The New Year's so bright, I gotta wear shades...

Well I hope everyone had a great Christmas holiday and that the New Year is treating you well so far. Mine has been very good so far there has been no drama or unexpected problems that have come up; so far so good. I have finished cleaning up the basement and I am now in the process of reorganizing and repacking my ‘stuff’, not ‘shit' there's a difference (see George Carlin), into plastic storage containers.

However, I have made time over the last couple of weeks to do a little work on the Porsche King Tiger that I have been working on. I also dug out a 1/48 BF-109 G10 from Hasegawa to work on as well. The Bf-109 already has all of the detail items that I’ll need to accurately detail the model. I’ve pulled out several items from Ultracast, Aires and Eagle Editions to add to the model and the cockpit is nearly ready for painting. I’ll be using the discontinued Eagle Strike paints for most of this project; they were manufactured by Vallejo for Aeromaster/Eagle Strike Productions. They don’t require any thinner as they are similar to the Model Air line from Vallejo, just use an acrylic cleaner for clean up. While I haven’t used them before, I have seen the results from other modelers so they do nicely.

The King Tiger has been a little slow in getting finished as I’m at the stage of adding the little photo-etch details and working on cleaning up the ejector pin marks on the track links. I’m still looking at reference pictures to decide which scheme I want to do. Depending on the particular tank, I might have to make some adjustments to certain hull details but I think for the most part it’ll turn out pretty well.

I’ve also been doing so reading about the new Tyranid codex, released today, and I have to admit that I’m a little excited about using my bugs again. The interesting thing that I have found so far is that my army used to be at 2000pts. and I’m curious to see if they have dropped down to 1500pts. I’d rather not be forced to by a bunch of stuff to make the army useable again. That is one of the things that upsets me most about how Games Workshop does their new codex’s lately. They force the player to scramble and bye a bunch of unnecessary items to make the army playable. Hell, in this new codex they have several units that actually have no models at all, forcing the player to come up with something quickly if they want to use that unit and remain WYSIWYG. While not a bad business strategy, it’s just a pet peeve of mine when you force people to do that right of the bat. Oh, well, I’ll still be picking up a copy of the codex today and then will probably add a Trygon or two before the end of the year.