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This was a lot of fun to paint and I am really happy with the NMM but I feel the OSL missed the mark. It's not something I am familiar with and I need practice. But here's my jailor watts and all

After almost a month of working on it, I finally managed to finish this one. Whew! It was fun to try to push myself further with blending colors using glazing (and the sheer cloth look turned out decent, too), but I really underestimated how much trouble it'd be when I started on it. As usual, more pictures and my thought process are on my blog: link I could've done with a bit more red glazing on the front of the skirt, but otherwise, I'm rather pleased with the results that I got from the parts that I really put effort into (I took the lazy way out on some parts towards the end because I was ready to just be done with it so that I could move on to something new ). The jump in the color on the hair where I did a second ink wash with purple is very stark in the photo, but I think that it's one of those things that doesn't look nearly as bad in reality. I'm also pleased that I figured out a better way of lighting my photos, even if it helps show off my mistakes more clearly C&C welcome

Bombshell Miniatures 10050 Celeste the Sorceress, sculpted by Kev White. I wanted a simple mini with few accessories to paint up as a quick little project, so I picked Celeste for her clean lines. As a bonus I used some of the Breastcancer Awareness Pink I have multiple bottles of. Spent maybe 3 hours on her.

Reaper Bones 77511 Xiloxoch, Naga So I had grand plans for this mini; washes on the scales and NMM on the headpiece, but alas neither of those came to pass. Like usual, washes hate me, so after a wash attempt that ruined my previous effort at painting the scales, I ended up meticulously painting and shading each scale. I did successfully glaze on the scales at the very end for shading, so i call that a win. Moving on to my grand NMM plan. After painting every scale I was pretty sick of the mini, and it sat untouched for month. Then I had an incident of pouring way too much gold paint into my wet pallet by accident, and used that as an excuse to just finish the mini.

Just something quick for fun. It looks better in person than pics I think.

@Crowley Meet Barney. Barney is a friend. Barney is everyone's friend. I visited a tiny local game comics store yesterday. (To see if they were still operational.) And while I was there, Barney wandered in with his people in tow. Barney made friends with everybody in the store, cause he's just that sort of Corgi, and that's how he rolls.

In the ancient days of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, the Troll never thought to name his characters. He'd get a concept in mind for yet another fighter magic slinger, and jump IN there, get stuck IN, and REALLY get invested. And the DM got him with the same trick every time... have a bartender or NPC ask "What's your name?" And every time, he'd stand there with his mouth open. He never thought to name a character until after the question was asked. But one time, he glanced down, caught himself, and yelled, "I AM LORAD, SON OF BOROMAR!" He was pretty declarative, and it took us all by surprise. Usually, he'd sit there and bobble it while the DM grinned. I looked down in front of him. There were his cigarettes, and mine. His pack was Dorals... mine was Marlboros. Even Bobo the DM had to admit it was a hell of a save.

I plan on putting Windows 7 on this new machine. I know it won't be supported for long but I rely on knowledge and statistics to keep me safe: my computer is going to be hidden behind yea much aftermarket stuff and hackers tend to target large systems in order to acquire millions of numbers at once, not piddly little systems with one person's info on it. And I don't trust an OS to protect me from viruses or ransomware, I trust me to find it in my system and nuke the sucker manually like I've had to do several times before. Linux is inadequate for what I do. Apple can [long redaction], I don't care if my sister works there. Cleaning laptop vents doesn't cut it for my poor laptop. Annually I've had to disassemble it to get to the CPU fan and heat sink ribs and clean those. I have a cooling dock on top of that, or, well, below that My laptop has a known design flaw, it's one of the early HP Pavilion series with the gigantic processor and the smallest heat sink they could get away with From what I can find they only used double threaded processors in this model for a short time before switching to something less volcanic. Now I control what goes in. And whether or not it sounds like the world's smallest jet engine

Once you let the smoke out the mystical magical musing goes away very quickly. GEM

Hm. "Thin your paints" was good. "Contrast is important" was up there. "Enough with the #$%@ BLACKLINING, this isn't ENGLAND, you fool," was important. "When in doubt, use purple for the shadows" was surprisingly handy. The uses of Brown Liner, particularly as Bones primer, was crucial. "A thousand throats may be cut in one night by a running man," was one I didn't think I'd ever have a use for, but it came in handy. "Don't reinvent the wheel; hang out with other painters," is essential. "Only a fool fights in a burning house," was obvious, but good advice. "Never use straight up black or straight up white," was amazingly useful. "Destroying an empire to win a battle is no victory, and ending a battle to save an empire is no defeat," is one that was surprisingly insightful. ...although now that I think about it, some of these may be off the forums at the Klingon Language Institute...

