From average joes to contenders

From average joes to contenders

     So how do the average joes compete with professionals like gmm at a venue such as adepticon? This is the biggest hurdle that I ask myself about before approaching a design for a display. Our team does not have one person that is a professional artist, none of has gone to school for art or even taken any classes. I personally am a nurse by trade(a murse lol) and do not interact with anything in my professional career that would assist me with a display.  But no excuses here, what that means is that I need to dedicate more time and effort into a project than an average artist because my skills are not as natural as the others. This was a lesson hard learned when building my first display for team bad decisions.
      The display was for the awesomely converted eldar army. People may remember it for the Nagash  wraitknight.  But I built the arc of the covenant.  I tried to incorporate ideas from my previous winning displays, you know make it a collapsible transport case that opens into a bigger display.  While this Great for a 2k army that has only one model type (deathwing) it is not so great for a 4k army that is being built in georgia(we live in Michigan). I built around the previous concepts but the arc displayed sort of flat and did not interact well with the models.

This is how it opened with the models on it. It looks good but did not knock it out of the park. It was also extremely heavy and difficult to transport.


     I learned a lot from this project. The negatives I learned from was first start the build prior to January, this will allow for more time with trial and error and it will also allow me to make adjustments based on marcus' great model builds. I started the coffin I may. Next, if you are going to build huge include transportation in the design. The arc ripped the ceiling of my vehicle and was damn heavy to lug around . Finally ditch the army carry g case plus display idea and just stick to display it added so many problems with very little gains.
      The positives I learned were always include an easy way to recognize it, my displays are remembered as the crate, the arc, and the coffin. This is a great way to book mark it in people's memories. Next, have models interact with the display. Some of the best pieces of this display are like the two spots that the models either fly over the display or interact in the water fall. Finally share everything with the team. My team has a million great ideas and each teammate has a grossly different way of looking at the project. With the coffin some of the best ideas started from teammate's challenge to push further.

The path to insanity

Hi there, my name is  Nick Mills and I'm charged with building the displays for team bad decisions. I've been with team bad decisions for three years. I became a member when I filled in for a member that was unavailable at the last minute. But how I became a permanent member was my experience with building big/different displays

        My experience comes from building one of my personal favorite displays. I built display for my terracotta deathwing. The theme of the army is much like that of the real terracotta warriors, they are in charge of guarding for eternity but they are not guarding a country they are guarding a great evil, anyway I digress. The display was to be just a dig site for the terracotta warriors but as the display was being designed my friend and I came up with the idea of making a display and transport case in one. This display has sheet metal under the troops to magnetize too, a lid that I remove to use as a background, and drawers to hold all gaming supplies. The case when closed is an ammo crate. It is a big heavy monster to carry lol. Marcus eventually talked me into creating another addition so that I can add my Knight that goes with the army. 

       Thus the barrel was created. The barrel is an add on that I can setup as the above ground background to the dig site. With this addition I won a couple appearance awards, most notably was bolt guns battles. But these could not prepare me for what was next.  I want to insert a special thanks to my friend Kevin Braat. He is our "laser guy", he has been instrumental in all of his help with many of my precision cut stuff for these displays. He is always willing to help anyone, his contact info is  kabcnccreationsllc@gmail.com. He does charge for labor and materials but is very fair.

         A display that has a 1850 point army in which u have complete control over it versus a 4000 point army that u will not see until April is very big/difficult jump, Especially with marcus building the models lol. I will continue to elaborate in coming posts, as marcus begins to post about his creative process, I think it become apparent why his amazing work can be my headache lol.

That is it for this time, I will continue the story of creating a large team display

Painting into the unknown

The first model is the hardest and sets the tone for how the rest of the army will be painted.  Hello there and this is Ian from team Bad Decisions.  I dislike painting, I love the end results but I dislike it.  Especially when I have no idea how to paint it or what colors to work with.  Painting tutorials are incredible for helping with base models but what do you do when there is a crazy model engineer on your team or living in your head?  You silently kill that model engineer, but since life in prison and suicide are horrible options we take what we learned and modify them.

