Can I play with magnets?

Hey guys, long time since my last post (as usual), but thought I'd post a little tutorial on how I magnetised my Customeeple silhouette markers.  It makes them a lot easier to transport as they go flat for storage.

First up, I'm very impressed with the Customeeple acrylic templates, they are good quality for the cost, and being able to get my main Infinity faction's (Bakunin) logo on there really sets it apart from some of the other templates available.  The silhouettes are no different, you get 3 templates in total, an S1/2, S4/7 and S3/5/6, plus a 25, 40 and 55mm base.  One thing that I was a little disappointing was that the acrylic is just a rectangle, so you have to glue it directly (and flush and centered) to the base.  I think they could be improved by adding a tab so that you can slot them in to the bases without requiring glue, but overall I was thoroughly impressed.  Anyway, on to the tutorial!

A (finished) silhouette template.

To magnetise your templates, you will need a bunch of 5mm diameter magnets, plus some 2mm diameter magnets.  First, you will need to find the center and diameter of the base:

Marking the diameter

The easiest way to do this is to draw 2 parallel lines anywhere on the base, then draw a 3rd line between the center point of those two lines.  The center of that 3rd line is the center of the base, and a line drawn from that point to the edges is the diameter.

Next, drill two holes 2mm in diameter at the edges of the base, both on the diameter line (being careful not to cut into the sides of the base.

Drilling holes on the diameter

Once you have drilled two holes, and cleaned them up, attach two of the 2mm diameter magnets to the bottom of the acrylic piece, being careful to ensure that when the acrylic is placed on top of the base, the magnets fit snugly into the holes and the acrylic piece sits flush with the base.

Magnets attached

Finally, attach 2 of the 5mm diameter magnets underneath the base, covering the hole you drilled earlier, being VERY CAREFUL  to ensure the polarities of these magnets matches up to those you attached to the acrylic piece, you may need to carve some of the plastic out of the underside, depending on where you drilled your holes.

 The 5mm magnets in place

And that's it! when you fit the magnets on the acrylic piece, they should sit flush in the hole and the magnets should hold it upright and in place.  They are pretty sturdy, though your mileage may vary depending on the magnets you use (I used neodymium ones)and I've yet to have one topple over of it's own volition.  Then once your done playing, just take the acrylic piece off the base and pop them back in your bag, flat as a pancake!

It's just a little inverted, it's still good!

So there you have it, magnetised silhouette templates.  It was really simple to do and in my opinion makes them much easier to transport.  Hopefully you may find this tutorial useful when you come to make your own.  Thanks for reading and check back soon(ish) for more nerdly goings on in the world of Leigen_Zero!

Sweating the small stuff in the small hours

 Hey folks, it's been a long long time since any of my promised fortnightly updates, but I haven't done anything hobby-wise that I felt was worth posting really.

I've decided that rather than stick to a fixed schedule, I'm just going to update as-and-when I want to, because trying to stick to a schedule when I know I either won't have the time or content is just going to make me a little stressed, which isn't something you want out of a hobby you are supposed to enjoy.  As an old colleague once told me, 'don't sweat the small stuff, and when you look at it, in the grand scheme of the universe everything is small stuff'.  

Recently, I've discovered that for whatever reason I tend to be pretty good in the very early mornings, we don't have curtains in our bedroom, so I've found that I've been getting up really early the past few days (around 5am-ish).  We do have blinds, but I'm the kind of person who can only sleep in levels of darkness that would give an owl a hard time seeing in.  This usually gives me a 90 minutes of time to kill before I get ready for work.

Lately I've been trying to get some hobby time in the evenings once my son has gone to bed, but by that time I'm usually so tired I don't have the concentration or focus needed for something like painting miniatures, so I've decided to make the most of this early rise and try and get an hour or so's hobby time in before I go to work.

I've been having real trouble painting up my Infinity miniatures, the details are really fine and I always end up either messing it up or finding myself unhappy with the colour scheme, so it gets chucked in the dettol and started again.  I think that my skills aren't really up to scratch, so I've decided to try and do some practice on a few of the Bones models from Reaper than I own before I tackle Infinity again, so I started small and over the past 2 mornings I painted up the 'Mocking Beast' miniature:

Reaper 'Mocking Beast'

It's only painted to a 'good enough' standard to get me warmed up, but I'm pretty pleased with it.  It needs a base, but that can come along next time I have some spare putty. I painted it using a mixture of several generations of GW paints (which revealed to me just how bad a state some of those paints are in) and army painter strong tone quickshade (a.k.a magic in a bottle).  There's nothing fancy there, just a basecoat, wash, then a single layer of highlighting.

