Sisters of Silence – Daan of War

The Word is Late

Last blog post I was finally ready to work on the bearers. Then, of course, life happened. Now, almost 3 months since the last post: I finally have some progress to report!

Sometimes when you realise that a project is taking longer than usual, it can be a good idea to roll with it. Instead of getting frustrated and settling for a less than stellar paint job, I decided halfway the first 5 marines that I’d just take the extra time to be completely happy with these. I’m glad I did and I can’t wait now to see the whole army come together like this.

In the meantime a few lockdown measures have been lifted in the Netherlands. So, between a couple of my most enthusiastic heresy friends, we decided we would be able to risk a 5 person megabattle at home.

Man! That was such a breath of fresh air to be able to play warhammer with more than 2 people again! I was playing with Arjan’s Custodes against Mechanicum (Dirk), World Earers (Bart) and Alpha Legion (Naut). For the occasion I brought along my Sisters of Silence and Knight allies as well. The game was lost in turn 3 when several key charges failed and at the end of turn 4 we decided to perform an orderly retreat for The Emperor.

Depite the long pauze in blogging I’m glad I finally had something to report in the aftermath of the Netherlands’ worst lockdown ever. As the world opens up again I hope to report more!

Thanks for reading.

Hobby 2020 so far: Slaanesh, The Pile and… Corona.

Now, with 2019 out of the way I can finally talk about what I’ve been up to recently. It’s been a lot and the world around hasn’t been boring about it either. I imagine everyone is like this now, but if I had known what a year 2020 would become…

Ok, so the year for me started out extremely optimistic. Even though I was still a bit shell shocked from the whole divorce ordeal, I was really happy with my new home:

So I decided: New Year, New Army! The Pile was going to have to wait again. I needed something fresh to get excited about and a new way to play the game. I settled on Slaanesh Daemons at the local warhammer store birthday and got the slaanesh half of Wrath and Rapture.

The store manager told me he was going to organise a growth league and that, starting february, I could use the army to play an Age of Sigmar game each month. I was very hyped and all set to build and paint a quick new army.

I was so productive, that I pretty much finished the whole thing (aside from a Soulgrinder I still had to purchase) on the 12th of March. It was the exact weekend before the lockdown happened.

After the lockdown everything started to become a bit unreal. Life began drastically changing. I had to cancel my trip to warhammer world as well as my music festival tickets. I also had to keep working a lot seeing as I work in the pharmaceutical industry. Everything around the covid pandemic still feels unreal to me and even as I’m typing this I’m still afraid of the massive impact I feel this event is going to have on my future. Like a lot of people, I try to cope by concentrating on the things that are still possible, but I’m also kind of bracing for the worst. Making sure I’ve got my life together seems even more important now in 2020 than it did last year.

Hobbywise I decided to dive back into the Pile. I had a lot of heresy stuff as well as random small projects left to complete, so the images below are a good timeline of what I painted from the start of the lockdown until the current date.

Daemon Prince I bought to support my local store during the crisis.

Now, as the world is starting to walk the long and winding road to normality, I have even played a couple of games again (at 1,5m distance):

First post-lockdown game against Stephan’s titanicus.

Now, finally, this weblog has arrived at the current day. The last thing I’ve finished from the Pile were the shattered legion vets and with them, the only things left there are Skaven, Word Bearers and the marines from Indomitus. Three projects, AoS, Heresy and 40k that I’ve decided I’m going to take my sweet time to complete. With the pandemic still controlling our daily lives I want to consolidate everything a bit and that includes my hobbies. Organising the stuff I have and fully enjoying the projects I’m working on. Hopefully from now on I’ll be able to post something new around once a month. Whether that’s Skaven, Word Bearers or 40k will be up to the mood I’m in.

This final thought also brings me back to what I was getting at the start of all these recaps: wargaming and painting miniatures is a great way to glue your life back together when it breaks. It’s fun, creative, social, rewarding of your diligence, able to match your pace and always has something new to find out about. I feel that as long as I manage to stick with it, it’ll help to carry me through whatever these roaring twenties have yet to throw at us.

