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I had planned to take some time off from painting to start testing a new game system I want to introduce at my local shop. My intention was to take a couple weeks to really stress test and learn the system before attempting to teach it. That didn't exactly happen as now a month later I haven't touched a paint brush or a single die. Between myself and the family getting sick plus all the spring work I've spent what little free time I have in the evenings watching movies or mindless television. While setting up my game testing table however I came across some terrain that really needed some attention. It seems my old foam rocks have seen better days. Knowing that "fixing" them wouldn't take long I grabbed them and added them to my desk where they sat for a month. So tonight I figured they would make for an easy project to get back into the groove. Grabbing a brush I got straight to work and really enjoyed a nice evening of painting. Having acquired these second hand however I had to use my best guess when it came to color matching. As you can see on the two dry pieces I did not get the color right. Up close this is very noticeable but at tabletop it is not that bad, so I'm counting it as a win, besides it still looks much better than exposed blue or pink foam.

Here is the Arcane Circle, Reaper Bones #77988. I used white ink with sorcerous mist and glacial mist on the runes and the carved inner circle. I don't think it's a good idea to cast a spell when there are cracks in the circle, though.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mojibakeminiatures/pick-a-prop-vol2-naturalia-compendium Similar to the Fantastik Plant & Rock Scatter KS from PrintYourMonster, this KS offers lots of plants and rocks. They have a 20€ EB for 240 files.

Alright, so the moss came in and did brighten her up. Now she has happy autumn instead of dark autumn. The lights were getting dim but I had to take some photos anyway! I might update them another time. The colors chosen are based off real colors in actual peacocks, even the spotted sash (upper wing near shoulder) and yellow cloak (legs) and the hair (more wing colors). The tall grass is made of real peacock feathers that I snipped and glued together. I wanted her to be going between some fantastic brush on a rocky hillside. One of the feather pieces got stuck under her arm for photos... and by the time I noticed my sunlight was gone. The flowers are from I think Floranatur? Something like that. The rock is first painted as a gneiss, then drizzled in schist dust, with actual garnets glued in as cobbles, then they got mossed a bit. Not too shabby for first real basing batch? I intend to do a "how to peacock feathers" when 1) I get the energy to do another cloak in peacock feathers, 2) empty out my wet palette, and 3) pick a figure for it. I'll also be taking @Clever Crow's advice and increasing the contrast per feather next time. Enough blather - you all just want pictures!

This is the Bones Dire Bear Sku 77494. I painted him for my Horde of the North project WIP: http://forum.reapermini.com/index.php?/topic/79398-horde-of-the-north-glitterwolf-paints-barbarians-and-mammoths/

So I finished my D20 Rainbow Dragon Challenge as given by @Cyradis, @Sirithiliel and @Pezler the Polychromatic. Challenge is here for those who want to join. http://forum.reapermini.com/index.php?/topic/76666-the-seers-and-a-wizard-present-a-random-rainbow-dragon-challenge/ My WIP http://forum.reapermini.com/index.php?/topic/76689-glitterwolf-has-accepted-the-d20-rainbow-dragon-quest/ And finally my Dragon! I choose Ebonwrath and made him a Fairy Dragon with Butterfly wings. He just landed near a wild river to smell the flowers..

Because @Beagle and I derailed multiple threads into rocks, with help from the chemist @NebulousMissy... Here, ask me about rocks. Or life. Or cheese. Or hats. Maybe about bees, or flying, or any random thing. Beagle, please interject for your Dark Side knowledge (petroleum stuff is the Dark Side). I don't know diddlysquat about the Dark Side, except for some basic field geophysics for remote sensing. @NebulousMissy gets chemist-stuff. Cool cool? Shall we let the randomness become random again?

