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Sorry for the recent intermission to your regularly scheduled blogging. I was forced spend the past two weekends attending mandatory classes to get a new work related license. Sadly because of this all hobby related activities including following all my favorite blogs came to a crashing halt. I will get a free weekend again at the end of this week so I expect to resume regularly scheduled blogging again Sunday.

Above is a snap shot of the Privateer Press Hordes Swamp Monster conversion I undertook for a friend. I understand he's been terrify opponents all ready. Sorry for the picture quality apparently the beastie refused to sit still for his photo. I hope to get some proper photos in the future. 

The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec, The Movie

Or "Les aventures extraordinaires d'Adele Blanc-Sec" is a 2010 French film from acclaimed director   Luc Besson (of The Fifth Element and The Professional fame) is an adaptation of a French comic series by Jacques Tardi published in the mid 1970's.

This is a crazy, funny movie with wit and charm. It never devolves into the common denominator humor found in far too many comedies these days. It is in essence as Gaslight fantasy set in 1910 with our plucky heroine Adele Blanc-Sec, herself an author of adventure novels, searching for the court physician of Ramses the 2nd so she can raise him from the dead to cure here ailing sister. Things don't go exactly as planed. She digs up the wrong mummy,

fortunately he proved to to be a nice chap to have tea with.

The lovely French actress Louise Bourgoin admirably portrays Adele Blanc-Sec with understated humor. Here is one of the French posters for the film.

I happen to own an English translation of the Tardi comic this film is based on "Adele and the Beast" and this film is a faithful adaptation of the comic.

 The Pterodactyl egg in the museum as it appears in the movie.

 The Pterodactyl egg in the museum as it appears in the comic.

Its not the action movie this trailer makes it out to be, but the film is paced very well. There is an English dubbed version floating around but I recommend you watch it in French with subtitles.

This movie was made with the approval of the original artist Mr. Tardi and its part of a three movie deal. I'm happily looking forward to to more movies in the future.


You can buy a US format version Blueray DVD of the film on Amazon here. Or the UK format (PAL) version DVD of the film here.

Paint Table Saturday #14, or acutually Sunday

My hobby progress has been admittedly slow. There are very few figures on my work space. The majority of my hobby time has been devoted to the Swamp Monster conversion here you can see I've attached the front reaching tentacles. You can see some GW LOTR figures in the background for Slumming in Goblin Town.

The Beast is finished for me his owner has taken him to paint him up so he will now slink of to the bog he came from.

Hopefully I will begin work on the Lledo horse drawn fire engine next week.

Sofie's Sculpt Table Saturday?

 

Working on the Beast.

Tiger oversees the work.

Sculpting not painting was my hobby activity this Saturday in fact I didn't get the paints out at all. I was goaded into trying to complete "the Beast" a second hand favor for a friend. The "Beast" is a Hordes miniature form Privateer Press called the swamp monster.

This is a random image of the miniature painted I took from the internet.

Its a large figure on a 40mm base note the tentacles form a leg-like base for the miniature and they are in 2 pieces a right and left side. Well my friend didn't want his swamp monster to be run of the mill. He saw some enterprising modeler modify his like so.

This is what he wanted it to look like.

Now I've nicknamed this hefty miniature "the Beast" because this multi-part figure fits together about as well as your average Games Workshop monstrosity. A lot of filing and filling with milliput is required to simply fit it together the way it was intended and to that the need to saw in to little pieces the tentacle legs and you can see why I've named it the Beast.

My efforts with the tentacles blue-tacked on.

The body is finished and the tentacles have been assembled from the bits and sculpted into shape. I had to make the tentacles from cut up bits as you can see in the photos below.

In the end I've found this to be time consuming and I have to re-sculpt over them anyway so if I where ever to do something like this again I'll sculpt the tentacles a new.

Most of my Saturday was taken up helping a friend complete his art school assignment by posing for him. The upshot of this is that i may have a new profile photo what do you think?

Introducing Slumming in Goblintown

 

I've created a new blog to chronicle my miniatures exploits in a new period, well if the Lord of the Rings can be considered a period.  To bolster this period claim I'll add some Dark Ages history, literature and myth articles. After all that's what inspired the great author himself. I’ve been a long time miniatures gamer and fan of Lord of the Rings I’ve been collecting the GW LOTR figures since they first came out in 2001 in conjunction with the first LOTR film. I enjoy the game and have played a number of games after a new years clean up I’ve discovered that I have 100+ figures earmarked for my LOTR project yet not a single one is painted! 

 You can find it here.

Sorry Ste the wargaming community is much larger on Blogger. 

I hope I can keep up with you Mr. Bowmen.

Battleboards Videos

BattleBoards is one of the very few professional gaming terrain board makers in the world. They have made numerous gaming/display boards for manufactures and clubs to be exhibited at Salute in London. They have recently begun posting videos of their work on youtube. I have posted all the videos for their latest project WW2 Bolt Action Italy board here for your enjoyment. All though this is very advanced stuff, if you watch carefully you should be able to pick up some tips to use yourself no matter your personal level of terrain making. The link to BattleBoards is here.
Enjoy!

 

Paint Table Saturday

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I've joined Sofie's Paint Table Saturday and movement that's sweeping the blogger community. Sofie of sofies-paint-blog has inspired the blogging community with one simple idea, every Saturday post your painting table. Off and on I've posted things I'm working on in my Work Bench series of posts.
 Now I don't have a permeate painting station I have to set it up each time I want to paint the picture below might give you a hint as to why. My poor artists daylight's on/off switch is no longer working thanks to being knocked from the table once too many times, but it soldiers on. I've recently cleaned off the kitchen table once my regular painting spot before it became a repository for random junk. Well its cleaned off enough to get some work done. So I unpacked the paints & brushes and dug up some LOTR miniatures to paint then to my surprise I gained a helper. 

Tiger! the curious kitty, she is the most curious cat I've ever had. For more on Tiger's miniature antics see here.

I will however post a painting table/work bench picture every Saturday from now on. Maybe I'll even get some painting in like yesterday.