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So depending on how much you pay attention to memes, you may be aware of one very popular one called "Somebody toucha my spaghet!" I couldn't tell you why that's what popped into my head back in October when @ladystorm first posted about her contest, but I tend to just accept that my brain comes up with really dumb ideas and just have fun with it. So, I present to you: Somebody toucha my spaghyeti! I had a TON of fun painting this guy! The kid (who toucha his spaghyeti) came from 03233: Townsfolk X: Children, sculpted by Bobby Jackson. I modified the stick in his hand into a fork with greenstuff. The yeti, of course, is 77434: Yeti Chieftan, sculpted by Jason Wiebe. I sculpted the bowl of spaghetti with Sculpey. I hope y'all like him!

I finished up this lovely lady last night. She was wonderfully sculpted by Bob Ridolfi. I really enjoyed the details on her and she was a lot of fun to paint. I always mean to paint a Halloween figure before Halloween but am usually too busy to actually manage it. I got this figure while at Reapercon though and decided it was meant to be, so I put aside a couple of other things to make time for her. I had a lot of technical issues with her due to my clumsiness - I dropped her THREE times which resulted in extensive repair work and having to reattach her to the pumpkin each time. There’s no indentation or any other indication for how she’s meant to be attached to the pumpkin and assembly is not my strong suit so I struggled a bit with that part. The way I have her attached leaves her foot hanging past the base by a good bit so I’ll need to build the base up on a little bit of cork, but she looked the most correct to me this way. (She is currently still sitting on top of foam tape and the craft paint bottle that I used as a holder, I just painted them black for pictures.) I was asked over on facebook how I painted the wings, so I’ll copy that info over here as well: I basecoated with MSP Black Indigo. (That’s one of this year’s Reapercon swag bag paints. I think Nightmare Black would probably be fine to use in its place.) Then I layered up using paints from Nocturna’s Imperial Purple Set. They’re Vallejo paints made for Nocturna and I highly recommend both that set and the Crimson Red set. Both sets come with little painting guides and the purple one walks you through how to do both cold purples and warm purples. I went in the warm purple direction starting from the darkest colours and layering up to the lightest. So Imperial Purple > Purple Hex > Amethyst > Witch Purple > Lipstick. Then I glazed over everything with MSP Gothic Crimson which was also a LE Reapercon paint, I think from the 2016 swag bag. (I can’t think of a replacement for that off of the top of my head but it’s a wine-maroon colour.) Then in the areas that I wanted to darken, like the transitions going back into the shadows and the backs of the wings, I glazed with the Black Indigo.

