2011-12-20

The Hobbit trailer

The Hobbit trailer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyZzsSAR-HE


The jaowsblog will take a break from posting from the 22nd or 23rd. Next up after that week long break (or so) is the Sand Wyrm and the Scorpion Swarm - if you can call six or seven bugs a swarm...




With above picture the jaowsblog/War of the Ring blog wishes you all a very Merry Christmas! Eat good food and relax. Good bye for now, good readers!

Oh, almost forgot my christmas gift for you all, a great picture to show you what christmas is all about: Stereotypes holding hands!


To avoid leaving you with an overload of PC:ness I leave in style by using someone elses work - a grand example on how to paint Lord of the Rings miniatures:

This guy was smart enough to take the time and add his webby-name to the picture... Well, that's all for some time, see you all.

2011-12-18

War of the Ring DIY:s

Vic from the shield has a moustache. Ripped it from season three, saw it by mistake when I paused the Shield to listen to my arguing neighbours and saw it had paused at this EXTREMELY hilarious situation.

Vic twisting his moustache.


By popular demand I will show you the blueprints to my Stone Guardian. Like the translation of beutiful Japanese singer/songwriter Sasaki Nozomi's texts, this blueprint may be found somewhat lacking.



As you can see - and as promised - a large sunday-funday update.

Haven't come a long way with the Helmingas. Don't think I'll work anything with the bases besides the normal sand (and static grass, in this case).



Scorpion Swarm. Actually really happy with this.

Since there will be a flat, simple mould done from this base, the scorpions are also flat and simple.

Edheldu soon 100% done.

2011-12-16

Celebratorial Post

The template change worked fine, so here's a celebratorial post with things that are objectively enjoyable:

Author Richmal Crompton. Great books, perfect for christmas presents to young and old. Humorous.

This parody of videobloggers (wait to April first 2012, we'll see what I can do in regards of copying David Firth's idea).

Above picture by Angus McBride that, for me, captures one facet of Middle-Earth in a perfect way.

And this A Smashing Time, also by David Firth.

And best of all, Bear Grylls fishing with his hands. Using his fingers as bait. Fuck you Chuck Norris.




And yes, I know the background of the blog is generic and one day it will be changed. That's all for this Friday, sunday is next update and boy, do I've got some sweet War of the Ring-stuff for you. Yeee-haaaw!

War of the Ring webz-work in progress

As you may see, there is W I P here. There may be some parts of the blog that interferes with other parts and the whole shabang may look jumbled. Have done some work within the War of the Ring scope, mainly the Great Eagles... again... and started on the Helmingas for Rohan.

EDIT: A little tip for all you procrastinators (well, not that blogging is high priority) out there - put an ugly cone in front of yourself everytime you try to procrastin... eh, spelling... you know what I mean, what I was trying to say is: The cone was so annoying I just started to change the blog template even if it will mean that this evening will go down the drain with editing and going Hulk-green with rage when the template screws everything up.

2011-12-14

Galadhrim Warriors



The Galadhrim Warriors. Here cleaned up, assembled, glued, primed and painted - but surely not payed by someone at GeeDubb. I like them. A lot... but have given an oath not to buy any, mainly due to shortage of space. But the kit really looks sweet...


Haven't got time to do much in the hobby lately, so we'll end with this. Good day, gentlemen.

2011-12-12

Desert Palace - project for War of the Ring

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First of all, sorry for all spelling mistakes in earlier posts, I am in dire need of time so pedantically correcting every minor mistake is sadly no longer a priority to me. This is otherwise something I take great pride in; I may not correctly use has/have and badly use sayings, but my spelling at least, should be correct. Alas...

As I'm taking a little vacation from the Edheldu project there will be some minor stuff done for the Desert Palace project. This is a sort of module-project: I can add a few silly details - details not normally associated with Middle-Earth, or not-so-fluffy as a reader commented (I liked your batrep, Annatar) - and remove some formations that I feel look too... well, units not harmonizing with this new, actually more high-fantasy theme. I am thinking flying carpets and lion cavalry.

