Ars Moriendi - A life in progress post

(Some appropriate music first)

It's common knowledge that life's a funny thing. You'll hear the "life's worth nothing but nothing's worth life" motto and all kinds of ready made predigested thoughts when getting on the topic but rest assured I won't bore you with any of it...

It's just that life's funny, you get a slap from one hand and a caress from the other... but memento mori I suppose (OK I did continue).

Why all the weird (and let's face it, slightly gloomy) tone ? Well because among a massive dose of real life that hit me in a face like a trout, some good things have immerged. One of those is that Brian Roe AKA the Roebeast from the Magical house of sunshine blog, has kindly organised a giveaway to celebrate his 200th follower and I've somehow managed to be the winner of it thanks to a fluke !

I think giving away a present in which Brian put some time and effort makes it even more valuable and the excellent thing about it apart from its quality, is that it blends just nicely with my bases and their sort of purplish tone.

On top of that Brian sent a postcard to accompany his gift and as expected from such a man of taste, it had this fine retro taste I favour a lot :

Thank you Brian and if you guys still don't follow the Magical house of sunshine blog, you should be doing this right now to get the opportunity to see really great projects implying exquisite scenery, models and art. 

After the joy of knowing there are still humans with hearts beating in their chests in this world, I decided to listen to the 9 year old voice in my head and decided to play with marines.

REAL marines, I mean. Marines with beaks, weird positions, awful details and uneven shapes. Yeah, the right kind of marines. THESE :

The result of all of this is super secret for now and I can only give you a little taste of it. It may not look like it but getting to this point involved a lot of cutting, pinning, bending and gluing and a fair amount of swearing on top. I enjoyed it tons.

Who can spot Daddy stealer?

I'm not giving more clues than this :

Meanwhile (well not exactly meanwhile, more like 1 week before) I decided to play a bit with weathering techniques with brushes. I'm still trying to get used to it but the process is fun so I'll keep trying every time I spot an occasion.

It consists in working with the foam you get in blisters and some steady hand to add depth to it with a brush but it's fun. Actually seeing how it's done in real is kind of scary though, waaaaaay outta my league (for now).

Another good thing is I got to meet a person I had only known from the web (who proved to be even nicer than I thought) and that I managed to get some much sought after models for Space fleet in the process !

During our friendly chat I even got a revelation to link the angry Hippo from the old Realm of Chaos range :

To Blame!, probably one o my favourite japanese comic of all times...

Blame! by Tsutomu Nihei

I'm pretty sure you'll all think this is pretty far fetched but believe me, it will all make sense at some point... maybe.

Last good point in all of this is I managed to get my hands on an old friend. He was my first rogue trader model and I sold it for nothing about 15 years ago. I remember regretting selling him the very same day...

But he's back, and I'm a better modeler and painter than I've ever been so first of all, I gave him a better pose than what I originally did (thanks to the secret art of pinning) and I plan on giving my best on the painting side to atone for my childish sins

Jes Goodwin retro Goodness at its max

That will be all for now, I'll probably have a bit more time to dedicate to this passion and to many other good things so chin up people and remember that you have to die...