LSTR

Thanks for the tips!

I forgot to drill a hole for pinning before I painted a mini. Is it fairly safe to drill a hole into a paint job after I seal the mini? It's not a joint, I basically have to pick a spot on the painted surface to attach a scabbard. If it'll wreck the piece I'll leave it off.

This will be cool to watch. I envy the fact that you get a room, let alone a custom build. I have 1/4 of a desktop and some lamps clipped to the underside of my loft bed.

Photoshop's autocolor adjustment reads in the highest, mid and darkest colors and extrapolates the corrections from there. So if you crop out parts of the image that are brighter or darker than the highlights and shadows of the mini before you apply the autocolor, it will affect things. Whether or not this is desired depends on what you cropped out. If you want standard autcolor adjustments applied to all of your photos, place them against the same background, use the same lighting at the same distance for each photo and to the side include a card with pure black, pure white and neutral gray squares. You want this card in a spot that gets the same lighting as the mini as possible but still in a place you can crop out once the corrections have been made. Take the photo and then import into PS. Apply the autocolor process. Make sure you have the Info palette open. (you can open it from the Window menu) Put your pointer over each of the black, white and grey squares in the photo. Black should read as 0, 0, 0 in the RGB values of the Info palette. White will be 255, 255, 255 and grey will read as 128, 128, 128. If it's off you can then play with individual values either under Color Balance or Curves (I prefer curves). This can get tricky so if your values are at least close to the above numbers you should be ok. Go ahead and crop the card out of the image. You can now adjust the image size under the Image menu. Now Save for Web as a JPEG. Save for Web doesn't save a preview file with the image to minimize file size so it's better than plain old Save for our purposes. Usually a JPEG setting of 10 is the best balance between image quality and file size. That's a lot of work but if you want to get picky about adjusting colors, that's how I would do it. If you have a mini on a neutral background and the colors include a dark dark and a bright highlight and want you to do it quick and dirty, go ahead and crop first then apply autocolor. There's also the eyedroppers in levels and curves... but I can save that for another post if you want to know more. Hope that helps, let me know if you have questions.

It's kind of hard to tell but did you simulate woodgrain on the lute neck? Or perhaps that's just artifacting from JPEG compression...

Yeah you had me guessing if that was NMM or not until I read about it. Great stuff.

Beautiful work on this one. I think it's my favorite version I've seen so far.

Several shots here.

The NMM turned out great! Smooth highlights all around. Very nice mini. Hehe, greenstuff some tentacles on the mushroom and call him a familiar... a Fungal Flayer.

Yeah, that's some bold green and the highlights in the hair pop really well. You did all this at the con?

Aquatic Familiars! Also there's Pearl, the mermaid. @[email protected] look into my eyes, make a scene... @[email protected] And yay, cookie!

The skin on these is looking gorgeous. So is the hair. Are you going to make a scene with Zann and Jana? (please say yes)

I can't get over that hair... or the rest of it for that matter. That's amazing work!

That cape looks soooo soft. I hope the fates let me actually pick up a brush this week. This has me all inspired and rarin' to go. Thanks for sharing this piece.

That painter in the video I linked is a Privateer studio painter. He's using paint directly from the pot so I guess that supports the notion that thicker is better for feathering.