The Ancible

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed a few things about the lair recently:

1. I haven't been posting quite as frequently as I should be
2. My posts have more stage by stage malarkey and more images in them
3. The Ancible logo in the links pane

This is all because Kenny Robb, editor of The Ancible online magazine (it's free, download and read it!), asked me to write an article!

Download Issue 9 here

"The Ancible is a full colour digital magazine that specializes in the field of Science Fiction and fantasy wargaming. Since we have moved from the print format the focus on design quality and independent reporting has not changed. The mix of articles hopefuly appeals to the majority of our readers but at the end of the day we have such a wide subject area that we can't please everyone in every issue so please be patient and hopefully there will be something in the next issue."

Talk about an honour!  Not ever having done anything like that before I was a little nervous about it, but in the end, it's just a longer version of a blogpost, with some more structure and more images - plus it's miniature painting, and I reckon I can do that...

My article is called "Watching Paint Dry", and looks at building and painting the light faction starter pack for the "Anima Tactics" game.  I also painted the "top gunner" for Kenny's article on the Khador Gun Carriage - he threw that at me as a rush job a few weeks back, and I completed it in an evening.  There's tonnes of good stuff in the magazine, and if you're interested in trying games outside of GW, this is a great place to go.

This is hopefully going to be a regular gig, so if anyone has any ideas about how to improve my articles please give me a shout.

Things I have learned already:

• More stage by stage pictures - it worked well on the gold armour in the article, but need more of them
• It's more fun if you get outside your comfort zone, i.e. non-GW, painting colours you have difficulty with, thinking more about your readers rather than what you want to see
• It's a damn good motivator to getting things painted - having an actual deadline, with someone waiting on you, is a hell of a driving force to getting things done

As with my blog posts, comments and criticism are always welcome.

So if you haven't seen the Ancible before, get downloading it and spread the word