Radagast's Rhosgobel Rabbit Racer - PP2*

PP2) Painting Part 2.

But before going into the images I would like to take this moment to prove myself wrong. The rioting continued all over this formerly nice country and my part of town got more than I could've guessed it would:
        A workmate who also lives in this area counted three police-buses and five regular police cars, and I counted two civilian police cars patroling and searching the bike- and walk-roads between the different areas here. There was also police officers stationed at many smaller intersections. I do not want their job - they seem to be totally tied by the politicans who control their top-bosses. "Do nothing and we can't be accused by anyone", seems to be their motto.

Despite the substantial presence of our violence-monopolists (without riot-gear, because riot-gear seems "so offensive" according to idiots that appearantly decide things in this country), the nearby school was torched, a commercial structure and something else which we couldn't get what it really was that burned until later (a vehicle of some sort). Some of the rioting immigrants/racists also robbed and beat down a couple of Swedes during this mess. No arrests were made.

The papers says everything's fine and has calmed down. I suppose this might be a light version of Winston's everyday...


The only good thing is that instead of going for a long and relaxing walk in the nearby park I stayed inside and painted a little bit instead. Plus watched Arrested Development season 4.

 I added a bird and hedgehog.

 Shine a little light on Radagast...

Here he is. A dour face. He will hold reins that are finished but that I somehow forgot to attach and realized this just now. This would probably be called a "doh"-moment if I weren't so tired, hehehe...

Again, the weird light makes a whole bunch of colours dissappear for some reason - the base has greens and reds as well as different shades of brown on it, it is not an even black as these images suggests.

More tufts are to be placed on this piece. And radagast will finally get his last licks of paint. But that's likely in the far future, for different reasons that are uninteresting when taking into account that this is a hobby blog. Good day.

Painting the Sleigh - Part One

Painting started yesterday even as the green stuff was drying. I got impatient.

There's plenty left to do paint-wise. Radagast shows bare metal on his backpack and on his left sultan-shoe.

Some different angles above... I had hoped I was going to stop doing this but here goes: Sorry for the bad picture quality.

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A garbage room was torched tonight as well as something that exploded in a series of detonations. Probably a car... Still, my part of town has been largely ignored. The small political opposition in my country called our ruling prime-minister for Emperor Nero: Playing his violin whilst the capital is burning.
    Rain has fallen and it seems like all is quieting down finally. Fires are still being lit and schools and pre-schools are being burnt as I type this, but the stoning (not yet any fatalities - despite their best tries) of normal Swedes as well as firemen, paramedics and police seems to have stopped, for some reason or another - maybe after seven days of intense rock-throwing without opposition, the "kids" have gotten tired... ?

DIY Radagast's Sleigh, part three...

Here in Sweden the riots are still going on. The rioteers are "youth" - a well known euphemism that Northern Europeans should know what it stands for by now. The rioteers are of course "religious" and "religious leaders" are basically saying that Sweden is evil and that's why their "youth" (men between 15-30!) are raping and pillaging Sweden. Yes, thank you very much for telling us that after giving you a better home for free and more money than real Swedes get when they're pensioned after 50 years of hard work and taxpaying.

I decided to put the rabbits on a 60 mm base because I wanted to pratice doing dynamic basing. I do not intend to use this model in a game so the unpracticality of it doesn't bother me.

Above, the basic parts: A piece of slate, cork and a piece of a branch. The sleigh is precariously attached to the stick. I wanted the rabbits and the sleigh to look like they are (sort of carefully) traversing rough terrain but still like it had some momentum.

The rabbits are really bad sculpts... but Radagast turned out fine. Next update will probably be about him being painted to semi-acceptable standard. Good evening.

Giant Rhosgobel Rabbits!

I went the way of the compromise. Instead of 12 small ones, I made 8 huge rabbits. As I have once seen huge rabbits in my own town/förort I know they can get quite large - and the ones depicted below are from a fantasy world, so I think I am excused.