I have a very large collection of Kingdom Death models. I think they're absolutely gorgeous and they are generally in an art style that I adore. Unfortunately, though I've continued buying them, I have not painted a single one. It's been a combination of fear of assembling them (they're notoriously fiddly - this model was in 8 pieces) and a fear of painting them because they're such beautiful figures and they're expensive as well, so there's added pressure tacked onto messing them up. So I decided that it was time to face my fears and get one painted. Since this particular figure is one that I have accidentally purchased 3 times (if you've never bought figures from the Kingdom Death shop before - they are put out in small batches that often sell out within minutes, so to get everything that you want, it's unfortunately very easy to accidentally re-purchase things you've gotten before because you don't have time to check) I figured it wouldn't be the end of the world if I messed her up. I've been working on her for a few days now. First of all, it took me 3 evenings to get her prepped and assembled. The first night, I clipped her from the sprue and worked on cleaning up mold lines (which I didn't do a fantastic job of and is really something that I have got to work on improving) the second night, I had to make a store run to buy plastic cement. This was my first hard plastic figure and I have heard countless times that it's best to use the plastic cement for them rather than superglue, but I didn't have any. Unfortunately, assembly didn't go well and I quit halfway through out of frustration. I thought that the difference between the Testors red label tube plastic cement and the Testors red label square bottle with the applicator was just that one had an applicator and one did not. Turns out the square bottle is liquid and the tube one is gel and the gel one sets up faster and was therefore easier for me to use. So I was able to finish assembly on the third night. Unfortunately, I had melted the plastic in some places and left gaps, so I had to do some repair work with some Bondic. If you're not familiar with Bondic, it is a liquid plastic in a tube that cures with a little UV light. It's great for quick and dirty gap filling. It probably wasn't the best thing for this particular application, if I'm being honest, because all it does is gap fill flat without any sort of texture buildup. I probably should have used some greenstuff, but I hate messing with greenstuff. So there are problem spots on her where there's some weird texture and it kinda just is what it is at this point and I'm ok with that. The following 2 nights were spent "priming" her with Brown Liner (spray primer is not an option for me and brush on primer was not sticking to her) and then I started in on her skin, painted her eyes (they are TINY and also half closed,) her tongue and her hair. The skin still needs some touch up here and there but this is the absolute happiest I have ever been with a skintone I've painted. It was a lot of very, very sloooooow layering working back and forth between shades with paint that was thinned nearly to a glaze consistency and then smoothed over with a glaze of the midtone. Her skin is varying mixes between MSP Chestnut Brown, MSP Golden Shadow, MSP Golden Skin, and working all the way up to MSP Golden Highlight. The pictures are washing out the highlights a bit. Her eyes were done with Warcolours One Coat Beige, Warcolours One Coat Blue, and Warcolours One Coat Black. Her tongue was a basecoat of MSP Rusty Red, then some MSP Blush Pink added in, then some Golden Skin mixed in for the highlight. Her hair was a basecoat of Warcolours Turquoise 3, then shaded with Warcolours Marine 4, then highlighted with Warcolours Turquoise 2, MSP Spectral Glow, and a final touch of MSP Spectral Glow with a bit of MSP Ghost White mixed in.

Hi, friends! In continuing with our plan to catch up with painting the Dungeon Dwellers as a joint WIP together as they come out, can I interest you in some Baran Blacktree? Buglips and I will be painting him in our usual fashion, but if you haven't already, make sure that you check out Rhonda Bender's awesome PDF painting guide for him here: Dungeon Dwellers Y'all probably know by now how these go, but if not, check out our Thanis the Bonecaller thread where it all began and that'll give you links to all of the other joint WIP threads we've done.

Hi friends! We have another project to share with you in our continuing series where Buglips and I paint the same figure using our own very different from each other approaches to miniature painting. If you're not familiar with this series, you can check out our previous topics: 03100: Thanis the Bonecaller 01614: Con Crud 2017 Convention Zombie 02818: Bugbear Warrior For this project, we decided to paint Scorpius Rex Dracus, which is an older figure in the back catalog of Reaper - just look at the number! 02017! He's one of the OG's of the Reaper catalog! Our usual method for picking a figure is generally that one of us already owns it and suggests it and then the other of us goes and orders it. However, for Scorpius Rex Dracus, we actually both already owned him because he's a really neat figure with a lot of personality. I know a lot of people are a bit intimidated by the thought of painting dragons, but I promise they're a lot of fun and this guy would actually be a great starter dragon, as he's on the smaller side. I didn't have a Sir Forscale, but here he is next to Queen Illeosa of Korvosa to give you an idea of his size. So you can see, he's a far less intimidating size than the dragons you see in Bones. (Spoiler alert, I'm going to assemble him a little later. ) But for now, here he is straight out of the blister: As we've done with our previous WIP posts, I will be tackling this guy with my method of painting for display and I'll do my best to take y'all through all of the steps that I go through from start to finish and share my thoughts with you as I go along. As always, please feel free to comment or ask questions - I'm always glad to help out in whatever way I can along the way. I'll try not to take too many blurry pictures....but no promises.

So I finished this guy up. I kinda abandoned my WIP for it because I had to put it on hold for a long while and then when I returned to it I realized that I was approaching it all wrong for the sculpt. This sculpt really suits drybrushing rather than layering, so that’s how I attacked it instead. That’s not my preferred method of painting, but sometimes you have to give up your preferences and go with what works instead. My rolled colours were: Main Colour: True Blue (I subbed in Dragon Blue) Second Colour: Brilliant Green Third Colour: Marine Teal I did the 3 Star Challenge, so the only other colours I used were Pure White and Pure Black. I was just messing around with the base....I probably could’ve made a more serious attempt at painting marble, but I honestly just wanted to get it done and move on to the next thing. I hope y’all like it anyway!

