I was sent to San Jose, California for training a few weeks back, and while I was out there I ventured to the local Games Workshop store in nearby Campbell, mostly for curiosity's sake since there are no GW stores around me and I haven't visited one since vacationing in England 12 years ago.
From what I can tell not a whole lot has changed. The GW store was only one mall slot wide and very deep, so entering the store felt somewhat like entering a tunnel. As is usual for a game store there were a handful of regulars in the back gaming area painting figures and chatting about gaming with the store staff. Upon my entry to the store I was set upon by a friendly-if-overly-earnest store employee who proceeded to interrogate me enough to figure out why I was there and then push the proper product on me. I managed to leave only having purchased a White Dwarf magazine which is a hell of a lot more expensive than the last ones I purchased 8-9 years ago. Sadly, the content has decreased in quality as well in my opinion. I miss the days of Paul Sawyer editing...
I made the mistake of asking the GW employee about the new 'munitorum' dice for 40K and was steered right there and given the hard sell about them being limited edition, once they're gone they're gone, yadda, yadda. They were expensive and to my middle-aged eyes looked hard to read so I passed on them. One can only hope that my future games don't decrease in satisfaction due to this.
After getting back home I've managed to work on my Tau figures. I hate using unpainted figures so I've been earnestly trying to build and paint the units out of my battleforce box along with a box of bitz that I got from a friend at the game store. I am working on the Vior'la sect army since their uniform looks the most 'military' to me. With the new GW paints I've chosen Nurgling Green for the armor and Catellan Green for the cloth parts of the Fire Warrior uniform. I like the colors but need to work on defining the borders between the colors so they don't look all washed out. I'm experimenting with inks, washes and highlighting for this first unit of Fire Warriors so they may look a little rough when finished. I'll just tell people they've been on campaign for a long time. More about this in a future post.
The other fun thing I've been working on is developing my airbrush skills. I've owned a Badger Crescendo 175 for about a year but have never broken it out to use it until I got the Tau. I was given a busted up Devlifish model that I was able to put back together and clean up a bit and I decided to use that as a guinea pig for learning how to airbrush. Figuring out thinning paint and PSI has been an experience but I'm making baby steps going forward. There are a number of good tutorial videos online that I've been using to figure things out, and I'll post links to the best of them in a future post.
Whew! Too much rambling for a 'short update' post. I'll sign off for now and good gaming everyone!