So getting back to small stuff, I enjoyed painting this miniature as it was a small, simple exercise.  The most important thing is that it's 'finished', so it can go and take a proud place on the shelf.  For me, it's a little bit of victory that chips away at the larger goal.  I think the boost I got from painting a small miniature like this can go a long way spurring you on to tackle bigger and more complex goals.

Anyway, that's it from me this week, so don't go sweatin' the small stuff, and come back soon for the next thrilling installment!

Nothing says I love you, like a Humboldt Squid

Hey everybody, thanks for checking back on Clawing at the Walls!

So last week's post is a day late in the posting, no excuses, I'm just crap at keeping to schedules, but what the hey..

So, there have been some hobby updates, in the 2 hours-ish I had for hobby time last week, I did manage to put brush to pewter and made a start on my Sin-Eater Observant:

Early Stages

I'm just blocking in the colours at the moment, but I feel that if I document any progress, regardless of how small, it just might keep me going on this whole blog thing.  I guess it's the whole momentum thing, a tiny snowball can quickly become an avalanche providing it rolls for long enough.  The Sin-Eater Observants are one of my favourite units in Infinity.  In the fluff they are the guards of the Observance, men who have undergone painful and sadistic ritual torture just for the sin of being born male, fitted with neural implants that jack up their reaction speeds to inhuman levels.  They are reactive-turn beasts and are armed with some of the heaviest weaponry in the Bakunin Jurisdictional Command and the models are just bad-ass looking.

Usually the 'core' of any of my Infinity lists will include a Sin Eater with Mk12, which for me is the right balance between punch and price, so I wanted to prioritize painting him up as he's nearly always seeing table time.  Colours so far are GW Codex Grey on the trousers and some other areas, GW Mechanicus Standard Grey on the left shoulder, GW Ulthuan Grey on the rest of the longcoat, P3 Frostbite on the armour plates and GW Goblin Green on the ribbing.  Eventually both the armour and the longcoat will both be white, but I want to experiment using different basecoats to achieve a different white for each area (note, I'm a traditionalist in some regards, when I paint white I start with an off-white basecoat and work up using many many layers of very thin white, oh and I'm also a bit of a masochist).  His base is self-built using plasticard and some flexible resin power-cable from Zinge Industries, the yellow will eventually be hazard-striped.  I haven't quite decided what to do with the Mk12 itself yet, but despite all the naysayers I will probably use some metallic paint on it.

In other hobby news, I made a start on my HoTT Skaven army, but came unstuck when I tried to remove all the extra metal that gets stuck to the bottoms of miniatures of this scale, it's a byproduct of the casting process, but it's lumpy, uneven and adds a good 1mm of height to these already 'large for 10mm' miniatures, I tried sandpaper but it wasn't sturdy enough so I think I'm going to have to invest in a heavy duty file to get rid of the excess metal.

Outside of the hobby world, I came across this bad boy in a mother-and-baby store:

The Alleged Squid

Yep, that's right, it's a gigantic plushie (the tentacles are about 18" long plus a good 12" of body) of a Humboldt Squid.  I knew then and there I had to buy this for my son, because in my mind, nothing can express the overwhelming love I have for my little dude like a cuddly toy cephalopod apex predator!  needless to say, at 3 months old, a giant red floppy thing with eyes the size of golf balls completely flabbergasts him, but I'm planning ahead to when he's a toddler, and he can truly appreciate it and insists on dragging it everywhere by the tentacles.

Anyway, I appear to have finished my beer (Asahi super dry, for anyone that's interested) and I have work in the morning, so I'm going to sign off now.  Thanks for reading and tune in next week for another installment in the nerdy world of Leigen_Zero!

Off to a good start...

Well, despite promises of activity between last post and this one,  i haven't made much progress at all (well, nothing worth writing about, I did prime a reverend custodier and a sin eater).  Reasons were numerous, our son has decided he wants to get teething done and out of the way early so he's been a bit grumpy.  Secondly,  as we now have a baby, we now enjoy the British tradition of spending most of the bank holiday weekend parading him around various friends and  family, and thirdly I've been under the weather with a rather nasty cold.  Not that these are things to complain about, except the cold obviously, but I felt the need to justify my lack of commitment to the blog after such a short time.

