ROTDOG Games BlogNOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!

NOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!

On 3 August, 2012 by ALlen @ ROTDOG

I’d like to take a second to talk to you about hobby disasters, focusing on one of my more recent incidents. We’ve all had them, a serious mishap to a model sometimes in assembly, sometimes after hours of painting.

A calamitous hobby event that makes you hold your head in your hands and despair.

The important thing is how you handle them.

Do you give up? Bin the model? Curse the Hobby Gods and put the model's in a cupboard never again to see the light of day?

I say this: ‘NEVER GIVE UP! NEVER SURRENDER!’ you can nearly always bring that hobby disaster back from the brink if you try.

Horrific paint job? A quick repaint can save it, worst case scenario you can strip a few layers easy enough.

Accidentally lopped a part off with cutters or a knife?

Make it into a conversion, (battle damage/injury) you’ll find the extra effort you put into that model will make it all the more special to you. Besides that stuff isn’t cheap these days!

Take my Stormvermin for example, now I have to say right off the bat these are not the greatest miniatures in the world. Not by any means, the sculpts are actually pretty poor and they sit toward the lower end of the scale when I rate them with other plastic miniatures by GW.

The hands just kind of blur into the weapons and bucklers and overall a lot of definition is missing where definition is required, still, they’re better than the High Elf Spearmen so I guess I can’t complain too much.

Lack of definition certainly wasn’t helped when I spilled an entire pot of liquid poly cement all over them, promptly turning their feet and bases into the consistency of marshmallow and ruining the finish of my girlfriends coffee table, bit of a disaster as quite of a few of them had their toes melt but I just knew I would have to be a little more aggressive with my basing than usual. No biggie right?

So I persevered with them, I had a funky colour scheme all planned out for them (which I will explain a little later) and I knew that they’d look great with the warchief from Island of Blood leading them.

First problem after assembly, ranking, anyone who had the old Chaos warrior models will sympathise here. The great thing about GWs Multipart plastic models is the ease of conversion and the dynamic poses you can get, the downside, especially on the earlier ranges was ranking the buggers up.

I still remember that I had to number the bottoms of the bases of my Chaos warriors so I could get them in the only order they would actually rank in,

Thankfully the Stormvermin aren’t quite that bad but they are quite chunky models for Skaven and cramming them on a 20ml base so they don’t get in the way of their fellows was a little tricky.

Anyway, I digress (per usual)…. I struggled through painting these models.

They certainly didn’t come naturally and I have to be honest they were a bit of a chore, not the easiest thing I have ever painted.

But Skaven NEED Stormvermin to stop the entire battle front collapsing into a tide of panicked musk squirting ratmen so I soldiered on.

Finally, after more hours than I care to mention they were done. I was actually quite happy with them, there was some nice blending and they certainly stood out next to my clanrats that was for sure.

They were however chipping a little, the paint was rubbing off on the tails and other pointy bits (probably due to my abrasive fingers) so I thought I’d give them a quick coat of purity seal. Big mistake…

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!

Disaster. Absolute unmitigated, air-turning-blue, apocalypse scale disaster.

I had this happen once before to a Mordheim Elf ranger and had to repaint it, but I sprayed my Lizardmen Bloodbowl team just the other week and they were fine.

A quick Google search suggested that a quick respray would solve the problem.

Did it buggery… more frosting, it was starting to look like I’d have to rebase all my Skaven on snow.

Next on the online oracle it was suggested that some Ardcoat would fix the problem (something to do with the varnish breaking down the frosting) … no such luck.

So the Stormvermin were looking pretty sorry at this point I have to say. Maybe it was the humidity, maybe the temperature was wrong; maybe Purity seal is just crap.

Trying to work out what had gone wrong wasn’t going to save my Stormvermin, I didn’t think anything could and although I wasn’t going to bin them I was close to chucking them in a drawer and trying to pretend they didn’t exist anymore.

Then I remembered ‘NEVER GIVE UP! NEVER SURRENDER’ The good thing about a repaint is all the colours were on the model, all id have to do is cover the frosting which was at its worst on the flat surfaces such as the purple tunics.

Also some models were much worse than others with a couple needing only minimal work (on the left above) unfortunately the most severely affected were the unit champion and another front rank rat.

The worst of all was the one I had tried to save with the gloss varnish and this was the one I was most concerned about, that was the one I knew I would struggle to save. (It’s the middle one in the above photo) the majority of them looked like the one on the right.

The good thing about the repaint was I actually found a few bits I’d missed so was able to tidy those up. 3 hours more and they were all done…