MissMelons

How big is the new Nathavarr? I bought...too many and couldn't find a picture of the new print that represents how big it is. Rumor has it that it's much smaller now??

Eyyyyyy!! Thanks everyone for the birthday wishes! I worked from home today to be spoiled by Mr. Melons and had a bit of pumpkin spice cake for dinner. 10/10 would do 30 again!

Gooooot em. thank you Reaper!

Its the excitement really, plus I'm at work. I know as soon as i look away, they'll be gone again.

F5 f5 f5

I'm just nervous about traveling with him, love! Nathavarr barely made it to Texas and Deathwing has seen better days after returning. This dudes coming along nicely!

I am so elfin excited!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Took a break after finishing Ysera and Durotan until I sunk back into anxiety and depression oblivion, got a bit sick and sat down to finish painting this old project of Monique Dr Noir. i need to find some minis for a diorama I have in mind and will make a new thread on that one. Just didnt want to make a new thread on Monique de Noir because I'm slow and procrastinate or have color ADD. Currently having a green phase but its starting to turn orange so I wanted to finish Monique De Noir before it got to that. I added her shield and started blocking out the colors. Saving her hair for last as painting hair is pretty much my weakest point right now. I'm having a love/hate relationship with nmm as the blending back and forth isnt exactly a science for me. CC always welcome. And yes, thats another dragon bust in the background. Was in the mood to paint it up but then wasnt @[email protected] so it rests there for now. Ultimate goal is to either do my ice dragon idea or nightmare Ysera which calls for reds and blues. Im feeling more autumn oranges, browns and reds at the moment though. As evidence by a poor defenseless bust I slapped some paint on.

Welcome to Thunder Dome!! Uh...I mean, hello. We dont bite much, hope that's okay. Least not too hard. Its because we care really. Don't be shy to just walk up to a table of painter and say Hi or grab a seat and chat. We're all here because we love to paint or sculpt or cosplay or secretly stalk our favorite teacher. It varies, ive done a couple of these once.....or twice. Honestly, Dilvish's response is far more insightful.

Thanks! I hadn't used a red base for a skin tones it was an interesting process. By the time I got to judy painting plain red for his wraps it wasn't quite as intimidating. Ive a new love for Clear Red though asthat made it easier. Thanks! I am pretty proud of it. I always paint and paint something for months at a time until I hate it, then love it again and it never quite turns out how I want it. So I stopped after working 3 seperate weekend on it. Spent a day doing touch ups and called it done. Its a speed paint in procrastinating Melons time. :) Three sets of weekends and a Saturday for final touch ups.

I definitely wish I could have pulled off an aquarelle paint job! Would be interesting to try! I originally aimed for it to look more ethereal but that would have been tough to pull off! The Mr wants me to use his spare dragon bust to pain,y her nightmare version. Hes also determined to have me paint a lot of red this year.

Thanks! His eyes were super tiny but I'm glad they came out looking okay! Its been a crazy two months for eyes it seems. :)

The eyes are intended to be a bit unsettling and other worldly. Ysera is based on World of Warcraft Ysera that is known as the Dreamer. Her eyes are typically supposed to glow blue but I wanted to try something new with her eyes. Her full form: I'd call her done until I practice sculpting her jewelry! The eyes I struggled with a lot because I wanted to do something different but still have her recognisable as Ysera. I may brighten or darken the contrast a bit more but ultimately, no other design changes would be applied. I'm glad you all like her though! I'm definitely in love with this bust!

Still working on this one as I needed to look away from green for awhile after working on Ysera. I went ahead and started doing touch ups and added the arm. I'm not too happy with the base but am really just concerned with the paint job right now. Im starting to feel more confident painting nmm and taking a picture definitely helped too! I'm able to ask, does this light make sense? No..no it doesn't. Does it look cool? Ehhhh I guess so. You should probably fix that. Yeah, okay.

I consider this as a speed paint as I 'finished' it in about 6 days. Not incredibly proud of it but not bad either as it takes me months to finish anything that I am ever happy with. This one was really more for fun and I had fun painting him. Goal accomplished!

This is pretty done besides the jewelry I plan to sculpt on it. As my scultping is Meh, I'm calling this the final product. I did something different with the eyes as I didnt really want to give her human or dragon eyes so I did neither. I kind of like how they turned out considering she sat unpainted for weeks because I wasnt sure on what to do with the eyes!

