space Marine that's been primed in black and then had a zenithal highlight with white done from a high angle make it look like it's being lit from above. The body is in one piece, he's holding a tall staff that looks almost Egyptian, and he's pointing with his other hand. His head isn't attached (it's on the piece of cardboard that held everything down while I painted it), and nor is his backpack and cloak, which looks like it's blowing dramatically in the breeze.

A photo of Lhykhis the Warp Spider Phoenix Lord, sitting in several pieces. On her body she's wearing sleek armour and is partially crouched mid-jump with a large elegant sword in one hand and her other hand out for balance. Next is her backpack/back armour which has two mechanical arms coming out from it and pointing forwards above the shoulders, and another two coming out below where her arms would be when the backpack is attached, and the whole effect very much brings to mind a spider. After that is the curved ruin that the whole miniature sits on, then her helmet which has an additional two eyes above where her regular eyes would be, and then finally there's the lightning effect that goes underneath her when everything is assembled, it looks like the bottom section of what would be a curved sphere of lightning.

A photo of the fully-assembled five Ork Nobz (and one gretchin) that make up the Fire Team, well, team. They're all hulking, bestial-looking brutes with lowered heads, massive jawlines and are all wearing extremely ramshackle armour that looks like it's been pieced together from whatever scrap metal they could find. Two of them have giant mechanical claws that look like what you'd find at a car wrecker and another has a flamethrower that's had a machine gun welded to the top of it. The gretchin looks like a tiny goblin and barely comes up to the waists of the full-size Orks, in one hand it's holding a stick grenade that's taller than it is, and the other is dragging a box filled with bullets.

I took a break from painting the Tomb World terrain to assemble and prime Ahriman! I'm going to try painting him in separate pieces, hopefully it'll make things a bit easier. 🤞🏻I also assembled and primed my Warp Spider Phoenix Lord that a friend gave me for my birthday back in April (also being done in pieces because ye gods).

And I spent most of yesterday assembling and magnetising the weapons on my box of Ork Nobz that I got nigh-on four years ago now. 😅 Realistically I'm not going to be swapping weapons out because these were just purchased for Fire Team, but I wanted to try it because I'm going to need to do it for the Deathwatch that came in the Tomb World box and I wanted to have something low-stakes to practice magnetising on (I've never done it before). It started out slowly but everything went off without too many hitches, until the very last miniature where I got myself turned around and put the wrong polarity magnets in and so they didn't attach to him. 😑 Fortunately I was able to push the magnets that were in his shoulders into the hollow cavity inside the body, with rather a lot of effort mind you, and then put a fresh set of correctly-facing magnets in to replace them.

I definitely need to make sure I pay extremely careful attention when I'm doing it for real with my Deathwatch, and I've also ordered a set of 3x1mm magnets because these 3x2mm ones turned out to be a bit too deep for a couple of the arms and I ended up drilling out the other side of the arm, oops.

our house warhammer 40k darkroom games workshop painting

Posted on 27 December 2025, 18:28

A photo of the (fake) Christmas tree at my parents' place. It's pretty big, probably close to 2 metres tall, and covered in lights and decorations. Christmassy without veering completely into "explosion in a Christmas shop".

A photo of my Christmas haul: eleven paperback books (mostly scifi), a Fender "Telepath" wireless system for being able to play guitar through my amp without needing a physical cable, and the Ahriman miniature from Warhammer: The Horus Heresy. The art on the front is a Space Marine in ornate red and gold armour with a kind of Egyptian feel going on.

A photo of two kookaburras sitting on the fence of the neighbour's back deck.

Happy Chrimbo, fediverse! The theme of this Christmas was "books". Plus unexpectedly a miniature from my daughter!

We also got to watch the local kookaburras hanging out on the neighbour's back deck.

christmas books darkroom mum and dad's presents new miniatures

Posted on 25 December 2025, 18:44

A photo of me, a white man with an increasingly-scruffy red beard and an increasingly-receding hairline smiling at the camera. I'm holding a guitar which you can just see the neck of, and behind me is the window out to the backyard where our little back room structure is sitting with its door open. The sun is getting towards setting but it's still nice and light outside. (Yes I'm aware that I'm facing the wrong way in this photo to be watching birds, you smarty-pants. 😛)

A very zoomed-in shot looking at the door of the back room as one of the little birds is mid-flight on its way out. I don't know what sort of bird it is but they're brown, TINY, and have a red patch on their faces. This one has its wings out and its feet extended because about a half second after I took the photo it landed on the grass.

