Procrastination by Numbers

[cunningmatt]

If the guy actually read your whole blog and still sent you a message, you should probably marry him... Or find yourself a new identity and go into hiding. Probably the latter!

This won't be any more awkward if he is reading the blog! ! - Yes I used "" shoot me now.

[Dave]

is it this blog or your proper bloggy blog?

[cunningmatt]

is it this blog or your proper bloggy blog?

I don't know (though this a proper blog too - I love them both!).

[cunningmatt]

Update 51 – Wednesday 29th February 2012: Leaping into Pirates.

Can you believe it, it's the final day of February? Isn't the year going fast? And also it's a Leap Year, which means two things – one you're probably not getting paid for working today, and two this is the day gentlemen, when woman can propose to you. Yeah I think you know which one of those is going to cost you more, gulp. Obviously I have been inundated with marriage proposals today... ok so I haven't, but for once I don't care. Keep your pussies away from me evil women!!! Sorry that wasn't really necessary was it?

Last week in hobby land I was talking all about Warhammer 40,000, no developments there this week, I've decided to back away from the 40K and lock my credit card in a secure vault – for the time being at least. Because we have other games systems to look at this week, yes another week when we don't talk Warhammer. Because only 5 months after purchase I've finally got round to opening up the games system formerly known as Man-O-War, it's Dreadfleet. And shockingly that's the second time in two weeks Man-O-War's got a mention, even I am surprised by that.



Dreadfleet the game of naval battles in Warhammer, and every Somalian's second favourite game just behind this:

http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/partNumber/3904859/Trail/searchtext%3EPIRATE.htm

Yep topical as ever I am talking about the games system that was released back in October, and was withdrawn from sale early this year, just in time for you to not get it. Still now I am talking about it, it has become the very definition of cool, prices on eBay will be rocketing!

With one of my many hobby resolutions this year, see Update 34, being to paint all the contents of Dreadfleet I best get on with it. A quick peak in the box shows us a load of frames:



And then underneath the sheet of cardboard all the nitty gritty:



We have a large fabric seascape perfect for Dreadfleet and also useful for any fantastical games of Subbueto you may wish to be playing. Apparently this sheet is quite frustrating because it easily catches and can be dragged along the table, fortunately I'm a very patient person so this shouldn't annoy me.

Then there's all your usual cards, with handy pack of plastic resealable bags to store all the different decks in (I genuinely love these, sad I know!), the bags of dice (including the evil red one). And of course the not chunky by Games Workshop standards rule book.



Having read the rulebook, the rules seem fairly straight forward and nothing too horrendous, and the game actually looks fun with a number of scenarios to play. Reviews seem to have been reasonably mixed, and in fairness having never played it I can't really comment – besides I've played Warhammer many times and I still don't know the rules to that!!

But before I play, I need to paint, can't stand using non-painted models so I'm going to work my way through the battleships and the scenery to get myself a completed fleet hopefully in the not too distant future.

I used the excellent Painting Workshop guide from White Dwarf 382 (October 2011) as a basis for all my ships:





Broadly speaking I'm going to follow the guide, as I'm not too interested in going crazily off piste with these ships – they all have a very strongly defined individual character anyway so the colours are very much hinted in the background.

The assembly instructions for each warship are printed around the edge of the bottom half of the box, which may seem like a great use of box space, but is bloody annoying having to hold the whole box up as you work out which part goes where!!



At this point it's very much worth looking at the painting guide, as this gives a good suggestion of the separate sub assemblies you should build prior to painting allowing you to access all the interiors and sails easily.



I decided to paint up the Heldenhammer first, the flagship of The Grand Alliance Fleet (the goodies), for those of you unaware of the background, it was the flagship of the Empire fleet until Captain Jaego Roth – wronged Sartosian captain stole it in order to head into the Maelstrom and destroy the Dreadfleet responsible for the death of his parents – a plot based on next week's Coronation Street. The Heldenhammer is equipped with it's own cathedral, hundreds of cannons, a giant statue of Sigmar that can drop it's hammer on unsuspecting ships in close combat and it's own duty free. Excellent who doesn't love duty free!

