A Desk! A desk! My Kingdom for a Desk!

I am exhausted but have a grin across my face only the Joker could top.  For the last few years I have been working on a makeshift desk, cunningly crafted from my student drawing board layed upon two filing cabinets with blue tac to act as a cushion.  The cabinets gave me no leg room, so I worked with a twisted back, and the drawing table itself had sharp metal ridges that gathered particles of epoxy, wire and epoxy and lead filings.  Not very healthy.
Kate and I decided to throw out the cabinets, shifting everything into storage boxes and buy me a proper desk...  and boy, its a thing of beauty.

Dave now makes stuff here!

I now have leg room, a dust free working space and finally room to work on a few scenic items and have a few to one side drying.  I am just so incredibly happy to finally have a dedicated space.  Bless Ikea. Creative energy flows around the room on the gentle breeze that bloweth on my straightened knees!

It took six hours of hard work to clean out the study, refile everything into 24 interlocking plastic storage tubs and make room for the desk,  as I blog this (and drink that coffee there), Kate is still busy refiling her paperwork into a storage folder.  The house is chaos!  Once she is done I will take over to do mine.  It is staggering how much crap can build up in a room if you let it.  The final joy is going to be dragging the grey, sombre, tin filing cabinets out to the road to be picked up by the council waste truck.  Begone foul soul sucking, knee cramping fiends!

One of the fun things I did today with the project was go through every one of my sketch books and remove any miniature designs, placing them into plastic flip folders for easy access.  I had about fifty sketch books, so it took most of the day to do.  I ended up with two A4 folders full of designs, which reportedly hold around 250 pages- giving 1000 a4 pages all up, with an average of 5 figure doodles on each page.  Thats well over 5000 miniature sketches.  That should keep me busy for a while.  :)




The first thing onto my desk was one of my new Dwerg Burrowguard troops and an Arcane Asgard Creature of Chaos Elephant Man to match the one that appears in Aly Morrisons 'Eavy Metal article in White Dwarf 80.

WIP Viking Forge Creature of Chaos (Aly Morrison Asgard Original Inset)

Colors matches in real life, but the photo changes it quite a bit.  As you can see, the two figures vary..  For starters, the weapon is cast lower down and has bandages wrapped around, I suspect to avoid breakages.  I am not sure if the original had a seperate weapon- which some of the Asgard figures do (never a good idea in my book), or if Aly converted it.  If anyone has an original I would be pleased to find out (and buy one).


Mine came from Viking forge, who have most of the Asgard molds.  I found quite a few little variations.  The model is surprisingly small, and seems to have warped quote a bit over its very long life.  The face is longer, the eye flatter, the trunk thinner near the bend, the shield rougher on the inside, the whole body feels squished horizontally and the front leg is about half as thick as it is wide.  Weather this is a casting issue or the original sculpt was poorly proportioned, its hard to say.  I was so delighted that this figure was still available that I grabbed two.
Mine has a belt and a roughly torn kilt, but Alys appears beltless and smooth all the way to the hip.  I suspect he has filled it with milliput to allow for decoration, as he definately did with the Skaven Plague monk from the same article.  I filled mine with liquid green stuff, just to check out how it performed really.  Not as good as milliput but more convenient.


  The White Dwarf 80 article has long fascinated me, and I have been eagerly collecting all the figures it showcases.  You may remember the copy I made of his Skaven plague lord from the same article.  I have most of the figures now, and trying to work out what bits are what for the converted models.  I would love to have a showcase featuring them all.

Well, I am now going to take my new found creative energies and put them into finishing off some more sculpts.  Have fun.

Go paint something.