minimattila

Alright, a quick PSA: I’m a dad now! Around a week ago my wife gave birth to a beautiful, healthy baby boy. After a few days in the hospital we came home, everyone safe and sound. It has been an interesting week full of learning new things and a little less sleep than what I’ve been used to!

I guess it goes without saying that my rate of finishing models is going to take a hit. Of course, I’ve been saying the same thing for years now, so there’s a chance you’ll not even notice! I’ll have to get used to a new daily rhytm with a lot more responsibility, and try to sneak in some hobbying whenever I can. Before the birth I was a bit worried about how I would feel about not having a lot of time for my own hobbies. But I got to say, after the baby arrived my hobbies haven’t seemed as important as they did. I’m sure this will change eventually (:D), but for now I’m getting a real kick out of taking care of my wife and my son. Of course, miniatures are still on my mind and I’m slowly trying to get that ball rolling again. Today I wrote the boy’s birthday on the bottom of his commemorative Space Wolf! Yeah, the day ended up being a day of national mourning for some, but a familial day of celebration for us!

I’ll also show a picture of my current project, Ghazghkull Thraka, and where I left him before we had to leave for the hospital. The arms are not glued on yet, I think I’ll add a couple more things before attaching them permanently.

The face and the base are already finished, actually even before the move, I just haven’t shown them here before. But here they are:

Very chuffed with both of them! Hopefully I’ll have the time to finish the model before the end of the year 😀

Miniature of a Different Kind

One of the reasons I’ve been a bit less active with the Warhammer hobby this year is that I’ve been preoccupied with another hobby of mine – computers and gaming. I’ve been building a new computer for myself, and after quite a long while of buying parts and assembling and tweaking, I’ve finally finished the build for the time being. And just to make sure it’s appropriate(ish) for the blog, it’s a small form-factor PC which makes it quite a bit tinier than the average mid-tower 😀

Due to the current situation in the world, the PC part market has been in a sorry state for quite a while now, especially with processors and graphics cards. Because of this, it took me around three months to get my system up and running. I started buying parts on Black Friday last November, and got the final bits ordered (the GPU and some other stuff) at the end of February. Not an eternity in the grand scheme of things, but certainly a far cry from just going to a webstore and ordering all the parts when you feel like it.

Assembly was rather simple for the most part, but I did have to do some rotary tool alterations to one piece. Ended up working just fine! I might try to further clean up the interior at some point, but it’s not hugely important right now. I got the system running pretty much inaudibly under light loads, and even under demanding workloads it’s tolerable. It does run pretty warm though, but that’s to be expected with such a small case.

I’m also really enjoying all the wireless peripherals I’ve acquired for this setup. My headset, mouse, keyboard and the Xbox controller are all wireless which helps cleaning up the desk and allows mobility. I have to plug them in for charging every week or two depending on the use, but it’s not so bad.

Games are running great for the most part (1500+ fps in Doom! :D) and to be frank they have been drawing me in lately more than painting. While you don’t get the same tangible results from gaming as you do from painting up a model, some instant gratification is fun every now and then! But yeah, as I said in my last posts, I’m slowly getting back to painting as well. I’m making progress with the rest of my first Necron squad, as you might’ve spied from the first photo in this post.

Intermission: Road Racing Photos

What? It’s been more than two weeks since my last post?! Where does all that time go..? Anyways, since I still haven’t finished anything new, I thought I’d present something different. I and my better half visited Imatra a couple of weeks back, to see an IRRC (International Road Racing Championship) event. Here’s a couple of my better photos from that day.

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Now, I’m not a professional photographer (not me in the pic above!), and wouldn’t even really classify myself as a hobbyist, but I dabble in photography from time to time. And what better subject to practice on than really loud and really fast motorbikes? Armed with an old entry-level DSLR and a brand new super-zoom lense that I got for a graduation present, I took around 400 photos in the 4 hours that we were there. Around half of them were more or less blurry messes, but I did manage to get a couple of nice and sharp shots with motion blurred background. More luck than anything, but I’m happy!

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The first race we witnessed when we got to the site was sidecars. I got to say that the passengers, apparently known as ‘monkeys’ in English or ‘purkkiorja’ in Finnish (translates roughly as ‘can slave’), are positively mad! It’s their job to help balance the bike in corners, and they do this by leaning over the edges, with bodyparts (face, mainly) almost scraping the tarmac. From photography point of view, the slightly slower speed of the bikes made them easier to shoot and track, so funnily enough there’s more motion blur on these than the following superbikes.

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Due to their speed the superbikes were tough to get sharp photos of. I had to increase the shutter speed, which results in less motion blur, but I guess it’s still enough to separate the bike from the background.

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The second-to-last race of the day, and the weekend, was with vintage bikes (from the 80s, I believe). Beatiful machines with cool liveries, and as with the sidecars, were a bit slower and thus easier for me to photograph. I should try to edit one of these photos with some retro effects, I reckon..