SUPER EASY! Just don't open it to check it, or stir it, or anything else. My aunt got one, and kept getting terrible results. I spent a half an hour on the phone before she mentioned that every time she checked on it, it just didn't seem to have progressed any. "What do you mean checked on it." "You know, I looked at it." "...I usually can't see much when I'm cooking with mine." "Oh, I open it to look." "LEAVE IT ALONE!" "Put ingredients in, turn on. DO NOT TOUCH AGAIN!" She finally got it. Coffee and digestive biscuits. I'd rather something like a hazelnut biscotti, but this'll do.

Finally some paint related answers! Don't lick you brushes. (Not that I got in the habit anyway) Future as a sealer/additive is not a good idea, unless we're talking about floors. It may have made sense15-20 years ago, but miniature paint/sealer formulations have improved significantly. Push the contrast even MORE! Even brighter highlights, even darker shadows. Brown liner as Bones primer is awesome! Use it. Kolinsky Sable brushes are awesome! Got some. Wet palettes are also awesome! Got one. Optivisors are awesome! Got one. ReaperCon is awesome! Went there.

Muahahaha! Acolytes for the Acolyte God!

These: And: (paraphrased) Don't be shy. Share what you paint. The forum community is extremely supportive and will give helpful advice so you can improve further. And: Don't worry if your first minis don't look great. The first minis of most now-excellent painters didn't look all that great either.

That's awesome!! I got my FLCS in Frederick to allow dogs into the store, even after Lucy peed on their floor.

So, how was it? When they stop working, but I'm cheap. Also, 'when they stop working' means when I can't fix them any more. TROOTH! I'm glad nothing bad happened! Yes, definitely replace the lamp/bulb/fitting. Like Unruly mentioned, also check the voltage on the wires. Hire one. Or get a friend/coworker that is an electrician to come give you hand. Seriously. If you don't work with electricity for a living, don't mess around with it; it can be very dangerous. I work with/on electronics for my job, so I know enough about electricity to be really dangerous, and there's times that I even question 'should I be messing with this?'

Yes... but it isn't going to get done before christmas... probably... Thin your paints. More. No more. Deeper shadows. No deeper. DEEPER! Bright up your highlights. WERE YOU LISTENING? I SAID BRING THEM HIGHER! YOU THINK THEY'RE HIGH ENOUGH?? YOU'RE WRONG! HIGHER!!

Mr. Thorne keeps lamenting that he can't put candles - actual candles - on the tree. I've seen it done. It's lovely. Wouldn't fly here, though; they trim the trees into oblivion, until you can barely decorate them without just sticking ornaments into them. Let alone put candle holders with real candles on them. *headshake* This reminds me, I was going to do some research into trees with rootballs...

Spent the majority of today hanging out with a friend that recently moved back to town and we played board games. Much fun was had even if we are bad at games, though we won 2 out of 3 of them. Now to get up the energy to make dinner and eat before it gets too much later.

Ladystorm posted today that more were on their way. Woohoo!

Windshield is clean, repaired, coated, and reshoed. Ready for the snow. Lights are on the trees, one indoor and one outside. Snoopy is on the mailbox and it runs. Might have to get more lights.

Good evening all, just got this figure painted last night and photographed at lunch today. I usually have a pretty good idea who the sculptors are for Partha, but this one eludes me. A female elf thief, I started originally thinking about foresty colors, but her black hair soon gave way to purple clothes and soon thereafter all thoughts of the forest went out the window. Anyhow, here she is, enjoy:

I'm told there's a farm in Upstate NY where parents send the family computer when they die get old. There they all gambol and play together like good little PCs and Macs, just as they did when they were functional young and fast.

if it's just a normal hard disk, you can just get an external disk enclosure kit that'll let you pop the old disk in a box and then plug it in to a usb

Finally doing some painting. Going to try and get my Escher crew mostly done today. So far they're looking a bit more Mardi Gras than I had planned

1) Get a wet palette: CMPA folks 2) Thin your paint: lots of people 3) Blot the thinned paint before using it: somewhere on forums, and experimentation 4) From lots of people: 5) Don't be afraid to use non-similar colors for shading (like using purple to shade yellows and greens): CMPA 6) Contrast is more important than hue: Lots of folks. 7) For goodness sake, figure out a way to put the mini on a holder of some sort instead of fiddling with it while painting: Lots of folks.