Hello fine people (and other assorted things) of the Reaper forum! Continuing in our project of teaming up to show you two different methods to go about painting the same miniature, Buglips and I decided that we would do a WIP thread for Con Crud, Convention Zombie from the 2017 Reapercon swag bag! He's a great little figure, sculpted by Gene Van Horne, that we thought we could have some fun with. This will be our second shared WIP thread in this series of ours, in case you missed it, check out our first one where we painted Thanis the Bonecaller: As with that one, I will be covering my usual method of painting for display, and Buglips will be approaching the figure with his own usual "fast-but-decent method." As with the last one, Buglips' method will be much faster than mine will be and you'll get to see where our two styles diverge. We will be sharing our own issues, thoughts and methods with you in the hopes that someone will find such things useful. So on to the mini! Here's my Con Crud, fresh out of his blister: I prepped him in my usual way, with some diamond files to grind off the mold lines and bit of flash that you can see on his outstretched foot and hand. He has some notable mold lines through his hair and back and down the left (his left) side of his face. I'll show you throughout the process how I'll tackle those. So here he is after I primed him with Reaper's Brush-On Primer in white, thinned down with some water. As usual, I only did one thin coat so as not to obscure the details on him and I took a couple of additional shots from different angles so you can see some of the mold lines that I'll need to work on a little more down the road.

So this guy was a relatively quick paint job - I worked on him over a couple of nights in between other figures and while things were drying. I had originally basecoated him a couple of months back when I decided that I was absolutely going to paint something using Breast Cancer Awareness Pink, as I have something like 8 bottles of it at this point. This was the figure that I pulled out of my Bones drawer. I’d basecoated him and then he made his way to the Shelf of Shame unfortunately. I saw him sitting up there and decided I would just have fun with it. The lemures do come 2 to the pack and are in 2 different poses, but this one is the only one I have painted thus far. I hope y’all find him as fun as I do!

This little lady has been kicking around my desk for a while. She’s a really fun little figure and I’d been putting paint on her here and there and I finished her up tonight.

I painted this lovely lady over the last week as my first project post-Reapercon. I wanted to apply some of the things that I learned but also have fun with her. She was a really great learning experience, thanks to everyone who gave me great feedback in my WIP thread: http://forum.reapermini.com/index.php?/topic/77557-01450-all-hallow’s-eve/&page=1 This was my first experience “flying blind” with NMM, as on previous attempts, I’d followed the highlighting of other painters’ examples. There is no painted example in the store yet, so I had to just wing it. @Kuro Cleanbrush gave me some much appreciated advice that I’m definitely going to keep using moving forward. This was was my first attempt at OSL, it’s not perfect by any means, but I’m pretty pleased with it. Let me know what y’all think, criticism is always very much wanted - it helps me learn and improve!