With clippers ready I assembled the hull of the Heldenhammer, and attached it to its scenic base, the sail of the rearmost mast was kept as a separate assembly, and each of the main masts were built as separate assemblies. At this point it's worth mentioning that each of the warships, bar the spectral ship the Shadewraith, comes with it's own cog – in this case meaning smaller ship, not cog! There's only one design of cog for each fleet (except for the Dwarf and High Elf ships), so it's import to make sure each cog matches it's flagship thus I've painted them up at the same time as the parent vessel using the same techniques.



What follows is a step-by-step guide to painting the Heldenhammer, it's largely based on the guide in White Dwarf 382 though I've added in stages for the detailing not mentioned in that guide. It's a rough and ready guide so the photos have been taken pretty much on the fly (you won't read the bloody thing anyway!). Also you'll not the guide is over 7 stages not the usual 4, this is mainly as due to the large amounts of raised detailing it's worth drybrushing all the internal deck parts and completing the outer hull first before even starting the raised details, otherwise you'll end up constantly retouching up.

Stage 1 – Heldenhammer



Hull: Merchrite Red
Deck & Masts: Khemri Brown

Stage 2 – Heldenhammer



Hull: Wash Baal Red
Deck & Masts:  Drybrush/Layer Kommando Khaki
Sails/ Red Flags: Basecoat 1:1 Merchrite Red/Blood Red

Make sure you paint up the little rowing boat modelled into the base of the Heldenhammer, which can be painted in the same way as the larger ship.

Stage 3 – Heldenhammer



Hull: Layer 1:1 Mercherite Red/Blood Red
Deck & Masts: Drybrush/Layer Bleached Bone
Hull Detailing: Tidy Chaos Black
Castle Walls: Codex Grey
Tiled Roofs: Fenris Grey
Castle Roofs: Scorched Brown
Sails: Devlan Mud applied in the recesses

Stage 4 – Heldenhammer



Hull: Highlight with Blood Red then Vomit Brown
Sea: Paint Regal Blue
Tiled Roofs: Badab Black
Castle Walls: Badab Black in recesses
Sail: Highlight 1:1 Vomit Brown/Blood Red
Cannons/Sail Rings: Boltgun Metal
Cannon Bases: Calthan Brown
Hull Detailing: 1:1 Scorched Brown/Shining Gold
Castle Roofs: Dark Flesh

Stage 5 – Heldenhammer



Hull: COMPLETE
Sea: Heavily drybrush with Enchanted Blue
Tiled Roofs: Badab Black
Castle Walls: Highlight with Fortress Grey
Black Walls/Flags: Highlight with Codex Grey
Sail: Vomit Brown
Cannons/Sail Rings: Badab Black
Cannons Bases: Badab Black
Hull Detailing: Shining Gold then wash Devlan Mud
Sail Detail White: Dheneb Stone
Sail Detail Yellow: Tausept Ochre

Note I painted a small twin-tailed comet on the sail of the Cog at this stage, using Tausept Ochre and completing as detailed for the Yellow sail detail.

Stage 6 – Heldenhammer



Hull: COMPLETE
Sea: Drybrush Ice Blue (concentrating on wave crests)
Tiled Roofs: Drybrush Shadow Grey
Castle Walls: Skull White
Black Walls/Flags: Fortress Grey
Sails: COMPLETE
Cannons/Sail Rings: Chainmail
Cannon Bases: Snakebite Leather
Hull Detailing: Burnished Gold
Sail Detail White: Bleached Bone
Sail Detail Yellow: Vomit Brown

Stage 7 – Heldenhammer

Hull: COMPLETE
Sea: Heavily wash 1:1 Badab Black/Thraka Green then highlight wave crests with watered down Skull White.
Tiled Roofs: COMPLETE
Castle Walls: COMPLETE
Black Walls/Flags: COMPLETE
Sails: COMPLETE
Cannons/Sail Rings: COMPLETE
Cannon Bases: COMPLETE
Hull Detailing: Highlight Mithril Silver on most prominent parts
Sail Detail White: Highlight 1:1 Bleached Bone/Skull White then letter on text using Chaos Black
Sail Detail Yellow: Highlight 1:1 Vomit Brown/Skull White

The subassemblies were then glued together with superglue, I filed down the base of each mast to ensure a sung fit into the deck (as the extra layer of paint will have thickened the model slightly, and here's the finished warship in all it's glory.