So let us start with painting deamon skin. There is already an amazing tutorial out there on how to paint Khorne models using the video "How to Paint Bloodthirster".  No, really watch it!  I tried using the bloodletter glaze but I did not find it made much of a difference in the model so I dropped that step from the video.  So instead I added an extra highlight of fire dragon bright to help make the model pop more.  When I became too lazy to highlight that turned into a light dry brush of fire dragon bright which worked out just as well around the muscles.

So now we understand how to paint daemon skin how do we red World Eaters armor without it blending in with the skin?  I chose something simple Mephiston Red, Agrax Earthshade, Mephiston red.  Leave those edges dark it defines the armor much more.  In the pictures below you can see my how the Mephiston Red looks totally different from the skin.  Now imagine me yelling and screaming "HOW DO I PAINT THIS MARCUS" as I stare into the unpainted empty eye holes of a zombie dragon head.

Hmm how does one paint a zombie dragon head?

So bone/skull color?  Anger boiling inside as uncertainty creeps to the forefront of my mind.

So I painted to head bone.  I left the cloth around the head black and dry brushed it gray.  I then super watered down black to make an ink to go over the cloth to dull the gray.

Dry brushing is your friend.

So how does it look with convention lighting??

Now that guy is terrifying.  What could I have done to make it better?  I could have made a lighter red on the armor to add additional depth.  I would have had to mix a white with maybe an orange because the last thing I would have wanted was to make a pink color.  

Well that is painting into the unknown.  I hope you enjoyed the pictures of painting through a Bad Decisions helldrake.

Stay tuned there are plenty more Bad Decisions works ahead.  

Competitively Humble Beginning

Greetings everyone, and welcome to the first post of many.  My name is Ian Dudek and I am team captain of Team Bad Decisions, my teammates are Marcus Baxley, Nick Mills, and Ken Summers.  We primarily compete for the Adepticon 40k team tournament painting and theme categories.  Since the team was created we have won Best Hybrid, Best Xenos, and Best Display.  If you don't remember us from Adepticon last year we were the team who constructed a coffin that Khorne himself would be proud of.

I am a competitive player, more like an ex-competitive player; which is complicated.  Let me give you a short history of some of my experiences.  a long time ago in 1983 my mother just... wait, we should probably start a little more recent and relevant than that awkward moment.  I have been around the competitive scene since 2004 winning many small tournaments and placing anywhere from the middle of large tournaments to winning Best Faction in GTs.  I have attended many years at Adepticon in hopes to win a competitive award.  My teams have always placed well scoring in the top 30 to top 20 overall almost every year.  One year my Adepticon team imploded upon itself, it was the closest we ever came to winning overall but attitudes towards a team member really drained what ambitions I had at Adepticon.  Think about it, your team had a single high loss vs the champions of that adepticon and nothing else but monster wins each game going into the final table.  Every player was unwilling to play with a teammate and effectivly went into the final game frustrated at each other.  This is a person that everyone drove 3+ hours in the same car just to a really awkward ride back home. After that Adepticon I started drinking more at Adepticon and slowly got myself kicked off the team I started.  Thus, my life as a hobby avenger was born; when life gives you competitive lemons you give that lemon to Marcus who will turn it into art, ask Nick to build you a display for said lemon art, and pull your hair out because Adepticon is a week away and we must crush the competition with the best lemon anyone has ever seen!

Anyways so I was kicked off the team I started and Adepticon was coming up.  I am still highly competitive so what is the best way to be competitive without needing to win a game or be sober for?  I ask you, the person still reading this far into a crazy long post.  You guessed it, retreat into the mountains master kungfu and fight crime.  Wait, that was plan B, plan A is competing in painting/theme to give us the best chances to win Best Faction.  I decided to put together another team, a team where every player could get drunk before game 2, where the hardest part of the day was moving from table to table without breaking any models, and purposely bring below average armies to get crushed.  A utopia of fun where rolling does not matter and you forgot what turn it was because shots seemed like a better idea at the time.