So between the Swag/VIP bags, paints that I bought at the convention and raiding the $1 paint bin at the Reaper Factory, I came back from Reapercon with around 40 bottles of paint. So the first hobby related thing I did after returning was to reorganize my paint racks, especially since they were a ridiculous wreck because I’d torn them apart while repainting Ma’al Drakar and then even more packing up paints to bring with me to Reapercon (which was pointless since I only painted in classes lol) While doing so, I discovered that I also hadn’t sorted and put away my Malefic and Fairy Flesh Sets, which are Vallejo paints branded for Nocturna. I felt really inspired looking at those paints and that’s how I got going on painting this little lady. Something that I’m really prone to doing is making what I’m painting really laborious and it takes so long that I get sick of painting it and it either ends up on the Shelf of Shame or I slog through it and end up unhappy with the results and/or end up taking a long break from painting. I don’t want to do that to myself anymore. So what’s the least exciting part of painting? For me, it’s laying down basecoats. It’s boring, it takes forever, and so more figures than I’d like to admit have gone on the Shelf of Shame during the basecoating process because it just took too long and I didn’t feel inspired anymore. So something that I’ve seen done a lot by painters who are far better than I is to paint sections to completion or at least near completion before moving on to the next part. That seemed beyond my capability because I thought I’d be too messy and ruin a completed part with a sloppy basecoat or just a slip of the brush. Then I realized, first of all, don’t be so sloppy then, dummy. lol Then I also realized, it’s just paint, it’s ok if you make a mistake that you have to fix. I try very hard not to be a fearful painter because I see people being fearful and it cripples progress constantly. You get stuck because you’re afraid you’re not going to use the right colour or the right technique or whatever and you end up not painting because of it. So I told myself “It’s just paint, if I make a mistake, I’ll just fix it.” Let me tell you, letting go of that fear has made painting this so much more enjoyable and I have made more progress on her in one day than I normally would have done in a week. Elf being a fearful painter. Sure there are mistakes and some of the blending isn’t 100% where I’d like it to be. But my good friend Skeletor knows already and I need to remember “Progress, not perfection.” So here’s where she’s at right now: So, as usual, my lighting situation and my picture taking are terrible, so things are getting a little blown out colour-wise. Her skin is a little less grey than that in person, but it is meant to be a non-human skintone. Now Im going to try to remember what paints I used. Bear with me because I was just mixing things and not worrying about it. Skin: All paints were from the Vallejo Nocturna Malefic Flesh Set and I was following their “Blue Tones” instructions. Basecoat was Cold Flesh, first highlights with Pale Flesh, shadows with Frozen Flesh and then final highlights with White Flesh. I went back and forth a bunch of times doing half step mixes to blend. Eyes: Good lord. These eyes weren’t easy. Her right one is 25% covered by her hair and her left one is like 65% covered by her hair and that made it pretty difficult to do much detail. After doing the skin basecoat, I blocked in the eyes with Brown Liner, then filled in with Warcolours One Coat Beige, then I did the iris with MSP Lava Orange, Pure Black for the pupil and then only on the right one I used P3 Morrow White to put a tiny reflection dot. Lips: MSP Fresh Blood mixed with I think a touch of the base skin colour and then probably a bit more of the base colour to make a lighter mix to make a highlight on the bottom lip. Dress - Purple: Basecoat of Nocturna Purple Shadow. Deepest shadows were MSP Red Liner, I also did mixes of the Purple Shadow and Red Liner to blend. Then to highlight I did mixes of the Purple Shadow with MSP Retro Elderberry (one of the new LE paints from Reapercon) and the highest highlights had MSP Spectral White added in, but I did glaze that back with Purple Shadow. Dress - Green: Basecoat of Nocturna Deep Forest Skin. Deepest shadows were MSP Blue Liner, with mixes with the base coat to blend. Then I did mixes with MSP Brilliant Green and eventually added very small touches of MSP Ghost White. Chainmail: Tiny, tiny chain mail dots. I had to take my glasses off like I was painting eyes for this. lol I started off with a basecoat of MSP Nightmare Black (all of the blue you see on her right now is Nightmare Black and will be silver NMM like the chainmail) then I used MSP Afterburn Grey (OOP Heavy Gear) mixed with a touch of Pure Black, then straight Afterburn Grey and then straight P3 Morrow White. Lastly I just have some of what’s going to be gold NMM basecoated with MSP NMM Gold Shadow. So what do y’all think? I’m not bothered by hard critique and always welcome constructive comments, so really let me know what you think.

No, I'm not neutering a 5 headed dragon, I'm fixing the sloppiness that occurred on Ma'al Drakar due to the time crunch during my 7 day challenge. First things first: Those aren't spots I missed, those are spots that I just spent the last few hours scraping with an x-acto to remove the mold lines that I'd missed. Yes, it was absolutely as heartbreaking to do as you think it was. I thought someone might find some use in seeing how I'm going about reworking things in my attempt to bring this beastie to Reapercon. So the destruction's done, next step, patching things up and continuing working on the mold lines I couldn't scrape off.