Now I wrote the vast majority of this blog in advance of the final gluing of the sails to the Heldenhammer. Despite me doing a number of dry runs assembling the masts, and all going as expected, the tallest mast got stuck halfway into its appropriate slot. Unfortunately the quick drying superglue locked in place, and now it is firmly stuck as it is, any attempts to free the mast just caused the exposed unpainted plastic to buckle. Annoyingly I seem to be very good at making a mess of things during the final assembly.



You can probably see the exposed grey plastic here, where the mast hasn't sunk all the way in place.

The only solution I can see bar attempting to cut and pin the mast in place (not fun) is to green stuff the base of the mast and paint it to match. That is unless anyone else has any bright ideas?

Answers on a postcard to the usual address please.

Fingers crossed next week will feature the repaired Heldenhammer and maybe even some Warhammer stuff. Just maybe.

[DarkStalker]

Answers on a postcard to the usual address please.

Gah, thats gotta be very annoying.

Seems to be a fair bit of the grey 'slotting' bit exposed so I might be tempted to cut it at the base, redrill the hole in the deck and have another go regluing..... had ideas you could try painting some string yellow and lashing it round the mast base to make a feature of it but if I were attempting it my highly tempremental modelling skills would just end up with it looking very naff :/

Green stuff is probably a safe bet  :)

[cunningmatt]

Seems to be a fair bit of the grey 'slotting' bit exposed so I might be tempted to cut it at the base, redrill the hole in the deck and have another go regluing.....

Yeah I'm tempted, I'm just worrying about f**king it up any more! It's always scary going in with the clippers on a finished model. On the plus side I did manage to repair my High Elf Dragon last night! Whoop!

[maelzch]

the paint job on the boat looks good matt!

To cover the grey bit of the mast, how about rolling some green stuff really thin, then twisting three bitts together (like my chaos dwarf beards), to use as rope?

[Toast]

How many cannons on that thing?  Can you sail it past a dwarf army and say ha! 50 cannons in the face?

I bet it doesn't float.  But do not put it in the bath 

Nice paint job.  String or thin wire carefully twisted around the base of the mast might work.

[cunningmatt]

the paint job on the boat looks good matt!

Thanks glad you like it.

Not sure about the rope, worried it's going to look ridiculously thick at the scale I can reasonably model without bursting into flames in a fit of rage. Hmmm. What do you think, would a massive ship have massive rope.

How many cannons on that thing?  Can you sail it past a dwarf army and say ha! 50 cannons in the face?

I bet it doesn't float.  But do not put it in the bath 

I think I counted 74 when I was painting it up, though I did lose count. Thanks for the advice on the bath too, if you hadn't said...

[cunningmatt]

Update 52 – Thursday 1st March 2012: Abercrombie & Bitch.

I look and feel like a tramp, no really I do. Recently I've noticed that my favourite clothes and shoes are starting to resemble a novelty colander, there's so many holes in them that I look like a cartoon representation of Wile E. Coyote after he's been savaged by a pack of hungry tigers. This means it's time to go clothes shopping. Problem is I'm sure clothes shopping is supposed to be fun, after all I'm a gay man I'm supposed to find purchasing new garments at least 168% as much fun as throwing around a selection of scatter cushions in an artistic fashion. Sadly stereotypes aren't always correct, though I do like a good scatter cushion.

