Blógünder Schlock

A local schlocker named John (WEKM here in blogunder) wanted a commission from me while I was at Dragons Keep. I gestured in the direction of the miniatures and indicated that what I really wanted wasn’t cash, it was metal. (Okay, I probably could have turned the cash into metal my own self, but sometimes that’s a lot more complicated than it sounds.)

Said metal has now been painted.

I’m really pleased with how he turned out. Yeah, there’s some slop here and there, but he’s looking really good, and I love the look on his face. If you look closely, you can see a little redness to his nose and ear-tips. I think he’s been drinking. If you want to get a slightly closer look, he has his own gallery page at Cool Mini Or Not, where you can rate the paint-job.

Yes, your votes over at CMON have an effect. I’m now ranked among the top 22% of painters over there. See?

I have no idea what this means (besides serving as proof that I can stuff ballots with the best of ‘em.) I just know it makes me feel good. Lookit me, Ma! I’ve got RANK.

I’ll lead with a picture. Last night I finished painting up this guy, and I’m really pleased with how he turned out — especially his face.

Some of those chin-spots are part of the scuplt, but some were free-handed in place. That’s a practice I’ll be returning to for future trollkin, I’m sure. There are more angles available over at his Cool Mini or Not page*. As usual, you can rate him.

Next up: Yesterday’s “Minumus, the One Page RPG” article is now lying to you. Enough of you asked Ken Burnside for clarification that he had to DOUBLE the size of the game. Today it fits on a single sheet of paper, but you have to feed it through your printer twice. If this daily doubling persists, by the end of the month it will be 2 to the 27th power (134,217,728) pages long, or a little more than half the length of the collection of now-obsolete D&D 3.5 manuals you currently regret purchasing.

The good news is that now your $2.00 donation gets you twice as much PDF. Woo-hoo!

And finally… I took a vacation in December following the book release, and earlier this week I discovered that I had forgotten how to draw, and how to grind. I figured out how to draw again (you have to pick up the pencil first) but still don’t have my grind on. I inked a very measly 2 rows yesterday before my hand complained. So I took a pair of advil, and was rewarded with mild tummy cramps.

My buffer-fu New Year’s Resolutions are as follows:
1) Advil Is Not Candy
2) Draw A Little Each Day Rather Than A Lot All At Once, At Least Until Your Hand Gets Better You Moron.

(*Note: some Cool Mini or Not content is NSFW.)

Here’s a cute bundle of cuddly fun for you: The “Bridge Troll” from Privateer Press. I painted him up this weekend after using my new Dremel tool (yay, Christmas!) to clean some particularly rough flash and mold lines from him.

There are patches on this guy where my blending is just awesome. There are also patches where it looks like I was in a hurry to be done because I was getting bored. It’s a good thing I’m doing this as a hobby.

If you feel so inclined, you can go rate him over at Cool Mini Or Not (note: Some content on that site is NSFW), where it turns out I’m ranked #2579 out of 5,492 artists. That’s the 53rd percentile, which is pretty squarely “average.”

I’ve named this particular troll “Fizzgig,” because his teeth remind me of a Henson creation from the movie The Dark Crystal. Unlike Henson’s Fizzgig, however, this guy looks like he could actually USE all those teeth…

You may recall the default-pose Krielstone bearer I painted (2nd picture in that post) early this year.

Well, he’s got competition.

This is a conversion: I started with the same model (and one of his partners, the stone scribes), shaved the hands off the stone, and mounted the stone on the scribe’s wrist in place of his axe-hand.

Then I sculpted a new hand for him. My sculpting job isn’t bad. You can see it here, from the back.

If you like this, you can rate it over at Cool Mini Or Not. Bear in mind, it is NOT a “10,” and is almost certainly not even a “9.” Don’t stuff ballots, kids. The pros can tell when that happens. (NOTE: CMON hosts some photos of NSFW miniatures. Click at your own risk).

I’ve also submitted this to Privateer Press for their “Pomp and Circumstance” painting and conversion challenge. I’m shooting for “honorable mention - somebody has to deliver the pizza to this party.”

Saturday’s figpainting class was fun, and was the usual mixed-bag. There were a few regulars for whom I demonstrated technique (I started and finished the miniature pictured here — “Princess Penelope” from the 1997 Ral Partha release of legendary Larry Elmore’s Snarfquest), and offered pointers.

There was a child who needed something to do, and mostly wanted to pour paint in puddles and then make a cardboard-brown mixture to be applied to the brown cardboard tabletop. And there was that most rare of gifts, the newbie prodigy.

Her name was Jeanette. Her Significant Other is often at the Keep playing Magic, and she is often left to entertain herself sorting his cards. She took to painting like an owl takes to hunting mice by moonlight… the poor miniature never saw it coming, and after a very productive session she had “Weird Pete” from the Knights of the Dinner Table series painted up just right.

It was hugely rewarding for me. Jeanette would ask what the next step was, and I’d explain it. She would then say “I can’t do that! It’s so tiny! You’ve got to be kidding!”

Then she would hunch over and do it, tiny, with no kidding whatsoever.

Then she would squeal with delight when she pulled back to look at her work. “I did it!.”

I don’t have pictures of what she worked on, but I’m guessing she’ll paint quite a few miniatures in the weeks and months to come. She also may start dipping into her honey’s Magic Card budget in order to fund her new hobby. The poor guy is going to have to start playing Warmachine…

There’s a D&D tourney running at Dragons Keep this weekend, and during the round-two/round-three break this afternoon I’ll be teaching a painting class.

