Secret Santa booty and prize draw reminder!

Hi all

just after xmas I posted a picture of the thoughtful Secret Santa gift I received.  This rather excellent idea is the brainchild of Ian and Catherine Wiley (run by Catherine, who was terrific) from "The Blog With No Name" the link for the blog is here.

Well I thought I would post up pictures of the completed pieces for the perusal of my SS and you all. Whoever my SS was, know that I'm very grateful and the carts have already featured in 3 Bushido games so far and are liable to feature heavily in the years to come, as for the building it will be incorporated into some board ideas I have bubbling in my brain.

All of the pieces are from 4Ground, i already own some of their excellent WW2 pre-painted buildings and I love them, like those these pieces were designed to put together and go straight onto the board, although you can add more paint to suit your tastes or existing stock of buildings. First of all then we have the Rice Barn...

The basic build is fairly straight forward although the doors were a bit fiddly and I ended up breaking a little peg on one of the doors, but when they were in place it hasn't made a significant difference so I'm not worried.

The teddy bear fur for the thatched roof, was quite interesting and I ended up brushing it with watered down PVA with an old toothbrush which was fairly weird but has a good effect and looks really nice.

The handcarts were simple as anything to put together and took less than 5 minutes each not inc drying time for the PVA.  Now I need to get a 28mm ox for the big cart....

They look really good on my Bushido board

Kohouei the ninja tries to hide from the watchful gaze of Manu the Buto....

And the steel bolts of Wasapu who had already cut down his bad ass ninja brother Katsumi

thanks again to my Secret Santa, much appreciated dude.

Just to remind you that you can still win that awesome Dice Bag from The Lucky Orc, all you have to do to be entered into the draw is add a comment below stating your favourite post of 2016 from this blog and why.

hope you enjoy
dGG

The Lucky Orc - review and competition

hi all

Way before xmas one of the contributers to a facebook page I subscribe to, told us all about his wife - Becky's new business venture - "The Lucky Orc".  She was making custom dice bags emblazoned with logos of your choice (I hope that sentence makes sense).

With xmas approaching I felt this was the ideal time to have a little look see at what she had to offer and I was delighted with what I found.  I decided that I would buy a dice bag for each of the Nerd Herd and obviously one for me with "da Gobbo's Grotto" logo on the front.  I messaged Becky my requirements and after several messages including sending her my artwork we came up with what I thought was a winner and this is what Becky did for me....

dice for scale

When the bags arrived they are amazing, the stitching is immaculate, the colours perfect, the materials hard wearing and flexible, custom hand made ties and the logos are embroidered and just bloody amazing.  Becky is delightful, incredibly talented and very helpful, the bags arrived within days despite being made from scratch and she even delivered one of the bags to a different address for me without hitch.  

I really love the bags and can highly recommend them and with that in mind have included a link to her facebook page below.

https://www.facebook.com/Theluckyorc/?hc_ref=SEARCH&fref=nf

I really, really like these bags and one of you lucky folks can really, really like them too as I bought an extra one as a prize for a competition, the first competition of a few I'm planning for 2017.  In order to win this bag....

just comment below on your favourite da Gobbo's Grotto post of 2016 and why (yes its a big of an ego trip, but also to check that people are paying attention...).  I will then put your entry in a bag and Missus Gobbo will draw a lucky winner out.  The closing date for this competition is the 30th January 2017, with the winner being announced no later than one week after. There is only one prize - the dice bag and it will be sent by Royal Mail within a week of confirmation of the winners postal address.

hope you enjoy
dGG

Mega City - 1, more offerings

Hi all

for today's post, I give you the next three judges that I've manage to paint up from my fantastic prize win recently.

First up is my Med-Judge, with my medical connection this Judge has a special meaning for me and the mini's sculpt is perfectly represented.  Bryan intends his version of the mini to represent me in his upcoming campaign (which I wish he would stop teasing us about!! ;-P) and I intend him to be a total no-nonsense medic, informing the patients in no uncertain terms to "man up!" hahahaha. I also want him to be able to kick-ass too, so don't expect a "do no harm" type medic!

I went with the black uniform with navy drybrush and gold shoulder pads combo that I used for JD and JH in my last MC-1 post, so I won't go on about it here.  There are some versions of med judges wearing green shoulder pads in some of the comic strips and it seems like there is a confusion about this branch of MC-1 Judiciary and a sorry lack of source material. In fact I can't remember any specific story lines that involved the Med Judges in any detail - grrr! I will have more detail coming hopefully at xmas when I get my Judges Handbook for the game but until then....

Next up I have the Special Judicial Squad or SJS.  These are the Judge hunters, internal affairs type boys. Tracking and dealing with rogue judges.  Although looked on with some distaste they are vital in keeping the most dangerous people in MC-1 under control - the Judges!!

They will certainly come in handy when I start to develop my own campaigns as I already have a few ideas for them!

anyway that's it for now

hope you enjoy

dGG

  

Hammertime!

Hi all

firstly, my apologies for you now having the MC Hammer song in your head for the rest of the day....

Recently I was very fortunate to win one of Bryan "Vampifan" Scott's fabulous prize giveaways.  If you can't remember what the prize was, the link is here.  Among all that 2000AD goodness was this awesome dude.



