Review 2011 or The Story So Far...

Good old BigLee, he’s already reviewed last year, made resolutions for this year and prompted us to vote in the blog awards, me - well  - I’m playing catch up. It’s almost a year since I started this blog, early February actually so not quite at my first anniversary yet. However I‘d like to take this moment to thank those that passed by, dropped in and said hello and maybe even stuck around for a blog or two.

This blog has certainly been an extra driving force for me to try out new ideas and whilst surfing other blogs I’ve seen many other great ideas I wish to try out, but the problem - there is just never enough time.  I’ve managed to get quite a lot done last year, but I’ve still got many unfinished projects hanging around which I really do need to get finished before I start anything else.

Let’s see, a quick round up. The ghost town I’m building out of coffee sticks has four finished models, one awaiting varnish and a sixth one almost completed as far as the coffee sticks go. 

This one has not been featured yet and is another attempt at making the model out of all recycled materials – an old pizza box, a dessert box and a toilet roll forming the base with the coffee sticks around the outside. These are ok once the sticks are on and the glue is dry, but during construction they really do feel very flimsy. I’m also experimenting with the Quality Street coloured transparent wrappers to give creepy light in the windows on this one. (The toilet roll is to add stability on the inside - Photos coming soon I promise).

A couple of country cottages and town houses were completed, but the one based on Zandina’s house has not progressed since the last time it was featured. I ran out of space to have all these models lying around, and when I had guests over they had to be boxed up and not all of the models have made it back out yet. This is also true for the remainder of the work on the ruined castle pieces. Some of these I also wanted to base up and add grass and some foliage to as well. 

However, before I do that some pieces are supposed to play a role in one of our D&D games, but we haven’t reached that part in the campaign yet despite having planned this out with our GM over a year ago now. See some of BigLee’s posts for the saga of our rather on and off attempts at completing this campaign.

The ghost town and the graveyard pieces are for a campaign I’m planning myself, and I hope to get some actual work done on that this year, and you never know maybe even play some of it. This is a campaign based on the TV Series Supernatural using the role play mechanism by Jamie Chambers and published by MargaretWeis Productions Ltd. It does mean I need to spend some more time reading, making notes and trying to develop actual plot ideas rather than spend weekends model building. 

Maybe I should do this part now whilst the weather is less than friendly, as due to space restrictions I don’t really have the room inside to model build so easily. I also have a whole pile of figures to be painted for this campaign as well, however as there is a remote possibility that one or more of my potential players may be reading this I’m my fingers still as to what these figures actually are, let’s just say some of them come from the excellent workshop that is Heresy Miniatures.

The Doctor Who Tapestry came out to play again, I hope to get as much done as possible, but finding source photos to reference some older stories is proving a bit of problem at the moment. 

Another problem I hope to overcome very soon is the book Karl, Birth of Mystery. My publisher has been somewhat lacking in effort this year, and I think he’ll be getting a new year’s kick up the backside very soon. I will keep anyone who has placed an outstanding order up to date personally with developments – and I hope to have some news in the next week or so once production ramps up again.

Thanks for the support and well, let’s see what 2012 brings.