Halloween Town

Happy Miniature Monday! Today marks the start of another speed paint challenge. This time, it's Dain Deepaxe (Reaper Bones #77074) suggested by @EpicBlueMouse. I'll catalog my process here on my blog and post on Twitter with the rest of the participants one week from now. It's always fun to see the different results we've all come up with! All able & willing participants are welcome to enter-- all you need is this mini, 7 paints, and 4 hours-or-less.

I gave him a fun background in this picture because I have some interesting ideas for his paint color scheme, inspired by our most recent Pumpkin-Ale & Halloween-Themed Game Night. This past weekend, we played D&D 5th edition for the first time. I bought the Player's Handbook while traveling last week and came home only to scour through the pages to build a character for Saturday's game. Our group brought it. We had 5 players total-- one on Skype, which was surprisingly reliable throughout the game. We met at 4pm to build characters and get settled, since we had to recalibrate our brains after playing 4th edition for so long. By 6pm, we had all more-or-less figured our characters out. We jumped into the two-part Halloween-themed story our DM had created and recorded audio throughout the whole thing. Absolutely hilarious! I may post the audio file to my blog when we get closer to Halloween and hopefully find time to meet & play through the 2nd part of the story.

One of our friends created a dwarf character named "Throzen Stoneheart" who went by "Stockwood" and vehemently believed he was a fairy. To give you a bit of a visual image, Stockwood was described as wearing a turtle shell bikini, a tutu, and had giant dragonfly wings glued to a turtle shell strapped to his back. While most people assumed he was in costume, the bearded Stockwood firmly believed he was destined to be King of the Fairies, which made for some absolutely hilarious dialogue. After this next Speed Paint Challenge mini had been decided, I knew I had to incorporate Stockwood's spirit into the paint choices. I'm not exactly sure how I'll incorporate my inspiration, but I have a week to figure it out!

Other than Saturday's Game Night, I slept in after spending a solid week on the road. While Sunday was supposed to be my first true day off from work in two weeks, I ended up needing to work a half day anyway in order to meet some crunch timelines. After dinner, I sat down to paint and chose a mini that had been sitting on the shelf for about two years. I've taken the liberty to rename him "Alucard" (Hint: for those who haven't seen/played Hellsing or Castlevania, try reading it backwards). 

Gabriel Darkblood - Reaper #02985

http://demarcs.deviantart.com

Since I'm on the "Hey, it's October!" Halloween kick, I want to paint him in a unique way, inspired by Castlevania's Alucard. I did some searching and found a few interesting images, and finally settled on one from demarcs' Deviant Art site. As I find inspiration in this image, I'll start painting in the middle of the miniature rather than starting with face, eyes, and hair like I usually do. It's a challenge, and I haven't made it very far, but I'm lining & mapping out different shapes and getting an idea for which sections will have the silver & gold trim. The inside of his cloak will be fun to paint. Maybe I'll even try my hand at painting some freehand patterns... maybe.

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!