The Golden Horde, with accompanying Golden King, looks high-fantasy enough to be the center-piece, although I have been playing with the idea of doing a Xerxes-like litter/howdah (not the historical one, but the Xerxes from the movie 300 - if you've missed it because you were living under a rock when it was current). The Golden Horde as of now, more looks like the Plastic Pieces of Shit, but we'll get there.


The idea is to make an oversized hand-carried litter that's been dropped and broken. All mounted on a modest little paperboard. Coins (a salami-sliced Mantic skeleton spear), elephant tusks (I think this is called ivory. What is ebony, though?), a little keg that will be broken and have its expensive contents fallen out, golden animal masks and some jewelry and gems. Will try to make the gold really light and shiny, so that will be the big challenge in a month or so, when it's all done.

I wish you all happy times and days and may hot babes come in your way!

2011-12-11

Desert Wyrm for War of the Ring

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Latest project (one of many) to make me not to grow tired on the Great Eagles for the Edheldu project (dropped the largest one on the floor and broke off one of the superheavy wings): A Desert Wyrm based on good ol' Angus McBride's paintings:





Well loosely inspired... It will be based on a 64mm round one. Rules will be great fun to come up with, looking forward to that. Detailing it will also be fun... thinking of different scales, making the head with lots of little horns and ears and stuff. Funny thing with the desert wyrm Angus painted is it somewhat look like a dog in the face :)

- - -

Something we all need before going to work today, a good laugh. This is one of my favourite Jan Stenmark's, though I really feel something was lost in translation even if it is almost word for word. Perhaps this is the reason why it feels dry... ? You see this, dear readers, the jaowsblog contains high and low, abstract and philosophical as well as concrete, right on blah-blah I'm boring myself as I write. Enjoy:

2011-12-10

War of the Ring - Desert project

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Oh my, almost forgot the cone.

This is for my stupid desert project: Work in progress snakes, beetles (scarabs... just after my article on how overly-themed TK:s are for WHFB) and other stuff. I have planned to do three lava bases, two swamp bases and two forest bases and then make a mould of them and cast away.



Khandish Charioteers renovation is progressing, quit pleased with them at the moment, just have to finish the paint on the charioteers themselves. Made the picture gray-scale since there's no sun up and the flash just made them stupid ugly. One beutiful day I will get the colours right.


Happy second advent!

2011-12-09

Mould making link

This ugly cone will be posted with every new entry here on the War of the Ring blog until I get my crap out of my whatever and get a new layout.

So, back to the actual business. Mr FoB gave me an AWESOME link on moulding, why oh why haven't I done this simple stuff? There are reasons (like multipart moulds) but when just doing something simple, like the lion I one day will finish, it is a perfect tutorial:

http://jamesrogersstudio.com/molds.html

The other link, also provided by mr FoB (check out his historical miniatures' blog -->) seems nice as well:

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/60/235930.page

Also found a nice blog - Rough War (of the Ring) - with many long and sometimes short articles + battlereports on War of the Ring. Link will be posted on the side in the near future.

And lastly, does anyone know where this extremely well built table is to be found. It doesn't look like a gaming table per se, more of a diorama.


I can see riot fences in the background of one of the pictures... does this imply it stands somewhere in Nottingham?

War of the Ring - The WoMT project

I smartly photoshopped away the unpleasant oily skin that was floating on top of my top-knotch coffee from von Lidl. The coffee represents work.


It has been stated a billion times before, and I say it again: Too much work. So, the jaowsblog will do what it is best at: Posting some crap. In upcoming projects there is the Warrior of Minas Tirith Command project or WoMTCmnd. I've always liked this...

... little miniature made by someone at GW, for LotR Strategy Battle Game - more exactly a mini game called Battlehosts, I think, where you each got a litte bunch of fighters and could level-up the captains etc. Anyway, this guy got me thinking: Why not make a bunch of command models, except the regular ones? Like how 40k has their different IG HQ-models - they all look uniform and more or less the same, but with small alterations they represent many different things.

I think Warriors of Minas Tirith is perfect for this - in theory - practically they are small when compared to other models from the range, they are one-pose and not that easy to modify, but I'll give it a go. Haven't really planned anything except the Mapper...

