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Sitting at home today, chatting with my brother who is in town visiting, he mentioned that his daughter would love something painted up by me for her 18th birthday. So over the last few hours I've been working on Shazirah a 54mm barbarian from Ares Mythologic. Here's the progress thus far - starting from priming black/white to where I'm at right now. It's taken me about 4 hours to get to this point. I'm hoping to finish her off in the next 2-3 hours as the skin is always what I fuss over the most!

Hello again, everyone! I've been something of a slacker lately when it comes to making an appearance on the forums, but I certainly have been painting, so I hope you'll forgive my absence! At last ReaperCon, several of the other artists were strongly urging me to finally try a larger mini than the standard 28 mm Heroic minis that (until now) comprised 100% of my collection. I responded by picking up a mini there, but, sadly, the casting of the figure was not as nice as I would have liked, and so I never mustered the nerve to get started. With this lovely miniature, however, the casting was simply wonderful, and the whole miniature was a joy to work with! Anyway, without any further ado, please meet Pyrrha (really Excelsy by Ares Mythologic/Draconia)! Thanks a bunch for looking!!!

Getting back into the swing of things, decided to take it easy by basing the fully painted yet unbased Excelsy I had lying on my Shelf of Shame(tm).

I present to everyone my first 54mm figure... DRACO THE BARBARIAN!! This was a heck of a lot more fun than I thought it would be and easier to paint than I assumed. The Figure is Draco The Barbarian from Ares Mythologic. He strode from the ruins having pillaged the ancient treasures and surveying the land before him for yet more plunder... Draco knew the time of high adventure was at hand and he couldn't wait to drive his enemies before him and hear the lamentation of their women! Thanks for looking and please leave any C&C that you'd like EDIT: NEW PICS!!! These are the new pics with the tweaks done to it for more grass, ivy, flowers, plinth and name plaque. Thanks to everyone for looking and for the C&C!!

Ok, I finished enough to not feel too bad letting her leave the desk and sit on the shelf! Whooo! This is Shennay, one of the busts from the Spanish company AresMythologic. I'm enjoying painting busts so much when I tried to go back to 54 mm this weekend I got irritated that I couldn't put all the detail in the face and eyes like I wanted! Heaven forbid a return to 25 mmm!! She's 1/12th scale resin, comes all in one piece and was fairly easy to prep so she's a friendly starter bust. For this project I decided to practice my transparent cloth, whites, freckles, red hair and TMM. I wanted to play with complementary colors, so this is done mostly in red and green. I used the red to shade the green as well. My WIP is here with some details including the colors I used. Enjoy! C&C always welcome and if I can explain anything or help out, let me know! Because of the transparent cloth effect, I've linked the naughty pics: https://www.dropbox.com/s/0k4trgyx0daer7a/shennay19.jpg?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/3752mpjqpnxzh17/shennay22.jpg?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/nvi7xiy96hxbzd9/shennay23.jpg?dl=0 Here are a few others that are safer: Sometimes she reminds me of Ce'Nedra... except, er, bustier.

Right. So since I'm set to teach of skin this year as well as "hard colors" I'm taking every opportunity to push my skills and try new things so that at least I have some good examples to share. I was just going to paint this one and be done with it, but I ran into a snag, did take a few in progress shots, so I thought I'd share my "failure" in order to use it as a learning experience. I say this because I think it's important. Everyone makes mistakes. They are all fixable. The mini does not have to be dunked in simple green and stripped. Even something that makes me cringe, I know I can salvage. It just takes patience and a bit of work. Gotta be positive! At any rate, that said, here's some learnin'! I picked this bust up because the euro took a dive over the summer and I'd been eyeing some of these minis, so I laid in a small stock. She's purty! So, progress: I fiddled for awhile trying to decide what color to use for the leather. So, color theory: Red + Green = WIN. Since I wanted a redhead, I decided some bright green was in order. I'm mixing it into the armor and the corset. These are good for contrast because they're complementary. When using complements I have to be careful not to make both of them too intense. So the reds here are desaturated to some degree- they live in the iron oxide instead of cadmium family, so hey're softer. I can get away with a brighter green in exchange. I'm trying to keep the colors value different as well. That's one of the things that trips minis up. I usually use this example: Same value = no contrast So when picking colors I'm careful to try to vary them as much as possible. If that makes sense. Next, I want a freckled redhead. Cause' reasons. Plus, need to work on my layering and how better to do that than to work on skin markings! So, I start by setting down some freckles. Notice how they look tacked on? Skin marking live in the dermal layer of the skin. Skin is bunches of slowly dying flat transparent layers over top of a bunch of other living material. The pigments live deep. The same goes for tattoos. So, it stands to reason that if I don't put some layers of my skintone over this, it won't look right. Ok- gotta actually go do my real job. I promise to get to the great mistake of doom soon!

Well it has been three weeks since I last picked up a brush though I did work on some bases, so I figured it was time to start a new WIP. This will be covering more than a few miniatures that want to get done this summer, preferably before I go on vacation in August. First up is Onufry the Ribald, a 54mm from Scibor. This guy is just for fun and I probably will enter him in a competition. I debated between doing a display base or using the one he came with. In the end I made one with some bark, a slate piece, a resin scenery dwarf head, and a resin tree trunk. I am really happy with it. Next we have one of my planned entries for ReaperCon, Dark Sword's Wood Elf Goddess that was their freebie at last year's RCon. I am hoping to paint each year's DS mini up for the following year. She is going to be based among ruins of building in the forest which is right now just the walls on some cork. There will be a tree in the corner and lots of greenery. Basically the forest reclaiming the area. Then I hope to finish my Zayna from Ares Mythologic's Draconia line. She was started last year but kept getting pushed aside. She is also destined for RCon. Another fun one I hope to work on is Reaper's Blightfang which I am doing as a purple/blue dragon. I have just started the base which will be a forest pond. Lastly we have Kabuki's The Hunter. Not much planned for her yet except I plan on keeping it simple. Her legs are so thin I did not want risk removing the base piece that she is on so I evened out part of a Secret Weapon base and now she will be standing on a rook in the swamp. I know not much has been done yet but any input would be appreciated.

Opening up a thread for this big bad barbarian. I started on him last night, but forgot to take pics some WIP pics. Firstly, I coated all the skin in black primer and then used white primer to pull out the details and pre-highlight. Next I took Reaper HD Stained Olive and coated all of his skin in it, then took Reaper HD Ruddy Brown and coated over that. These are the pics I forgot to take, but I'll snap them when I get home tonight and add to this thread as I go along. ETA: I almost forgot, I also did his eyes already and then used brown liner to darken some spots, line where the skin meets leather, and give him a more brooding look.

I feel a bit bad saying this, but since the Euro dropped in comparison to USD, I finally felt that it was worth it to splurge a bit on a mini I've always had my eyes on for a while: The casting is absolutely amazing; no mold lines to speak of, square slots fit like a dream. Only gap I see is in the two parts of the cape; I'll need to fill that before doing much else. Only boo-boo was the sword crossguard was snapped off... but I hate bits that fiddly anyways, and I was on the fence about adding it in. Dilemma solved. Assembled into all the major sections for now, need to think about what color the armor is going to be...