Hobby Basics - Gaming Tools

Its quite a long time since I wrote something for my Hobby Basics series. With my latest purchase I thought this would be a good time to do another article here, this time covering some of the tools you will need for war-gaming (my experiences are mostly for WHFB, KoW, Warmachine/Hordes and similar games). I have no experience in historical war games, but I don't think that they differ so much that my points will be invalid :)
I again warn you: Big chunks of text incoming! So be prepared if you follow me after the jump :)

Hobby Basics - Basing material | Part I

From time to time you will hear the question "Oh what do you use to do this and that on your bases?" or "Where can I find some stuff for basing my miniatures?". Therefore I thought of making a small list of the things I found work well with miniatures and what stuff I don't like.
And to be mentioned at the beginning: I will not talk about premade bases! This stuff is great but most of the time too expensive for big armies.

Today I will talk about the different basing materials I use especially the stuff you can get for free (or with very small costs):

Hobby Basics - Glues

As promised I will do a complete series of Hobby Basics and here comes the next part, this time I will talk about glues. Every now and then you read on the tabletop forums questions about which glue is the best and what do you use for terrain and so on and so on. Since there is a broad selection on the market and you can nearly buy one glue for one task, this is now a jungle where you can get lost. That's why I will talk a bit about the glues that work for me.

White/Wood/PVA glue

The classics for terrain or base making. I have different kinds of white glue because I like to have different levels of thinning and don't want to mix this stuff everytime I use it. I have a roughly thinned one in my bottle which I use mostly for basing. I like the flow on smaller areas and how you can spread it with a brush. Then I have a big bucket with only some drops of water in it. This I use for terrain making like on my modular gaming board. Through its thickness the basing material sticks much better to the surface which is needed for played terrain (with bases this would only cause the miniature to "sink" into the sand).
As you can see I only use white glue from sone well known manufacturers. I tried out some cheap stuff from the one euro/dollar store but this stuff is even more diluted than my selfmade micture. Which means this is total crap. Perhaps you are lucky and get some better stuff but for me this will not be an option anymore.

White/Wood/PVA glue in different sizes

Hobby Basics - Tools

"Oh nooooooes, another boring of these: use this and that tool! babbling" you may think now. But as not all my readers and hobbiest in general are pros and have years of experience in miniature painting or terrain crafting, I will do a short(?) series of the tools I (!) use. I will give no advices to buy this or that, I will just give a statements of the experiences I made (or make) with the mentioned tools.. Hope you will like it though.

Pliers 

Often needed and a long time not in my toolbox: Pliers! I don't use any fancy and expansive pliers. I bought a small set of fine mechanics pliers in the hardware store and am pretty happy with them. I didn't want one for all, I wanted one for cutting out the miniatures from sprues, one for bending miniatures, wire and so on. I think they went over the tray for arround 6€ so not really expensive and something I couldn't hardly go wrong with.

A set of small pliers

Review - Warhammer Battle Magic

Hey there, since I have shaky hands at the moment (fever and outer temperatures of arround 35°C aren't a good combination), I can't paint and concentrate on doing some reviews of stuff that arrived in the last few weeks. I'll start with the Warhammer Battle Magic cards from Games Workshop.
For the older of us, not to be mistaken with the old Battle Magic of the fourth edition :) 

Warhammer Battle Magic cards

Long time, no see - Distractions, Progress and Summer Flu

Hey girls and guys, sorry for being on the slow lane at the moment. First I had a day off and celebrated my birthday in the biggest funpark here. On top of that I had the last days a training course which was very interesting but really much information and input for my working life. Then my computer nearly crashed after buying ind installing a new graphic card and last but not least my wife and I cought a summer flu. Fever at now 30 - 34°C is not really funny.

But nonetheless I made some small progress with my stuff. As stated in one of my last articles I want to rebase my old models from the nineties. While I was at this task, I also made me a base for my warp lightning cannon and a testbase for some unit filler or multibase. Its nothing special or fancy, I just wanted to show you some progress.

Rebased some old stuff

Baking time

Today I took advantage of the beautiful weather outside and went to a walk with my wife. We both looked out for our collectibles: She for herbs and plants like elder flower or wild strawberries and I myself for basing materials. I was very lucky to find an uprooted tree from which I could scrap of some bark. Therefore it's baking time!

Baking the bark