leolson79

Rewriting this post because, in hindsight, it came across as way more negative than intended. I love the idea of this, and I would love to see Reaper implement something like this in an official capacity. Show your vaccination card at registration, get a "Vaccinated" ribbon. Don't want to? Don't have to. I get why Reaper doesn't want to do that, but I think it would make a lot of folks feel a lot better about attending the con, given the current state of the planet.

Thanks!

Hey, y'all. I'm guessing this question has been answered somewhere before, but given the choice between frantically trying to finish a figure for the painting showcase and digging through the forums... well, here I am. Will the classes be recorded for download later by participants? While this would be helpful to be able to go back and review stuff later, I ask mostly because I'll be at work while most of the classes I'm interested in will be going on, which will make participating live rather difficult. I totally get why they wouldn't be recorded, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to ask. Thanks!

Thanks, y'all!!

Just a heads up for folks booked at the Embassy under the full rate (like me), the RC rate is actually still available for Wednesday night. If your reservation includes the night of Wednesday the 2nd, you can call the Embassy and they can split your reservation such that you're paying the RC rate for the first night, and the regular rate for the rest. It saved me about $70. It's not a huge amount, but that's $70 I can put toward something else now. Just make sure that when they modify the original reservation to shorten it a day, they still give you whatever rate you originally booked at. My room was around $195/night when I booked, and when they changed it to add the RC rate for the first night, the rate jumped to $233/night for the rest. After a couple of panicked phone calls, I was able to get it straightened out. Hopefully this can help ease the strain on other folks' wallets, like it did mine. Plus, now I can "officially" say that I'm staying at the Embassy for ReaperCon, so hopefully no worries about the swag bag. P.S. For those wondering, I was assured that while I will have to check out and check back in, I will be able to get the same room and I won't have to move my stuff around. Time will tell how that pans out.

That's a bummer. Hopefully, Embassy will just give ReaperCon the whole thing in 2021. It seems pretty clear that RC can fill it without much trouble.

Southwest doesn't fly to DFW. I think you're thinking Love Field. Still in Dallas, but a longer drive to Denton.

Goodie bag is a good point, but Embassy Suites does free breakfast regardless, so at least that's still on the table.

Wow. That was... completely unexpected. Totally missed that. I mean... it's awesome for ReaperCon in general, but since it took a couple months last year to sell out, I figured waiting a day would be ok. Hopefully, they're able to get another block opened up. Thanks for the heads up.

When I try to book through the link, I get " The requested rate is not available for 02 Sep 2020 - 07 Sep 2020 at Embassy Suites by Hilton Denton Convention Center." Is it sold out already?

Brilliant! I had missed this completely. Thank you for the link. Now I don't have to worry about downloading the photos off my phone.

Been meaning to post this; finally getting around to it. Here's my reviews for my full list of classes. This Class Is About Contrast (Greenwald), Thursday 1:00 - Already mentioned this one earlier in the thread, but it's worth saying again - this class was fantastic. Highly recommend it for just about all levels of painters. The presentation part went down to the wire, time-wise, so no actual painting. Some hands-on time to practice what we learned would have been great, but honestly, since it would mean losing out on a portion of the lecture, I'd rather skip the hands-on part in order to maximize the info learned. If Jen doesn't teach this class next year, it will be a tragedy. Blingin' Out Your NMM (Lovejoy), Saturday 1:00 - This is probably going to sound harsh, following the Contrast review, but this class was disappointing. There was a hand out, but it was emailed to folks after the class, and I think the class would have benefited from having physical copies at the beginning. I didn't get the sense that Aaron wasn't interested in the class, as Shadowphaze did, but it did feel somewhat disorganized, and we didn't cover nearly as much as I'd hoped. This is where I think having the hand out ahead of time would have helped - it could have served as a syllabus of sorts and helped to drive the class forward, because the hand out had more information than we got in class. I have some experience with NMM, and I think I'm "ok" at it, but I struggle at times with where to place the highlights, and I was hoping this class would help with that. Bangin’ Reflections - Achieving Convincing NMM Environmental Reflection Effects (Kantor), Saturday 3:00 - No hand out for this one. This was kind of a weird class for me. The first half was a presentation about theory and execution, and the second half was hands-on to put it into practice. The presentation part was great, and quite informative, but I struggled with the hands-on part. I think it's largely because the painting style felt so drastically different from what I normally do, I couldn't wrap my head around it. Not a knock against Ben, but I think this technique isn't for me. Having a hand out of the presentation would have been great. I wasn't the only one taking a picture of the screen with my phone for every slide. Object Source Lighting (Olds), Saturday 5:00 - I wanted to take a refresher on OSL, so I was excited when I saw that a seat had opened up in Drew's class. There was no hand out, but the class was almost all hands on. Drew did a good job explaining everything, and it worked pretty well for me. We did a hobbit with a lantern, where the lantern was the only light source. This was great as a jumping off point, but it would have been cool to see how to tackle situations where there's an ambient light source in the mix as well (i.e. the rest of the figure isn't simply painted black). Maybe a section at the end of the class to discuss challenging situations that one might encounter?

Some of us picked the Windows BECAUSE of the sabotaged name...

There were a handful of vendors who weren't open immediately upon the vendor hall opening (for whatever reason), and they had big sheets covering everything on their booth. Seemed like a good solution. Obviously, it's not going to prevent someone dedicated to helping merchandise sprout legs, but they're going to have a helluva time not looking really conspicuous about it. Since, at that point, the vendor hall would also be filled with actual shoppers, I suspect that would be more than enough of a deterrent. I also think that having a downloadable and printable form for registration would help speed things up considerably. Lyn Stahl had put together one for the GenCon competition this year, and it worked great. I've got no problem making it mandatory, provided there is a stack of blank forms available for the inevitable folks who forgot to fill one out ahead of time.

