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Finally painted something for myself for a change. Nothing terribly fancy, but I think he turned out alright. Enjoy, The Egg

This is 77299 Female Antipaladin that I received from fanguad for the Spring Exchange. My "instructions" for my partner were to paint something that would fit either "Something wicked this way comes" or "I solemnly swear that I am up to no good." Fanguad did great on both counts. She is definitely up to no good with her giant axe. He threw in a couple other sinister figures that are most certainly wicked! (89010: Damiel, Iconic Alchemist & 77123: Zalash, Dark Elf Assassin) She is beautifully highlighted and shaded and I am going to look at her when I next paint skin as hers is gorgeous! I love her face! We also happen to have the same color hair! Ha! Thank you, fanguad! I love her so much! My pictures do not do her justice. Fanguad, if you took better pictures, please add them on here!

Hey everyone! I just got my engagement photos in, and I was so pleased with them I figured I would share them! My wonderful Aunt took them for us, and the wedding is going to be 50s themed, thus the asthetic. I couldn't be happier with them! My Aunt did a great job! My fiancee really shows me up in these pics though, she is obviously the star of them... well maybe the car is.

My last dragon, before Bones 3 arrives, finally painted. (Not including the one dragonling I still have.) Hard to get a picture of him.

The weekend I finished up Terezinya, Bonepander Wizard, the last of the Bones 1 Kickstarter Necromancer set that I had left to paint. Even though this figure is labeled as a wizard, I thought her lack of extensive armor, or anything particularly 'wizardy" looking about her outfit, and that fact that she is carrying just one weapon, made her a good candidate to be a Thug in my Necromancer warband for Frostgrave. Since she was just going to be a Thug (low-level fighter), I didn't do anything fancy with the paint job. Just a quick tabletop application. As always, C & C welcome.

This is another One & Done post. Starting with early yesterday: ...that evening: ...the finished Whatever today: This miniature could be a fine example of not knowing when to stop adding details.

Here is a cake topper that I made for a couple who wanted to be dressed like their MMO characters. I really love some of these cosplay cake toppers; they’re always so unique and interesting.

Hey, folks! I'm brand new here, though I've been lurking for awhile, and brand new to miniature painting in general. This is my absolute -first- attempt at painting a mini. I tossed around whether or not to post, but why the heck not, eh? The earlier I get constructive criticism, the earlier I can put it to use! I've been wanting to try my hand at painting for awhile now, and finally decided to get a learn to paint kit. I set right to it after receiving it yesterday. He's by no measure great, but I'm fairly happy with him for a first attempt. At the least, I was never tempted to strip him down and start over. :P If anyone has any constructive criticism or tips, they'd be greatly appreciated. The most trouble I ran into was with dry brushing highlights; I seemed to either go far too light or far too heavy on it, with no real middle ground. In any case, if I had any doubt about sticking with this as a hobby, they were long gone last night. Down the rabbit hole I go! :P (Edited to correct the absolute mess that my image uploads were.>_<)

Hi again, still working on more Ral Partha dwarves, and here are my last two additions, two dwarves with axes, but one kind of a barbarian feel, decked out in furs and a bit of scale mail, and the other one more of a rank and file dwarf, kind of skinny and in a coat of chainmail. I'm enjoying painting these dwarves actually, as it keeps torturing me with different armors and keeps me working on the NMM. The barbarian dwarf was kind of interesting in that I could get the white of his eyes on the left eye in, but couldn't reach it for a pupil, as he's got these big, shaggy eyebrows. Made it a bit challenging, but I don't think it's very noticeable, especially at these angles and the other eye was very easy to do and reach.

