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Merry Christmas Git & family and everyone one else who reads the blog! Had a quick scan through this blog and oh my god it's amazing. I will read it properly so it might take awhile keep up the amazing work!

Merry Christmas Git's and family make sure you keep warm with all that snow you have.

Happy Christmas to anyone else ready this as well

Merry Christmas to all of Family Gits, and season's greetings to all who follow this thread....

Amen Gits, here's to another 12,000 in the future

Thanks everyone for your kind wishes. Had a nice evening with Mrs. Git's family, cousins got to open some presents (the rest will wait until tomorrow morning). My screaming headache was finally beaten into submission by some Tylenol (thank God). Successfully fixed Christmas train #2 so the tree is properly accessorized. Kids are in bed... though Thing 2 is so excited he's vibrating. Still have some wrapping to do... but we're in good shape over all. No late night toy assemblies this year. (Yea!)

@graven: Thanks for the pin-up girl, I'll use her for sure. If you see anything else out there you think has potential, please send it my way. I still have 3 large sections of wall to paint and decorate.

Time to do the Christmas eve thing...

Night all,
Gits

Merry Christmas, Gits! Enjoy your wonderful morning and fantastic evening!

Merry Christmas Gits

Go play Santa

Merry Christmas Chowder & RiTides! 2 hours of sleep later....

Great morning, everyone made out like a bandit. While we did stay largely away from 40k presents... I did get a few things that relate directly.



Desperately needed the brushes... the lack of good brushes is what's had me painting walls rather than marines lately. Excited about the brush cleaner/conditioner too. The Sturmtiger will get converted into a grot tank. Really looking forward to that project! Also got a new printer and keyboard which are somewhat gaming related as I'll finally be able to print out new posters for my ADL and print my army lists again. The new keyboard will facilitate posting on dakka.

I guess you could call it a "gaming infrastructure development" Christmas.

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OH, and I snuck out and took a picture of the tree after Santa came... The settings on my camera for taking pics of minis also work for low-light still shots!

Wow. Thats a mighty good looking model, is it already grot tank scale or are you using the bits from it too make them?


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... and nice tree

It's grot tank scale, right out of the box.

The tree is Mrs. Git's personal expression of mental instability. I disavow all knowledge of it or responsibility for it after it's cut & carried into the house.

Merry Christmas Gits! Such a lovely home and family you have!

Those Aegis are coming together really nicely! the group pic of all of them so far really look sweet!

Wow that tree is amazing its even got some great OSL effects on the ceiling, well done Mrs Git's

Thank you dstein & Meph!

@Gir: Actually, I did those with my airbrush!

You MUST have used masks for the starburst effect though

Yeah, starbursts are tough to do right. The tendency is to overdo it and make every light a starburst... but really it looks best if there's just a smattering here and there.

Who's the lucky tyke who got the skis?

Or what appears to be a pogo stick?

Both boys got skis. Used... but they'll work just fine for a first set. Youngest got the pogo stick from Santa. He's having a pretty good time with it... up to 5 consecutive bounces. Not bad considering there's almost no concrete on he property that isn't under 15" of snow.

I can just see it know all those strange imprints in the snow from said pogo stick lol

More like the strange imprints in the wooden floor.

Hi
Loving your work so far can't wait to see more love the xams tree and presents a lot like ours yesterday without the colorful lights ooh arrrr eeeee.can't wait to see thatr grot tank thb!!! Possabily fisrt time back on dakka for months!!! Btw blog has had update….
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/810/357188.page

Nice! Beautiful tree, Gits.

I'm looking forward to seeing you grot sturmtiger. I got a 1/48 sturmtiger myself to try out as a vindi. Hopefully, I'll get to put it together next week.

I thought you might be interested in this for your grots, too: Imperial Japanese Army Kayaba Ku-4 Ram-jet Fighter. Also 1/72 scale.

That's pretty cool YB. My only concern is that it's a bit too streamlined looking for grots. Hmmm... have to think about it and see how the sturmtiger conversion goes. Then perhaps on to bigger fish!

*He crawls in, dragging himself forward with bloodied hands. He looks to you, eyes crusted open, bloodshot and glazed.*
"Is it over?!"

Well that was a hell of a mission! I thought I got lost in the interwebs at one point but I made it through all 331 pages. Front and back! I had to skip over little sections on some pages that were just chat or I would never have read it all before Hogmany comes around but otherwise I consumed it all.

