Monday 13 July 2009

134 Black Paint FAIL

Ha-ha!

No pic, but this weekend, to give me a break from painting veterans (they're coming along, though more about that below) I thought I'd get on with painting my playing mat.

Since I got back into the hobby I've mostly played my games on my 6x4 chipboard (in two halves). It's cheap and heavy, but it keeps its shape well and when not in use it goes beneath our mattress for extra back support. I've always covered it with an old, dark green bedsheet, stretched taught and pinned to the sides of the board or to the bottom of the table. This has the double advantage of keeping the boards together securely and obscuring the join between them, which can be too useful a mark for guaging distances. But it's green.

So I decided to paint it black. Not only that, but chuck some sand into the paint too, to give it a surface texture (I'll go back in future and get some different greys patched onto it, for depth and variety). SO I hung it over my washing line, pegged it up and mixed up the black paint/sand combo.

And brushed it on.

And thought it smelled a bit funny.

And when I tried to clean my brushes...whaddya know? - I accidentally used the pot of black emulsion paint I'd forgot I had.

Bugger.

There's nowhere to get brush cleaner on a sleepy Sunday afternoon in our village, either. Or at any time, I suspect.

So...I got half of the sheet covered (fairly effectively actually - but it's very unlike me to finish stuff) and I screwed up two cheap old brushes.

So let that be a warning to everyone out there: Learn to read and don't be a prat.

In Other News

Veterans all have heads now and are coming along nicely...but I playtested them in a blue-on-blue scrap in Vassal on Saturday night and I'm not impressed. Harker's lot should be fun enough on their own, but they're rubbish for long-range anti-tank and only marginally better at ranged anti-personnel. Losing the veterans' ability to infiltrate really is the unkindest cut of the new Codex. Damnit.

And today I was digging a World War I trench with kids at school. Really. Great fun but I'm bloody knackered, with another three days of it to go!

Cheers,

- Drax.

5 comments:

  1. Sorry to hear about the black paint FAIL. But, at least you get to dig a trench... how does the saying go? "The world needs ditch diggers too"

    Here is a LINK just for you.

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  2. See, now you can experience how your guardsmen feel down there on the battlefield. Putting yourself in their shoes certainly will help with your understanding of your men and this make you a better general! ;)

    Vets work brilliantly for me. Triple-plasma and triple-melta, both must be mounted within Chimeras though, otherwise they die without doing much useful things.
    And now that I actually gathered some money to spend on more Chimeras the local store is all out of stock and the internet store doesn't have them as well!
    Sometimes you miss the days of mocked and with little interest in Guard, huh?

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  3. I thoroughly agree: Vets are great when they're tooled-up and mounted. Maybe I'll look at that more, actually; but for now I don't really have the right models spare (although I do technically have plenty).

    Maybe that's something to aim at. Then again - what would I have to moan about?!

    And Brian: You're a git. I laughed!

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  4. I had a right laugh when I read your post, and then an even bigger one when I read Geeks response and followed the link.

    Can't offer much advice on the Vets but digging a trench sounds fun - did one in my front yard about a month ago and put a hedge in it.

    To what extent are you going - full historical with duck boards, sand bags, mouldering bodies and rat infestations, or a basic hole in the ground approach?

    Also, be careful of gas lines, water mains etc. Not quite sure what the British building code is like, but i know over here in Oz, you can have pipes anywhere from two meters below the surface, to a bare few inches, and replacing water pipes on a sunday afternoon is no fun for anyone.

    Pom.

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  5. It's 'Challenge Week' this week at school, and I'm working with a history teacher and two gangs of kids over 4 days.

    It's about 40 metres long(!) in total, with a Grecian key/dogtooth design, firestep, duckboards, sandbags, the works. We even got a trench stove going today so we could make a brew.

    It's supposed to get to about 5ft deep plus parapet/parados, but at 3-1/2 feet deep today we hit some serious rock (the rest has been shale so far, and pretty tough going. I'm not afraid of hard work, but this is bloody tough going.

    The site was checked beforehand, but thanks for the warning. It's on an embankment above the all-weather pitch, and we even post a sentry whilst we're working (usually whichever kid got the pickaxe in the eye most recently!)

    Oh, and we have a plastic rat, which scared the daylights out of one sixth-form girl today!

    I'll post pics on completion.

    Thanks again,

    Drax.

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Thanks for taking the time to comment!