I am off to work to order around the twenty or so young women that are employed for the christmas month. How my bosses could let me in charge of these women/girls is a mystery, I'm as kewl as the popped-collar guy below, and there will be little work and lots of "hey, whatcha doing girl... ?" and "... call heaven, because they've lost an angel, and that's me... "

He looks like a young Stringfellow Hawke.

EDIT: It will of course not be anything like Strinfellow Hawke, I am strictly proffessional and will probably be known as the Angry One by the newcomers. And sorry about the demotivational, I just found a bunch of them and... well...

2011-12-06

War of the Ring blog redux

I will within the week change the layout of this blog in order to get the army-get-together pictures their own little page just below the title. Since blogger so kindly let me use their space I will not complain on the problems that will occure. It could just be me being bad with comm'púters (was going to post some IT-crowd here but jaja) - as the old saying goes here in the cold north: You have to be two to fight! Man måste vara två för att slåss!

Super duper EDIT: Oh, I forgot: There's another reason for the layout change, the upcoming articles I will be writing for this blog needs a wider space and I am not allowed to change that with this old template that isn't supported anymore. So why did I choose this old template back in 2009? Well, actually I got it in 2006 or 2007 but for some reason all that is gone... whatever, the reason being is of course that I know that some people don't have a Metal Gear supercomputer-room and really hate to wait for heavy webpages to load. I was there, back in the day, when hotmail took four or five minutes to load and I say this: NEVER AGAIN!

2011-12-05

Edheldu Wood Elves project - completed-ish

Finally. Got the 64 mm bases copied so I could replace the square bases that came with the models... This will be the end of my Wood Elves of Edheldu (I must confess I think I had some fluff written down, but it is long forgotten now), a project that's been in the running for almost a year, now. Anyway, here are the last WIPs:



The reason why I am so thorough in showing you these somewhat bland pictures is because of the article below: When doing a flying creature - and avoiding use of the transparent pin - one will invariably try to fill out the base with something. I will do three versions of this filling: The first is the understated one: It has an Elven column and some stone work around it, the rest is just some vegetation.

The second base will have a tree below the Eagle. This is for practical reasons since the Warhammer Giant Eagle is such a huge model, so it will need good support.

And, the third will be somewhere inbetween, though its base is the most underworked at the mo'.



I will try to finish off with a laugh here, since it is indeed sad times when a project is nearing completion. I generally avoid the demotivationals since they are legio around the web...



EDIT: Who the hell buys a Turtles icecream?


PS) To all my Scandinavian readers, when writing in my native language I never(!) särskriver/don't-know-the-engelska ordet. Ifall någon irriterar sig på detta kan jag motbevisa: Hjultyp, korvskinn, silverpokal, jätteroligt. Felaktigt beteende: Hjul typ, korv skinn, silver pokal, jätte roligt, war hammer, war gear. Etc...

PS2) Doctor's appointment at nine tomorrow, I think there's a certain doctor that's going to wait for a certain jaowsblogger in vain...

2011-12-04

Unit fillers, part 1

Unit fillers, PART 1
Here it is, the short article about unit fillers. It is usable for modelers from most games where you have units larger than one model, for example KoW (Kings of War), WHFB, LotR WotR etc. Remember, this is written for fantasy/medieval themes, NOT high fantasy - in high fantasy you can use whatever crap you like, there are no borders and no stops and there are some exceptionally ugly and boring examples out there. Since most people play high fantasy, it is not strange or unexpected that most great projects actually have a high fantasy theme, but those who succeed, are the ones with an intelligent look on creativity and can impose creative restrictions on themselves.

Why use unit fillers
There are three main reasons:

1) Lazyness when painting - it can be easier to make a big rock with one guy standing on top of it, instead of having to paint, in this example, four regular rank and file models.

2) Cost. A small stone (becomes a large rock in our scale), or a tree made out of small twigs, is infinitely cheaper than three or four models from GW. If you were to use, for example, Mantic models, there's would be no need to make fillers for this reason. Then you'd be looking at reason 1 or reason 3.