There is still much left to do on this project.

Radagast's Rabbit Racer - Part Two

The project is going as planned. The rabbits are a hassle, and after a suggestion from mr El Zorro I have started working on a frame to make a stag as a plan B.

Above we can see the rickety sleigh. I used some of my highly praised spark-knowledge to finish the basic structure of this fucker. Below we can see the Nafta Warrior turned into a peaceful porcupine- hedgehog-lover called Radagast.

I loosened his right arm and bent it upwards to hold the ear-flap-hat, just like the model I am trying to copy. Sometimes it is just so relaxing to wholly copy every last bit of a model.

Blogger have been "effing" with my picture-uploading business... but finally, the images uploaded and everyone is happy. Please note that I for some reason thought it necessary to censor my fingers.
    Also, please note that R-gast (as he's called in the 'hood) is a barefoot hippie. There is a huge probability that this will be rectified.

Another sleighing video on uuutuuubee. A kick-sleigh being pulled by a jet. Old video...

Sculpting Radagast on Sleigh - Part One

A humble beginning.

The plan was to not sculpt a new Radagast but rather reposition the limited edition (well... ) one that came with Escape from Goblin Town. However, when I planned this project I came to think of a little bugger from one of the Perry Miniatures ranges, a Nafta Warrior - a crude flame-thrower guy, if you will. He had a sufficiently enough similar pose and so I dug him up from the box of unassembled models.
        Lately, after looking at projects made by good sculptors, I have learnt the lesson of using the right mixtures of blue and green when using green stuff. I am now forcing myself to use more of the blue part even if it means I will end up with just yellow and no blue after a while. It might save me a few crowns to always use a 50/50-mix, but the time and annoyance to use a mixture that's not even close to satisfying is just stupid, and hence, I will now use the correct mix of blue and green to make different parts of figures I sculpt. A more blue GS to general shapes and a more yellow-ish mixture for beards and furs and the like.

Anyway, in the pic above there are the three main parts of the sleigh and the beginnings of a new Radagast. Finally found a use for the so called liquid green stuff (which probably are acrylic plastics and not epoxy, which might explain the heavy shrinkage and uselessness): I painted it on the metal wire for a whole slew of positives: Easier to get the primer to stick and easier to work with when attaching GS.

Links
Lego Radagast that proved more inspirational than I first thought. And a technical yet entertaining and somewhat humorous link about mushing: Radagast's Racing Rhosgobel Rabbits.

Questions!
The biggest load to carry in this project will be the rabbits. At first, the plan was to make six pairs... twelve rabbits... that's 92 little rabbit legs and 118 ears and a billion pieces of fur to sculpt. Suggestions to this matter? Either decreasing the number or make a whole other creature. And if I were to decrease the number of Rhosgobel Rabbits, should I make the remaining ones even larger?!

Episode 97 of Podhammer...

... is out. Here's the link. We are living in good times indeed when a new episode of Podhammer is released. I hope that mighty Jeff will grace the show with his voice in any of the future episodes. Haven't listened to this one yet, so there will not be a review of the episode.

Vacation over & Eurovision SC finishing...

... which is not my cup of tea. Not to mention the city it's all held in: Malmö, the city of Crap. I will not delve deeper into the matter... The Eurovision is this year held in my fatherland Sweden and is a big feast for people who make music that hurts your ears - the music is not really my thing but I think we can all appreciate the festive feeling of the whole thing. It is a fine and family friendly affair... Last year's winner was like any radio-music - like potato chips, full of fat, fast carbs and cholesterole for your brain to get slow and simple. The only difference last year to other years was that Sweden happened to win.

Enough with the Euro-bullshit. To get up in the hobby-saddle again, I have made a little list (once again), in what to do.

