DixonGrfx

Fantastic! Although I am looking forward to the con, sitting around for an hour prior to registration sounds less than optimal. Thanks Inarah!

So what time does check-in open? The site doesn't seem to list the hours anywhere...

It's been months since I picked up a brush. My kid is about to start a new campaign and needs some figures painted sooooo... I needed to warm-up and found this conversion fig in my rummage box. He made me think, "Ahh, Hiratio, I knew him well."

Thanks Nomad. Didn't realize that. I haven't been following all the buzz like I have in the past. The new address is the building next door and so still in the US.

Well crap.... I have been out of pocket... aaaaand my shipping address was out of date. ***(facepalm)*** And I'm Wave 1 so although I corrected my shipping address I'm sure it already went out.... Guess I'll need to follow up with Reaper when the dust settles. I didn't remember that my shipping address was here at the office and the office moved last year.....

Almost all surfaces have blocked in color. Some of it is undercoating for metal paint. I think that's what I'll paint next. The metal paint block ins.

No. That he was a reapercon class figure. Two brush blending with Matt D. Then the metals are Scale 75 Metal Alchemy paints.

Won this guy at the kickatarter conclusion party. Started painting him and is fun, but challenging.

Won this guy at the kickatarter conclusion party. Started painting him and is fun, but challenging.

I have picked up the whole line of BONES paints excluding the metals. I haven't had occasion yet to use every single one of them yet. So far, the only one I haven't gotten the coverage I expected was 9430 Polished Leather. The color was good tho. They are my primary go-to paint set now though. I still find myself grabbing the Liners, Clears, Flow Improver, and Nightmare Black quite allot.

Ahh.... I had the visibility of most of the paint lines turned off. I vaguely remember doing that when I first bought the app and the only paints I had at the time was Reaper. In the intervening time from then to now CO has added more paint lines that I had not manually turned off the visibility. Thus my confusion. Adjusting the settings resolved my issue.

It would be nice to have the Scale 75 paint lines added. Right now the line isn't huge like the Reaper MSP range. So it's not difficult to manage. But it would still be nice to add my collection of Scale 75 paints to the app.

It's not retail release yet. I got mine in the Bones 3 KS rewards.

I had allot of fun with the color palette inspired by Chinese Golden Dragon.

We did do some brush work on the bandanna to blend some of the gradients. But not very long. We moved on to work on her bodice. The black leather parts were our next focus. Interestingly enough, we used inks to give the leather a satin finish and with the black ink we mixed in violet ink. It looks fantastic. And the last thing we had time to work on in class was the brocade. We used a blend of paint (from the Fantasy & Games line) and metal paints. The workshops were amazing. If you ever get the opportunity to attend a Julio Cabos workshop I highly recommend it.

Airbrushing the bandanna: 1. Using the mid-tone color we airbrushed the figure aiming from the bottom towards the top. 2. Using the highlight color we airbrushed from the top down. 3 Using the Shadow color we again airbrushed from the bottom up. I did not take pics after each application. Just after the airbrushing was done. Then the masking came off.

Once we had the face done, we next worked on the bandanna. This we were going to return to the airbrush. So I removed the masking from the bandanna. We began to paint the bodice. There is some detail in relief on the figure. But it is very subtle. In order to retain enough detail to see we had to paint the color in thin glazes. I did not take photos... We used poster tack to cover the work we did on the face and skin. Then wrapped the figure in cellophane (or cling wrap) to protect the rest of the figure.

After working the eyes, we started on her makeup, blending some of her flesh. this bust does not have sculpted eyebrows so we painted them on. Her lips also have a pretty soft edge that isn't strongly defined. We painted the outline of her lips then filled the remaining volume.

Try this process. 1. Load the paint on your brush 2. Wick away excess water on the towel 3. Paint a quick stripe on your thumb to test how the paint flows off. 4. Evaluate that test application before you move on to the figure. 5. If it flows well and you get the coverage you were hoping for on your thumb, paint your figure. 6. If not, make a judgment call as to what needs adjusting. Paint too thin? Not thick enough? Right consistancy, but brush belly swollen with water? Return to step one making adjustments as needed. If you watch any of the professional painters, you'll see some variant of this process EVERY TIME they put paint to a figure. The pro's get familiar with the properties of their paints. And they test before they apply paint.

Before we started brushwork on the skin we painted in her eyes. Here Julio talked about paint consistency, brush selection, and precision brush control. His method for painting eyes is more elaborate than I was accustomed to, but I think part of that is due to the scale of the figure. We only painted the eyeball, we didn't even darkline. I ran into trouble with her right eye as there was some trash on the surface. So it wasn't a very clean application of paint there. I was able to make it look decent.

Last week I was privileged to attend the Julio Cabos 4 day workshop. We spent 2 days on a historical figure and 2 days on a fantasy bust. I thoroughly enjoyed myself in the company of like minded enthusiasts and a very generous instructor. This is the second time I have taken this workshop with Julio and it was just as amazing this time as last. Now on to the good stuff. I'll start by saying that Julio geared the class to put us out of the mindset of painting this figure for competition. He wanted us to feel free to fail and try new things, to push ourselves far outside our comfort zone. He had phrased that we should view our figure as a sketchbook. To that end, the figure was prepared, but not meticulously. There were a few mold lines and a bit of flash here and there. The parts of the figure had been glued to short thin dowels to use as handles. They used Tamiya grey primer to prepare the surface. Choosing grey was problematic. Mainly because the figure resin is grey and it was near impossible to visually verify that the surfaces had been primed as the primer and the figure were pretty much exactly the same color. So I am not entirely certain that all the parts, or even all the figures had been primed before we began. Julio discussed picking out colors and encouraged us to line up the colors we plan to use on a figure. Then on a blank white sheet of paper, paint swatches of the colors to verify that they will look good together before starting on the figure. After that we jumped in. We started with the skin and the mid-tone color. Using an airbrush, we sprayed the mid-tone aiming from the bottom of the figure towards the top. Here we were careful to avoid a solid base coat. This proved to be very difficult for everyone. We were all experiencing poor coverage as the paint was beading up and running. This was either due to the primer being hydophobic or that the surfaces did not get enough or any primer. In order to get the paint to cover we had to hold the airbrush back farther from the figure and dust the surface very lightly and then use the airbrush to "blow-dry" the paint. It took some doing and took longer than anyone anticipated. After a bit everyone had worked through getting the first color down. We then applied the skin highlight color aiming from the top down. Lastly, we added the skin shadow color, again aiming from the bottom towards the top. Julio had us mask off the bandanna because we would be painting it yellow later.

It seems to me that there will always be some grumbling after any auction after every show because there are a limited number of prizes to auction and not enough for everyone to win something. There isn't really anything you can do about that. The raffle helps allot because it drains the pool of bucks to spend at the auction. Any other way to spend Reaper Bucks would help even the odds during the auction, possibly help those in the less than 1500 buck range.

That would be James Wappel's Shaded Base Coats class. You wet blend several colors on the figure as your base coat where you try to block in your shadows and highlights.

I try to catch a Wapple class every year. He is a mad genius pushing the norms of figure painting. And the shaded base coats class is a game changer.

All the more reason to keep coming back! Getting to know everyone is a multi con project. Even so, I doubt meeting all the forum folks is a reasonable goal.