The Beard Bunker

An 80th birthday present is not be the realm of book tokens or a pack of socks. With my mother reaching this milestone last year, and my father getting there this month, it seemed apt to go at least somewhat further. Making something felt more meaningful to me than an acquisition. But what to make? Then I hit upon the notion of making something for each of them that would symbolise what they'd chosen to do with their lives. Today's post will be about the process of making them. It's not exactly our usual content, but hopefully you'll enjoy the diversion. So, Mum's present first. She has been known to enjoy painting (this is an understatement) and has spent much of her life appreciating and aiding wildlife, so a painting representing that in some way felt right. However, to keep things a bit comedy (and within my skillset) I decided I would make the painting preposterously tiny, requiring a level of detail and precision entirely at odds with her preference for looser...

When we decided to hold the first ever Beard Bunker painting competition, we needed a neutral figure, since we all painted different armies, but we wanted someone suitably powerful and impressive.  So who better to choose than the intergalactic space warrior, leader of the Recyclons from Sigma IX, Count Binface! Ok, well, maybe that's true, or maybe with all the recent hype about him we found out about his official mini and decided it would be fun to all buy him and paint him and thus came up with the idea of a Beard Bunker painting competition.  Tomayto tomahto. If you have been living under a bin rock , and don't know who were are talking about (not unlikely for our non-British readers), the good old Beeb has done a good summary here . Tom Starting with myself as probably the least interesting entrant, it didn't really occur to me to do anything special here.  I just wanted a tiny Binface painted accurately to his r...

Paint the perfect tiny face in only twelve hours! Paint a hundred miniatures to tabletop standard in a day using this simple trick! Hone your tournament build by avoiding these underpowered units! Actually I'm fine, thanks. Online discourse has a tendency to cater to extremes, and I find this to be a common presence even with hobby content. Things are frequently either about getting the best possible result, or the fastest possible result, but here's the thing: neither of those approaches are actually fun . Unless you're a competition painter, optimising for extreme detail means dying of old age before you finish your army, and optimising for extreme speed will usually produce an army that you don't feel quite so satisfied with. The overwhelming majority of wargamers spend more time building and painting their miniatures than actually gaming with them on the tabletop, so it's pretty important to find what makes you enjoy the ride the most. I suppose partly it comes ...