Sometimes Life isHard

Hello. I want to first apologize for the lack of posts here on my blog. Unfortunately life can sometimes intrude in our hobby, and recently a lot of things have happened that have made life very difficult. I won't cover details here, but will say that in the end the police have become involved (not against me, but for me). So basically in the end the third BEST thing that has happened since my last post was my hot water heater blew up. Running water is never my best friend. Fortunately, no real flooding or damage, just a lot of mess. I am mostly upset because now it will be $600+ I can't spend on getting more Oldhammer. Sigh. But that is life, and sometimes it can be hard. Yesterday is I hope the culmination of the "bad things" that have been going on around me, as my 70 year old neighbor came home from the hospital after open heart surgery, and either shot himself by accident or took his own life. Seeing his wife in so much pain was incredibly shocking emotionally, and has put all of my bad stuff back in to proper perspective. Stuff after all happens, but life is life and too precious to get too worked up.
Luckily for me, I'm old enough now and prepared to take some of these things in stride. But since I just started blogging, it means I've been hard to find - even on the facebook groups. And I don't think I have been on the forum for over a week. But it means that my big hobby updates are running behind already. And I have to catch up now that I'll have some time to breathe. So I'm going to try painting tonight, and hope to take wip pictures as I go. Just remember, I'm not on Blue's or any of the Golden Demon winner's levels.
I do have a picture for one of the cool basing parts that I did attempt. I've decided in an ode to Kev Adams and the old style painting, that I'm going to add homemade plants and mushrooms to a lot of my minis, similar to his figures which (I believe) were used as the pictures for the Lead Belcher and Man-Mangler photos:

Now, for my project I am going to be painting both of these, and all of the crew. In fact I have a couple of them, and also Skull-crushers. I also have the basic Orc Stone Thrower (almost the same as the man mangler).

In fact one of the Skull-crushers was a more recent ebay purchase, and was relatively cheap (I actually bought the auction for all of the crew members that came with it - 22 guys I believe!) but came without the counter weight on the front end. I'll have some pics of my fix on my next update, as I'm going to get it painted and then start in on the crew and Ruglud's as I experiment with the green ink which arrived. But instead of the usual counterweight (which I'll have on two of my Skull-crushers), I wanted something else. So I decided to green-stuff up a mill stone (one of those stone donut things with grooves that smash grain). Pretty happy with it so far, but the test will be when its all painted up. I may go for a bell shape if it does not look right. But I thought that would be appropriately looted from a Empire village and may give me a cool story if this one ever does something really cool.

But as an ode I have to learn how to green stuff mushrooms and stuff like Kev did on the above sets. So here is my first attempt at mushrooms, at least making them....

I have a bunch of different sizes, because I am not sure what will work best with which figures, but thought it might give me some freedom when I put them on a base. They can still be trimmed to fit, and they are a bit rough, but I am still kinda happy about them. It definitely gave me some practice. I also want to try some of the bigger flatter ones for my war machines and for more particular models.

Anyway, sorry again for the long delay, just glad that in the end I do have a great hobby I can fall back on! But after tomorrow I should be almost on track. I also got a message from a certain recent Golden Demon participant and I'm expecting to have some cool things to share with you all hopefully by the end of the week.

Cheers!