Hi, Welcome to my blog, This page should let you know a little about me, Chris Sutherland, the author of this blog, and give some info on why it exists. So here we go, this. Is me: My name is Chris Sutherland, and I come from a small town in the north east of England Called Bedlington, a few miles north of Newcastle Upon Tyne. I went to university at Northumbria University, where I studied Multimedia and Digital Entertainment computing. The course was mainly Video editing, special effects, 3D modelling, Web and graphic design, with a few other things thrown into the mix. While I was studying and after I graduated I worked at HMV, where I worked for nearly three years as a sale assistant, before this I worked for BT as a Broadband sales advisor, and before that I worked for Silverscreen DVD. After leaving HMV, I joined a company called Design a Cake in march 2010, I was then seconded to Max Merch, where I stayed for nearly 11 months, before moving back to the Main company head office. While at Max Merch I took on the role of Web Administrator, running the website and ebay store. I also took on most of the graphic design duties for the shop, designing fliers, adverts for local and national magazines, shop POS and website advertising campaigns, I also did most of the product photography for the shop. I redesigned the ebay store for Max Merch, away from the normal store ebay provides, customizing it to fit with the branding of the website which was preexisting from before I joined the company, after 11 months, it was decided that I would move back to the parent company, Design a Cake, where I would continue my duties, but mainly for Design a Cake, rather than Max Merch. In September 2012, I was offered a position working for a company called G&M Supplies in Whitehaven in Cumbria, Which happens to be very near to where my fiancée Judith was living. I do a similar job now for G&M that I did at DAC and Max merch. Creating 2D graphics for web and print, managing products on the company website, online marketing, SEO, branding, EDM campaigns and the like. Outside of my job I continue to do graphic design and photography as my hobbies, as well as following music, reading, computer games, film and TV, drawing and last but not least War gaming. I started war gaming about 14-15years ago, introduced firstly to Warhammer 40,000 by a couple of close friends, I soon joined the Northumbrian Adventurers Guild War Games club in Newsham, Blyth. Where I continued to develop my love of the hobby over many years, expanding into warhammer fantasy battle as well as what have come to be known as the “Specialist” games such as Blood Bowl, Necromunda, Gorka Morka and Inquistor, to name the main games I have played. In June 2010 I witnessed a small tournament at NAG, involving a game called Flames of War, I instantly fell for it. I’ve always liked world war two related things, this stemming from my time in the Military (Royal Engineers Reserves), and long conversations with my late grandfather as he recalled his epic tales of his time in the services! However the main thing that drew me to the game was not the period in which the game was set, or the rules (however these did help a great deal), but the terrain, the battlefields in which Flames of war games are generally fought over are so much more than your average 40k table, which in comparison is generally utterly rubbish. So I was hooked, I’d started loosing interest in the 40k system a while before this, so many things about it just haven’t sat right with me for a long time, then after seeing a FoW game, I pretty much ditched it there and then. Now don’t take this as me completely ditching 40k, far from it, I still love the “fluff”, although I have fallen behind with the current Horus heresy books (due to driving to work, not getting the bus!), I will always love the 40k universe. I feel like i’ve just outgrown the game. As an Ex Royal Engineer, I wanted to do something with the engineers, seen as we are/were everywhere (hence the moto, Ubique), I looked into FoW and found that the list for me was going to be the Paras, This fell nicely into place as one of my Favorite books is Pegasus Bridge (by Stephen E. Ambrose), this book tells of the Pegasus bridge landings on D-1, I figured I would do an airlanding force, with attached Royal engineers. Well, this didn’t really work out as planned, I ended up with FAR too many paras, from various boxed sets, and not many Engineers, as the list only lets you take one unit. The majority of the Posts on this blog will probably revolve around war gaming, with others based on graphics and maybe even the odd pointless rant about whatever happens to be annoying me at that particular point in time.