2013 achievements and what's coming in 2014

Once again I had a very busy December, though because we stayed in town this year and have had our first child, that business was having a very proper Christmas setup and a bunch of hobby time catch up!

I have to say, 2013 was another amazing year!  Due to personal commitments I didn't get as much gaming time for tournaments and such, but that's OK - becoming a father means I am going to have to sacrifice those types of things more often so best get used to it! I managed to make it to four blood bowl tournaments this year and also ran one for the first time - I got the two in that mattered the most (Zlurpeebowl and Lakeside) and managed to win the Best Appearance trophy at ZBIX.

On to other matters - first up my planned items for 2013

Of the 3 mentioned projects I was planning to attempt this year, I completed 1 - the necromunda walkways. In terms of more necromunda stuff I did get some dark vengeance cultists converted as a Redemptionist gang and am very happy with them. Once Ric @ Ricalope puts up a tutorial I plan to give it a go using his method for painting these guys - they have the same bases as my Flesh Tearers and will fit right in as cultists when using the chaos-y corsair models I built.

I had also been planning to bring my Insane Goblin Posse to Zlurpeebowl and gun for best appearance - CHECK! This required adding something more to the team (required by me) so I got a couple more basic goblins painted up.

I failed completely to paint the Ravenwing at all - partially because I needed a few more bits to finish building but mostly because GW annoyed the hell out of me with some stupid decisions and make me re-evaluate my loyalty.

I failed at painting some of the chaos-y/corsair marines I had built for my raptor legion - solely because the primer went on too thick and obscured some details - however I did get some more raptor legion marines painted and even more assembled.

However I am really happy that I managed to finish up several long outstanding projects

• based some WHQ characters
• finished zombies for Axt
• completed counters for orc blood bowl team
• finished skaven enginseer for hakomike

I managed to paint a lot more than I expected to finish with a new baby - score one for motivation/focus (ie. if I get 20 minutes to paint, spend over 15 of those minutes actually painting)

I currently have 6 terminators in progress for my novamarines - it doesn't look like they will be finished for this year, but they will give me a good start to next and that combined with scaling down the eventual plans means I just want to paint up a second land speeder storm and will consider that army "finished".  I hope to get some games in for 2014 and then may consider putting it up for sale/trade.

Other plans for 2014 include;

• Making the Canadian Open blood bowl tournament bigger and better than ever.  Check out more information on the NAF Canada website or on the NAF forum thread.
• Getting some Deadzone figures painted up.  I plan to start with my plague faction as I have lots of them and some ideas about using staining and washes to get a good effect.
• Painting up the Redemptionist cultists if Rics tutorial is done this year.
• I have some plans for a couple blood bowl teams to increase what I can use.  One is a proper team to build and paint as a themed counts as Necromantic team.  The other is a very quick & funny themed Ogre team.
• Finishing up the Novamarines as mentioned above and getting some games in with them.
• Once my FOLDIO lightbox arrives, getting serious about nice pictures for the blog and starting to go through my painted stuff bit by bit.

Happy New Year to my followers and best wishes for a great 2014!