Ottawa's still very cold today. And my chin is naked. MY CHIN HASN'T BEEN THIS COLD IN YEARS. THIS IS A CRISIS. CALL OUT THE NATIONAL GUARD!!! Or the Reserves? Cuz we don't have a National Guard that I know of. Or I could, say, grab one of the many scarves littering the house. (Even though she doesn't particularly like scarves, my wife is such a fanatic knitter that scarves just seem to happen at random intervals.) Also, I now have movie + lootz! Gonna go post it up in the Acquisitions. Glad you survived! Sorry about the back. I hope you're feeling better soon! Izzy seems like a magical person to me. Like a fairy or something. I've never met her, even on social media, I just keep hearing mentions of her and then every once in a while some amazing artwork appears and it's like "Oh hey look Izzy swooped down from the sky and made the world a more beautiful place!" Maybe Izzy's like Batman, only instead of fighting crime while dressed as a bat she just makes pretty pictures while.. I dunno... dressing like herself I guess? Which really makes this a terrible analogy. OOOH!!!! But like maybe every once in a while Bryan comes in and sits down at his desk and then Izzy emerges from a shadow no-one even knew existed in the office and drops a stack of drawings on his desk, startling Bryan, and then delivers some cryptic pronouncement about them, and then when Bryan looks down at the pictures Izzy vanishes again! What would the Izzy signal look like? ... right, apparently all it took was 3/4 of a day of vacation to turn me into a raving lunatic. Wheee!!!!

So Very Tired We all "called in" today. Went to Scarborough Faire yesterday (190 miles one way) and had a blast. Walked... and walked... and omefg walked and my back seized up on the way back to the car. Almost didn't make it. Will post acquisitions later. Tired. Ache. So much fun. Saw Izzy "Talin" and she got to meet my mom and kids. I think the kids may be more open to ReaperCon if we can ever make it. They want to do Scarborough again. I didn't want to leave. Can I live there? The gyro place had The Best Gyros. Aaaah sooooo goood!

Why does his helmet have a Crest that looks like five playing cards?...that's my only question. Look, we all know that Gronk is terrible at cheating at cards but we aren't going to call him on it cause he has that insane crossbow. It's Detritus the troll, a member of the Ankh-Morpork Watch. Part of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. Trolls don't function well when they get too hot; their brains start seizing up and they get stupid. But if you can cool down their brains, they smarten up again. Detritus's first dwarf friend made him a helmet with cooling fins to help keep his brain cooler so he could be a little less dumb. (And now maybe I need to spend some of my vacay reading those books.)

"It's a knick-knack, Mr. Black, give the frog a loan. His old man's a Rolling Stone."

So, I thought I'd go ahead and post these, as my exchange partner received them. Just hoping they arrived ok! only have USPS confirmation. I taped up the sword between two pieces of cardboard as it was very bendy I found and I was worried it'd break in post. But anyway I took pics first before shipping so here they are :) Yes, I took a lot lol since I wouldn't see it again I wanted to make sure I had a record in case I wanted to do something like it again :) few words about them: the wolf is supposed to be a timber wolf - I got some reference pictures and tried to duplicate that pattern. His eyes are quite dark because I just dislike the white showing when on most animals you won't see it at all (I realize there's a lot of exaggeration in miniatures but I just didn't feel right doing it on the wolf). The bases are a bit simple because my partner had expressed a preference for ones that would be useful in gaming and since there are two minis on this, I put them on a 40X40mm base I believe, but left them not actually attached, in case he'd wanted to put them on their own. I just used some paint and flock, pretty basic, to help them "match" each other and the base, itself. I'm pretty happy with a lot of the way the details came out, really this is one of my better minis. It's not on par maybe with some of yall's stuffs but I'm proud of this little bugger.

Here are a couple of Bones goblins I painted up yesterday. Just a quick tabletop paint job. I did a few minor conversions; detailed them here: http://forum.reapermini.com/index.php?/topic/68042-chaos-wolfs-conversion-clinic-pic-heavy-open-topic/ Please let me know what you think.

I'm sending this to Izzy on the Book of Face!

Like this:

In a disturbing development the Rustoleum® corporation has weaponized glitter: Edit: Don't tell the platypod.

BACK UP ALL THE THINGS! Ugh, barely lunch time... The program I need still doesn't work...

I just found out where I'd stored all my photos from 2004 to mid-2009! So relieved! I had a few really good ones in there, plus a bunch that have a lot of sentimental value. I'd just stored them in a folder called "Old pics" that wasn't in my Pictures library. Now that I know where they are, I'm making a backup!

My middle brother is high-functioning nonverbal (and doing just fine at 38yo - the most financially stable of the whole family) and my dad ran into that a few times when he shaved off his winter beard in the spring, From then on, he got Rob to watch when the beard went away so he knew it was him.

Ah yes, the good old duck of doom, DOOOOOOOOOM!!!

The girl in my garden that has a sword now has a duck on her head. You should know better than to pick up a duck in a dungeon.