1) Rectify the fact that some comments had been lost in the spam-filter. I have retreived two comments for now, but there might be more - I do not delete any comments that aren't obvious spam!
2) Finish typing part two of Large Creatures and Contraptions for Middle Earth/Lord of the Rings, or whatever I was going to call it.
3) Inform you that there is a crushing probability that the names for the Blue Wizards, Vindalf Alatar and Pallando, is more or less canon. Canon in that Tolkien wrote it down somewhere but it never was published. And I whom always figured I'd read the names in one of the appendices for Lord of the Rings... But no, apparently, I.C.E. which produced an RPG with Middle-Earth as playing ground, worked closely with either Christopher Tolkien or someone at Tolkien Enterprises (no idea how small or large that entity were at the time) and got a unique opportunity to read and use a huge part of unpublished materials.
4) Finish the Misty Mountains-army.
5) Take some pictures of updated armies. Sun's finally here so the pictures should turn out acceptable
6) Make a vignette for this blog.
7) Sculpt a 28 mm llama!
8) Start to collect pieces to make a Grond. I would like to mount it on a mûmak-base. Around 160 mm to work with. I imagine two trolls pushing it and maybe pressing in two smaller Great Beasts of Gorgoroth in front of it - which wouldn't fit, of course, but still... I can not see myself doing it on an even larger base.
9) Completing the Arnor army list. And yes, I am aware that Arnor wasn't a big player in the Ring Wars, but I like the idea of it. And besides, what says you have to play in late Third Age?
10) Try to PDF the finished army-lists from the project to arbitrarily balance War of the Ring as well as make a hyper-abridged how-to-play booklet with the FAQ:s and erratas inserted smoothly and seamlessly.
11) Learn better English grammar. The adjective-end "-ly" and verb-end "-ing" seems to be the only forms used here... Also, has/have might be something you learn in 4th grade, but it has escaped my mind. And more colloquialism! Preferably correctly used colloquialisms...
12) The replaced goblins from Games Workshop will be made into some sort of high-fantasy Mutant Goblins and based on some over the top mushroom littered trays.

And we end on an even dozen.
      Hopefully there will be no terrorist attacks on this "We are one"-fest here in Sweden. What grand irony would it not be - especially considering in the city it's held in... wait, that's not irony, that's expectations fullfilled...
       Hmm... there are more things to do, come to think of it, let's not end on an even dozen:

13) I would really like to make a Radagast's Sleigh! I have some more ideas in the same vein, but we'll come back to that later.
14) Finish the Elven Sky Chariot. Alph means swan in sindarin or noldor, by the way. Maybe it can be used somehow when establishing the final name for this project. The intention is to give the chariot some sort of wings instead of the magic fly-inducing fins, which doesn't really feel (bunny-ear alert!) "realistic".

The chariot needs wings!

15) Currently, I am finishing some rules for many of my homemade projects (I consider these rules sketchy, to be honest, more placeholders than anything) but also for the newly released models for the Hobbit Strategy Battle Game: Grim Hammerers and Warriors of Dale, Hunter Orcs etc. These rules will be published under the now empty page "War of the Ring".

 

 16) Enjoy some Wäppel-painting.

Sweet painting by Jämes Wäppel.

17) Just seven more months until The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug comes to town!

18) Make the model to the left but with Galadriel instead. Tree-witch-babe Galadriel.

I think I lost track on what I was doing. Good bye for now.

Domestic Vacation

As depicted below, you can see I'm obviously off to the lands of Cockaigne...

... for some traditional nose-pulling.
   Return date has not been set, but it will be a very slow month with regards to our hobby. I know I have some ongoing debates and haven't answered some PM:s over at TWF, but it'll have to wait, I'm spent and tired and need to unplug and rest. Have a good May, one and all!

WHFB Phoenix - Unboxing and sprue-review

Warhammer Fantasy Battle Flamespyre Phoenix. 400 SEK. Contains two sprues, one 20 mm base and one WHFB-chariot-base + one pin for mounting flying creatures.

