Spolight: Ryan Herbranson - Bronze Prize Diorama for Golden Demon Japan 2013

It seems that here in Japan the Golden Demon event was held yesterday and my friend Ryan over at Blood of Angels won the bronze prize for his amazing diorama. The competition must have been incredibly fierce because I absolutely love his work. There is some great background behind the scene too, but I don't see it on his blog so I'll ask him if I can copy/paste it from somewhere and then I'll edit it into this post. Posting about Welcome to Wargaming will just have to wait a little bit. This is too rad not to blog while it's hot =) Without further long-winded ado, here are pictures of his great submission. Congrats Ryan!

Spotlight: Skeeve (who taught me more than he probably realizes)

Yay! I finally have internet again! Wow that was a long two days...*ahem* anyway...

There are basically two moments in all my time hobbying where I saw immediate, profound improvement in my work. The first was when I opened White Dwarf 316 and became absolutely obsessed with Nurgle. The tutorial in that issue taught me more about painting than I had learned up to that point and changed the way I painted and modeled for years. The second time was when I saw Skeeve's Blight Drone tutorial and decided I had to learn more about blending and layering thin coats. I contacted him through the 40k Online forums and was astounded that this brilliant painter had the time to reply to lowly I. Well, I feel a great debt of gratitude for it, because I learned so much through his guidance that again, everything I do has been affected by it. And it gave me the confidence to try new, bolder things. Here are a number of his models that I gathered up to show off. Enjoy.

Photos from NagoyaHammer 2013 - 1 of...?

Not sure how many sets of photos I'm going to end up with here, but I'll post up more as I can get them. For now I have this set and one more from my phone that I'll put up tomorrow.

These first pictures are of game one. Kill points, starting from the short table edges. Looking at the enemy heavy weapons, we seemed to be okay if we could take down the Quad Gun and IG tanks early on. The IG heavy weapon teams and the Shokk Attack gun were of some concern too, but with enough shooting they'd have to go to ground for a 2+ cover just to survive. It was difficult to pound through all the awesome cover saves the ADL provided, but once we got flyers and skimmers behind it to deny that save, units were more manageable. It was a fun game. I learned a lot about ADLs from it. The Shokk Attack gun was actually the mini that would end up winning the 40k painting competition and I feel bad for not getting closer during the game to appreciate it. The IG were neat for being modeled from actual Squats. that was my first time to see them. Cool stuff!

Here are shots from my second game. 2 objectives, long table edge deployment. Pre-game planning had us thinking that usually means "roll dice and tie," but with all the fast skimmers we had, we thought there was a good chance we could win through the mission objectives. We had first turn again and took the center as soon as we could because it was being played as a Skyshield Landing Pad...or at least I think that's what you call it. Anyway, we were able to effectively separate the other team and focus fire on the few targets that were presented to us in the early game. Playing to get the bonus points for getting all three secondary objectives (that gave a bonus point for the round in the overall tournament score), I was trying to get line breaker and piled out of my Wave Serpent with my Dire Avengers. I was sort of thinking his Farseer had to fail his saves eventually...but he just wouldn't do it before he got to shoot up and assault my Avengers to death. Oops. Our opponents are great guys. Both of them are from New Zealand. I had already met the Craftworld Eldar player before at a different event. His army has moved in a very different direction since then. I'll be looking to see where it goes later in the year.

 

Random shots of other people's armies. I'll lead off with this awesome Hello Kitty army. I know there are several of them out there on the internet, but I like that this one actually utilizes near-scale conversions. It's just so hilariously well-integrated.

 

 

 

  

 

  

The Craftworld Eldar player I played in round 2 had done some cool airbrush work with wire mesh. I think it looks incredibly good and just goes to show that there is a lot to be done with random junk in a hardware store if you get creative with it.

 

 

The next set of photos is from the painting competition. Unfortunately I couldn't get shots of everything. Actually forgot my own and one of the others I liked a lot, so I had to lift those from a friend's album.

 

40k Category - Second Place (Tied - Mine, hehe)

40k Category - Second Place (Tied)

40k Category - First Place