This shot forcibly reminds me of Cookie Monster®. But all the others are decidedly Lovecraftian. Malefactus, only you could combine Muppets and Lovecraft; whimsy and horror...together, gibbering.

I have a trebuchet. This makes me happy... I found the Tinkercrate trebuchet kit at the Goodwill Store for $4 with the Sunday Sale discount.

I'm sorry for your loss, and my sympathies to your entire family. @Mori: I agree! This forum is super nice and friendly. I was commenting elsewhere about the fact that I'm more relaxed and less guarded on here than I am almost anywhere else on the net. Or, for that matter, in real life either. @Aryanun: Let me know what Izzy says. And just to extend this post further... I'm losing my vacation for the rest of the week. But it all works out... It's just being postponed a week, so instead of being off all this week and next, I'll be off all next week and the week after. And today just becomes a bonus vacation day, so... hooray! And between figuring out some of the things that had been bothering me, having an important conversation that went exceptionally well, and getting a bit of time to myself today, I'm already in way better shape emotionally than I have been for a couple months. So I should be able to spend vacation having fun rather than spending it all trying to destress, which was the original plan.

Spoiler for quote length Don't freeze, otter! I'm so glad you had fun, Aryanun! I was super interested in that faire until I realized it was 4 hours away, haha. Dear husband would not be up for that. LOL. Your raving is amazing. I love the Izzy signal idea. xD I met her once in person at ArtistCon! She is an absolute angel, she smiled and let me stutter through an introduction and ask questions and be generally awkward while praying that I didn't get fingerprints on her art. I just about lost my mind when the Christmas minis popped up and I realized it was the same artwork that I saw! People are just so darn nice here, I don't think saying that will ever get old to me because I know better than to take it for granted.

My browser tab got long lost, so I started a new garden. So far I've grown a birdbath.

I've been trying to spawn something in my one remaining bird bath/planter by using a tight blue light. A bird or snake would be nice, but all I've managed is two eight-footers*. I will continue to delete them until the garden stops being obstreperous. http://xkcd.com/1663/#eb17c732-fcc4-11e5-801a-42010a8e0007 * Today I am avoiding the fraught question of whether to use an English or inaccurate Latin plural of a Greek root word, or the even more pretentious Greek plural, by translating entirely to English. (Latin being Greek to me ... or something like that. )

Guess what I did this weekend...

Like this: Why does his helmet have a Crest that looks like five playing cards?...that's my only question. Look, we all know that Gronk is terrible at cheating at cards but we aren't going to call him on it cause he has that insane crossbow.

@canuckotter - If you're looking to do video chats, then I think google hangouts is your best bet. If you're looking to do voice & text without video, then I'd check out Discord. Also, while we were evacuated and sweating our elves off post-Katrina (we evacuated to my aunt's house north of the lake, so we still got hit by the hurricane, but were safe from the water, but lost power for 3 weeks) my father decided to shave his head to help keep cool. He walked in the room where I was sitting with my dog, Korben, who has always absolutely adored my father. Korben didn't recognise him without hair though and viciously barked and snarled at the stranger in the house for a good 10 minutes before we managed to calm him down and convince him that it was still my father. My temp, who is old enough to be my father, and I just had a great time reading through this article: http://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/articles/2015/01/02/a-glimpse-at-your-expenses-100-years-ago which is comparison of average US expenses in 2015 compared to 1915.It's a short read, but super interesting.

A bunch of our friends are part of the bear community in Ottawa. (Big hairy gay men, basically.) Our kids are very accustomed to seeing facial hair come and go. Even if they had that kind of difficulty, I suspect by now they'd have so much practice dealing with it that they'd be OK... OK, maybe not, but still. They've got a LOT more experience than most kids in adjusting to people growing and removing facial hair. First real day of vacation today! Woo! ... I've already had to stop myself 3 times from opening my work email and checking what's happening. Trying to decide what I'm going to do with my day... It's too grey and rainy to make me feel motivated for anything. Maybe I'll go rewatch some of my favourite episodes of Avatar... Like Katara getting fed up with the water bending master and very nearly taking him out. (I started listing other possibilities and then deleted the list because I realised I was starting to list like half the episodes and that seemed silly. )

Ack. One of the tiny little pieces of "grass" has evolved into a balloon on a stick... And the little tree that took two days of careful pruning has been eclipsed by the trunk of a giant redwood that just showed up, lol. Big tree is gone, along with the balloon and a few stray leaves and branches on the small one. I now have a lamp post, a cactus, and a really tiny bowl on top of my other bowl...