Current status: practicing palm muting by doing some power chord chugging on my Epiphone SG while watching the tiny little birds flit around outside searching for seeds after I mowed the lawn yesterday.

They hop from place to place, then elongate their necks to make themselves taller and wiggle their little tails while they do it, it's so cute. Two of them even got bold enough to explore the back room and were in there for a good minute or so! I managed to catch one mid-flight as it zoomed back out.

our house selfie me darkroom birds guitar

Posted on 24 December 2025, 18:28

A photo of the start of our game of Kill Team. The terrain is all ruined industrial-looking concrete buildings with rusty pipes everywhere, and along the top of the ruins and in various spots down the sides there is snow that's fallen and collected so it looks extra desolate. Closest to the camera are my Corsair Voidscarred (think punk/pirate space elves) in elegant flowing fuchsia-coloured armour, and on the opposite side are the greenskinned orks. They're a very ramshackle bunch, wearing all sorts of differently-shaped armour that looks like it's been bashed together from whatever pieces of metal were available, and carrying weapons of very dubious quality.

It turns out that one of the people I play Kill Team in the office with actually lives just five minutes from us! So he came over today and we managed to get through a full game, my Corsair Voidscarred versus his Kommandos, and the Voidscarred actually won for once. 🎉 The final score was 11-7, I had five operatives left out of a starting total of nine, and the Kommandos only had their leader left out of a total of eleven.

Operative of the match definitely goes to my Starstorm Duellist Arendra Firewinter who accounted for three of the filthy Orks without getting killed herself (holy shit is her fusion pistol nasty). I also managed to position my Soul Weaver really well and she was able to heal my operatives on three separate occasions and give an extra APL on two. I'm sure I forgot a few things, but I think it was less than in the past, and I did remember the trick of charging into someone but not fighting them to completely negate the Rokkit Boy (he had to use both of his APL to fall back on one turn, then the next turn he was vaporised by Arendra's fusion pistol). This was also the first proper outing with my Hivestorm terrain and I'm absolutely stoked with how good it looked on the tabletop!

our house darkroom gaming kill team games workshop kommandos corsair voidscarred

Posted on 13 December 2025, 18:34

A photo of a bowl of ice cream, with Ice Magic, chopped up strawberries, and crushed peanuts on top.

At work for the past slightly under two weeks I've been drafted into getting the internal documentation for our new platform wrangled into a better state (where the current state is basically "it's been written by individual effort from a bunch of devs who've all been operating mostly independently and also the platform is changing almost week by week and nobody has had time to look at things with a customer-focused eye"). I'm pretty well known as The Documentation Guy and so bringing me in to help has been basically bringing in the big guns.

It's been really interesting and I'm learning lot, plus everyone is really nice and helpful and answers my endless questions, but man is it draining. So this is an extremely TGIF bowl of ice cream. One more week to go and then I have three weeks off and let me tell you I am very excited.

our house work darkroom food ice cream ice magic

Posted on 12 December 2025, 19:26

A photo of two of the wall pieces of the Tomb World terrain. The designs on the wall have a geometric alien-robotic look, and part of it is covered with cracked stone so it looks like the alien-robotic section has been exposed underneath the stone. The stone is brown colour, and the alien-robotic walls are shaded white and grey, with white highlights, and really contrast with the crumbling stone. The right-hand piece is the one I'd previously finished, but the left-hand one has a cool almost Egyptian-feeling doorway in it where the top half of the doorway sides tilt inwards. It's got a big chunky door frame painted in dark green and the door has three gold-coloured Necron scarabs on its surface.

Wall piece number two is down, plus one of the connectors and a door! (And not pictured, another one of the "doors" that looks like a bunch of lightning).

I had briefly thought about painting Hexwraith Flame into the little gaps in the connector pieces to make it look like it was glowing but quickly decided that I cannot be fucked.

our house darkroom games workshop painting terrain tomb world

Posted on 7 December 2025, 18:02

A photo of a big round table with the remnants of a bunch of food on it.

Aww yiss, yum cha with @[email protected] @[email protected] and @[email protected] (and another friend who isn't on the fedi anymore). 👌🏻

darkroom food yum cha

Posted on 7 December 2025, 11:58