The Road to the NOVA 2012 Part 6

Molds , Castings, and Monuments... Oh My!

Well here we are with building session 4 come and gone. In this last session we covered three major undertakings.

The first is the mold making for our ongoing projects. We are making molds for a project that will be fully revealed soon. till then here are some teasers...





The second is the casting project. Using a series of molds created by our staff and many of the fantastic molds from Hirst Arts we are attempting to cast tons of extra bits to be added to our buildings and scatter terrain. Check out these shots of castings already in progress as well as some of the newest scatter pieces made with some the cast parts. By the way we are using an really fantastic product called Merlin's Magic. you should check it out.





Lastly we began the Monuments project in Ernest. As you can see the Washington Monument project is under way but there is still much to be done!



Sceen here is part of our staff hard at work on the second project "The national Air and Space Museum." Wait till you see it.



Till next time

Later

RGH

New Lord of the Rings Books!

Hello All,

I picked up all 5 of the new LOTR-SBG books over the weekend. I an really liking the stream lining the new build system brings to the game. At the beginning of each book is a section that show how forces are now put together. It adds structure where there was very little before. The funny thing is that you can still build pretty much anything you want. Even better the allies rules have been simplified to an easy to use Good Guys vs. Bad guys structure. no more of the old systems flow chart (I made Flow charts) style where some forces could not ally with certain others just because their forces had no interaction in the movies or books. About the only thing that went away in the new system is the ability to have tons of troops with a single "captain" leading them. That is fine with me as the game is SPECIFICALLY designed for heroic play!

As I was looking through my computer this morning I came across these pictures from a LOTR tournament I attended a few years ago. Considering the subject of the post it seemed like a lucky find. Please enjoy (BTW: Mine are the forces of Rohan/Gondor)

Mixing it up.
A clash Forces

HOLD!

The Last Stand

The Generals Clash


I would like to say I won the game but the unfortunately the Witch king was to powerful to be defeated that day.

I did manage to get the Sportsmanship award. I guess I was everyone's favorite opponent to beat on :)

Until next time

RGH

January 2012- Here There Be Monsters

Hello all,

The month of January (When not working on NOVA projects) was dedicated to Monsters! I have a ton of them and mostly leave them on the shelf as they take a while to paint and I have several Army Projects going all the time. Well I decided it was time to change that. I managed to get 12 beasts and Monsters painted up in 31 days.

Here is the Breakdown...

Island of Blood High Elf Lord on Griffin- January 1



The Old Metal Warhammer Giant- January 5

Size comparison

2 old Metal Ork Killa Kans and an Old Metal Deff Dread- January 10th - 15th



Check out the Grotzoka above!

3 Vargheists for the Vampire Counts (On display at GW Fair Oaks) January 16th-23rd

1 Varghulf for the Vampire Counts (My Wife Did The Brown One) January 20th



I finished up some Bat Swarms that were painted years ago- January 20th



I found this Cyclops Giant at an AC Moore for about 12 dollars. it is on par with the current plastic giant in size. The first picture is what it originally looked like. The others are post my overhaul. January 23rd

The Original

The finished product

Lastly on the 31st I finished the Lord Of The Rings Cave Drake Unfortunately I have not gotten any pictures yet... January 31st

Lastly Here are some works from December that I Did not get a chance to really show.

Skaven- A better picture of the Hell Pit Abomination and the Plague Catapult



And lastly A group of assault Terminators with Lightning Claws- (Please GW make them not suck in 6th ed!!!)



Well that's all the time I have for now. Look again real soon another NOVA Open Update.

Till next time

Later

RGH

The Road to the NOVA 2012 Part 5

BUILD SESSION 3

(Picture Above is of my check list prior to heading out into the cold on Saturday)

Well We did it!- 3 sessions in January.

The third installment for the NOVA terrain project went off well despite the cold weather and Ice. We had a pretty good turnout of around 7 people. We even had two folks show up before Mike or I arrived!