This.

I know someone who went to Linux. Sadly - and Mr. Thorne has said much the same, although he uses it for a lot of things - Linux is not really very suitable as a replacement OS for most people. I wouldn't advise someone to switch to without being /very sure/ they are pretty savvy, and probably more technical than I am. I say that both because I considered it for a while, and dumped it as an option, because it just doesn't do what I need it to do, and most of the emulators that would let me run Corel/just about all my games/other stuff I use that Linux doesn't support natively aren't very easy to use, and because I saw someone with very similar use patterns and a heck of a lot more computer savvy to me switch, and.. lemme tell you, I heard nothin' but complaints. Grump! I can't run *program*! *program* doesn't play nicely with WINE/other emulator! Gripegripegripe... It was not the best six months. For anybody. :/ Linux is a very good OS. But if you aren't doing something that it is designed for, or savvy enough to make it work for the thing you want to use it with? Not a solution. I'm not looking to start a debate, by the way; I have no opinions on what's best - I despise 'em all. So far, I've not seen a solution that works perfectly; they've all got bugs. Sadly, not the fat, tasty kind. ^^;

But on the upside he looked round and found me computer that will play wow etc in my price range

17 years?!? No, that's not normal. 5 years seems to be the upper limit to non LED lights...

That project needs to be finished Jack.... Don't be a piker! Use a Flamethrower! @Crowley to the rescue!

I am at the upper limit of height for petite sizes, but apparently I am short-waisted. I wear petite sized dresses, but regular sized trousers.

Working on a belated bday/doubling as holiday gift for a friend and DM. This was originally one of the "Nozgul's Marvelous Unpainted" human wizard minis. Img link (one on right). Converted it to better resemble friend's character: A heavyset archanist archwizard who is generally jolly, high, and giving out magical candy. The character also has lots of pockets and satchels with assorted items and goodies. He's basically the DM's avatar in game to point players in the right direction. Anyway, his arch wizard character was taken prisoner at one point and trapped inside a jar..... So I decided to try my hand at a jar display. Used a metal washer under the floor in the jar, and magnets on the miniature's base, so he can take his wizard out for tabletop play, and store him in the jar. The jar base has been a pain in the arse. Bottom of jar isnt flat at all, so I cut a piece of heavy paper to the size of the base and then put it in and filled the jar with coins for a few days to bend it to the shape. Once I was satisfied it had molded properly, I took the paper out, cut it in half and molded on top of it usinf a base of hot glue, and topping it with modeling paste that I textured. Scratched up the inside bottom of the glass with clarse sandpaper to give glue some grit to hold to. Put a few coats of black paint into the bottom border of the jar and then added a bunch of Elmer's for each half of the base. The whole base would not fit through the opening if it was one piece. I think I either used too much glue, or the Elmer's just doesnt bond well in this situation. But it's taken over a full 24 hrs to mostly dry. Added some more paint on the jar base texturing, then used a sculpting tool to pull parts of the paint off the inner glass to get that slight tendril look, and now I'm about 90% done. Still need to put a clear coat on the wizard, and may add some other details to him if I can figure out what will really help. The jar, I'm thinking a piece of black fabric attached to the top part might work out well, with some kind of sigil. Any suggestions or advice on anything else is welcome.

The best places to place webs is at the airport. You catch really big buzzies there. Thats because you are a troll?

Present company excepted. Obviously? In completely unrelated news, there's a farm in Upstate NY that sells computer parts. Cheap. You might have to wait a bit to get exactly what you need.

Never suffer a mouse to live. They are among the greatest Enemies of Man, having slain too many to count through their spreading of filth and the destruction of that which we need to survive. Regret not their extermination. I may be biased:

Careful, tomorrow's M....well, you know what it is.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/explora/computers/tips-and-solutions/convert-old-hard-drive-external-unit How-to article. It's not a list because the instructions aren't complicated (look at HD, say 'yep that's a HD', one row of pins or 2, measure size, get screwdriver).

Oh! I've done that before. Yeah it's doable. It can be a Thing!

