Media - our house - Page 20

A photo taken from my perspective looking down towards my lap, I'm sitting in a single seat lounge chair with my legs reclined. On my lap is the novel Dune Messiah and wedged next to me between my left thigh and the arm of the chair is a small scruffy blonde dog.

And now it's time for some reading!

Posted on 2 March 2024, 21:11

A photo of my standing desk in its upright position, with a bass guitar sitting to the left of the desk, a MIDI keyboard on the desk, and Logic Pro showing on the main display.

Yisssss.

our house music darkroom bass guitar

Posted on 2 March 2024, 19:39

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.

beanie our house dog darkroom

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 steampunk-looking terrain on a game board, it's all walls and put together to look like the interior of a gothic-slash-steampunk starship. The terrain is all rusty-looking like it's been properly abandoned for centuries. Closest to the camera are the warriors of the Astra Militarium, ten heavily-armoured women in white-coloured armour wielding various guns. On the far side are six Plague Marines, huge superhuman warriors in green armour that have all sorts of gross mutations.

A close-up of two of the Astra Militarum who are about to go barrelling through an open hatchway. Above the hatchway are black and yellow hazard stripes, and the walls are all details with pipes and skulls and cabling. Next to the hatchway is a little button pad with a round screen that I've painted green and it looks like it's lit up.

A closeup of one of the sections of wall that has a series of ten smaller screens on the left half of the wall. They look like they're probably CRTs (or whatever the Warhammer 40,000 equivalent is) because they're curved and are green and glowing like what one of the old Apple IIe displays from the 80s looked like. On the right half of the wall is what looks like a round radar display along with two much larger screens, also green and glowing. Similar to the rest of the walls, there's also a bunch of cables and wires and pipes and skulls and it all looks appropriately grimdark.

A closeup shot of the leader of the Astra Militarum who is wearing an officer's army cap and has her cloak billowing out behind her. She's pointing a glowing plasma pistol directly at a Plague Marine who has a giant mouth in the chest/abdomen section of his armour and is wielding two plague knives (which basically look like mutated short swords). They're both standing at either end of a room that has two open doors where they've come in, and all the walls are the standard grimdark steampunk/gothic look with cables and pipes and skulls and rust.

My Kill Team terrain is DONE! Absolutely fucking stoked at how good it looks, I even painted the screens up to look like, well, screens! Other than the screens, all I did to the rest of it was a drybrush of Ironbreaker plus the rust pigment. I wasn't looking forward to having to individually apply pigment fixer to everything but fortunately using a solid thick coat of matte varnish via the airbrush has done the trick just as well, and with far less effort. The hazard stripes above the doors look so good too, and I made sure I dabbed them with rust pigment so they looked properly worn like the rest of it.

lightroom our house games workshop painting terrain into the dark

Posted on 18 February 2024, 16:06

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 two of the sections of the wall terrain from Into The Dark. It looks very steampunk with lots of pipes and skulls and both are painted the lower colour being a dark metallic blue and further up the wall it fades into a lighter copper colour. The section on the left looks almost unfinished compared to the one on the right, that looks a lot more "lived in".

Also after our last game of Kill Team, I decided I wanted to add a bit of extra pizzazz to my Into The Dark terrain because it looked a bit dull next to my friend's set that he put a fair bit more effort into.

One of the things he did that I particularly liked was adding hazard stripes to all the walls above where the doors are, because it's VERY easy to miss the fact that there's a door there and suddenly your opponent opens one right next to one of your operatives and you're like "...oh, shit." Very happy with my hand-painting efforts for the hazard stripes here, I also did some drybrushing with silver (I had done zero drybrushing at all until this point) and used the MIG brand rust pigment to add some extra grime and wear, and it looks mint. Left is before, right is after.

Now I just have approximately twelve million more pieces of this terrain to do. 😅

our house kill team games workshop painting terrain into the dark

Posted on 12 February 2024, 21:51

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