Middle age must be beckoning, because now when I go around clothes shops I find myself saying horrendous comments that I believed only my parents were capable of uttering such as "These don't look very practical", or "They'll be a bugger to iron.". It's all really quite upsetting, I blame modern fashion. How on earth are you supposed to wear jeans whose legs taper to an infinitesimally small point at your ankle, so that they only really fit the triangular Mr Rush from Roger Hargreaves' Mr Men books? Or trousers that have a seam that spirals around your legs like a rampaging anaconda desperate on sucking the life force out of every vein your body. See they don't look very practical, and they would be a bugger to iron.

Frustrated by my inability to find anything I like in my regular shopping haunts, which whilst boasting an impressively large shop floor space seem to be laid out much like an episode of Scooby Doo. In that if you run for long enough it turns out you're just passing the same three T-shirts and one style of chino as that is all the animators could be bothered to draw. I decided to take the plunge and head to some more "designer" shops, shops that have been recommended by my friends, who whenever I meet them seem to be wearing clothes that look fashionable but not so outlandish fashionable, that they look like thye were dressed by a blind flamingo. So with expectations riding high, and a need to get some clothes that don't make me look like I've been attacked by Edward Scissorhands I headed for the "designer" shops.

The first thing I notice upon entering such stores, is it's not immediately obvious where the gender divide runs. Shops I'm used to like Next and River Island and even the department stores my mother used to take me to, are usually split with male and female departments on different floors. Which for men always means a trudge up and down a flight of stairs, I sometimes think it's a miracle that disabled men actually own any clothes and don't have to wheel around naked all the time. However in the new-fangled designer stores of my new fashionable lifestyle, it's not to so obvious. An arbitrary wiggly line runs down the middle of the shop with all the definition of a hotly dispute international border. It's easy to accidentally stray into hostile waters and find yourself looking at a T-shirt that looks really nice, except upon checking the price you realise it's a Size 8. With disgust you throw back the T-shirt horrified that someone might have seen you and instantly presumed you're a transvestite, rather than coming to the far more logical conclusion that you were shopping for someone else. Some shops make it even more complicated, Gap for example has pictures of androgynous models all around the store so you can't be sure if their male or female pictures near the clothes you are looking at. They're beautiful definitely, but every single model has a smooth face is clean shaven and sports suspiciously short hair. It takes just as long to judge their gender as it does to judge the gender of the clothes beneath them. Other stores go to more random extents, I'm sure my recent visit to Superdry was confused by them having a large men's department surrounded by various satellites of ladieswear, with no clear frontiers between the two. The other problem with this kind of stylish fashion, is even the garments that look obviously feminine could be for men, perhaps plunge neck T-shirts have become fashionable for the man about town, or maybe Culottes are now a unisex item, you can never be sure.

Of course complex segregation of male and female stores isn't the only potential pitfall for the unwary shopper. I recently visited a store called Abercrombie & Fitch for the first time, despite sounding like the name of two particularly ostentatious cats ("come down from the worktop Abercrombie"), it's actually a high-end designer clothing store. On arrival you're not met by the usual shop system that we're used to, the one that's served us well for the rest of our lives. No rather than being faced with the traditional door that you enter the shop through surrounded by windows displaying what the shop actually sells. You instead come face to face with a store with no windows, because it's too exclusive to actually display its wares, and a queuing system that would make Chessington World of Adventures envious. Yep that's right you have to queue outside the store just to make the store look more desirable so that more people join the queue, in a vicious cycle that couldn't be more British unless whilst waiting you were served tea and scones and got to say something deeply xenophobic. In my mind this doesn't make Abercrombie & Fitch look designer, it makes it look like the Post Office but with less old people.

