morganm

Finally tried the poor man's wet palette. Small, shallow tupperware with a folded up paper towel and parchment paper. So far I like it. Suits my "style" nicely. By "style" I mean.... I tend to get interrupeted often during painting =P I would always come back to dried up paint in my wells. I hate wasting money and to me that was just a waste of good paint (thus good money!) Now I can just pop the lid on, go do whatever it is that requires my attention, then come back minutes (or hours!) later and get right back to painting. Also came in handy doing my first attempt at flames / fire. I wanted to mix ahead of time the different colors for each step from yellow to orange / red. I could mix it all right there on the wet palette and then draw from the different colors as I progressed up the flames. If I had done this in paint wells I would have used 3 or 4 wells, mixed up WAY more paint than I needed (again wasting paint!), and then by the time I was up to using orange the yellow would have dried up. Which brings me to another point. It was nice having colors I used hours before still wet and usable for touch ups. In the example of the flames I had got some orange too far down on the yellow. I was able to go back to the yellow and touch up with out mixing more paint.

Between SAT and SUN I put 6 more hours into the reaper kobold party.... almost done! I'm gonna shoot for get'em done tonight. Wife works, kids at grandmas, and I just have the dog and laundry to contend with.

I was hoping you were going to advise the use of rum while painting =)

Spent a few more hours on the kobolds... almost done!

While I think a lot of the devil worshiper BS has been washed away with time you're still quickly labled a geeky nerd by most "normal" people if you admit to playing "D&D". I find most ppl are just 'too cool' to even try it; they don't want to be labled by "normal people" as a D&D nerd. Funny enough; a lot of those people are engaged in fantasy football / baseball / golf which some how isn't nerdy? I think they are a bunch of closet geeks who found a socialy acceptable fantasy game. The moment "normal people" saw them for the nerds they are they would stop =) (edit: spelling/grammar)

Goals: Finish Reaper kobold party. Find some time to actually game. So Far: 3 hours on SAT painting kobolds 2 hours on SUN painting kobolds

Lg. cube: All the cubes!

Med. cube:

Final shots of the gel-cubes! Small cube:

Spent another 3 hours on them SAT night. Mostly doing armor and weapons; this is my first stab at Non-Metalic Metals... basically because all of my metallic paints are so old and thick they are a PITA to work with and I end up getting fruastrated with the results. I have plenty of grey liner, rainy grey, and some other shades of grey all in good shape I thought I'd give it a shot =) The chainmail I'm not very happy with. It's a few washes of grey liner, a layer of raniy grey + grey liner, then pure rainy grey on top... it looks like crap if you look at the kobold with the axe. Dunno what to do about it other than start over on it. The plate has a few layers of thinned down rainy grey. I happy with how that's going but thinking I should have started with a darker color then worked my way up. I guess I'll have to work from the middle out to shadows and highlights.

Sorcerer:

Acolyte:

Archer:

Axe Murderer: Axe Murderer:

Seal Clubber:

Sweet dude! Hopefully you kept the mold and can make another? :o

LOL I love this mini!

Welcome back and glad to see you put'n some paint to minis! I know it can be a real challenge finding time to paint; especially with how kids keep you busy.

I read your post about how terrible you said you were and then I clicked on the link and thought... "he must have linked to the wrong figures because these aren't bad.". Checked again and then saw the names are the same; holy cow those are the right images. THEY AREN'T BAD! =) I think with some water based acrylic paint, quality brushes, and practice you could be a really good painter! Had the same problem with brushes; lots of ppl said "oh get some DaVinci's"... then I went to Dick Blick online and saw they had like 20 different kinds! Lots of good advice on these brushers here: http://www.reapermini.com/forum/index.php?/topic/33939-davinci-maestro-kolinsky-brushes

Few consumer level printers actually say they can print on cardstock; however many can. Look for some other key words in your printers capabilites such as Greeting Cards, Post Cards, or Business Cards. These things are typically done on a cardstock paper thus your printer would be capable of printing on it. Also look at your printers instructions on how to print those things. A lot of them rely on a manual feed tray =(

I love terrain as well. I went a different direction though and mostly use cardstock models for props and terrain. Primarily I use World Works Games products. Only have 2 hirst arts molds and they are just for props. If you want to try out some free card stock models you can check out these. WotC D&D Models http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/fpm/archive Stones Edge http://www.stones-edges.com/freesamples Fat Dragon http://www.fatdragongames.com/fdg_free.html Haunted Mansions (not the right scale! but some really neat models) http://www.webring.com/hub?ring=papermodelwebrin;id=91;prvw

You'd be surprised to see that Legos are used quite regularly in resin castings. I guess the build-ability of them is very handy. Something I want to tackle someday is resin casting. I know a lot of the Hirst Arts casters use them for building a solid and straight wall to keep their walls straight and true as they build using HA blocks.

They are the separators between the seeds of white birch catkins. If you go right now and harvest last year's catkins they are dry and crumble at your touch. The separators look a lot like dried maple leaves. It is very labor intensive to separate the "leaves" from the birch seeds (took me two hours to get enough to do the bear and possibly one other mini), but they look so much like real leaves that it is worth it. Andy Yeah they really do look just like tiny maple leaves. So was that 2 hours of leaf seperating included in your 5 hour total time ? =) Did you seal or varnish them at all to help protect them or is this a display piece that you're not worried about? I could see them getting damaged pretty easily on the game table. Unless they are far more rigid and sturdy than they look because they look fairly delecate. Thx!

Thanks! It's been an easy fun little project.

Me too; they end up splotchy and horrible looking when I tried it =(