Your Armies for Double Trouble (Part 1)

Last week I posted asking for people to submit some pictures of the army they're working on for Double Trouble. I got literally no responses so I decided to email everyone who's bought a ticket and now I've actually had some stuff so here goes.

First up here's Daniel Wellington's Ad Mech offering. This was particularly intriguing for me because not only is in in Ryza colours (which my Ad Mech would/will be) but also because he's got purple as an accent colour which is what I often do with my armies.

I think they already look awesome and I can't wait to see them in the (plastic) flesh. He says this was where they were at about a month ago and he's in the process of adding some Breachers which I'm looking forward to seeing.

Next up for today is Michael Corr (the same guy who's blog I featured on recently). Here's what he had to say:

As Double Trouble is fast approaching, I began to think about which of my armies I wished to take to the tournament. I have a feeling that Double Trouble is going to be an unusual and fun gaming event and am really interested to see how the random pairings will work each round. I decided that I could branch out a bit from my standard marine tournament armies (my Ravenwing and White Scars) and maybe take a force that sees the table less often. With that in mind, I have been coming up with a Double Trouble list for each of my 4 armies, looking to the blogging community on which force they would like to see or face. You can find my 4 potential lists here. Any comments on which list you would like to see or how to improve any of my lists would be much appreciated!

My personal vote would be the Orks because Orks are awesome. I love playing with or against them. The more greenskins at DT the better frankly! I'm even considering swapping my DE plans out for Orks to be honest.

Anyway, I'll be back on Sunday/Monday (motivation permitting) with some more army progress pictures. Hope you enjoy this little series.

Better Know A Blogger featuring... Me!

Despite barely blogging of late, Michael over at St Andrews Wargaming asked me if I'd mind being interviewed for his Better Know A Blogger series. Of course I was more than happy to oblige, especially since Michael has supported Blog Wars and is coming along to Double Trouble. Anyway, you should all head over to his blog and have a look at my "interview" and also the previous articles in the series where other bloggers have answered the same questions. I've enjoyed reading their responses because I rarely get to know much about the other members of this community.

It's ironic really because the whole point of starting Blog Wars was as a means to get to know more people behind the blogs I read. Sadly, in running the events I didn't get much chance to chat. That isn't to say I didn't meet some great people in the 10 events over the 5 years of Blog Wars but there's only a handful that I know much about out of the 100+ people that attended in that time.

The process itself was a great way of reminiscing about some of my hobby past. It's interesting to think about what got me into the hobby and some of the experiences I've had along the way to where I am now. I lament my lack of time to both paint and play at the moment and tournaments are definitely something that have fallen off my schedule at the moment. It seems like whenever I see one advertised I've already got plans for the weekend in question. A great example of this is the GW Battle Brothers event in July. I'm free for it but my usual partner at these things, Matt, isn't. We just can't seem to get it together lately. Perhaps things will improve as our kids get older.

This lack of time has driven me towards playing more board games and quicker games like X-wing (which is awesome - you really should play it). I think I'd be quite content just to work my way through FFG's collection frankly. I have a bit of an apathy to 40K as a whole at the moment. The game is getting more and more complicated to the point where I just don't feel like I know any of the armies any more. There used to be a time when I could tell you pretty much everything about every army but I'm not even close to that point right now. It's as much about me as it is about the game mind you.

Anyway, head on over to Michael's blog and check out those articles. If you're a blogger too then I'd encourage you to contact Michael and be interviewed too. It's great to get to know more about you all.

I'll have to have a reminiscing post at some point soon where I look over some of my photos of old models and flick back through my 2nd edition rulebooks!

Your Armies for Double Trouble & Three Colour Minimum

Well folks, I'm ashamed to say that I have literally made zero progress since the last time I posted about my Dark Eldar. I'm finding it incredibly hard to motivate myself to paint them up right now. Line highlighting is just not enjoyable for me. Maybe I need a better brush or something but I find it to be laborious with minimal rewards. At this point I'm even considering selling my DE, that's how much I hate it!

Anyway, in a bid to motivate me (and also highlight some other people's much harder work), I thought it'd be good to have a project log of as many people's armies as possible in the run up to Double Trouble. I'm throwing it open to you guys then. We've all got just under 8 weeks until the tournament. Depending on your life outside the hobby that should be enough time to get to the three colour minimum required for the tournament, even if you're starting from scratch.