Once you've meandered your way through the queuing system, there's a veritable team of people to great you at the door. Firstly, in order to give you the entirely false impression that the store is actually a five-star hotel, a number of smartly dressed men open the doors for you. Because you are clearly too important to open the door for yourself, as an aside (and I don't wish to do people out of jobs, especially in these tough economic times) but if not having to open the door is that important, why not just fit automatic doors – it works for Poundland. Up next there's a woman employed solely to say "Hello", that seems to be all she does, just says "Hello" – I could do that job..., if I was woman, wasn't a grumpy s**t and didn't have all the looks and charm of a rancid plate of semolina. Then there's an unfeasibly attractive half dressed man, with a ripped torso who you can pose and take a photo with. If that is you're mad. No one in their right mind gets their photo taken next to an unfeasibly attractive person, because in the resultant photo their beauty will make you like Quasimodo on a particularly unpleasant visit to the Burns unit. Upload that photo to Facebook and people won't be thinking about how attractive the man looks, or how much of a fun time you're having, but instead on how old you're looking or that they didn't realise you'd got fat. This is why sensible people only ever agree to get their photo taken with their ugly friends, because it makes them look that much better. And if you can't work out who the ugly person in your group is, then it's you. And before you make a smart a**e comment, I am fully away of my place in the food chain of looks, what can I say? I appreciate the plight of the plankton. Apparently you have to pay for the photos, again another connection between Abercrombie & Fitch  and Thorpe Park, though at least in this photo you won't look like you are vomiting your dinner up (sadly the same cannot be said about your friends viewing the photo making unfortunate comparisons between you and the model).

All this and you haven't even entered the store properly, in fairness it has to be said Abercrombie & Fitch looks pretty plush. Where Primark at the end of a busy day looks like the aftermath of a particularly bloody explosion at a Bring and Buy sale, Abercrombie & Fitch still looks elegant and tidy. Primarily this is because the minute you do so much as even breathe in the direction of one of the display racks a team of highly trained professionals rush to rearrange all the tops lest you upset the karma of the store. The shop's wears are, as you'd expect from a designer clothing label, perfectly bog standard t-shirts, hoddies and jumper swhere the inclusion of a designer logo has led to the decimal point, on the price ticket, jumping one place to the right. Aside from the clothes, the most bizarre thing I discovered in the store was a dance floor complete with dancers. No, not some professional dance act recruited in from a swanky London performing arts college, but actual members of staff, in the staff "uniform" dancing away. As if to show that working for this company is soooo amazing, all we get to do is dance all day because we're that cool, and our lives our wonderful because we work for Abercrombie & Fitch and we're only employed because we're beautiful. All us mortals can do is hope that they all spend the work Christmas party crying in the corner because they realise just how fake all their work friends are, that they'll be forced to wear a branded paper bag over their head the minute they hit 25 in case they make people wretch, and that their lives are meaningless pawns in a sea of commercialised bulls**t. As I say, all we can do is hope, because actually they're having a great time. To**ers.

Despite the clear abundance of staff in the store, with enough spare people to dance next to the racks of clothes and fold out every micro-crinkle that the displaced air caused as you moved your fat body through the store. Despite all this, when I visited there was only one till open, and a massive queue. Would it have killed the brand image if for one moment the dance floor had been emptied and some people manned the tills? Apparently it would have. Unfortunately for some ridiculous reason the problem of the large queue was magnified by the fact that the till area was decked out with more mirrors than the average swanky hair salon. Resulting in thousands of copies of the same row of frustrated sand bored faces being visible on every surface wherever you looked, much like a Girls Aloud concert.

Obviously the big question is did I buy anything? Of course not, I was just confused by the array of unknown shopping experiences I hadn't expected. Like Henry VIII wandering through a modern shopping centre for the first time, both appalled and intrigued at what I saw with equal measure. Which coincidentally is the same set of facial reactions you see if ever I'm forced to watch The Only Way is Essex. Instead I simply walked out of the store, empty handed only to pass the "Hello" lady again, except this time she said "Goodbye" – but in a tone that really said "I knew this shop wasn't really for you, but I didn't say anything as you came in.'

On that note I'll bid you adjure, except to say you can now follow my tedious ramblings on Twitter just "connect with" @ProByNumbers #goonyouknowyouwantto – see look at me down with the kids. Last night you missed me agree to marry Annie on Twitter. And incidentally if anyone has any decent second hand clothes they wish to send me, they'll be welcome. The situation is getting quite desperate. I claim to be a size Small, but in reality unless it's at least a big Medium, the fabric will be pulled across my body tighter than the skin on Anne Robinson's face.