Borked.

Awww bummer, we look forward to having Rudys every year. :(

I actually just bought 3 Reaper Kolinsky's at Reaper con and they're still holding up perfectly. I rather like them. Maybe that was a bad batch?

Did some more work today and started working on weathering the belt on the pirate but it has been awhile. I started with shading here and blocking out thr colors: So I pushed this up further and its going quite well. Started blending the metallic effect here and its slooooooowwwlllyyyy coming together. Super slowly. Sadly slowly. Omg so slowly.

I got lost in the mystical realm of Overtime but still painted when I got the chance. The goal before the new year is to go for fine detail stuff. Once these three are all finished, I'm going to paint one of the dragon busts and finish another one. I don't really have a project for this to lead up to for next year as Rcon 2018 is sort of on the backburner for now. (we're trying something out in 2018) I finished the Oni fro Collapsed Industries but will likely not make a show off for him so I'll share his finished look here: The Goal for him was to paint red again, and actually, try to texture and paint hair. I realized that while I've taken darn near every other kind of class, I NEVER took a painting hair class. o_o Huge Oversight on my part if I wanted to get better at it. So I pulled up some real-life examples of black hair with light and maaannnyyyy miniature painting examples to see how other people have interpreted it.I could probably do a bit more to it but I'm pretty satisfied where it is right now. There is a little bit of a design on her corset that could easssiillly be painted over and lost but I needed the practice for fine details, I painted the details I could see and just embellished what I couldn't. I think it's turned out rather nice so far. I wanted the corset to look like Brocade cloth. So I needed the two tones to show through so it looks threaded and for the design itself to look raised. I'm tempted to try to line the black design part in silver or a rich grey to pull off this effect but I worry I may overwork it at that point as it's tiny. The Inktensity set is suppppper shiny when applied but it helped me set a base color for her scarf. I still intend to use it for tinting, but needed to bring up the color a lot more and create more contrast. All I did here is block out the colors and I haven't blended just yet. I've also started on Monique De Noir. I'm missing quite a bit of what goes to her, but it's not a deal breaker. I have her arms and her armor parts so I can work with that!. I do not have many WIP pictures of her as It was a huge leap out of my comfort zone with her but now that I am at a happy place I don't mind sharing it!

Hey Hey!!!!! I just crawled out from under the luxurious world of work and overtime. I've got this addictive habit that revolves around painting and buying minis after all! It was a pretty relaxing day. Easy day at work, no fires, drama and I got to have some cake! Still sort of amazed that I am officially 30. I can no longer claim that I'm twenty. Thanks everyone for the well wishes!! /crawls back under mountain of workload with a combination of miniatures

Welcome Back from Reaper Con!!!!! I decided that I should probably start paintinf my busts or I will become overwhelmed with them. So first up is an Oni and one of the lovely ladies from Naughty Gears. After that, I decided to tackle the tiefling bust from Dark Sword. I cant keep running from it. I primed both models but my air compressor is still shot so the priming quality isnt great but its workable. I also sprayed a little too close and it ran a bit. I also wanted to test out the inks from Scale 75 that I bought. Its glossy as hell so I'll have to play with it to make it a bit more matte. I dont like to dullcoat as the weather here is always out to get me and i've had awful experience trying to in the past. I did a lot more work today on the Oni as the day before I worked on the skin tone of the pirate lass. I finally sucked it up and pulled out the white paint....okay, almost white paint it was bleached bone! I used clear red to boost the red of his skin. I then used the Inktensity red to sort of blend and make it pop more. Both the clear red and Inktensity red are similarly colored but it balanced it out nicer.....now...should I add even more red? I totally can. :) C&C is always welcome. Lemme have it!!! Thanks!

Oh man that was the one thing about that shaded base coats class. I spent months and months of practicing brush control, placing color exactly right, layering exactly right, having the rhythm down to clean brush, wipe brush, grab paint, apply paint and such to perfect it and gain muscle memory. BUT in that class. Shaded freaking Base Coats. You dony need it. You paint. You toss on a color while you have other colors still on your brush and you paint. It may not look great initially, but that's okay, thats what shading is for. It was very liberating taking that class. I love my techniques and blending and stippling and other things, but its refreshing that you can paint just as well using Wappels techniques too.

Yesssssss!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!