Thanks for reading!

2019 Part 2

This us the second part of a recap I’m doing of the period between blogs. Check out the first part here.

So, in the last part of the previous post I explained that during the whole divorce period I was still able to run and finish a Horus Heresy campaign. It was a really fun campaign and with our dedicated group of players it really helped me have some fun days to look forward to. There are too many battles to explain in detail, but I made a point to really take some nice pictures this time. So first up, here’s a gallery of some of my favorites:

Now, as I said in the previous post, I had been painting up Sisters of Silence to not only clear some backlog but also to take a really cool, unusual army to a bloodstorm event. I have long had the ambition to expand my Raven Guard into a company sized force, supported by Sisters of Silence, Knights and Militia. Basically, a small expeditionary fleet. This bloodstorm tournament was the first time my army started looking the part:

The rest of the Bloodstorm tournament went really well. So here are some more cool pictures:

I even won the Players Choice award for my army!

After Bloodstorm, it was straight on to preparation for Armies on Parade. I had promised to participate with a combined board built by Dirk, Stephan and myself. We would all build our boards seperately but they’d be able to ‘click’ together for the show. Here are some WIP pictures:

It was the most ambitious project I’ve ever done with scenery building, but it looked amazing on the parade day itself.

All of this was going on during the renovation of my new appartment so, needless to say, this was a very busy time for me. When the time came to attend the Gurash Wars in Groningen in oktober, I was truly spent and decided to stop attending events for a while and focus on getting my life back together and finally start painting that pile I was all on about way back in January.

Finally at ease in my new crib, I got myself a new car and started taking some vanity pictures of my titanicus as wel as adding a knight banner to the collection.

During the rest of the year I tried to spend some time relaxing and painting up a random assortment of stuff from the pile. Didn’t take a lot of pictures of most of it since a lot of it belonged to projects that I had basically completed already. It was a very productive time though and set me up nicely to have a great time 2020. I was super motivated to get back into dating as well as just enjoying life. I made plans for a trip to warhammer world as well as to attend a music festival again. Here are some final pictures of 2019 and I’ll leave the rest for the 2020 recap.

Thanks for reading!

2019 Part 1

This is the first part of a recap of what I’ve been up to in the period in between blogs. Second part will be coming up soon.

In january I posted ‘the year of the pile’ where I vowed to start clearing out my backlog. Terrain was to be my first challenge but first I had to spend some time on the Horus Heresy campaign I started running back in 2018. It was going to be the halfway point in january so I organised a massive megabattle:

Small selection of the many awesome pictures we took.

After the megabattle there was also another Bloodstorm Heresy tournament early february which was again an absolute blast.

Dutch Heresy scene is quite small, but everyone there is an amazing army builder. That’s why heresy remains one of my favorite game systems.

Then I finally finished the terrain I said I’d build in my post and a miniature for the dungeons and dragons campaign I was participating in. However, this was going to be the last hobby I was going to do for a while.

March and April 2019 were completely dominated by the divorce for me and I was not able to do any painting at all during this time. The heresy campaign kept running and I played some games here and there, but it wasn’t until early May that I was able to pick up a paintbrush again.

With all of my warhammer in storage, I wasn’t able to work on any of my existing projects. So much for the year of the pile… Nevertheless, around this time I was starting to recover a bit and I treated myself to a starting box of titanicus as well as an eternal guard box to make myself another D&D character.

During the rest of the summer, the titanicus helped keep me going until I finally had the time to dig up some stuff from the storage box. There was a new bloodstorm tournament coming up so I decided I was finally going to paint my Sisters of Silence.

I finally finished my last Sisters model in september and that brings me to the end of Part 1. I’ll spend one more post to show some stuff from the campaign that finished around this time and the bloodstorm tournament I had prepared for. Because by september I was done with most of the mess from the divorce and I had even bought myself a new apartment that I had to spend time redecorating. So, I’ll end this post with some postive new home pictures and continue with the warhammer in the next post!

Thanks for reading!