Hopefully it'll be fine. And you/your brother might be able to install the old disk into your new machine.

So, somebody in the painting forum just asked for advice on how to seal a "petrified" fish souvenir they picked up... (We always get the most interesting questions here...) Quite frankly, from the pic they posted it looks more like the thing's been completely salt-cured. I recommended consulting a taxidermist or anthropologist to see if there's a specific product for that sort of thing that might be commercially available or at least to get more informed advice. Wasn't one of the well-known female painters here an anthropologist for awhile? And in a slight tangent into archaeology... 95-yr-old Sphinx prop from The Ten Commandments unearthed in CA In slightly less important archaeology news, I went up into my attic for the first time in about twenty years. I found another six shoe boxes of comic books. I have yet to take them down and look through them, however, as I am a fair bit heavier than I was the last time I climbed the ladder to the attic repeatedly, the ladder is twenty years older, and the attic is much smaller than I remember it being, lol. I am thus about to call my painting apprentice, Spawn Number One, and see if he wants to earn a few bucks for fifteen minutes of work.

See, I'm was/am a programmer but that doesn't mean I want to constantly spend my time fixing computers. Perhaps because I'm more of a database person but it's not actually fun to lose an afternoon to trying to make computers work when what you really wanted to do was shop online for Christmas presents. Or whatever else you were going to do when the computer decided it couldn't. Yes this happens on all computers, but it happens less with standard consumer software. It's like my friend who decided he wanted to make his home "smart". Months of trying to tweak settings and code while the rest of us just grumbled about how the lights would turn off if we sat down for a coffee chat because we weren't moving enough for the sensors. If I was excited about home automation I'd be keen to make it work, but it's just not a problem I'm interested in solving so it would drive me insane. Windows 10 takes a little bit of time to get used to, just like any software. It's like someone re-organized your kitchen, once you figure out where everything is you're good to go again. There are probably changes under the hood, but most of them are pretty seamless.

This neatly explains to me why my brother and brother-in-law, whom are both programmers, constantly sing the praises of the almighty Linux, and tried for a long time to convince us to switch (their arguments did tend to stutter against my question of "will my games play nicely or at all on this OS?"). I'm decently computer-savvy for an average user, but the more I perused the Linux website, the more I went . Yeah...not really designed for casual home market use. I may not be a fan of Windows, but at least it works and I know enough of the quirks to get it to behave the way I want most of the time. I shudder to think of the day when I will be forced to upgrade because Windows 7 won't be supported any longer. It was lovely! I will give a full report later, when I have time. :) Huzzah! --OneBoot :D

After 3 I've found it isn't worth repairing. On the other hand I usually buy bottom shelf computers. My new laptop is something of an upgrade!! FIFY A universal truth...

To always blame Buglips. Also the hair color recipes.

Non tasty bugs are not fun.

"Don't sniff goblin butt."- @buglips*the*goblin

Sounds like a failed capacitor. That's usually what pops like that in computers. Probably on the motherboard. If it's an AMD system, it probably wouldn't be that hard to get a replacement motherboard that was still using, I'm assuming, the DDR3 RAM that you most likely are using if the PC is 5 years old. If it's Intel, then yea, probably easier to just replace the whole thing with how often Intel changes CPU sockets, so finding a decent motherboard using that socket that isn't used is going to be harder. They've probably changed sockets 3 times since you bought that PC. If it's a laptop, then there's no point even trying regardless of who made the CPU.

I don't know why, but I can't get a recent discussion out of my head, and it's been like 4 days. A guy was proposing certain changes to certain regulations and laws. When presented with documented, factual, historical evidence that the changes he was proposing had been tried and were the cause of much suffering, his response was simply "well, that couldn't happen today so you're drawing a false comparison." The very reason it couldn't happen today is because of the regulations and laws we put in place to stop it, otherwise it never would have stopped in the first place. And there was no convincing him otherwise, regardless of how much evidence from other countries, where such regulations and laws are closer to how he wants them, was presented to show that no, the same things would happen again if given the chance. I can understand having a difference of opinion, but this guy's beliefs honestly scared me. And I can't get it out of my head because I know that he's not alone in thinking that way...

Oh.. Icicle strands... I'd love to have some of those on the eaves. I don't want them badly enough to stand on ladders though. :/ Heights and I don't get along at all, sadly.