Blógünder Schlock

In order to leave you with uninterrupted Schlock while I do back-to-back conventions, I’ve needed to work a little further ahead than usual. Tayler Corporation Headquarters has been a busy, busy place for a while now.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t take an evening off and paint an alligator. Anybody who says that pink and green don’t go well together hasn’t been using the right shades of pink and green.

Click the image for the full set of photos over on Flickr. Or have a look at the slideshow!

My paintjob isn’t as detailed as the studio’s, but my color choice kicks theirs right in their boring, olive-drab pants. And in truth, I can’t take all the credit. Drew Olds, my painting mentor and the Artisan-In-Chief over at Garden Ninja Painting Studios peered over my shoulder and suggested the pink wash that led to the belly colors I ended up using. Yes, he made the miniature much more difficult to paint by pointing out things I could do that were harder than what I wanted to do. Thanks, Drew.

The family went camping this weekend. I went driving up and down the canyon.

This was so we could finally participate in the massive Pope-Durfee family reunion (that’s Sandra’s mother’s family,) but my own partial participation was a concession to “Howard really needs to get some work done,” along with “Howard would like to be well-rested on Monday.” And so it was that my oldest daughter and I slept at home while everyone else was three thousand feet up.

My daughter’s excuse for not sleeping in the (crowded!) tent was that she just got back from camping and really didn’t have the stomach for it again.

In some of my non-camping time I relaxed and painted, finally finishing the Stormclad warjack pictured here. Check out my Stormclad Flickr Set if you want to see the annotated pictures and close-ups.

Is it camping if the site is only 22 minutes from your home? Yes. But not if you sleep in your home. My family went camping. I had three days worth of “picnic.”

Well, no. There isn’t. Garden Ninja Painting Studio lives in somebody else’s garden. But they’re good friends of mine, and good things are coming.

First, though, they’ve partnered with BSCReview.com to run a contest. The winner gets a full set of patina-finished Goblin Quest miniatures. These were sculpted by my friend and mini-paint mentor Drew Olds, and are licensed characters from Jim Hines’ Goblin Quest books.

There’s a second contest starting in a week, and a third a week after that.

Now, on to good things. Garden Ninja Painting Studio is going to handle the production (and painting, for those of you who want it) of a 28mm-scale Sergeant Schlock miniature. Melissa Mayhew is putting the finishing touches on the sculpt, so we expect to have it ready in time for Christmas.

I can’t wait to get one.

In the meantime, go over to BSCReview.com and sign up to win some patina-finished pewter.

I’m enjoying my vacation.

(non-sequitur: As I typed that last sentence my beanie-monkey fell off of my auxiliary monitor, bounced off the Wacom tablet, and hit the floor. Just so you know.)

My good friend Richard Bliss (marketing guru extraordinaire and unwitting mentor) sent me a gift, courtesy of the geniuses at JibJab. It’s an extremely accelerated version of “It’s A Wonderful Life” with new faces. Enjoy!

My buddy Bob “Mountain of Lovin’” Defendi (game designer and Writer of the Future) has now posted five episodes of Death by Cliché. For your convenience, links! One, Two, Three, Four, and Five. I am listening to four and five while painting some Warmachine figures. The laughter interferes with the detail work, but containing myself is good practice for preventing those pesky beverage-out-the-nose events.

Finally, in the last two days I’ve knocked down an entire week of comics and finished the scripting and penciling for the Schlock Mercenary: Out From Under bonus story. It comes out to fifty-one rows’ worth of work. Err… play.

Ahhhh, vacation. Merry Christmas, everyone!

(Update: After posting this I picked the monkey up off the floor and carefully repositioned him. The photo is proof.)

I took a chunk of the day off and did some fig-painting. The last four models in my unit of Bog Trog Ambushers got their last coat of paint.

I keep track of the point-count for painted vs unpainted models in my collection using the “Armies of Immoren” tool. Imagine my surprise when I updated the model count, and the point count climbed to exactly 3000.

For the record, 3,000 points’ worth of Warmachine and Hordes models was a lot easier to reach than 3,000 strips was. Still, it’s quite satisfying.

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…