Sergeant Hammerstein of the ABC Warriors, I lifted this straight off of Wikipedia to save myself writing a ton of stuff....

Hammerstein is described as a Mark III war droid and was commissioned in the early 21st Century to fight in the Volgan Wars. Hammerstein's right hand is a hammer that is used in hand-to-hand combat while on the back of his left he has a missile launcher. There are tank tracks on his feet to aid mobility. Hammerstein also has two sockets in his waist to attach auxiliary arms but he finds these embarrassing. During combat operations his head has a grim human like face but after he was decommissioned this was replaced with 'civilian' head that features a single square 'eye'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammerstein_(comics)

The ABC Warriors are/were in my top ten best thing about 2000ADs universe.  I loved the characters especially the sarge and his human consort Terri - who believed she was a robot! They were also involved in the plot lines of one of my favourite comic characters of all time - Nemesis the Warlock. Fab times!

So imagine my delight then when this 55mm monster blasted his way into da Grotto and demanded to be painted first!

Sgt Hammerstein unbased at the back, you can see the size of him compared to the 28mm figs.

First of all though he needed to be based, originally he comes as a single piece with a integral metal base, but considering the size of him this was woefully inadequate and he couldn't stand up unaided.  So rooting around in my bits box revealed a lovely 60mm round mdf base that I'd bought for my Bolt Action medium machine gun crews.  As it is a really big base I didn't want it to be too plain, so I found some scraps of foamcard that I had used in previous projects and with the judicious application of sand and cat litter produced this...

Knowing that the primer spray I use would melt some of the foam, i covered parts of it in PVA leaving some areas exposed to produce a ruined masonary look that is fairly generic looking.  I then covered the grey primered base in a home made black ink and drybrushed it with Vallejo "Medium Sea Gray" and then again with a drop of white added to the gray.  I then painted Sgt. Hammerstein in a mix of GW's "Runefang Steel" and "Mournfang Brown with a drop of GW "Averland Sunset" to create the golden brown colour.  Then picking out the joints and feet/tracks in black and drybrushing with runefang steel.

base colours and drybrushed joint/feet

after that I used Army Painter's "Strong Tone" and washed the whole model in a really heavy coat. Once that was dry I highlighted with the base mix and then gradually lightened it up with successive tones by adding more "runefang steel".  I picked out the ABC markings in pure white and finsihed the base off with some yellow sector markings and one of Bryan's wanted posters that he'd sent me months ago as another gift!

no gold paint was used in the painting of this model

he's massive!

does my butt look big in this?

are you sure?

As for use for the Sarge, I've got loads fizzing about in my head! from generic robot for almost every futuristic setting to the boss level beastie in a Judge Dredd RPG encounter to finding more of his ABC buddies and running them as a skirmish faction for the JD miniatures game!

What ever I use him for you know that he's gonna be a big hit.......groan, I'll get my coat....

hope you enjoy
dGG

I am the one, the only one.......Just gimme the prize!

hi all

Ok so I may have just fudged a rather excellent Queen song for the sake of a blog title but hey ho....

Anyway, at the beginning of the month the esteemed Lord Siwoc of Brain and Guts fame ran a giveaway which I was lucky enough to win (ok there was a 33% chance). The prize was a rather cool 3D printed fountain from HORIZONCREATION3D.

Well I received said prize and a little bonus from milord (Danish sweets - yum!) in the post last Friday and by Sunday it was finished! I was that happy with it literally I couldn't wait, if work and my daughter's birthday hadn't been in between it would have been done even sooner.... 

pre-primed, glued with Gorilla glue

There was some minor clean up from the 3D printing to do, loose wire and some sanding otherwise it was easy to prepare and took paint really well. A spray black primer to start followed by two coats of "cookie dough" emulsion - same as the stonework for my Bushido temple. Then I chopped up a High Elf spear shaft to produce some coins and Pva glued them to the bottom of the fountain to represent a wishing well type thing (!?) a quick coat of GW "shining gold" and then the whole thing was washed in my homemade black wash and base highlighted. A quick spray of Matt laquer and we get to

Then it's a toss up between leaving it there or adding water. After a lengthy internal debate I added the two part epoxy I used on my newest Bushido board, I only needed two tubes (although I probably could have got away with one) so it cost £2 for the whole model to look like this

Apologies for the slightly yellow cast, the epoxy does look like this before drying completely clear but I couldn't wait to take pics.....

An hour later it looks like this.  The epoxy is hard to the touch although still a bit tacky.  It was at this point i thought about using some microfilaments from a xmas decoration to in a sort of spray at the top of the fountain that the epoxy could have adhered to to make it look even better.....never mind, maybe next time.

Anyway my thanks to Lord Siwoc for the fountain it's amazing and will fit in just about every setting I can think of. Check out the Horizoncreation3d site (the link is at the beginning of the post) there is loads of great stuff on there, I particularly love the bioterrain! :-)

Hope you enjoy

dGG

Ps - sadly no sweets survived past the weekend, this blog post is dedicated to those Danish "rock candies" that sacrificed themselves for this sad, fat Englishman's pleasure...