So I started working on this guy back in March, he was just basecoated with the pattern established (which was based on Rhonda Bender's beautiful example.) This afternoon I decided to pull him off of the Shelf of Shame and finish him up. I should've gone a size up on the base. And as usual, my pictures are terrible but I'm tired. C&C always very welcome.

So here's the thread for the rules: I picked Stormwing. And here were my rolls: I will also be attempting the 3 Star Challenge version, so I will have my colour palette limited to my 3 rolled paints, plus black and white. I did a quick once over of the mold lines and then glued most of him together and threw some green stuff into the gaps. You're also allowed to prime with Brown Liner, so I'll be doing that next. There's no time limit and I can use any size brush I like, which will be a refreshing change for me.

So just a little thing that I finished on Monday. WIP thread is here if you missed it: http://forum.reapermini.com/index.php?/topic/76415-guindyloo-vs-maal-drakar-in-7-days/&page=1 These are just some of the pictures that I took after I finished when I was half dead. If you want to see something specific, let me know and I can take some more. Most likely, I will be working on this some more post challenge, so I wanted to get a show off up before I change too much....if that's a thing that I do.

Not gonna lie, I'm really nervous about this one. I may be making a terrible mistake, but I am going to be attempting to paint this giant 5 headed dragon in 7 days with a size 0 brush while working my usual work schedule that tends to run around 56 hours. I will have a 3 day weekend to end it out, but I originally wanted to take a solid week off to do this, but my work situation may be changing in the next couple of months - nothing bad, mind you, but I might not have as much time off as I have in previous years and I'd rather not wait until the holidays to see how things shake out. Let's be real here, doing this particular challenge while working a 56 hour week is not just crazy, it's stupid. But it's what I have to work with and I am probably both crazy and stupid. I have the added complication that we are probably going to get a lot of throw off rain coming over from Harvey and my area does flood, so I may lose even more hours if I get stuck at the office or stuck in the grocery parking lot waiting for the water to go down. Or the power could go out and I will have to paint by candlelight. Everybody keep your fingers crossed for me that such things will not occur. So here's my version of the roolz. If you're new to the 7 day challenges, take my version only as an amusing thing to read and check out the Official rules here: http://forum.reapermini.com/index.php?/topic/69639-7-day-goblin-challenge-official-rules/ 1) Thou shalt not use any brush larger than a standard size 0. 0 shall be the number on the brush, and the number on the brush shall be 0. 1 shalt thou not use, neither use thou 2, excepting that thou ensures that it is actually 0/2 on the brush. 5 is right out. Once the size 0, being the correct number, be reached, then lobbest thy size 0 brush towards thy foe, who being made of Bones, shall be painted. 2) 7 full days (168 consecutive hours) from when the timer starts are all the time that is allowed in this challenge; whether that time is spent working, sleeping, painting or sobbing uncontrollably is up to the participant. The timer starts with the posting of a picture of all of the many pieces of Ma'al Drakar and the intended brush(es) to be used and a device bearing the participant's local time. The challenge will therefore end at the same time 7 days (168 consecutive hours) later or whenever the task is declared as completed prior to time running out, or whenever the participant should happen to pass out and/or expire. 3) All visible areas must be painted, and all paint must be applied with a regulation brush. Putting a blindfold on oneself in an attempt to bypass this rule will not work. 4) Boiling to correct warpage and scrubbing the model to remove casting residue are the only prep tasks allowed prior to the timer being started. Removing mold lines, greenstuffing or otherwise altering the original sculpt in any way beyond factory spec is prohibited and way not cool, man. 5) All pieces as included in the box set at retail must be painted. This means no pretending that you aesthetically prefer a 4 headed dragon and thus cut off one of the heads to avoid painting it. 6) Each participant must declare in their thread title that it is an attempt at completing a 7 day challenge so that the organizer can make note of the participant's valiant effort and the rest of the community can watch the fascinating downward spiral into insanity. 7) After declaration of completion, the participant will have 2 hours to submit their official entry photos in the Official Entries thread. Up to 5 pictures per entry may be submitted. Failure to submit photos within the given 2 hour period may result in a sudden onset of spontaneous human combustion. It is not appropriate to include pictures of oneself in the official entries thread, not only would that be strange, but everyone knows that cameras steal your soul. 8) Failure to complete the Goblin Challenge in the allotted time may result in the participant becoming a goblin themselves, although in rare cases, the participant may have the option of completing a labyrinth in 13 hours to avoid this penalty. The inclusion of a singing referee in too-tight pants in this additional penalty round is, unfortunately, no longer an option. The participant waves all responsibility of the challenge organizer should they fail and thus become a goblin, or should they lose their head or other various body parts, become trapped in an oubliette forever, or find themselves plagued by an eternal stench. I will be starting approximately 8 hours from now, or whenever I manage to get home from work. Oh and by the way, I haven't been able to get myself to paint very much for the past few months. Hell of a way to force oneself back into painting, isn't it?

