My week of hobby 01/01/2012-07/01/2012

First off before I get into full swing I'd like to wish any readers a very happy and geeky new year!

So where do I begin? It's been a very busy week for me, both in the hobby and out of the hobby, which means I can't remember what order things happened but here's a round up of the weeks shenanigans.

I carried on prepping my Grey Knights this week, and focused on the dreadknight and the strike squad, managing to get them all cleaned up and primed. I also settled on the bases I'm going to use and headed back down to Firestorm Games to pick them up. They're made by a company called Model Display Products and the ones I chose are the Round Tech/Star ship deck ones. There was minimum clean up needed and were quite a bargain, about £4 for 10x25mm or 5x40mm. All I need to do now is decide what I'm going to paint up first!

On a related note the bases that I'd ordered from Fantascape arrived on Tuesday and these were even more impressive than the photos on the website.

They're called Wyrdstone Mines and were around £8 for 20 of them. These are going to go onto my Avatars of War Dwarf Berserker unit and will hopefully look awesome.

While I was in full swing of cleaning off mould lines I picked out the Black Kraken from my Dreadfleet box to start work on first as I thought it would be the easiest to paint. I totally forgot to take into account how hard it would be to clean up. I eventually got it done and only had one snapping incident, so that's also been primed and is awaiting it's paint job. White Dwarf a couple of months ago had painting guide so it should be really straight forward.

Something that's really taken off on twitter (by the way you can follow my on there, @Warllama40k) is #miniaturemonday where people post up a photo of their progress that week.

My entry was this photo of my completed Gyrocopter.

The big news of the week was my birthday on Wednesday, when my amazing girlfriend once again added more fuel to the miniature fire by giving me a stormraven! Needless to say it had been taken off the sprue by lunchtime and blu-tac assembled by the end of the day. Despite what the interwebz say about this kit I think it's a total beast. However it might have to join the back of the Grey Knight painting queue as I also signed up for the Bolter and Chainsword Librarium Painting Challenge again and pledged to paint my palladins, strike squad and dreadknight. Basically all you do is pledge how much or little you want to complete and the deadline is the end of March. It's pitched as a great way to motivate hobby progress past holidays. I'll have to see if I can resist painting the almighty flyer until that's over.

The 6th saw the Black Library release Gav Thorpe's new book, part of the Space Marine Battles series, called Catechism of Hate (http://www.blacklibrary.com/all-products/catechism-of-hate.html). This is/was a limited edition release of 1500 copies and from what I could tell was sold out within 2 hours. As it's a book about the ultra Ultramarines I was all over this and managed to bag myself a copy, woop! I've got no idea when it's going to be posted but will hopefully get me back into reading since I haven't picked up Nemesis (from the Horus Heresy series) in over a month.

The final bit of GW new was that January's White Dwarf finally arrived on Saturday. On flicking through it looks to be a great issue albeit with a heavy slant towards Warhammer Fantasy. As usual I'll be posting up a proper review in the next week or so.

So there you have it, the first week of the year turned out to be quite 'action' packed. Cheers for reading!