Sorry for the late notice. It’s been a busy week.

If you’re interested, seating is limited, and there’s a $5.00 participation fee. Paints and brushes will be provided, and you can pick out a single, human-sized Reaper miniature from the rack to paint on. You’ll get to keep that.

I’m going to focus on blending, but I’ll also dicuss washes, painting teeency details, and lots of other stuff. And yeah, I’ll have some of the things I’ve recently painted on-hand for you to look at. The pizza-box Krielstone Bearer is really cool, and I ought to post a picture of him.
The class starts at 3:00pm, and should run for about 90 minutes.

Per my last post, on July 3rd (and well into the morning of the 4th) I started and finished painting a heavily-customized Dire Troll Mauler “Extreme Sculpt.”

As one-day paint jobs go I’m quite pleased. It’s definitely not my best work, though. You might not be able to see where I was going too fast, but I sure can. Still, I like the way he looks.

If you think he looks a bit front-heavy, you’re quite right. I’ve got a sheet of lead superglued inside his base to try to balance him, but he will definitely fall on his face if you give him a push from behind.

I think the part I’m happiest with is the way his back turned out. Everything between the base of his spiny spinal crest and his loin-rag is my own sculpting — the lats, the spinal muscles, and those rosy cheeks. I modeled it using my smaller Dire Troll’s back as a guide. I think it looks much more interesting than the back the sculptor created for this model, and with paint on it’s really hard to tell where his work ends and mine begins (though the babboon-butt is a definite cue that the Cartoonist was here.)

Want more angles? Click on the thumbnails!

It’s been a long time since I pulled (or tried to pull) an all-nighter.

We all had a great time, I completely painted a very large, heavily customized miniature which I shall post pictures of soon.

Content yourself for now with a few pictures of “Knuckles the Troll” after I sawed him up and pinned his limbs in a new pose, but before I added any sculpting or paint. Click for bigger pix.

And now, I’m going to try and get some more sleep. I only went 32 hours without sleep, but that seems to have been plenty to wipe me out.

Okay, the subject line really isn’t fair. But I’ll get to that.

The painting workshop went well, and was packed. I didn’t turn anybody into an instant Golden Demon winner, but several people made breakthroughs. My only regret is that we didn’t have enough space. There were 20 of us crowded into two small banquet tables and one dinette table… we would have spread out, but there were RPGs running on every other table in the store.

Next time we do this we’ll schedule it all by itself, and we’ll make sure that all the “master” painters (Drew, RJ, Ty, and maybe me) can sit and paint along with everyone else, so there are more demonstration cycles available.

After the workshop Boyd, one of the new Warmachine players, asked me to come downstairs, because there was a game going on the one available table, and they needed a rules lawyer. It turned out there was room on the table for TWO games, so Boyd broke out his Menites, and he and I played a 500 point  game, while I doubled as an expert for the game next-door.

Here’s where I’m torn… I want new players to have a good time, but I really can’t bring myself to throw a game. Besides, when you’re teaching the game it’s helpful to actually USE all the cool tricks, stacks, buffs, spells, and feats, so that other players can see how it works. Right?
But I feel bad. My Dire Troll Blitzer (the one with the cannon on his back) pot-shotted Boyd’s cavalry which invited a charge. When the charging cavalry failed to kill him, he ate half their horses… including the one that Boyd was painting during the workshop.

Then my Mauler pounded Boyd’s “flagship” warjack (the Avatar of Menoth) into scrap in one round. And from there it was just a matter of preventing his increasingly lonely warcaster from potshotting and killing my warlock — I’ve seen lots of games turn right at the end that way (I’ve dealt that sort of defeat out myself), and had no desire to fall victim to it.

(As an aside, this is the third time my trolls have devoured someone’s cavalry. Not having any cavalry of my own, I can’t say how they’re supposed to be used. I’m afraid, however, that I’m in for a rude awakening when somebody figures out how to NOT serve them up as iron-shod troll-chow.)

Boyd was a great sport, and we had a good post-game discussion about tactics, and “where things went south.” If his cavalry charge on my flank had been timed to arrive with his jacks on my front line, and if his caster had popped his feat on that round, I expect the trollkin would have been crushed. Conclusion… his forces were too staggered in their approach, and his feat came too late in the game. Also, he had some spells and abilities that would have made a big difference had he known to use them.

Boyd, thanks for the game. Your horses look wonderful (and taste even better!)

This Saturday, June 23rd, is Free RPG Day. I’ll be at Dragons Keep in downtown Provo teaching a workshop on how to paint tabletop miniatures. The class runs from 11:00am to 1:00pm.

There’s no charge, and we’ll try to accomodate everybody who shows up. You can bring a miniature of your own, you can buy one at the store, or you can learn to paint using one of the pre-primered Clan War minis we’ve got (while supplies last — there are 14 of those). You are welcome to bring your own supplies, if you’ve got them, but we will be prepared to provide paint and brushes as well.

I realize there are dozens of styles and techniques for painting miniatures. I will be teaching a fairly simple method: base-coat, ink-wash, blend, then highlight. If you can pick your colors quickly (e.g. “don’t stare at the model all day”) and if you have a steady hand, you should be able to finish a good looking mini in about 2 hours.