About twenty years or so ago a game came out that I fell in love with, a game that touched my inner Ork and spoke to me in a nice simple language that I could easily understand. A game of Orks and vehicles, white knuckle speed and vicious combat, mutants and huge explosions all set in an arid desert wasteland. What's not to love, right!?!? That game is GORKAMORKA! Anyway, my son, who is younger than the game by a few months, recently watched a few videos of the game on the mwg youtube channel and decided "Hey Dad, we should play a Gorkamorka campaign." "We have no terrain or vehicles for the game anymore." I said calmly, trying to hide my interest and excitement thinking this would just make the subject go away because even though I love the game, this immediately raised a red flag of me building a ton of terrain and vehicles while everyone else just got to play in the end. "We would literally have to build everything we needed. So unless you are going to help with every single step along the way, its not happening." I figured that would be the end of it because he is not a big fan of the building process, just the playing process. There was a VERY brief moment of silence and then, "Okay....what would we have to do?" We sat down that night with the books, looked at game pics and desert pics on the web, watched some of the videos on youtube from the mwg guys and made a list of scenery that we would need to play the game. Flash forward about two weeks to two days ago when we find ourselves in one of the local home improvement stores and end up coming home with most of what we need as far as the main supplies go. Two 2' x 4' x 1/4" sheets of mdf and one 4' x 8' x 1" sheet of insulation foam. That night we laid out the rough ideas we had for the two cliff faces, this took quite a while actually as I kept going back and forth between depth of protrusion onto the board and playability. I wanted them to not take up too much room but still have enough space on top to maneuver small and medium vehicles while larger ones may only be able to go in a straight line. Each cliff also needed a single ramp for vehicle access. The following day we sketched out the bases for the rest of the larger terrain pieces. I had to remind him that we didn't want to waste the material so we needed to cram as much as we can onto each board. Today we were both off so we decided to spend it working on terrain. First thing we needed to do was to cut out all the bases. An extra piece of mdf from an old project was also turned into a dune. Next we laid out all the bases onto the foam and traced all the shapes, making sure we had enough space to get everything on took some rearranging but we managed it. By a very huge bit of dumb luck when I scored the sheet of foam and broke it in two, so we could get it in the van and home, I made one piece slightly larger than the other. While at the time I was a little bit upset at myself for not bringing a tape measure, this ended up working perfectly. I am not sure had it ended up in exactly half that we would have been able to get everything on the two sheets half sheets. We then cut out all the foam shapes and laid them out onto their respective bases to see what we ended up with. And the extra dune. The space shown is a 4' x 4' chunk of the game table, I think we did pretty good on not wasting the mdf. The bases without foam are not getting a full level, just a small ring around the edge and will represent the tar pits, mine and chem pool. The dunes were all attached to their bases with liquid nails, weighed down and left to dry for the night. That's where we are now, not too bad for one day really. We both had fun and he is already talking about getting a trukk and chopping it up to make it into a lower riding trukk to run over my grots...because I guess that is what I am playing again...probably, I like the little underdogs.

As I tend to do, I had a side basing project today for our Paint Day here in the Finger Lakes of New York. So I present the ... Mountain Base w/ Marble Boulder. The pieces are obviously, Bark (from Home Depot Mosser Lee garden bag), Marble stone (from Lowes, loose in the parking lot), Play Sand, and Super Glue. All of that is mounted on a 3.75-inch Square Trivet from the dollar store. The bark and sand has Reaper Brush-on Sealer on it to allow a good surface for painting. Once the sealer dry, I primed it with Reaper Grey Primer and then washed it with Reaper Coal Black. From there, I coated the sand that I could see with the Reaper Sparkling Snow. Finally, I started working on my finished rock colors. I went with Reaper Redstone Shadow, Reaper Turkey Brown, and Reaper Tanned Shadow as a highlight color. Amusingly, this brought it back towards the original bark colors. If you hadn't guessed it, I am leaving the marble piece alone for the moment. I do expect to coat it with DullCote later which should dull the sheen making the boulder fit in with the scale a bit more. Enjoy and Stay Tuned!

So I made this out of Crayola Air-Dry clay using the usual methods. The stony texture was applied with a rock. Because fractals. I'm fairly happy with this recipe for sandstone - raw umber basecoat, beige drybrush, orangey-brown (Folkart "Moccasin brown") glaze. I'd like to do a taller one, so that the cave troll isn't looking over the top like Kilroy. Giant Tiger Beetles. Because entomology is the realm of monsters. Cicindela pulchra pulchra (the Beautiful Tiger Beetle) for the color scheme.