Allright Reaperites! This is what took me so dang long to get finished and shipped out to Marsya, which was supposed to go out last fall, I believe. At any rate, the crazy whirlwind that is life delayed the project by several months, and I am happy to report that she had received it! At any rate, I knew it would have to be special as she'd requested something along the lines of fall in Krynn. I was able to track down this: Goldmoon: And this: Riverwind: These two are a couple of the main characters out of the Dragonlance novels, and I figured they would be a great pair for the nature scene that I was planning to prepare. So I purchased them, stripped the old paint that was left from God knows when (these minis are from 1989), and proceeded to paint them up! The base is a simple birch section from Michael's. The leaves and tree trunk are from Secret Weapons, the plants and such are Army Painter (I think) and everything else is sand and paint from various places. The bowstring is from my little girl's hairbrush. One thing that was driving me nuts as these were the first two minis that I started painting once I started up again, and they seemed so small! Turned out that they were smaller than what I was used to. They gave me fits for a while as I readjusted to painting. At any rate, here's the result: And a collage: So I finished my exchange! I hate that it took so long, and I'm going to do my best to never allow that to happen again! LOL! Questions and Comments are definitely appreciated! Thank you all for viewing! -K

I wonder what sunburned octopi look like....

Some idiot got so happy that the day was gorgeous with a nice breeze and the lowest humidity I think I've he ever felt here and went out under the Eye for about an hour and a half at noon. With no hat. Sure glad I'm not that idiot tonight cause he kinda looks like a lobster.

I came home this weekend to a lovely vignette from Kharsin. I love it Goldmoon and Riverwind are awesome and painted so nicely. Thank you again Kharsin for the piece, it will be displayed in my game room miniature display cabinet for all to see. Kharsin already made a show off thread but here are the photos I took.

Okay all! This is the latest experiment as I needed some time off from Space Wolves and I wanted to play around with some ice effects. I stumbled across this old tutorial by Monkey Sloth on making ice, so I figured I'd see what I could do with them as I've been messing around with Space Wolves and all of their frozen misery. I picked up this mini at ReaperCon 2015 and figured I'd try her out as it'd been quite a while since I've painted something with this much cloth on it. I have to say that I spent way more time on this figure than I would have liked, but at least it was a great exercise in cloth, frost, and all things that have helped knock more brush rust off my brushes! You'll have to forgive the blurriness of the pics as I'm still learning to use the camera on this iPhone 6s. I'm used to my old Galaxy S5 camera that took awesome pics so... yeah. I'm learning. Anyhoo, copious pics.... Some things I liked about this project. Others, not so much. A few didn't even come through in the photograph: 1. I definitely liked the amount of PRACTICE I received as I'm really just starting to take off in painting after several months of no painting whatsoever. Hopefully the next project will reflect this. 2. I liked the tutorial on the ice. It made some lovely ice, in spite of my cat taking out one of the cups of ice crystals before they were ready. 3. I did NOT like how the frozen effect on the staff came out. You can't really tell in these pics but the staff is coated in Secret Weapons Snow Effects, giving it quite the bedazzled appearance in person. This did not translate to the photographs most likely due to the close proximity of the lights, AND the fact that I should have shaded the staff BEFORE coating it... I digress... Anyway... 4. Your girl got a big dress! It's hard to appreciate how much space she takes up on that checker. In fact, this piece was basically finished until I found out that she was doing the splits on the edge of the checker. The ice effects, like water effects, shrunk considerably leaving a bowl like depression, causing her to not sit flush with the bottom at all! I had to fill in the void with sand, then shade, then I reapplied a thin layer of ice effects... which then soaked into the sand and ripped half of it up. It was then treated to a drenching in thin super glue (some of which somehow got into the corner of my mouth...) then sealed and dullcoated until most shine from the glue was relieved. At the end, she still didn't sit level, which is why she has 2 extra shards of ice shoved under her dress as you can see in the pics. It was either that or see her rear pin, and she had no desire to show that off. 5. I liked the ink effects on the checker. Look great in person! Basically, she was a difficult lady to mount on an ice themed base of my custom design. BUT, she's there and done enough! LOL! Here's a panoramic view: Thanks for looking! Questions, comments and complaints are always welcome. LOL! -K

The Faceless Horror Garbage Removal Service from start to finish; starting with early yesterday: ...that evening: ...the finished Whatever today: This miniature could be a fine example of not knowing when to stop adding details. AND there is anew Mushroom in The 'Hood: ...is that a sweet smile or what?

