Happy Xenos New Year!

I hope everyone made it home safely last night... and are paying for a night of drunken debauchery with extra special New Year's Day hangovers!

Nothing wrong with that - just feels like it!

Anyway, from a hobby standpoint 2012 feels like the year of excess.  My game room is practically overflowing with armies... too many, in fact.  I have almost everything I've ever wanted - all those models I could never afford when I was younger, I own.

Lord - now what to do with them all?

Paint 'em, of course!  I made a trade with Gauthic, Tau for Necrons, and it was a definite Win/Win.  Added to my collection were a unit of Spyders, a Monolith, three Wraiths, a unit of Destroyers, a crap-ton of Scarab bases...



...and well over 60 Necron Warriors!

Gauthic doesn't paint with a heavy hand, but flash on rank-and-file doesn't bother him that much - this dude doesn't paint models, he paints armies.  His perspective is different.

Come to think of it, I need to adopt some of that.  But I digress - in the pictures you see the majority of the Warriors (flashing removed!) on paint sticks with a spray coat.

Here are the three Spyders.  I spent quite a bit of time cleaning the models and assembling them, but the legs are just awful sculpts.  I used a heavy file, but since the outside of each individual leg sort of dips inward...

...like a (___)...

...the heavy vertical lines of flash just wouldn't come off.  Sort of like...

... (_|_)...

...they've got butt legs!

My plan - already in the works at the time of this post - is to weather the legs heavily to cover the flaws.  They have, after all, been pattering around the Tomb Worlds for many thousands of years.

Here I was trying to take a picture of the two test models, painted over Gauthic's original scheme, but as you can see a Hormobug took center stage.

'Cause I've again caught a massive case of Bugs! -

Not to be confused with What's Her Name from the old days, who I always suspected had a roaring case.  Of Bugs! that is.

Do you still believe the old neighborhood gossip?  Despite the rumors, it's not usually just one girl on the block... ahem, servicing the community, but there are exceptions.

Such as What's Her Name, God bless her innocent soul and well-worn heels!

We were talking about Bugs! after all, right?

Sorry.  Lost time there.  Moving on.

I took stock of my hobby preferences recently, what with metal and plastic models outnumbering the population of a decent sized town in my game room.  I'll probably expand on my thoughts in a later post, but the bottom line is this.

I'm a Xenos man at heart.

My favorite army is Daemons, closely followed by Eldar.  I was a huge Orks man in it's last edition (not so much in its current form, for some reason), and recently the Necrons and Bugs! have become a something of a welcome obsession.

Even the Marine armies I've played for any length of time had something of a twist, such as the 13th Company.

Of course, I have my Brotherhood, but I have to be honest that I'm more interested in the look and fluff I've come up with rather than a passion for Space Wolves.

More on these themes at a later date, but 2012 is going to be a Xenos New Year.  I'm planning Necrons, Bugs!...

...and Daemons.  :)