Better Know a Blogger: Part 32- Sprue Grey/Golden D6

Today's Better Know a Blogger features Adam Jones (@spruegrey) from Sprue Grey and the Golden D6.

Sprue Grey is a very nice hobby blog, with some posts featuring his work in progress on the recent Squaduary challenges, as well as the older Dreadtober. He also has a number of reviews, including a more recent one of Heresy Miniatures. 

Adam might now be better known for the awesome Golden D6 magazine. This is an awesome regular hobby magazine, available online, that is written by gamers, for gamers. It features regular tutorials on painting and terrain, as well as battle reports and army showcases. 

One of my favourite articles was a tutorial on creating dungeon tiles from foamboard. A really simple technique, but giving amazing results. 

Here are Adam's answers to my questions:

In the dim, dark ages past, I started playing Dungeons and Dragons at high school. It was all badly done innuendo and naughty encounters with succubi, but what else would you expect? As a result of this, I discovered a FLGS (Friendly Local Gaming Store- Mike) called Mind Games (long since passed into memory) and marveled at my first exposure to miniatures. I ended up buying a four pack of adventurers: a halfling, a samurai, a thief and a barbarian. From that point my fate was sealed. My FLGS also stocked this magazine called the White Dwarf and again, my journey to the dark side was complete. It was inevitable that painting would follow and my first fumbled efforts on those four models with Humbrol enamel paints, well, we all have to start somewhere.

I wax nostalgic about those days still, and one of my favourite memories was buying White Dwarf 125 and 126. For those keeping score at home, these issues were my first introduction to the amazing Eldar of Jes Goodwin. Many years later I had the good luck to meet him at one of the Australian Games Days when I was working as a “red shirt”.

These days, family commitments, two kids, work and real life really make a dent on game time. My 12 year old son makes rumblings about playing and I kind of dread the financial cost of having two gamers in the house. Lucky for me there are a heap of options available and he keeps eyeing off my newly acquired Blood Bowl …

I really enjoy the social aspects of gaming, but these days I'm more of a painter than a gamer. And even that happens VERY slowly! Most of my gaming, back in the day, was tournament gaming. I never dreamed that there were a heap of gaming clubs and social gaming until I fell in with a group of guys and we used to play regularly in a mate's garage (http://www.spruegrey.com/thanks-to-daves-garage-2/ ). Those were some of my favourite memories of gaming, along with round six of a tournament called Arcanacon where I would regularly play off against some real gentlemen for the wooden spoon. Competitive gaming is fun, but I was never taking it that seriously and by the last game of a tournament, you weren't playing for sheep stations, let's be honest.

At the moment, my painting desk looks like a train wreck. I am painting an Outcast warband for Dark Age, a bounty hunter warband for Rogue Stars and my Orc Blood Bowl team. I desperately need to go back and update my beloved Plague Marines and Sisters of Battle.

I've also jumped on board with #Squaduary. It's a challenge to get one unit built and painted in the month of February; a timeline that even I can stick to!! My fame (or infamy) is based around my tectonic painting speed. If you check out the blog, you'll get a great idea of how slow my painting is, and how infrequent my gaming is.

I am a giant geek. As I write this, I am wearing my Iron Man Nikes and happily tell all and sundry about my wargaming, painting and general geekery. There's no point in hiding something that awesome.

As cliché as it is, the only way to get better at something is to practice. Paint as big a variety of models as you can find to improve your skills. Today, YouTube, blogs, forums, Facebook groups, twitter, Instagram and the internet in general is an awesome repository of knowledge. The signal to noise ratio is sometimes a bit skewed. Here the key is perseverance. And that not even taking into account your FLGS and gaming clubs. We have no reason not to fully enjoy our hobby and exceed even our wildest painting dreams. That does sound wrong, now that I see it written down.

Used to be a PC gamer as well, I was never able to pay attention to a split screen and would get destroyed regularly.

PlayStation.

McDonald's chips and Burger King burgers. I'm an enigma.

I would crawl through a sea of glass for a Pepsi Max!!

Thanks to Adam for taking the time to answer my questions. Be sure to give him a follow on Twitter (@spruegrey), as well as checking out Sprue Grey and the Golden D6!