I'm 3 hours early, but.... Happy Burst Day! @Guindyloo

So last year at Reapercon I took Bryan's conversion class and he let us know that at the Reaper booth at the con, they were selling conversion packs filled with pieces of Bones figures to be used in conversions. I bought 2 packs. They'd been sitting in a closet ever since until last week I decided to open them up and see what I had and what I might want to do with them. I ended up having a lot of fun putting together a bunch of little abominations, but I was sitting on my couch while in the google hangout and so there was no glue involved. I stuck each combination into a little baggie and took pics so I would remember how they should go. I haven't really been painting or doing any hobbying for a while though and so they were likely destined to sit in a drawer for a while. However, seeing maxstyles post about World Wide Miniature Day, I decided I could commit a few hours to working on these little guys. I meant to get going earlier, but I've been really tired today and had gone all slug mode on the couch. But I think I have a bit of a second wind now so I'm going to see what happens. Here are the first two that I glued together the other night. Don't ask me what any of the parts are. They weren't listed in the conversion packs so I have no idea.

This is the figure that I sent out for the Spring Exchange. Tracking says it was delivered 5/25, but I haven't heard anything back, so hopefully nothing terrible happened to it. Anyway, my recipient wanted something colourful that could fit in the world of Alice in Wonderland, so I went for a female Mad Hatter sort of look. Sorry for the potato quality pictures as usual. The base gave me a really hard time. The first 2 things that I tried to make it with didn't work out, my original plan had been to have 2 teacups stacked, but I couldn't get the construction to work out, water effect pour went to hell, realized afterward that I should've done more to the sugar cubes and inside of the teacup rim before pouring the water effect and I re-painted the teacup twice and am still not happy with it. The teacup is made from the top of a GW paint pot...one side is thicker than the other, which I really should have shaved down more, but I nearly chopped off my thumb and gave up. I filled it in with greenstuff, which is also what the handle is made out of - I managed to pop the handle off twice, so that was fun. Overall I'm pretty happy with how she turned out, just not the base so much. Anyway, C&C are always welcome!

So this is a thing that's happening right now. No promises on how fast this is going to happen, especially with my impending Bones 3 shipment, but I thought I'd throw this on here.

For the January/February RPChallenge, one of the bonus challenges was: I immediately knew what figure I was going to use but unfortunately she caused me quite a lot of trouble, especially her wings. Fortunately, Jessica Rich very kindly helped me out with some great advice and thus released me from my downward spiral. The base is by Scibor miniatures and was a lot of fun to paint. I've been very pleased with every resin piece I've ever gotten from Scibor and this was no exception. There weren't even any mold lines to clean up. Anyway, I hope y'all like her! (Pics are a little washed out...I probably should've used a darker background. Oh well. .....and I just realized that the jar she's sitting on looks like it's part of the base....it's not, I just should've put the jar under the background fabric. I just paint things, man, I'm not a professional photographer. )

