Goaliejack Luongo! aka Go Canucks Go!

This is the tale of how one unassuming little warjack grew up to be one of the best goalies in the world. Warning: this post contains conversions, sculpting, hockey talk, and may contain traces of Canucks fanaticism.

As well as being a miniatures enthusiast, I’ve been a Vancouver Canucks fan for 18 years now – as long as I’ve been watching hockey. Shortly after I started following the Canucks, they came within spitting distance of the holy grail of hockey: the legendary Stanley Cup.

They were exciting times in the city of Vancouver, as it was only the second time the Canucks had ever gotten as far as the finals. When the Canucks lost by 1 goal in game 7, it was devastating.

Thousands of ‘fans ‘ jumped off the bandwagon, but I stayed true. Through 17 years of more disappointments than victories, I stayed true. Now, at long last, the Canucks are in the Stanley Cup finals once more. For the first time ever, the Canucks are the favorites to win it all. I decided that I must honor this achievement in my own way, by creating my own personal mascot for my team. (more…)

A Reasonable Dream part II

In our last installment, we heard about the beginning of my journey towards trying to get 100 points of my Cygnar army painted in 3 months, ending roughly at the halfway mark with a pitiful 5 models painted, out of 58 that I had planned to paint. Whoops.

Shortly after that point, a Warmachine/Hordes league was starting up. I decided that I wanted to try something new for this league. Specifically, I wanted to use Epic Stryker’s theme list. I wanted to do this for 2 main reasons. First, I’ve never actually used Epic Stryker before, mostly because I have a tendency to only play with casters who are painted. Second, I wanted to have an army with 2 units of Stormblades assaulting everything in front of me.

Based on that, I knew that the models that I would paint next would be Epic Stryker, and the unit of Stormblades plus officer and standard bearer. The fact that I had already begun the basecoat on the Stormblades sealed the deal. The fact that I hadn’t begun the basecoat on the unit’s weapon attachments, the Storm Gunners, meant that for now I wasn’t going to bother with them. (more…)

A Reasonable Dream part I

In late 2010, the staff at Privateer Press (the makers of Warmachine and Hordes) had an in-house “Impossible Dream” challenge, in which they each attempted to paint a 100 point army within one month.

When I heard about that, I thought to myself: “Self, I think I’d like to try that.” I tossed the idea around amongst the regulars over at Vancouver Gamers and was ultimately convinced by them that it was a ridiculous idea, but changing the timeline to 3 months would make it a fun thing to attempt.

A few of us decided to take on this challenge, with the ultimate goal of having some sort of show-down at the end, where we would take our newly-painted 100 point armies and battle it out for bragging rights. Unfortunately, it looks like that grand finale probably won’t be happening, due to waning interest, one of the participants moving to another city, etc.

Anyway, for me the most important part of the challenge was always trying to get that army painted. I really enjoy painting, but for some reason I always have trouble getting myself motivated to actually do it. I tend to find that unless I’ve got some kind of deadline in which to get a certain number of models done, it just won’t happen. Because of that, I’ve got a firm rule that I’ll never take an unpainted model to a tournament (I will sometimes use unpainted models in casual play, but I greatly prefer not to). I also take on whatever painting challenges come my way. If I didn’t, I’d probably only have a half-dozen Cygnar models painted right now.

The first step for this particular challenge was to look through my depressingly large collection of unpainted miniatures, and decide what to include in this 100 point army. My primary focus was to include models that I’ve wanted to get painted for a long time, with a secondary focus on ending up with a playable 100 point force, and a tertiary (yes, that’s right, I just used the word tertiary in a sentence – thank you AD&D module D01-02 Descent Into the Depths of the Earth for teaching me a word that I could then insert into a blog entry many years later in an attempt to make people believe that I’m educated!) focus on making it somewhat reasonable from a painting standpoint. No massive infantry horde for me! (more…)