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February was a productive month. Here is the Dragon and Stocking freebie from this past Christmas. #1631. Here is another little dragon. The Young Fire Dragon (DHL #3332). It's not easy being green. Time for class. How to grow your hoard. Here is the Human Wizard, Vodelis. DHL # 4009. He and Amari have the same broach. I think they are old friends from Magic school. And finally, here is the Bones Kickstarter V hippogriff.

Happy birthday, @TheAuldGrump and @Inarah. I hope you enjoy this. Notes follow after the photos. This is Grenadier’s Hippogriff, #138 from the Fantasy Lords series way back in 1983, now sold in lead-free pewter by Mirliton Miniatures, Italy. It’s well sculpted, with securely fitting wings. I wanted to paint something different from the common hippogriff colorings, something with a little challenge to it. So I decided to go with several black and white patterned creatures. The front end is based on an osprey, the wings on a hoopoe’s, and the hindquarters on a zebra, all somewhat modified to suit the figure and to blend where the shifts happen. Whenever you’re going to paint a chimeric model, a creature made up of the parts of other creatures, it’s a good idea to go look at real animals to see how their colors and feathers and skins look, and also how they blend into other things. If nothing else, there are excellent visual resources on the internet. Technical notes:

So here he is so far. He's being made for my daughter, so his name will probably end up being, Buckbeak... And that's okay. But I'm painting it in more of a golden eagle and bay color scheme, rather than the gray. I tried a dusky white/gray scheme first, but the sculpt didn't lend itself to those colors... I couldn't for the land find a satisfactory, unpainted hippogryph, so I used Starmane, Unicorn (02151) and Griffon (77157)--both lovely sculpts by Sandra Garrity. Took a little wiring to make it solid and to act as a skeleton for first plumber's epoxy, then greenstuff. The base is the bottom of a spackling tub reinforced with construction cloth and filled with epoxy (the 'grypy's wings make it a bit top heavy). I think it'll look pretty good when finished--soon I hope!

Sooo.... I'm sitting here, out on the West Coast of Canada, impatiently waiting for my KS Bones to finally get here, and browsing these forums looking for ways to amuse myself. Having found the "Show Off" forum and been impressed by many of the paint jobs here I was reminded that, quite some time ago (2005 to be exact) I'd took some time to actually assemble and paint a couple of Ral Partha lead miniatures that I'd had kicking about since the mid-to-late-90's and that I'd subsequently uploaded images of the final results to a "Microsoft Live Spaces" blog I maintained at the time. Now, I do still have both these mini's so I could take fresh images, but, as it happens, all images uploaded to "Live Spaces" blogs were automatically stored in what would eventually become "Microsoft Skydrive" so it was actually quite easy to locate those older images, allowing me to share them here, now. :-) One point I'd like to make is that, actually having first started miniature painting as a pre-teen back in the early 80's (ya, ya. I'm an 80's chick, get over it!) I first learned with enamel based model paint and continued to use them almost religiously until recently. (In fact, I haven't actually started using acrylics yet, but I have friends who switched over ages ago and will be doing so once my KS bones package, with all four paint sets, arrives.) In any case, working with enamel model paint is quite different from working with acrylics inasmuch as how colours are mixed and blended. Also, the reason I continued to prefer enamel paints was their natural glossy depth (something that I thought wasn't possible using acrylics given examples I'd come across back then but this site has proven that belief to be unfounded) and I generally enhanced this with a glossy top coat, which did have an effect on how the photos turned out. The next two posts will include the photos. First up (as it was painted first): The Jabberwock