The Intermittant Activity of the Reluctant Hobbyist.

Ohhhhhhhh, It’s been toooo long!!! This blog is woefully neglected. I’ve had quite the… diminished output in hobby over the last couple of years, but I’ll do a little catchup on what I did achieve in that time before I HOPEFULLY get back into the positive habit of tracking my hobby and you know… actually hobbying.

so… lets look back at… errr… Christmas… 2020, so mid End Times (Covid Extravaganza). This is 5 projects ago, which is a sign of how unproductive I’ve been (avaraging 2 projects a year). It was the first Secret Santa we had done on the discord and the person I drew asked for something from the Middle Earth Battle Strategy game. There’s always a £25 suggested value for the gift. I got hold of a Boromir and this would be one of the unusual occasions I didnt do a conversion. instead I would just try to do a good job of the “box art” and this is what I ended up with…

I was pretty happy with how it turned out and the recipiant was happy too which is all I wanted. It was a pretty unusual project for me, a lot of freehand and trying to match a “canon” colourscheme., I fell like I got it close enough anyway.

Afther that I still wasnt very motivated to carrying on but an opportunity came up to help with a charity project on twitter. It was to donate a minis that were converted for a female space marine army to promote inclusion, the money raised with to No More Damsels London. This had to be finished by march 2021. I converted a Librarian and an assault marine. The chapter had its own colour scheme, chapter symbol and basing instruction. It was a challenging project, I dont do a lot of standart marine conversions and I find getting the non-organic shapes right pretty tricky. I was happy with what I came up with in the end and the project raised a bunch of money and I was happy to have helped.

Following this project I had a sudden crisis of hobby. I was already struggling with motivation a little bit but then a bunch of uneccesary drama in the hobby community on Twitter and a falling out with someone I knew really sucked the joy out of it for me. I didnt touch any more mminis until… SECRET SANTA 2021! (Secret Santa features heavily here has half of my hobby output for the last 2 years). This time I drew a chap who said he didnt mind what he got. Obviously that broad choice isnt helpuful so I stalked his posts on the Hobbyist Discord and saw a lot of Age of Sigmar, Destruction minis. I saw a few squigs and things and remebembered that manglers were a thing. I love the mangler modelsand set about trying to find one for around £25. Low and behond a good friend of mind had one and was willing to sell it to me, so my project begun. It was already painted though and the whole point is to give them a mini painted by you… so I thought, the existing paint job could be a base coat and I could just sort of add details and highlights. Then I decided… if I converted it, that would also consitute enough effort if my paint job wasnt any better than the original.

My problem was, while the Mangler Squigs are a cool detailed model… I absolutely hate it when you have two very detailed models on the table that are exact copies of each other. I understand fodder being very similar, you dont examine those things very much but the more detailed a model is, the more obvious the identical parts of them are. So I wanted to try and make the mangler squigs as different from the stanard kit as I could.

I swapped which squigs were on top and bottome, and moved the goblins around. Then I decided to take inspiration from the Great White Squig’s cool shark like face and have a go at practicing with miliput. cut the nose and mouths off the two squigs and gave them new faces. I also cut down their huge tusks to be more like broad shark teeth.

They guy who recieved these was really happy and didnt even noticed until it was mentioned to him that the models were uniquely sculpted… and while some poeple said that would have upset them, that their work had gone unnoticed, I was actually super thrilled. I couldnt have got a better compliment that the work I had done was so in keeping with the model, it seemlessly blended in. I was really happy with this one, it was a shame to give it away!

From there we go on to April 2022, when in an effort kickstart my hobby I bought two Underworlds warbands to play with Warbringer. Our free time had taken a bit of a hit and our usual venue for playing 40k once a week had been unavailiable for months. Getting a couple of warbands felt like a good way to play some games with friends that wouldnt take to long, and there were small and contained units that required no expanding. So I bought two, one of them I had been looking at at my last trip to Warhammer world, Blackbeards Buckaneers. Because I was concerned about not having a lot of motivation, I thought I would keep this a low pressure project and just paint them like the box art rather than think of a new colourscheme.

They werent too bad to paint, I wouldnt say enjoyable because I rarely “enjoy” the painting aspect of the hobby, but I didnt get frustrated. I painted them using the GW originals as reference apart from the parrot and monkey which I changed based on a couple of other things I was enjoying at the time. The parrot I decided to painr the colours of a macaw, inspired by Ranzaks parrot in his artwork for the Skull and Shackles Pathfinder Card Game. The monkey I changed to look like a japanese macaque as I was watching the TV series Hitmonkey (based on the Comics).

I would say I was satisfied with this, I was pretty happy with the ogre and goblins but struggled a bit to get the animals the way I wanted. I was happy enough with them though. So that brings us almost up to date, I will do a different post for the next project I did… the Secret Santa for 2022, The Ork Mega Dred!

Thanks for reading this, I’m probably pretty out of practice and my blog posts were probably of questionable quality before who knows what they look like now. If you have any feedback for me on these projects I’d love to hear it!


~Pandora’s Bitz Box~