Raggy's Gaming Adventures

For those of you who are not familiar with Bubblegum Crisis, it was an Anime, first made in 1987 and remade a few times in the years since. It is arguably a great example of female empowerment where a group of women put on powered armor suits and fight crime. They aren't doing this to catch the eye of some guy (mostly) and frankly make most of the male characters in the show look like incompetent idiots. At the meta level there are still some things that could be done to make the show a little more gender equal (either stop applying fan service / skin requirements or apply them to men and women equally) but I still think it was a pretty solid show for demonstrating women can also kick ass. Bubblegum Crisis was also one of the first anime shows I ever watched and when I found out Ground Zero Games had a range of figures from the show I rushed out and bought them... at a Salute ... about 10 years ago... and they joined the ignominy of my lead mountain. I unearthed them a few wee...

People may wonder why an Englishman, living in America, chose to paint a reading Orangutan to represent his 'tribe' in a painting contest. Is it a statement about British education? A statement that we are all once species sharing a planet and should all get along? An outright protest? Well not really. It is a celebration of a great author from Buckinghamshire who passed away far too soon. This is for Terry Pratchett , author, satirist and role model: The full album of photos, including the work in progress and a nifty animated rotation can be found in this Google Photos Album . - Raggy, signing out

Hey folks, Updates have been getting a little thinner on the ground as I am currently preparing for an exam and workload is piling up a little. The pro elves have been progressing by inches but there has been some decent progress on our favorite Orangutan: After substantial angst over how to paint the flooring, I opted for a silvery/grey wood effect using: Unfortunately for those trying to reproduce, I have no idea what that grey paint is. I bought it from The TreeFellas from a UK game show. They don't have a web presence but their paints are great. Of course, having settled on the base, I needed to tint the wood, get the shading in place. I tried 4 washes: I then drybrushed the Minitaire Mummy to bring it back to a more wood color. I drilled through the middle of the board and added it under the Librarian to allow for direct juxtaposition. In the end I settled on the Dark Tone to remove any of the red hues, keeping them on the Librarian himself. I al...

For those of you that are new readers to my blog, you should know that for the last year or so, my painting focus has been Blood Bowl. The drive for this has come from my local League that runs short seasons giving me just enough time to paint up a new team for the next season. The results have been pretty solid. I have played in four seasons and two tournaments with a new team each time that has really gotten me through the list of Blood Bowl teams in need of painting. Why am I talking about all this Blood Bowl nonsense when there is clearly an Orangutan reading pictured below? Well in order to avoid burn out, I will switch up my focus every so often and pick up something else. Recently a lot of my friends have been gearing up for painting contests (Our local convention KublaCon and some for the Crystal Brush at Adepticon), with all the new skills I have picked up recently thanks to CK Studios and Miniature Monthly (See previous blogs here and here ) I figured I should put my ski...

For those of you not familiar with the universe of Terry Pratchett's Discworld, it is a fantasy universe that had a major part in making me the person I am today... it has a range of miniatures sculpted for it by the awesome Micro Arts Studios . Discworld features, among other wonderful characters, 'The Librarian': He is the Librarian at the Unseen University Library and was turned into an Orangutan through an ill explained, and by now barely remembered, magical accident. He is my favorite character for many many reasons: his love of books, regard of them over and above people, philosophical thoughts and ability to kick ass when required. So why am I rambling on about all this? Well I bought a large collection of the Discworld miniatures, promising myself that I would paint them once I felt that I was talented enough. In my latest attempt to procrastinate in painting up my Pro Elf Blood Bowl team... I noticed a cool little painting competition on reddit and with Mini...

After a couple of pretty grueling weeks in the office with all sorts of issues, I've been looking forward to a two day class in how to Airbrush miniatures more than words can convey. The class was held in the back room of my local game store and saw a dozen avid hobbyists gather to spend the weekend painting up a Space Marine Dreadnought (mostly Forge World Contemptor Dreadnoughts). The class was lead by Caleb Wissenback and aided by Kat Jackson as CK Studios . I have raved about these two on a previous post  and this class was even better than that one. I am not going to go into too much detail of what the class covered as I think you should really try it yourself if you are interested in Airbrushing (if you don't have the kit, you can get that as well from them at a great discount). So what did I do? well this: Day 1 How? Well we started with this: I had prepurchased my Dreadnought from Kat in advance of the class and it came primed and ready to rock. I was also...