So what did I think? Well I don't want to see another Mantis Warrior ever again! Haha, no seriously, I really enjoyed the journey. Your work is of a really nice quality and it was nice to see you improve throughout. My highlights are probably quite unusual but that's because this isn't normally the sort of blog I follow so I'm viewing it from a rather unusual point of view. Here are my top four and the reasons anyway, in no particular order :
a) The very recent Aegis Defense Line.
Because of the level of detail you are putting in and the quality of the paint job! Imperial terrain is something that ties into one of my slumbering projects and this has so far been the best inspiration I've seen. If you don't mind I'll probably use some of your ideas, altered to suit my needs?
b) Tyree.
I think this has been your best model by far. Top paintjob and a minor conversion to suit your theme. I feel this is where you excel, you can take a nice lookin fig, make it your own and paint it up real nice. A skill far too many people lack. It's not something I've ever been able to do, I've got a blog planned for later this year to try and remedy that though. I'm just going to kitbash some marines, paint 'em up best I can and get 'em on the table to learn to play again. I've been converting right from the first box I picked up and I'm starting to feel like I missed the core of the hobby. Reading this blog was always something I planned to do but now seemed like a good time, a bit of research and inspiration for my own marines
c) GMS.
Yep the Great Marine Swap was a highlight for me in your blog. I never realised how involved you were in it's origin which was interesting and I loved to see your collection growing. I'd like to take part myself when I start work on my own Chapter and you'll be the first person I'll be sending a pm to when the time comes!
d) Your Mantis Warriors.
What? Yeh, Your Mantis Warriors. I tend towards DIY lore becuase i don't like fiddling with canon. That's always been a rule of mine and I find that when people do fiddle with it it really grates on me and feels wrong. You, sir, found a little sliver of grey area and I loved it. Your lore was enjoyable and you managed to make the Chapter your own without messing with what's already solid. Great job!

So that probably isn't what other people would pick out but they are a few of my personal favourites.

I'll leave this here before it gets any longer, Merry Christmas to you and yours Gits!

Wow CL... it's kind of hard to know what to say. I can't properly express how honored I am that you braved the tumult of 2+ years of random activity, chattiness, angst, losses of confidence and frustration... I'm sure you'll need therapy now.

Your comments are as welcome as they are insightful. I'm never quite sure how people view this blog, though occasionally I ask (and do get responses). Mostly messages of assurance and encouragement which are welcome, but rarely the kind of analysis that you provided. Thank you for the time you dedicated, not only to go through this monster... but to sort your thoughts and put them on "paper". I really, really appreciate it. I am blessed to have a great readership, may of whom have become good friends even though we will likely never meet. I'm sure you've noticed that at times, the contributions to this blog or to my Mantis Warrior mythos have been significantly advanced by readers... and indeed still are to this day. One of the main characters in Ice Angel's fiction is the MW I made him as a GMS trade, and the things he's done with the character have educated my opinions about my own chapter. I haven't even begun to work on my post-crusade army yet, which will prominently feature sculpts from BLACKHAND that really give character and style to the later-period chapter. Occasionally, people do their own one-off Mantis Warrior figures, which is wonderful to see.

To your specific highlights:

a) My interest in the ADL has been a surprise. I usually hate painting big things because the level of detail I like to do means that they either take FOREVER to finish, get boring or I make accommodations for expediency so the results are less to my liking. I think because the ADL is in small pieces... I'm able to compartmentalize each and a single figure.. thus spend the time on it that I want but I get that sense of accomplishment from completing each section, which keeps me motivated. I've seen a LOT of good terrain and building work on Dakka lately... things that have been a major inspiration to me. The neat thing about my approach to the wall (from my perspective) is that it's a pretty good hybrid between my "style" (as evidenced by the zenithal lighting on the green panels) and the gritty, more realistic aspects of the rearward side... which really is where all the personality lies.

b) I forgot about Tyree. For anyone interested who's also forgotten, he's my Mantis Warrior version of Tycho.



Great figure. A great challenge too. It's tough to take something so iconic for a specific chapter and try to bend it so serve another purpose without destroying the fabric of what made it so interesting in the first place.

c) Nearly all my best work is for the GMS. I'm always in such a hurry to get the huge backlog of my own stuff done that I can never really completely relax and just "create". I can do that with the GMS figures... and it shows.

d) Thanks. I've been lucky... and since changing cannon is NOT something I wanted to do (I feel the same way about it as you do), I've really tried to "work between the lines" rather than re-writing the lines to suit my own purposes.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you too CL. Thanks again. I sincerely hope you continue to contribute to the blog and I'll look forward to seeing what you do once you get your blog up and running. Be great to have new blood in the GMS too, there's been a influx of new folks and it's been really a fun thread to follow lately.

i rember you doing him very fun to watch....

 HAZZER wrote:
i rember you doing him very fun to watch....

This sentence could be taken all kinds of the wrong way...

Hey... Hey now.... This is a family show!

I have actually been working on a project for the last several days. A Christmas present of sorts for followers of the blog. Not eye candy, something you can actually use. First two steps have gone well, if the last step works I'll have something by tomorrow.

Well done C's L for slogging through the whole blog, its a monster....i remember when all i did to catch up was read through 110 pages and that was daunting enough, congratulations!

Hey, with "blog view" it's only 34 pages!