So yesterday I got 2 of my Brother in laws to come over to play a game of CAV. I preset the table with terrain before everyone came over. The woods were considered Light woods, the lava pools were considered rough terrain (there are no Lava terrain rules in the book I could find), and the mousepad grass and cardboard were considered road. (I didn't have time to paint all of the terrain including roads and I don't have a road game mat.) I added a bit more road than is pictured here. Also, The factory building I built is perfect for holding the initiative deck during play. We started with only 1 Dictator A each just to get a feel for how things work. Once we got a feel for the game, we went for a larger 2500pt force consisting of; 1 Emporer 1 Gnomic 1 Dictator A 1 Despot All 3 of us had matching forces. Sadly I didn't have everything painted yet. [/url There were 3 possible deployment zones. There was a zone on either end of the table or you could start in the mechbay in the town. My Borther In Laws chose the table ends leaving me with the mechbay. We house ruled that I couldn't be fired on until a model left the mechbay. In our first game turn Borther in law 1 came up the road behind the mechbay using the buildings to screen his forces. He did some indirect fire towards Brother in law 2. Brother in Law 2 chose to camp in the light woods on the other side of the table and pick off my forces as they left the mechbay. My gnomic and despot did some damage, but I ended up losing my gnomic in turn 1. My Emperor and dictator worked their way over toward Brother in Law 1's forces to keep them out of the city. My Emperor ended the turn stunned. Turn 2 saw significantly more combat. I couldn't move my Emperor so he picked on Brother in Law 1's forces. but didn't destroy anything. My despot was lost in a hail of fire from Brother In Law 2's group who still camped out in the woods. I also lost my Emporer. My dictator decided to find some cover and get out of the way. Brother in Law 1 Did some indirect fire at brother in law 2 but only dammaged a gnomic. Brother in Law 2 then failed his repair roll destroying the gnomic. At that point we called the game due to time (Brother in law 1 had t be up at 330am today and it was almost 9) and declared Brother in law 1 the winner since he didn't loose any models. I'm fairly sure we messed up many of the rules as we went, but we did so consistently so it worked out. Next time, we will have a better Idea of what we are doing. Below are some battle pics.

Last August or so I helped TophDNA with his Summer Exchange (I think) and he was painting a cowboy for someone. At any rate, I decided to paint up this Gunslinger as Roland Deschain from the Dark Tower Series. I believe we did these in one evening, although I didn't complete mine. I'd put some crackle whatchamacallit on the base and left it to dry. However, I didn't get around to painting the base until a few days back while I was waiting for something to dry somewhere. I figured I should finish him as he'd been waiting around for quite some time. Really the only thing to note on this one is that I finished it in a record amount of short time as I tend to fuss over things for wayyyy too long. It took months to just finish the base, and oh, I did add a 5 O' Clock shadow while the base was drying. *Spoiler ALERT* Oh, this is Book 2 Roland as he's missing 2 fingers off his right hand... Here you go: Again, with the funky camera, I apologize! I'll figure it out eventually... Thanks for checking it out! -K

Following Alton Brown's lead: I try to jeep something healthy in my desk like seeds or nuts for "grazing" to help prevent impulsive over eating

I always get my best ideas and desires to paint and create around 11am... while I'm at work... :(

I wonder what sunburned octopi look like.... Honestly, I would have expected you to go with something more like this:

Also most excellent protection against ankle-biting mosquitoes, if one chances to have a cloak which brushes the ground.

Good night world. Looking forward to going to work tomorrow so I can get some rest.

Cloaks are great, stylish protection from sunburn

I am walking through the thread in my monks robes, to the tune of Queens "Bohemian Rhapsody".. Oh yeah.. Bop and shake that cowl, and get happy sandal feet ! Mamma.. !!!