Our Last three Adepticons:

Team Bad Decisions 2014: My painting skills at the time were crap so I had to reach out to the craziest and best modeler I knew which is Marcus Baxley.  My brilliant and lazy plan was to have Marcus just add new models onto his already existing extravagant Ork army and we would win best Xenos for sure.  Did I mention Marcus is loco?  He said he did not want to use any of his painted models because he could do better.  He singlehandedly built two Ork armies and converted two guard armies using all Grots, Squigs, and looted tanks.  Operation: Be Lazy At War Gaming was a success and we took home Best Hybrid.  Everyone celebrated donated any winnings to Marcus for next year and went our separate ways.

Team Bad Decisions 2015: The second year we were trying to make plans on what we wanted to bring and I have never seen Marcus so wound up about destroying the status quo.  Eldar was and still is the best army in 40k and Marcus wanted to bring a bad Eldar army;  probably knowing that everyone would crush us off the table.  The words he constantly threw around "People are going to lose their minds when they see these models".  Once again Marcus crushed out some models and sure enough, we only won a single game with Eldar.  Sometimes I wonder how does one lose with Eldar and the answer is to allow Team Bad Decisions to write an army list for you but I digress.  An army display was always lacking and our new teammate Nick really stepped up to the plate and fabricated an Arc like from Indiana Jones.  Nick built a solid heavy display that would have everyone wondering what was in the box.  At the end of the tournament even with so many Eldar teams, we took home Best Xenos.

Team Bad Decisions 2016: As a team we decided to go with Khorne Daemon Kin.  Winning the last few years felt a little hollow and team morale appeared to be low.  I discovered Marcus loved building but did not care to paint, Nick wanted to build a coffin and fill it with skulls blood and a coliseum, the rest of the team wanted to contribute this year as well.  I wanted to help creatively but I was more known to organize the team set everything up and fill up my body with the appropriate amount of alcohol each game at Adepticon.  Marcus has been teaching me how to paint for a long time and demon skin was the one thing that seemed to stick.  I ended up volunteering to paint all the models with skin and Marcus said he would touch up anything that was not up to snuff.  With Marcus having my back I felt I could take on the challenge.  In the middle of delegating tasks, one teammate dropped off our team.  I figured as long as we had Marcus, Nick, and myself we could really find anyone to join last minute to help out.

So the plan was to have everyone create a list of models they wanted for the tournament.  Each player would then order the models and send it to Marcus to build/convert anything Marcus wants for your unit you would have to purchase.  Eventually, we found ourselves buying and buying more and more models with a junkyard of bits.  Let me tell you when you make plans with Marcus there are no plans.  He is the master of chaos, at the beginning of the purchasing and planning phase Marcus will frequently get a new idea for models and we would be back to purchasing bits/models for a bit longer. As more and more models kept getting ordered more and more models kept coming out.  What once seemed like a small project turned into painting eighty models of skin and armor just to find out a majority of them ended up being blood tithe models.

The tournament came to an end and we won Best Display.

In a nutshell, Team Bad Decisions strives to lose games of 40k, build insane models, paint to a higher standard, fabricate crazy displays, and hopefully inspire the Warhammer community.  I want our team to inspire players to believe that seeing awesome converted models is way cooler than winning a few games.

If you are interested in our work in progress pictures with some behind the scenes pictures of our previous years you have come to the right place.  We will also be sure to share some spoilers of our new Adepticon army throughout the year, although we like to keep things secret so expect a trickle and not a flood of information about Adepticon 2017 and yes we are already working on it.

Welcome to Team Bad Decisions!