Gotcha. A good rule of thumb is that if you have to ask if there's enough contrast, the answer is probably no. Give it a few more shades darker. Your brain will be all "what are you doing? you're ruining it! OMG STOP!" Don't stop. The worst case, and highly unlikely, scenario is that you'll be the first person to ever be told by the judges that "there's too much contrast." The blending seems to be fine, from what I can see in the pictures. As long as you've got decent lighting from above and from the front to eliminate unintentional shadows, and keep the figure and camera still, that should be good enough for WIP pics. Take a look at the areas under her cheeks, the back of her neck, and the underside of her arms. From the pics you've shared, it looks like those areas could use a bit more shading. Also the areas above her eyes and below her brow. It doesn't need to be super dark, but having it a darker shade than the basecoat will help to set off the eyes once you get them painted in.

It's kind of hard to tell. Without the highlights added in, we're kind of only seeing half the picture, so to speak. Assuming a zenithal light source (since you haven't started the OSL yet), the darkest parts of her skin would most likely be under the chin and the insides of her thighs, especially towards the top. The shading there could probably be a bit darker. Looking forward to seeing how this ends up!

That dress turned out amazing. Great sculpting work - until you pointed it out, I had no idea that the figure was so extensively converted, which is surely the sign of impressive worksmanship. The tartan pattern looks well done, but there's a lot of it. Kinda to the point that it's almost distracting from the rest of the piece. Also, I think that the creature's skin could be slightly less green. I don't know that I would do anything too too drastic, because you've done a good job with the colors to focus the viewer's eye on the archer (which should be the focus), but right now, he kind of blends into the rest of the base and gets lost. Maybe a hint of purple in the shadows to set him apart? Anything else I might have had to say looks like it was covered pretty well by the judges' comments. Overall, a fantastic job, and a well-earned Silver! I can't imagine it would take much to bump something like this up to Gold next year.

To be honest, I'm kind of surprised that there weren't more projector set ups in the classes. Something like what James Wappel had set up in his spot outside the main hall would have been fantastic, and a boon to just about every class that was available.

That was what was really great about the class - Jen opened my eyes to the fact that there's so much MORE to contrast than "brighter highlights, darker shadows." I loved seeing the pictures she posted of the figure that really popped in color, but when she switched to b/w, it was almost exactly the same value across the board. The one suggestion I might offer is in regards to the graph she showed with value contrast along the Y axis and hue contrast along the X. Quite a few people in our class seemed to struggle grasping the concept of what she was trying to show, so maybe more explanation that the length of the line on the graph represents the amount of contrast you've got. Longer line = more contrast, and the line can only get so long when you limit yourself to value contrast. I probably should have said something to that effect during the class, and I feel guilty for not, but I was distracted by the urge to curl up in a fetal position with my migraine.

Just occurred to me to ask... did they give any nicknames for the other two colors?

I want to give a shout out to Jen Greenwald for her "This Class is about Contrast" class on Thursday. She had a hand out of the Powerpoint presentation she had, and it was packed to the gills with useful information. It's the one class I really, REALLY wanted to take and it did not disappoint. We ran out of time before we could get to any actual painting, but the info was so useful, I didn't care. I felt miserable the entire time, as I was rocking a migraine, and it was still far and away my favorite class of the weekend. Definitely useful for all painters across the spectrum, since it dealt pretty much entirely with theory instead of technique. I cannot recommend this class strongly enough for next year. I hope she continues it.

Ah, ok. We didn't get any nicknames. Just "grab a sample!" It behaves pretty much like any other Reaper paint, near as I can tell. Thins well, goes on smooth, nice coverage. I've used it for some deep shading and dark lining on bone, trying to apply what I learned in Jen Greenwald's excellent class on contrast. Haven't tried it for anything actually... purple, yet.

"Sample" Edit to add useful information: I played around with it last night, and it appears to be a hair darker than Imperial Purple (9023), but lighter than Nightshade Purple (9022). Hope that helps.

So now that ReaperCon is in the books and I have a chance to do so, I thought I'd try posting something more than just random questions about what to expect at my first ReaperCon. These are my MSP Open entries that brought home some hardware of some sort or another. I've got a few more that were entered but weren't judged, if anyone wants to see them. I didn't want to dump a whole bunch of photos in one post if I could help it. Post-Apocalyptic Whack-A-Mole: My entry in the Diorama category; took home a silver medal and a gold Bombshell dog tag. I've got a love/hate relationship with "Artie" from Bombshell. I absolutely ADORE the pose, and she's one of my favorite figures that Bombshell has to offer because of it, but also because of it, the poor girl has broken off at the ankle close to half a dozen times. Irrespective of what I may or may not have won at the competition, the fact that she survived the entire weekend without breaking and has made it home to the display cabinet where I will never touch it again, I take as a huge win. 14274 Clarissa the Banshee: This was the piece that was judged in the Painters category. She also took home a silver medal. I was simultaneously delighted and heartbroken to learn when I picked her up that she was one point away from a gold medal. I did her up in a monochromatic color scheme. The only colors used are Reaper's Marine Teal (9077), black, and white. Dancing Queen: Also entered in Painters. No medal (obviously), but she did win a gold dog tag from Bombshell. C&C is welcome! My first ReaperCon was a blast, and I'm already mulling about ideas for next year.

I had number 026 - SO CLOSE!! It was the little velociraptor, though, which was the one I was hoping for anyway, so I can't really complain. Looking forward to next year!