Good Housekeeping

On Tuesday I made some changes to my website to improve the overall user experience. 

  1. I cut down on how many posts will be featured on the main blog page, so you should experience faster load times. Since my posts are especially picture-heavy, I expect mobile users will see a significant improvement!
  2. Archived my previous blog posts organized by month as well as categories. It's hard to believe I've been blogging every Monday & Thursday for the past 5 months! While I haven't had every post ready the night before, I'm happy to say I've only truly missed one post since I started. I posted the next day of course with my regrets, and while coming up with ideas twice a week isn't always easy, I'll continue to do my best to keep posting timely & relevant content. 
  3. I added a Speed Paint Gallery on my blog page that links to the miniatures I've painted within 4 hours over the last month. I also created a button that links specifically to blog posts about Speed Painting. Voila! 
  4. I merged the "About Me" and "Contacts" pages. Have a question? Want to share ideas or suggest a topic for future blog posts? Feel free to drop me a line!

I have some fun news to share: I just found out I won 2nd place for my Alien Hunter on a Reaper forum contest-- awesome! It's humbling with so many talented artists out there, and I love learning new things from each one. The community I've found inspires me to keep painting. That being said, I want to take the time to sincerely thank each of you for your involvement! From brand new painters with questions to full-time professional painters sharing their tried-and-true methods, I appreciate you all-- thank you for your support and interest. As I continue to learn and grow, please don't hesitate to reach out! 

In the meantime, I'll be enjoying the weekend after a very long work trip and I can't wait to paint in the comfort of my own home. As beautiful as this stormy-and-sunny drive was, I'm glad to be back.

I'll be painting and playing a little D&D 5th edition this weekend. That's right, I finally gave in. I visited a really cool bookstore that featured games & comics-- I'll write more about that next week! However, I broke down and bought this:

We'll be rolling some brand new 5e characters this Saturday. I'll let you know how it goes! Until then, have a great weekend!

Speed Paint Challenge 3

Happy Miniature Monday! I'm happy to report that I'm getting faster with this speed painting thing. Again, I'll use "Speed Painting" loosely, since I consider anything between 2 - 4 hours a creative race against time. This past week, a new mini was chosen by @catafracture, a new participant in our last #speedpaintchallenge. The Reaper Bones miniature we agreed upon was cheap ($2.79) & Bones in general are relatively low maintenance and don't require priming-- perfect since I would need to paint him while traveling. The standard rules applied: 7 colors, less than 4 hours. Here's what I came up with in 3.5 hours total (4 hours if you include the increased drying time):

I didn't expect humidity to be as big of a challenge as it was. 30 minutes into my initial venture, I found that the paint layers just weren't drying-- adding considerably to my overall paint time. Very frustrating after spending the time unpacking & setting up my mobile paint station:

Two days later, while I was still waiting for the weather to settle down, @EpicBlueMouse suggested I take advantage of the humidity and work on wet blending. Why not? At the last minute I changed up my color scheme and swapped out the metallics I had in store for the weapons in order to focus on a cool orange/purple cape concept. It was fun to try and blend rich orange into a dark purple and see how quickly I could create a nice transition. Lastly, I blended the edges of the cape into a lighter, rich purple and was grateful for the mini hair dryer I had available. Without it, I'd be watching paint dry for ten minutes in between each layer. 

I chose to focus my time & effort on the cape color transitions and the details of his armor. The weapons (especially the back view) suffered somewhat, but I think the sacrifice for the end result was well worth it! My final seven paint choices were as follows-- all from the Reaper line:

Leather White, Blue Liner, Marigold Yellow, Burning Orange, Monarch Purple, Nightshade Purple, Dark Skin

Work In Progress Photos

Another speed painting challenge completed, another obstacle overcome, and another skill aquired! 

Work In Progess · Lord Ironraven

Today's a fairly short post. I'm traveling again, but in the meantime I've made some good progress on Lord Ironraven. He's a Reaper miniature that I purchased in an eBay lot. He was already glued into his base and in overall rough shape when I got him. After some careful cleaning, he's turned out to be one of my favorite Works In Progress! He's my study in painting silky blue fabric and practicing my True Metallic Metal technique (TMM). Most recently I've been working on his leather pants and details on his armor. I'm painting the crosses to look like a more delicate white enamel contrasted with the darker metal armor. I figure a guy running around with silky ribbon attached to his weapon is probably in ceremonial armor anyway. I'd like to work in some blue detail into the crosses to try and tie the blue & white motif together. Here's what I have so far!