Bought it today, Saturday. There were no painted examples in the store and the boxes of the new WHFB-stuff was/were discreetly set in the back of the store - which is strange, perhaps this model's premier release was not this Saturday but the Saturday before?

This is the sprue with the main wings and phoenix-fire addons. All the parts has little to some mould-lines, as expected. But as learnt over these maybe 10 years of LotR-hobby from GW is that freshly produced plastics are in better shape than when the sprues are older. Might sound abundantly clear, but for me it wasn't.

... and this is the sprue with the frost-addons.
    A phoenix is in itself a rather high fantasy thing but just like dragons are also a high-fantasy thing, there are quite a few examples of well done dragons that look realistic in their own way. And this is a phoenix that is well done and looks "realistic", well, believable is the correct word - remember it is done for Warhammer Fantasy which is the epithomy of over the top and high-fantasy. Lately, many of their models have gotten better and I have also become desensitized of the OTT and Extreme Skull Ornamentations (the skulls can be filed down to find a fine model below said skulls), but the trend is: Better proportions.
    Some birds have heads that are larger than you'd expect. As this is natural and happens in our God-given nature, I am inclined to not mention the rather large head on this phoenix. But I will do it anyway: The head is quite large.

With this 399 SEK model came one 20 mm square base for the foot version of the phoenix rider, one chariot base and one (1) transparent pin for mounting of flying creatures. It is the flying pin version 1.1 that presumably doesn't break as easy. I stress-tested it, because I have extras, and this new one was a lot more sturdy than the old ones.
    The detail is very good and I almost feel love towards Games Workshop for producing this kit. The feeling passed quickly, but that has nothing to do with GW or the models, it is just that feelings tend to pass quickly in my mind and heart, what, with being a llama and all.

I give the model 5 llama-teeth out of 5 llama-teeth and this review, with pointless sidetracks and talks about feelings, a lousy 2 out of 5!

Phoenix: 4,8/5. Not a full 5 due to the large heads.
Elf-rider: 0/5 for Lord of the Rings-fans and probably a 3,7/5 for WHFB-players. The positive thing is the inclusion of separate leg parts.
Sprues: 5/5. With the trend of putting alternative parts in one kit, these two sprues hit the five.
Price: 3/5. I find the price more than acceptable. It is still just one model, though. And for 400 SEK I could sponsor a New Delhi-low cast family of nine for almost ten (10) days! Lucky for me I do not wish to sponsor a family of nine (9) New Dehlians but rather buy this one (1) phoenix-model.

Khemrian Warsphinx -> Rhûn Automaton

The very humble beginning. I will "dilute" all of the main parts to make two automatons! You may remember me talking about this idea earlier when the Rhûn project was running at an all time high. I didn't forget it. These automatons will look very little like the warsphinx when I am done with them - this doesn't mean the home-made ones will be better in any way - far from it - but the project shall be more interesting than the finished result, methinks. My versions are very toned-down and boring, add some sloppy sculpting and thumprints and you get how high I am aiming for this project. A purely recreational project.

I supported the local store and paid 50 SEK extra instead of ordering it from www.figurspel.se and my halo shines brighter than normal.

Other projects
- Radagast on sleigh.
- Finish painting sky-chariot.
- Go and buy a flamespyre phoenix.
+ A tonne of other things mentioned earlier that I have forgotten about. I will go back and note each and every one of my promises to our holy hobby.

Stealing Radagast.

