The Beard Bunker

Oooh, what a nice-looking soap box. Rolls up sleeves. The following sentiments were something I often heard back when I used to work in a GW: "[Partner's name] will never let me get that." "I brought my own carrier bag so I can sneak this purchase into the house without him/her knowing I bought more plastic crack." "My partner will be annoyed if I start painting again, so I'd better not. Do you mind if I just look longingly at the cabinets for a while?" One time I remember a man in his fifties bought a £100 box of space marines one day, only to bring it back the next day looking sad because his wife made him take it back. As a comedy aside, we'd had a freakishly quiet day at the shop, and so after the refund ended up making £-1.50. The minus symbol is not a typo. Of course, on the flipside, we hobbyists often behave a lot like drug addicts. With the release of the Sector Mechanicus scenery, we can even buy a plastic crack pipe. S...

Like a bad rash that keeps returning no matter how many times you visit the GUM clinic, I’m back.   In my   last post , I showed how I’d built my Chinork. It basically said 'I just built it'. The time came for me to paint the thing, a slightly tougher feat.  The plan for the nascent Blood Axe contingent of my army is that each vehicle will have its own camouflage, so the first thing I had to do was pick a camouflage pattern. I wanted to pick camo patterns that suggest that the Blood Axes understood how camouflage looked, but not necessarily why it worked. The 'Unifying theme' of the army will be its various gaudy patterns.  So I trawled Google looking for inspiration. I didn't start with much hope, I mean what modern military service would pick a truly stupid camo pattern for their aircraft? "Biggles, They'll just think you're a tiger" Turns out the RAF would. Presumably this is the camo they use when fighting in a tiger ...

Sometime perhaps in the not too distant future, I believe the Bunker will be returning to the Old World, to continue our adventures beyond Hochland, Fort Schippel, Hergig, and the comically named Bergsburg. On their return, I'm hoping there may be a delicious added threat to venturing anywhere near a tree, because of course anywhere in the Empire really needs more reasons to fear woodland other than Beastmen, Undead, Skaven, etc, etc.  Coming soon to a forest near you, the very definition of proactive environmentalists;  pointy-eared, super-snipering tree-huggers who consider armour to be an affectation of those too slow to dodge whatever the others throw at them. The Wood Elves (WElves) are a force with a very nice theme and some extremely good looking and evocative models (I'm looking at you Dryads, Wild Riders, Treemen...);  Wardancers are not part of that list however. Very much a product of their time, and with an amazing dynamism, their propor...

The magnificently bearded bastards populating this post were actually painted back in January, which means I finished three Empire units in the same month. Ooosh. These guys represent one of my most epic procrastinatory fails; I built them, thought about painting them, remembered how long it took me to paint the other cavalry in my Empire army, and then stuck them in the box of unpainted shame. For seven years. Well there comes a time when one simply has to sack up and throw some paint at the problem, and since I didn't want to spend ages on the project I decided to see how much of it I could do with drybrushing. The answer: quite a lot. I figured bay horses would take best to this treatment, with only the white bits needing to be wet-brushed. The outriders' capes were also fair game; the metal was similarly quick as it just got a layer of Army Painter Gunmetal followed by Nuln Oil Gloss. The whole unit got knocked out in... I forget how long exactly, but it was an ...