Stay in School

Another video I just had to share … watch it to the end …. LOL

More Planes

So I spent the last evening working through my photos and videos from the weekend and soon ended up playing around with the videos. Blink, Blink .... 3 hours later I ended up with a short clip of the World War one planes. I've still got alot to learn about video using my DSLR (must start using my tripod), and then there is the editing side of things. I now understand why making movies can take so long,

Also played around with a few filters to bring up some of the shots from the very Cloudy and dull gray day that was Sunday.

P51 D Mustang

Gotta Love Summer

Shot a few weekends back... Just gotta love Summer.

Maori Bay - West Coast - New Zealand

Wings over Tauranga

More shots from the the Air Show. I finally got some good shots of the Sea Sprite.

Also managed to get a few nice shots of the Venom with vapor trails coming off the wings 

Wings Over Tauranga

So I've been slowly getting though all the photos I took over the weekend, and put together these shots from the group of WWI planes. I love watching these fly, and they are alot of fun to photograph as well

Wings over Tauranga – Practice Day

Today Lee, Will and myself ventured down to Tauranga for the practice day of the Wings over Tauranga Air Show . A beautiful summers day with about 15knot winds.

Here’s a quick few pictures from the thousand or so I shot day.

Now time to get some sleep for the full day tomorrow, fingers crossed the weather holds for us.

Call of Cthulhu LCG

After painting some of the mini’s for Mice and Mystics and seeing how much better it made the experience, I decided that I just had to paint the Cthulhu Domain models for my Call of Cthulhu LCG game.
I love this game, so I had a bit of fun with the air brush. There was no way a matt finish was going to work for these guys, so went all out with high gloss which turned out better than I has expected.

And some random awesome Cthulhu artwork
 

Garage Kit – Dark Elf

I finally got around to taking some photos of my first finished Garage Kit. It was definitely a learning experience and I made lots of small mistakes and a few big ones. It was well worth it though as I learnt alot. I've already got two other kits from a different supplier (http://www.e2046.com/) and the quality is so much better, the resin is also a bit more flexible and the casting is far superior compared to this kit that I got from http://homemedia4u.com , so I already know the second kit is going to be much better than the first.

Linage Dark Elf

So the mistakes I made and learnt from

1. Chipped her ear – need to handle parts a bit better, it strange handling such large part compared to the 28mm models that fit in your palm.
2. Masking wasn't up to standard, and had several band runs onto the skin.
3. The repaint of her body skin was required, but I never repainted her face so the skin colors don't match that well.
4. Prep work – should have spent a bit more time sanding and using higher grade sand paper (already got some for my second kit)

Live and Learn

Smash'ed Em' Bro

For those who don't live in NZ, they probably wont know the TV sports segment we have here referred to as "Smash'ed EM' Bro"( But I think you can work it out). Well in a game of FOG on Sunday, it happened. For some bizarre unknown reason, the Dice God's were out for complete an utter blood in my first game. And for once it wasn't Viking blood.

I was using my 600 point tournament list of Vikings up against Phil s Spartans. Not only was I rolling good dice, but almost every re-roll I got hit. Then if I did need to make a death check or cohesion roll, I was passing them so often even the God's wouldn't have wanted to bet against me. I lost three bases the whole game and had one battle group break. So it was a complete and utter Spartan blood bath. And it wasn't due to my deployment or any super sneaking rules or anything, just simple God or maybe demon blessed dice. Sorry Phil, that just how it rolled.

And yep, I used a complete set of different dice than I normally do.... think I may save them for the tournament next month.

My second and third games of FOG today were against Will with his Roman's. Now before today, Will's Romans were bating the heads of my Vikings, winning 100% of the games. So in the first turn of our first game it was heading that same way and it continued for that game. I did manage to break a few of his battle groups but got beaten soundly.

The second game however was quite different. I actually thought about some tactics and they worked to a degree.(shock horror ... me...having tactics... and trying to maneuver Viking) Anyway, this time my dice demons were back on my side, and I had some advantages with overlaps and numbers. All adding up to a complete reversal of the first game against the Romans. If fact I was another Smashed Em' Bro moment.

All in all a good day for the Vikings, winning two out of three games. So I now pretty happy with my list for the tournament.

Epic Evil Baby

I’m still laughing, just had to share this.

W.I.P - Painting Progress

My painting effort so far this year has taking off, having had a break and holidays seems to have got me re-enthused to paint again. But today's effort in painting was well and truly dashed by that annual accounts (one of those necessary evil’s in life) but I still managed to get a couple of hours in and further my Ronin boys closer to being finished. Touch ups and basing still to do, but 6 pretty much done and 4 to go.

f Also in keeping with my new year goal of painting the models I have, I got stuck into several terrain bits for Mob wars I hadn’t finished up yet. Along with preparing a few other models. I’d thought I’d start a log of my painting, similar to my Gaming records. Here’s a quick list in no particular order  … (man I have alot to paint)

Ronin	4
Empire of the Dead	10
Steam Punk Gang	10
Mob Wars	11
Dr Who	7
Pirates	8
Pirate Ship (Large)	1
Wild West Civi’s	2
Bushido	8
Flames of War	an obscene amount of Russians
Hell Dorado	8
FOG Renaissance	Complete Samurai Army
Gladiator	18
Uncharted Seas  - Elves	9
1/6th Garage Kit models	2
1/32nd Scale Airplane models	3
Dark Age	2
Heavy Gear	5
Infinity	31
Firestorm Armada	10
War Machine	40+
War Hammer 40K	50+
War Hammer fantasy	50+
Dust - vehicles	6
Dust – infantry	46

Club Day Annual Napoleonic's

Today was the first meeting of the South Auckland War Gaming Club for 2014. The standing mass battle of 28mm Napoleonic's for the first meeting of the year took on a new epic scale this year. A 16 foot long table with a third 8 foot table making a T-shape.

The game was in memory of John Berry (coming up 6 years since he passed away). I never meet him as it was before I joined the club, but it sounds like he was a champion of the gaming cause and a nice guy.


Using some old school rules and a ridiculous amount of miniatures (thanks to the guys for supplying all the stuff) we split into teams and formed up some battle plans. With so much going on and so many of us doing different things I wont attempt to do battle report as it wouldn't do the game justice.

Glen, Kevin, Mike and myself took the French with a Spanish attachment up against the Russian and Bulgarians. So here's an epic amount of photos for an epic game.

 In the end and after an entire day gaming, the French and Spanish take the victory.

 (Big thanks to all the guys for an awesome days gaming)