3) Looks. It can look really nice with a filler or two. Especially when going with a theme.

In my Edheldu project, it first started as a combination of reason 2 and reason 3, but after a while, laziness somehow got into the equation: Since I had burnt so much time into the trays, I just didn't have the energy nor time to paint a whole bunch of elves, so in the end I scrapped some ideas and now I have a few extra elves laying in my model-box.

Examples of unit fillers
The easiest filler is generally to put a large monster in the middle of a unit. You could also do a *very simple* minidiaroma: The space used for four models instead get two models that for example carry something or perhaps are fighting or interacting. They could, of course just be normal, just spaced out - a typical reason 1 and reason 2 filler. Laziness and no money. If you have a more realistic theme, then I suggest a command group on a larger base (or bases within the bases if the rules take into account single, specific casualties like: I aim for your Banner Bearer, and I killed him - remove him!) - or some form of cliffs that clearly divide the force and you can lose a couple of guys without it looking too cheap.

This crazy ugly thing (made by unknown) is part of a unit of some sort of ugly warriors in WHFB. While I would never do such a thing, it is still technically interesting: It is cheap (I assume) and made of old parts and things found in the bin, looks simple enough and will be a piece of cake to paint - how could you paint such an abomination badly? If you have a somewhat more high fantasy theme, you could easily get away with doing strange creatures that take up waaaay to much space, but still look cool (as long as the creature is mythologically compatible). A better example would be this WHFB project, where the creator used the much cheaper LotR-models instead. And better looking:

A perfect example of using a large monster - that actually takes up almost half of the space of the unit, but still looks good. In this particular example, the monster is of course slightly more expensive than four of the regular warriors in the unit, but cost is, as stated earlier, not the only aspect of fillers and filling.

The guy in the following picture, in the middle, is a good example of a command model that could be placed either in the front - as probably suggested by the rules - or, if you just intend to use it only as a filler, in the middle, effectively taking up lots and lost of space.


You could have some guys carrying someone on his shield - or as a casualty, by dragging him ontop of his shield. Remeber to differ between theming and diorama.


Concrete examples

Runestones. These go all the way. Double runestones, all the way. Works for anything.
Bodies. And if you play WHFB, just take your bag of miniature skulls and pour over everything or just make piles of them.
Fight mini-diorama. Take the traditional enemy of the force you're doing, and make something on an area that comprise of the general space normally occupied by around four models. There's an extremely ambitious example of this on the Warhammer Forum, where a project with dozens of in-fighting orks form dioramas in every unit, in fact every regiment is a diorama.
Slaves. Works good for most dark alignements - here's a great place to put the models that was left over when you did another project. A variation from this would of course be carriers for the not-so-dark armies. Carriers, baggage etc...
Nature. There are so many things here, tree stumps, rocks, animals, hunting scenes, carnivorous plants, entangling plants - you've seen most of this in other projects, but you can vary it to such an extent it will always feel like your own project. And if you think nature's been overdone, try switching it from the classical temperate, jungle and desert to something else, why not invent a ecosystem of your own? A system where all animals have copper based blood instead of iron (yeah, yeah, bad example - remembered this has been used by every douche who thinks he's original, from fantasy writers of the twenties to Scifi writers of today; the Grunts in Halo as a concrete example *insert stupid yellow smiley*).
Treasure. Always nice. I save this for a while since I have a dormant Abrakhan project involving treasure.

A cart or broken chariot is an extremely nice way to make a good mixture of diorama and filler. Barrells or cargo that has fallen out etc.

You only have to decide whether to make the whole shabang a diorama, or have two or three mini dioramas or theme it to the terrain - even if the terrain is a newly fought battleground, it doesn't make it a diorama if it just something the models stand on, then it is just ornamentation: Fillers! Which is exactly what you're after, easy and simple fillers.

