Moving soon.

Not virtually, of course.  But physically.  In a few weeks, I’m moving out of my relatively small NYC apartment up to a giant palace in Syracuse, NY. My wife has to finish up some schooling, and where the wife is, I like to go.
One of the “joys” of moving is trying to figure out how to organize the vast collection of my hobby and then wracking my brain in determining the best way to pack it all for moving!  I mean…the minis are easy.  I have *just* enough foam to pack all the important minis like this always-near-completion-but-I-just-bought-some-more-minis Crimson Fist army.  And my Tau are already packed and ready to go…so no worries there!


But what about all the other stuff?  The boxes and terrain and bits and bobs and terrain-junk box and paints and WIPs and the cats and all the other stuff.  You can’t just stuff it all into boxes and hope they make it, right?  I mean…I spent days organizing my bits and bobs bins!

Do I unpack it all and stick into baggies?  Tape all the bins shut with plastic wrap?  Wrap it in bubble wrap, stick in a box and look forward to resorting all the bits?  (Note: I’m probably going with that last option as I love sorting and resorting bits.  My doctor says it’s cause I’m crazy. My wife agrees.)
What about the vast amounts of terrain?That’s not even all of it.  I have an assortment of bastions and trees already waiting to get packed as I type this.  My method? Wrap in bubble wrap and hope for the best.  Oh.  And then I’ll write “Fragile: Please don’t break my toys” and a crying face on the side of the box.  Hopefully the movers will think I have a kid.
At least the books are easy except for their ridiculous weight…I didn’t even know I had this many White Dwarfs (Dwarves?)! And I’ve taken the time to consolidate all my uncut sprues into a few empty boxes.  And put them on the shelf.  The “Dark Angels Army” box?  That has 5 Landspeeders and at least 18 bikes and 2 more Deathwing additions to my Dark Angels.  Unassembled.  I have an illness.  This hobby.  I love it. But man. It is desperately unfriendly to moving!  And I forget how I packed all this stuff last time (and then bought a lot more stuff)…so I just know I’m going to commit the same mistakes all over again.  I’ll designate a shelf in the new place as the triage ward for shell-shocked minis. 
But when it’s all over, I can look at my wife and say…look!  All my stuff is packed! I’m awesome.  And then she’ll point to a corner of the office and smile politely…
DANG IT!

Flesh Tearers: Small Update

Got 3 more Flesh Tearers assembled.  I haven't had much time to hobby these past weeks as I've been swamped with work. I'm also prepping to move to Syracuse, NY from NYC. Any readers up there familiar with the area?


Here are the 4 Assault Squadies posing together. My night time shots are terrible, but at least you can see the amount of movement the new Death Company legs and arms offer!  It's pretty awesome.


Here's a better shot of a Beakie marine rushing into battle.  The Assault Pack is from DC set, as are the legs.  Entirely by accident, this marine was assembled with lots of tassel-like things on his legs and pack, but in the end, I think it makes him look really dynamic.  For the base, I've taken to using Ron S's (Over at From the Warp) method of lifting up the feet a slight bit so the marine doesn't look like they're sinking in to the flock. It works really well and allows me to go nuts on the base without worrying about blocking up all the detail on the marine's legs.



This next marine is another simple assembly just using DC arms.  I wish I had taken better pictures.  I've taken to using Picasa and getting better at them as I play around with the settings. If only I had more time to devote to the hobby and to documenting the hobby.  I know.  I know.  The lament of every hobby blogger out there!

If you have any Flesh Tearer links, I'd love to see them!  I'm a bit intimidated by the prospect of painting red, but I think it's time I stop being such a chicken about it and do it.  Hopefully, I'll get some time this weekend to knock out a test model!

Terrain Tuesday +1: Last chance to vote for me!

 There are only 5 days left of voting over at the first ever Terrain From Junk Contest! I entered a rusty old fuel depot turned bastion.  I figured any tall structure in a besieged city would be fortified in some way, so I thought, "why not make it serve as a bastion as well?" TfJ had a few rules (you can read here) that I followed and I managed to pull the whole thing together from start to finish in about two weeks.  Must have not been working very hard.

Unfortunately, in the midst of making this terrain piece, my original computer crashed and I lost the majority of my WIP pics. I've now learned not to delete pics from the camera until I've made my back ups, but for this round of Terrain Tuesday+1, there are no WIP shots.

 

This is the only picture of the bits used that I have.  In the back, I used cereal box cardboard for the detailing on the Coffee Can.  I also used it to make the sidewalk tiles and the rivets for extra detailing.  Cereal box cardboard rules!  I've used it before on my DIY Drop Pods way back in the day and I'll probably use it again. It's cheap, abundant and doesn't look half-bad painted!

 

Also included in the picture is foam core...which every terrain maker knows about, so I won't get into it here. This was used for basing. The original plans for the oil drum was to have stairs going up to a second floor, but I scrapped the landing in the interest of time.  For bits, I used various pieces from various sets (you can see an ammo box in a pic or two and the ladder came from a hobby train accessory set), along with a generator/pipe line from the IMEX Chemical Plant terrain set. The set I bought had extra pipes/drums but no platform pieces, so I can't recommend them based on quality control...but the pieces themselves make for great pipework detailing.  I wish I had found a way to use more of the set in this piece!

Not pictured is the styrofoam tiles used to create the rubbled wall and the sculpting clay used to create the sandbags on top of the structure.  Various materials assembled to form a piece of terrain worth fighting for!

On my long list of Terrain Tuesday projects, I plan to make a second Fuel Drum Bastion to compliment my first one and also to slowly convert my City-table into an Industrial Warzone table. I've kept the template I used to create all the details, so assembly should be fast enough that I can take pictures again!

Thanks for looking!  Now please head over to the contest site and vote for my piece or if you like flamekebob's piece better, by all means...vote that way! Participation is the key to enjoying this hobby after all.