Paint Table - The Start

Hey folks, it's been a long time since I've painted any minis. When I was living back home with the parents, I had everything all set up in the basement with a paint table and even a nice wargames table with terrain. Now, living in a small apartment, it's hard to have any space at all to do this kinda stuff. Well anyways, I've broken out the painting table once again, to get back into the swing of things.



This is a Cryx Nightwretch Bonejack. Recently the game Warmachine has gotten my interest. It's quite different from Warhammer, and I liked the models. So, I am starting a Cryx army :).

I am still a bit rusty at painting minis, but I hope to get back up to speed and hopefully learn a few new tricks. You can look forward to more "Paint Table" posts in the future :).

Star Wars: The Clone Wars

So, I was able to catch the new animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars movie last week. I didn't feel like spending the money to head into Manhattan. So, I decided to take a walk to the Kaufman UA theater in Astoria, despite childhood warnings never to go around that area. My parents had told me stories about how a friend of theirs was mugged and stabbed in the eye in that area. Whether the fear of walking around that area was irrational or not was questionable. I did have to walk through quite a desolate and crappy neighborhood to get there. The odd thing was that the theater itself was a nice, standard, suburban-style cineplex with an Uno's, Applebee's and a Panera Bread next to it. It reminded me of being back in the suburbs :).

So, How was The Clone Wars? Well it had a few problems. The first to stand out right away was there was no opening crawl of text. Instead we have this cheezy opening narration. The series is of course geared towards kids, but you figure they'd at least be able to read for a little bit at the opening of the cartoon.

The animation itself was nice, though not as smooth in some of the action scenes as I would have liked. But, somehow I think the stilted movements might have been intentional. The character style for me worked better in the previous 2-D Clone Wars animations than it does in 3-D. The battles were nice, but not as epic as I would have liked. They could have done a lot more. My main gripe was the canned animations of all the droid combatants. Also, I found it annoying for some of the ships and armor to be off-model from previous movies. Looking up things on Wookieepedia only brings the explanation/excuse of them being different ship and armor variants.

The story was a bit blah to me. I know this movie is just an introduction to an animated series coming this Fall. But, I would have liked a grander story focus for a feature film. The search for Jabba's son? Are they serious? I thought I would like the new character Ahsoka, but she ended up being a little too annoying at times.

All of this though is totally forgivable to me since I am such a total fan :). Just seeing another chapter of Star Wars on the big screen was enough to give me a grand, fun afternoon. Although, after dinner at the Panera, this lead to an after-movie walk to the Northern Blvd. Toys R Us and a Star Wars toy shopping spree :). Yes, I like to punish my wallet every now and again :).