Much was accomplished and we learned several valuable lessons. for example: Painting in really cold weather is a bad idea. This happened when we decided to texture paint some of the projects from last week. The projects are OK they just took forever to dry.

With texture paint unavailable we moved to good old household Spackle to give the buildings a "stucco" like appearance. This worked out well as you can see below.






Once everything from last week was prepped for painting we tackled some new projects. The team decided to forgo painting until the weather warms up and instead concentrate on building as much as we can in January and February.

We only had one working foam cutter as the other seems to have died. Even that did not stop our group of diehard volunteers who managed to build even more scatter terrain than they did the week before.

(The pink pieces above were from week two but you get the idea!)

On the building front we managed to get somewhere around 12 more buildings ready for texture!



At the Sunday Staff meeting our illustrious leader Mr. Brandt stated that we have managed to get somewhere around 80 pieces of terrain built in just three Saturdays along with the 80+ tables prepped this is a hell of a start for 2012!



Thanks to all of you.
Keep up the great work!

RGH

The Road to the NOVA 2012 Part 4

**


Buildings and scatter- Here we go!!!!

Good Morning all,

Saturday was build session 2 for the NOVA 2012. I am happy to report that it was a roaring success. We had around 8 to 10 folks show up. We started the day finishing up the last tables (18 I think) then went straight to work on the terrain.



BTW- Everyone signed the last table and those who were at session 1 but not 2 had their names added by the staff. Just giving credit where credit is due. :)



We broke the group up into 3 teams.

Team 1- Buildings
Team 2- scatter terrain
Team 3- MDA board bases


Using my favorite building material (foam board) team 1 was able to construct 13 buildings from concept to constructed. Not bad since they only had around 4 hours to work on it.



Team 2 used the hobbyist's best friends, pink foam and and (2) hot wire knives, to make a staggering 22 pieces of scatter terrain. This was the team I was lucky enough to be on. I will say that close proximity to wire knives can get you light headed even with good ventilation. so be careful. :)



Team 3- had the most unrewarding job of the three and will get first choice next time for jobs! These guys cut and shaped over 80 12X12 MDA boards for bases. Then the rounded the edges with sand paper. They did this out in the cold while the rest of us were warm inside.



I salute you team three.

in all over 80 boards were prepped and 35 pieces of terrain are ready for sand and paint. Not to mention the 18 tables that were completed.

Buildings ready to paint

Lots of Scatter Terrain



WAY TO GO TEAM!!!

Once again the food was killer. We had tacos and taquitos- Not really sure where but I will post it when I find out.

Well that's it for now

Later

RGH

** Image used without permission- for amusement only

The Road to the NOVA 2012 Part 3

15mm scale model of US capital found at the WARDMAN PARK MARRIOTT- in Washington DC


Hello All,

Happy New year to all. Today marked the first of the NOVA open build sessions. These sessions are intended to get us ready for NOVA 2012 only 8 short months away. in this session we felted tables. LOTS of tables! I did not get a complete count but by the estimates provided we completed 36 6X4 Tables and 35 4X4 tables

Here is the board we were using to keep track of this process

Here are a few of the finished tables loaded into the truck.

With a new year comes new faces and this year has been no exception. Several new volunteers showed up and were quickly put to work. There was some grumbling about labor laws and stuff but Mr. Brandt could not be moved. In all seriousness these new guys hit the ground running and did not stop till the work was done!

"Labor laws be damned!" says task master Mike (seen entering the shot on the left)

Tables Tables and more tables- We needed someplace to put all those Buildings and hills!

That is not to say that NOVA veterans did not do their share. Quite the contrary, as Several members of the famous 2011 team made appearances or at least made their presence felt.

Beware of the Man in the Black hat!

Dakota doing her best statue impression

It true Brandt style lunch was served and was , as always, a hit! Thanks L. :)

Lunch is served! (If you were not there you really missed out!)

So to wrap up- Felt attached to around 70 tables: DONE! Make New Friends:DONE!, Great Lunch: DONE!, and Good Time Had By All: DONE!!!

Till Next time...

Later
RGH