On the plus side, all my outstanding orders have come in, so I've got a large number of pendraken ratmen ready to become  a HOTT army (and ive been  rummaging through my skaven bits to find suitable parts to make up some beasts, behemoths and an artillery piece.  I finally got round to picking up the reaper bones wereshark i bought off ebay, but wouldn't fit through the letterbox and spent far longer than necessary in the parcel purgatory known as the sorting office.  It's a rather weak moment in my hobby  history,  where i went on ebay to get some plasticard and ended up buying a wereshark, but it's a great looking model and might see use in my mordheim undead.

On the downside, this does mean that due to not having any outstanding purchases, the rules of 'play it painted' I cannot make any more untill all that I own is completely painted (I am allowing myself one exception,  that is the foot troops of my egyptian HOTT army, which i refuse to order until the website puts up pictures).  This seems to be a problem endemic to the 'micro' scale miniatures market, no-one in thier financially sound mind would think of selling 28mm or bigger miniatures online without good photos, but at 10mm or smaller, the sellers seem to think that people will simply make blind purchases. I appreciate that many 10mm etc manufacturers have significantly larger miniature ranges, and tend towards a cast-on-demand model, but seriously is it that difficult to get a few cast, then get some photos taken before putting the range up on your  website? I'm not asking for professional quality snaps here, an employee with a steady hand and a good camera would suffice, but just make it so that my purchases don't involve any degree of 'well let's put some money down and just pray the sculpts dont look like crap' or require trawling Google Images for days hoping that someone much braver than I made the blind purchase and put the images up on thier blog for all to see.

So anyways, i'm going to sign off now, I've had a little rant which has satisfied the innate need in every British citizen to complain through the medium of written word and I've stated my case on lack of progress, thanks for reading and check back next week for hopefully more productive tales from thenerdy world of leigen_zero!

First post!

Hi there, and welcome to my new blog: Clawing at the Walls!

I'm Leigen_Zero (not my real name obviously, but I like the whole mystique of existing behind a 'handle'), and this afternoon I discovered that at some point in 2011 I created a blog, but never actually bothered to post anything, or check it regularly, or remember it existed.  So today I decided to change that.  I don't remember what the original purpose of the blog was going to be, but I've decided, as a self-confessed, card-carrying nerd (no seriously, they make us carry little cards around here to distinguish us from the rest of civilized society), I've decided to use it to blog the various interesting and geeky things that have been going on in my life.

Some things about me:

• Firstly, in January this year my wife gave birth to our first child, who I love dearly, despite the drool stains that are marking the left shoulder of all my t-shirts...
• I got into miniatures gaming way back as teenager through Warhammer 40,000 (which sadly, due to various reasons on both consumer and producer side, I no longer engage in), but I've got a fairly broad mind and I've expanded into several other miniatures games, board games, and other nerdly pursuits.
• I have other interests outside of little lead people, I play the ukulele and the guitar (badly, on both counts) and I'm a software engineer by trade.
• I have a concentration span that can be measured in femto-seconds, which kind of leads onto why I am bothering to start this blog in the first place.

Long story short, I have a large number of unfinished projects sitting around my hobby room, currently it stands at:

• Infinity: Jurisdictional Command of Bakunin
• Bushido: Savage Wave
• Mordheim: Undead warband (pirates of the vampire coast themed).
• Hordes of the Things; Ratmen and tomb-kingish-undead-construct-things.
• Dystopian Wars: Empire of the Blazing Sun naval fleet.
• A rather large quantity of scatter terrain for Infinity.
• A bunch of miscellaneous stuff.

So, anyway, what I would like to introduce you to is this:

The Shelf of Shame

This is the shelf for my finished miniatures projects, as you can see, it's pretty sparse and desolate, currently it contains:

• 2 objective markers for Bushido.
• A 'Professor Plum' Cluedo piece I painted out of boredom.
• My Shadowrun character, who I will get around to finishing some day.
• some random reaper bones I picked up as practice models.
• And a pair of pliers... 

(note: my wife and I share bookshelf space, which is why Fifty Shades of Grey is on there, I'm not really into novels about mild bondage with wealthy businessmen)

Anyway, much like Homer Simpsons encounter with the Stone-Cutters, I wish to unshackle myself from the shelf of shame, and become chained to the shelf of triumph!

So my intention is to use this blog to document the progress of my various projects, and hopefully fill the shelf with finished projects I can be proud of.  I intend to post updates roughly every week or so (probably on a Sunday), but my 'hobby time' is a little limited, so I may wander off-topic on occasion to document forays into my other interests, sometimes I may just post some sort of rant about first-world problems or something, or whatever I get a chance to do that particular week.

So anyway, that's the first post out of the way, hope that has piqued your interest enough to make you come back in a week or so and check out what's been going on in the nerdy world of Leigen_Zero!