After watching the beautiful and characterful model Radagast the Brown on Sleigh I have decided that I want to make my own - especially after Scott's short comment on its delightfullnes. I want to sculpt a billion rabbits and make a little sleigh and mount it all on a nice 120 mm base. The only problem is: How to make Radagast?
    I already own a Radagast, the running version with Sebastian under his left arm, from the Escape from Goblin Town "Limited" Edition-box. Only problem is, I do not want to start hacking him up. I like my paintjob and do not trust my sculpting capabilities enough to start cutting the model up. So, what to do? Theft, is the answer!
    Veteran readers might know I once stole slate from a DIY-store, and recently I found some hazy clump foliage which I was able to sell to a friend for good money. All good things comes in threes? Do they not? So, a third crime to top it all off sounds like a good idea:

So, what I want are your tips on how to steal a finecast model from a store. Any store. Should I betray the trust of the regular store (easier because they trust me) or shall I have some sort of "criminal's code" and go to a fresh place and do the stealing? Will I use a flashbang as a diversion?

As it stands now, I have planned on using a skimask, kick in the door at the exact moment the store opens and just run inside, grab what I want and go. The other plan is to casually walk in (wearing my best crocodile clothes) coolly say "tjaba" and put Radagast in a bag of groceries. I was considering the somewhat convoluted Mrs Doubtfire-tactic, but after watching Arrested Development I reconsidered...
     Of course, this is not something that will happen, it is just a little comment on the debate on GW and their pricing and how we are supposed to *mainly* perceive the Hobbit as a collector's hobby: The models are now priced so high that it is actually almost a sensible thing to risk stealing them!

In this country, if you steal something small to smallish at a value below 200 GBP/220 EUR, there's a 1,2% chance to get caught*. After that, there's a 50% chance that police will actually show up. After that, there's a very high chance of police dropping any charges because of political reasons ("many-crimes", as they are called, are "supposed to drop in numbers", so our violence-monopolists simply look the other way whenever they can). The chance of not being processed as a petty thief are high, some say around 80% if you are older than 23. Younger petty thieves will be noted either in a five-year running registry after been given a fine or simply released without fines after stating their identity. The youngest will be given a consultation time with a halfwit social worker. It is not mandatory to show up to the meeting.
    So, in the incredibly unlikely event of getting caught in fact happens, you will still only get fined between 80 to 200 EUR depending on the situation and the goods. So, were I to fill my bag of groceries with finecast I would make better money than a convenient store-robber but risk almost nothing! So, kids, you heard it here first, start stealing that goldcast if you live in Sweden, because it's worth it.


*) An internal security educator from my company said this and many other things that might or mightn't be true - he didn't really seem like a sharp knife, like most people being consultants in this country. Parrots, that's what they are...

Swan Chariot, painting phase 2.

A project consisting of a sky chariot, three elves and two swans. And a 120 mm oval base with a sparse selection of vegetation. Purple or white flowers will be added to the base.

Toying with the idea of painting the golden leaves on the swans in green instead, I think they would lively up the front of the model slightly.

As you can see in this picture, the pulling ropes aren't finished yet. I have the missing four parts in my desk-drawer but they will be added when I have gotten my new, smaller rare-earth magnets, the ones I happened to have was almost 40% too large.

The sky-chariot itself is slightly warped due to me being sloppy during the construction of the basic paper construction. Chariot itself consists of paper, plastic WHFB-bits from the Burning Chariot of Tzeentch, green stuff, grey stuff and miliput and more paper.

I am still testing different colours, but the crew got their first layer of verdigris. I will work up the metals again and perhaps add a blueish tint - I believe that this colour is called azur? Or is it? The colour-mix between green and blue that many men have a tough time differentiate from blue (not talking about colour-blindness).

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In other "news" I can inform readers from not-Baltic-bordering countries that celebrations of Valborg have finished without bigger disturbances in this stretched-out country known as Sweden. Valborg, or Walpurgis as it might be called elsewhere, is an old pagan thingie (renamed after Holy Valborg in... in... some year or the other) where you light bonfires, throw firecrackers and both celebrate spring (again) and scare away the trolls, vättar, gnomes and evil spirits. And in the university cities of Lund and Uppsala, for some reason, the celebrations are really heavy. Here's an example of a family friendly tradition in old university city Uppsala (situated close to the capital Stockholm)