And remember, when doing fillers for a themed army, just brainstorm, use the cultures of Earth to simplify things for you: Are you theming it to a particular terrain (desert, ocean, snow), then I do not need to write anything more, there are dozens of good filler examples for these characteristical/archetypical terrains. If there's a culture you're theming it around, try not to fall into the classic over-theming pitfall (which will be the article after the conclusion of number two in this miniseries):

Like if you were to do a slightly Egyptian themed and just go for death in a billion ways: Skulls on skulls with caskets and tombs and skeletons standing on skulls. Yes, it looks nice, like kitsch really looks realistic, but it doesn't last very long. Try to look at other aspects of, in this example, Egyptian culture: The life aspect, the highly developed administratorial system that was used (inspectors, irrigation specialists) - things that at first might sound gay, but only because you haven't seen it militarized a gazillion times in White Dwarf. Do your own thing!


Part two of this article continue in the next week, where more concrete examples will be presented...

2011-12-02

Homemade Khandish Charioteers (old DIY)

This is a really old project, but it seems it's time to post it. I worked with this the first time around christmas 2006, I think - and did some Rohan Chariots with mr D. I later scrapped these but thought the general planning of them was totally okay. Well, the idea for the wheels, the rest of the chariot is just a matter of taste, you could do it in plasticard, used bits, old chariots parts from GW etc. So, this was initally constructed in early Euro-spring of 2008 - "tabletop finished" after a week and now, almost four years later, I am really finishing them. They have actually gotten some games, would you believe it?!

Above are the two finished wagons. Next to them, to their right, are the templates. The horses are homemade, nice polyurethane copies - shamelessly copied, I should add.

This shows one of the more elaborate chariots I did at the time. Look at those slim wheels, huh?! :) Made from electric cabling pipes, sawed in little slices like salami.



I used superglue to make the thin cardboard that forms the "prow" of the chariot to stick to the "floor" since it cures or hardens really fast and forms snugly againts it. I do not intend to learn the exact terms of chariots, so we'll settle for floor and prow.

The shamelessly copied horses with their gear and the finished chariots. Notice the plastic middle beam which should have the yoke crossing it, how fat it actually is when compared to GW's? Well, I looked at pictures on wagons from my homecountry, cirka 1890, and never thought of the difference between two heavy ardenners pulling a good old, massive Northern European farmer's wagon compared to a light one like the chariots of old. It works anyway, methinks.

2011-12-01

Making a shit-simple mould

Here's a shit-simple mould with its not-so-crappy result.


Had some excess polyurethane and a mould that was sealed and I had forgotten what it was, so I poured some of the excess plastic into that, turned out to be the wings for the WHFB Warhawk I made a mould of to stop me from becoming crazy with rage when the superheavy wings fell of all the time. I have since learned better pinning methods :)

Yeah, the Khandish Charioteers are going forward - a while ago I ordered a blister of Khandish Warriors to replace the old plastic copies I did - they looked okay, but the originals in white metal should be better now that I actually put some more serious work into the chariots. BTW, the Khandish Warrior mould(s) from GW really seems to getting old, the white-metal ones had as many flaws as a so called Finecast model...



How to do it
Take a 64 mm base, a piece of arts cardboard (will not burst into flames when hardening the super sculpey) and some super sculpey. Make a ring, flatten it somewhat so it almost looks like a ready mould. Then press the 64mm base into it (use talc as a release... release agent?) and remove it and fix it up a bit. Harden it with a heat gun or put it in your oven (read the label of your Super Sculpey(tm) to get the correct temp). Done. Then pour your favorite polyurethane into it. Let it almost harden and then remove. Use a release agent if you like - I used violence and the mould will probably hold for another 5 or 6 bases.

Normally when I try to take income from GW I make better moulds, for example the mould of the Axemen of Lossarnach - which gave me a really nice formation of four companies, but for simple crap like a base, one could skip almost all difficult and careful steps (in mould making AND when casting) and just produce four or five of these flippers, if you like. If you wonder why my language is strong, then it is because I've been training the same time as I have inhaled poisonous fumes so the testosterone levels are whooooooaaaarrwwww! Fuck yeah! I am currently screaming at my biceps as I'm writing! Wööööööööööh! I'M WRITING THE FUCK OUT OF THIS BLOG!!! WOOHOOO!