Raggy's Gaming Adventures

This is not intended to be offensive, and my appologies if it does offend. Ok so here is my question. I was coming home late today and on the way out of the tube station and at the top of the stairs in the Newsagent's window were a load of magazines for black interest such as Ebony. Now this month every single magazine had Michael Jackson on the cover. Are these magazines promoting Michael Jackson as a black role model? Of course he was hugely successful, but he had several lawsuits against him and so on... but this is a man who spent most of the latter half of his life trying to not be black... Is this really what young people should be taught, that being themselves, no matter how great or successful, is not enough?

Yep here they are, my first 40 handgunners. They are certainly not the best paint job I have ever done and to be honest I don't think they are even up to the standard of my spearmen, however I did enjoy doing them and it gave me the opportunity to try a few techniques and get practiced at doing rank and file after having done so many unique figures recently. A lot of the eyes have ended up looking terrible and I blame this entirely on my being sloppy when doing the flesh. It is a real bugger trying to paint without access to the painting station and a good light. I have already made a start on the huntsmen and thought I'd post a pic of the work so far: - Raggy, signing out

No, this is not a blog about Arsenal. The plan was to paint up the boring rank and file units whilst stuck in London... starting with the Militia, then the Huntsmen and then the Gunners... Well it is all going a bit arse backward. I have started with the gunners. Every time I look at a unit of 20 figures, each in a different pose, with different accessories, weapons, hats, clothes it makes me feel queezy. Nice regimented boring old-fashioned and best of all easy to paint. I love them, the four different poses are enough that you can mix and match and get a really good looking army. Well it has been slow going, I have never been a quick painter and there are 40 figures on the conveyor belt. I have done a bit on the other figures, the huntsmen have had their flesh painted on and a couple of militia men have gotten some special treatment: As you can probably tell, these figures are nowhere near complete yet. I haven't even finished the base colours yet... really ...

It is a sad reality that these days spam is an inevitable result of dealing with the online community. Often otherwise legitimate sites gain some additional revenue through selling addresses to spammers. I don't expect to change the world, but I am intrested in finding as many of these companies as possible. I do this by creating a seperate email address for every site that I sign up on, the addresses aren't listed anywhere else and so the only way a spammer can know of the address' existance is if it is given to them by the site I signed up on. On each site, I will make sure to specify that I don't wish to receive any promotional mail first or third party etc etc. Should I get an spam in one of these accounts I will write up the details on this blog. I should emphasise that this is not the focus of my blog, just a sideline for my own amusement. So once again if you have any sites you would like me to check out, just drop me a comment. - Raggy, signing out

Well as I have already mentioned I am down in London at my parent's house helping out with redoing my Grandma's old house. As a result I don't have a lot of time to paint, and I also don't have a lot of my stuff with me so I decided to focus on the rank and file. This has allowed me to do figures that I have been avoiding, without fear of being sidetracked, it also means that I will be able to put in a lot of practice of some techniques (such as eyes) and really improve on them. So far I am making decent progress with a unit of Spearmen completed (they were already mostly done when I left): I have also done the eyes on all 80 of the other miniatures that I brought with me. That is 40 Handgunners, 20 militia and 20 huntsmen/archers: I have now done the base flesh on all the handgunners and just over half of the huntsmen: PS Appologies for the poor quality images, I will try and get some better ones in the near future when I have made a little more progress. ...