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Hi all, Sorry for the delay, I've been rather absent over the last month or so. It doesn't help that I haven't logged into BM on my 'phone so quite often I'm checking the forum in the form of a ghost... Last year has been a bit of a mixed bag of stuff, with quite a lot of figures but less than I thought overall as there are several new unfinished projects for the shelf of doom. In January I caved to peer pressure and did a bit on my Dune diorama by painting up this Cthulhu Wars monster as a sandworm. It's a hard vinyl figure with nice detail but the seams are always a pain to clean up as you have to pare them down with an ultra-sharp blade rather than scraping. The start of the year was rather taken up with organising and marketing our Scale Models Expo again, but I got these skeletons finished by the end of February I think: They're pretty fun - fiddly to build but I enjoyed the painting although as ever the details seemed to go on forever. Here are a few close-ups: I made my daughter a custom Nerf gun in March so she could dress up as a zombie hunter at our local comic-and-stuff show - she has an ID and some zombie samples which I think I did the year before? The week before Scale Models Expo I had time to put two of these ships together in about 48 hours. I broke the other one slightly and it needs a repair and dusting so it never got photographed. They're more Bandai 1/1000 Space Battleship Yamato 2199 kits. Like everything Leiji Matsumoto does they're really pretty. May and June saw some experimental Necrons which I think came out really well. I finally seem to have made my peace with lighting effects on minis The Immortals above were pretty quick to do, the Wraiths below took a lot longer: They look pretty cool together and I really should paint some more, but then Soul Wars came out and distracted me pretty badly... At the end of June I also did another Nerf gun for L's birthday, which was a super-quick two day job in terrible weather. Not my best work but it's not terrible and she was really happy. I did a presentation box with satin lining and custom foam, using the graphics from the Photoshop image. July was mostly building Soul Wars figures, and I managed to paint some test ghosts: Since there were duplicates I did some simple conversions like this Chainrasp who has an empty hand instead of a weapon - he looks like he's going to fetch someone such a slap! I painted one of the Endless Spells at the same time - a Suffocating Gravetide, which was really fun. There was a bit of a gap in finished projects then (see below) but at the end of September I had a great time making a couple of Hotwheels/Matchbox cars into wargaming pieces for a game called Gaslands: I want to do some more, but stripping the paint is quite annoying. In October I got talked into entering Armies on Parade again and painted more ghosts (all in a week!) this guy isn't really finished yet but he's quite close... Since it was Armies on Parade I had to make a display board, which had to happen in five very busy days. Just made it in the end: My daughter got involved too and painted several Tau to add to her existing Pathfinder figure: After that madness I went into a bit of a decline (plus it's videogame release season!) but managed to finish last year's Pteras for our club competition. I even did a little bit of extra work on it in December to fix some things I didn't like. I was rather pleased with the figure, who came out quite well for 1/72. And that's the lot. Except it isn't quite, because at the start of the year I finished off this beast I've not been talking about it/showing it since it's supposed to be for a book, but I haven't heard anything from them for a year so I reckon I can get away with posting a pic or two here: I was expecting great things having built the excellent Viper, but this is a different beast altogether. Soft detail, bad mastering, some very good fit and some bad. I ended up doing an awful lot of work including a scratch interior and cockpit louvres plus the lighting stuff. Still, it's a very big model and not terribly expensive, and it's much better than not having a studio scale Raider kit I also had a couple of good works-in-progress which I need to pick up again: All in all not a bad year. I need to dust the Raider and take some proper pictures of it really as I've made a very fancy Perspex stand which looks pretty cool. It's just so stupidly big that it's hard to photograph. Cheers, Will