So I'm painting this lady up for the January/February Resolutionary Painting Challenge - bonus challenge #1 which says to paint up a figure as a classic horror creature. I've been working on her off and on for the past couple of weeks so I'll spare you every single picture I've taken during the process, but basically she started out here: Then I painted in her eyes and started working on her skin. So fast forward to last night where I decided to start working on highlighting the red and.... well I knew at the time that I'd gone way orange, I just hadn't realized that I'd gone THIS orange. So tonight I worked on glazing everything back to red. I'm happier with the wings, but I really regret how much I obliterated the highlighting on the skirt. But, this is how it goes sometimes, right? Push and pull, make mistakes and work on fixing them. Here's where she's at now:

So on facebook in December, a few of us took to doing a daily art challenge for the entire month inspired by Morihalda and her awesomely inspiring dedication to pursuing her art <3 I think Bathory started it and CashWiley started calling it the Morihalda Challenge (if I'm remembering correctly) and my dedication to it was to paint every day for at least 10 minutes. I was able to keep it going for the entire month and once we got into the new year, I decided to keep it going. I don't typically believe in making New Years resolutions, but dedicating myself to painting and/or mini related hobbying for at least 10 minutes every day seemed not only doable but like something that I really wanted to do. I'm passionate about painting and improving my painting and you can't improve without practice and discipline. I have thus painted every day since December 1st and I hope to keep painting every day for as long as possible. The Resolutionary Painting Challenge http://forum.reapermini.com/index.php?/topic/72577-resolutionary-painting-challenge-2017-chatterquestions/was something that I often saw people posting in and about on the forum, but I never thought that I could join in because I wasn't painting as much before and I paint pretty slowly. However, for this year, NomadZeke made the challenges bi-monthly, which I think reduces some pressure on meeting the quota and now that I'm painting more, even though I still paint slowly, I'm more likely to be able to finish a lot more and it gives me something extra to work toward. On top of that, I've always seen the bonus challenges from the RPChallenge and thought that they sounded like a lot of fun and as much as I'm dedicated to practice and discipline, I never ever want to forget that I paint because it's fun. Sometimes I put too much pressure on myself to paint something well and I get all stressed out about it and I just need to let it go and have fun. So finger painting a mini? Yes, please. I knew exactly which figure I wanted to paint for it because I thought that all of the deep recesses would help me to get good contrast. I discovered very quickly that although that was true, it also made it very tricky to get paint into the deep recesses in the first place! So as I always do with Bones figures, I started out with Brown Liner. I had to thin it enough to get it to flow into all of the deep recesses. I should have thinned it more though because what I ended up with was WAY too much paint on the figure - so much that it took a couple of hours for it to dry completely. Once it dried, however, I made sure that I did a better job of controlling my paint consistency so that it would run where I wanted it to, but not all over the place. I did some unintentional wetblending, which turned into intentional wetblending. So much drying time! I think he turned out pretty great, what do y'all think?

I know some of you have already seen this guy on facebook (thank you for your feedback there!) but I wanted to go ahead and get this guy posted in show off before I slip away into madness painting DDS2 in 7 days. Originally I'd planned on painting this guy for my father as an xmas present but when it became obvious that I wasn't going to have enough time to paint a second figure in time, I decided to give him to my mother instead because she follows my painting on facebook and I knew she'd appreciate a painted mini as a gift a little more. She loved him, although we both agreed that I made the dragon far too cute. The NMM is not entirely successful, although I think it's better on the axe than it is on the armour.... which is funny since I spent way more time on the armour than I did on the axe. Ah well. C&C is very, very welcome as always! I'm pretty proud of how this guy came together, but I'm always very much looking to improve! WIP thread for him is here: http://forum.reapermini.com/index.php?/topic/72164-dark-sword-frog-dragon-slayer-wip/Thank you for the feedback there as well!

So this is the second one of these Scibor ornaments that I've painted. I started him before Christmas to have something to post for my daily painting challenge on facebook so that my mother wouldn't see what ended up being her Christmas present. As a result, I was painting it for too long and got to the point where I just wanted to be done with it, so it's rougher in some spots than I would normally like to leave, but, eh, gotta move on. The skin got away from me... I don't think the highlights are too bright, but I do think that I made them too large so his skin ends up looking stripey instead of highlighted. Anyway, C&C very very welcome, as always!