If you'd like to catalogue your progress on From the Fang then please send me (using the contact me link) as many pictures as you like of your miniatures as they are now and then at least fortnightly updates of how you're getting on in the run up to the event. Feel free to include any bits of text you want to accompany the photos or even full guest posts if you'd like.

For those of you who already have a blog of your own, please send me a link to any posts that cover your Double Trouble army project. Even if you're already on my blog roll I'd like to hear from you so I can collate together everything DT related.

Assuming I get enough material, I'll try to post a weekly update of your hobby work and hopefully we can all encourage each other to get some new (or unloved) armies painted up!

Three Colour Minimum
On the subject of painting, I've had a few suggestions regarding enforcing the "three colour minimum". This was always the limit at Blog Wars but I never really handed out any penalties for failing to meet it. I've said before that I'm not a fan of so called "soft scores" and that's still the case. However, I appreciate that if you're putting a lot of effort into your army, you'd like to think others are doing the same. If nothing else you'd hope that everyone can at least manage to get three colours on there.

What I propose is that during the first round everyone will simply tick a box for both of their first round opponents to indicate if the army meets the standard. I'll then follow up on the ones that didn't get a tick and check them out for myself. If I agree that they're lacking then I'll impose a tournament points penalty (amount to be determined). Obviously it relies on honesty from everyone (there's no real benefit in lying) but it saves me from having to review each army to see if they're suitable. As ever though, I'm not totally set on this so I'd like to hear your thoughts. No one likes playing against grey plastic or black undercoated armies though!

Dark Eldar for Double Trouble WIP - Part 2

Well firstly, apologies for the sporadic posting of late. It's a combination of factors as ever. I'm trying to put my free time into painting instead of blogging. The other big thing is that I'm really struggling to get excited about new releases of late. The weekly release cycle has taken some of the intrigue away and I find it tough to get enthusiastic about a couple of new models for one of my armies here and there. GW have got themselves into a bit of a hole at the moment from where I stand. With the exception of Chaos and Sisters, they haven't really got any armies at moment that require a massive overhaul of rules and models. I'd argue that sisters don't need much work on the rules either.

It's ironic really that we were all clamouring for rules in WD again, more regular releases and more stand alone games. Now that we're getting that it's having the opposite of the desired effect on my enthusiasm. The models for Deathwatch look great but I can't face another board game with unpainted models. Perhaps that's because I'm so in love with X-wing and the pre-painted models there are more than good enough. I suppose the key is that I don't want to add more grey plastic to my collection. I want a cupboard full of at least gaming standard models that I can look forward to using in battles. To that end, enough rambling, let's look at my progress on the DE so far.

I'm really torn on the colour scheme still so I picked up a line drawing of a Kabalite Warrior and had a play with a colouring app on my phone to try and come up with something original. I created an interesting mix of off-white and purple that looked really good on the picture. Trouble was, I wasn't blown away when I tried to apply it to a real model:

Now, obviously it's tough to tell from just base coats but I'm just not really feeling the love for it. I do, however, still like my original paint scheme plan as shown on my now several year old test model on the right. I therefore tried to apply it to a reaver jetbike to see how I felt about it.

Painting this convinced me to stick with my original scheme but I thought it'd be good to try and apply the same blue stripe to the entire force. Here's what it looks like added to one of my more painted Venoms:

The paintwork needs a bit of tidying up here but I'm happy with the general effect. I'll then try and continue the ice blue stripe down the middle of the warriors' and scourges' helmets. I think the purple needs to come through a bit more strongly too so I went for random panels on the reaver canopies to break them up a bit and make them more individual:

I'm pretty happy with the way this comes across. You'll notice I continued the blue strip onto the rear fin as well. Not decided what I'm doing with the reavers' helmets yet. Think it'd look too much with the stripe continuing through. As you can see I've also started on the seat cushions and painted in the controls. I'm toying with bringing in some of the off-white on the weapons but will have to see how it looks.

My problem now is that all of the colour scheme indecision has put me quite far behind schedule. I was hoping to be sat here with finished reavers at this point but I still haven't got anything off the table. Here's what I've got to get done in the next 9 weeks:

• 3 Venoms with crew
• 5 Reavers
• 10 Scourges
• 10 Warriors
• 1 Archon

That's 29 models so not far of a model every two days!! Not saying I've got no chance but...

Anyway, hopefully your Double Trouble armies are coming along better than mine. If you haven't got your ticket yet there's still time. Head to the DT page now for more details.