Hey! We're finally done! Here's 4 different views, and please, let me know how I can improve on this. I'm still having camera issues though. This is a combination of an Ott light, an overhead dinner table light, plus a 100W reveal bulb. They're obviously at very different temperatures, but hopefully I'll be able to rectify that soon. At any rate, enjoy! P.S.: I'll probably add my standard "only under ott light" pic just so followers of the WIP can see her like normal. The WIP for this figure can be found here: http://forum.reapermini.com/index.php?/topic/53668-jazzys-garden-and-bladesinger-sister/

One of the biggest mistakes painters make when learning basing is thinking that rocks are gray scale, meaning mostly just a few shades of gray and nothing else, and while it's true that some rocks are like this they're not as common as people seem to think in our hobby (and let’s be honest, its boring to look at too). Hey you, the one without any color, you're boring. Why is this? I'm guessing people just never look at rocks or think it's too hard to do anything else. This is quite far from the truth as painting up rocks can be really easy if you’re willing to break some standard painting conventions. In this tutorial I'm going to cover some basic basing techniques including using real rocks and how to quickly sculpt some when using real rocks won’t give you the look you want as well as painting two different rock color schemes: desaturated (basically its sort of gray but has color) and something a little more complicated. Using Real Rocks This one is pretty obvious but I’m surprised with the number of people that actually pay for rocks, we’ve all seen them at hobby\game stores and why pay for something that you can get for free? I went outside and over the course of two days just collected random rocks from the street gutter and have more then I’ll ever use. I kept a small bag, like the ones sold in the jeweler section of hobby stores, in my wallet and just stopped and filled it up when I say something I wanted. I'm a master at picking up homeless things One note is that more porous rocks are harder to work with when it comes to the prep aspect, as they don’t glue or take primer as well, but are easy to dry-brush so there’s a trade off. Keep a mix if you can but pick up what you like as that’s what’s really important. Quick Sculpting Rocks So what if you need something like paving stones? Well you can quickly do this way faster than you’d expect thanks to some help from Mother Nature. You're Welome The first thing we’re going to need is some rocks. What? You may be saying to yourself “this man is crazy (but really good looking so I’ll listen to him some more)” which is a common reaction I get. One of the best ways to make something you sculpted look like a rock is to use one to texture it so we can quickly and easily get the random surface that a rock gives you. You’ll want to get a collection of rocks with more jagged edges, smooth edges and any other type of edge out there. These will be only used for sculpting and will get messy if you’re using anything but Green Stuff (or similar epoxy) so have a good place to store them. The two I'll be using In this tutorial I’ll be using a clay like epoxy called Milliput, though Green Stuff will work as well, as I like how easy it can be to work with and takes to texturing with real rocks (especially when wet). There are two type of Milliput White and everything else. The white one is an extra fine and not needed, all the other colors are the same just with different coloring with the most common type being yellow. A note on working with Milliput: This stuff does not come out of things when dry so it’s highly advised to use an apron or clothing you don’t care about as it can get really messy if you get it wet—which I like to do. Also wearing rubber gloves will make your hands happy. I start out with mixing up some Milliput and then putting it right to work—there’s no need to really wait like with Green Stuff—in building up my rocks. This base is one I’m going to be using with water so it’s recessed (see my Ice base or water base tutorials). I’ve make one bolder on the left and then pavers all the way to the right. I get the Milliput wet and smooth it out (really easy with rubber gloves as there’s no worry with finger prints). I then take my texture rocks and get them wet—this way you don’t have to worry about whatever you’re working with sticking to them—and then start pressing. There are no real rules on how to do this as every rock is different and so are people’s tastes. Just take some time and find what you like. Once that’s done I’m going to sculpt in the paver’s edges and touch up edges with my rocks again. This step and the previous one really can be done in any order but I find touching up the textures to be easier then the lines (as all that pressing is going to cause some to disappear). Now we set aside our base for the Milliput to dry (it takes as long as Green Stuff so doing this before bed or work is ideal). Prepping the base Now that everything is dry I’m going to add a real rock to the base as there’s no real reason to sculpt a free standing rock like this unless you can’t find something you like. Plus this will let you compare my quick sculpted boulder to a real one. Now I’m going to prime them white. The reason for the white is I’m going to show you how to add some quartz to your rocks so the white base coat will work perfectly for this. If you have another type of mineral you want to add, like a metal, feel free to paint some spots of those colors in now (though it’s probably not best to do it 100% that color unless you want a lot of it showing through). That's it for part one. Part two will cover painting.