A Lazy Weekend

Greetings once more, readers.  I am obviously back, and I have the updates to show for it.  I haven't gotten much painted since I got back, but today you'll get to see a bit of why.  You see, I just got a bunch of Kickstarter stuff in, and well:

That's a good chunk of Malifaux figures assembled and ready to prime, and yet:

There's still a few more.  This is just the tip for what I've gotten - but that will have to wait for another day - and I think that's going to be my next major project, and boy, will it take a long while.  It should be pretty awesome once it's done, however.

And the last tidbit for tonight, is the finished version of Tobias Winterhorn.  Quite a change from the basic greys we started with, eh?

Well, that's all from me today.  I probably won't have anything tomorrow, but tune in Monday for... well, whatever I end up doing then.  Until then?  Paint on!

Better late than nevermore

Good evening, readers.  I must apologize for missing my post time yesterday - but that happens when you come home to a power outage - and I'm not going to try posting up an entry from my phone - why, that would be Sparta!  Erm...  Madness, I mean.  Madness.

Anyways, yesterday and today were my two weekday gaming nights, so not a lot had been accomplished between them.  But I did learn the results of the painting competition I was in!  Drumroll, please.

...

That would probably work better with an audio track...  Anyways, I took second place in the competition, falling behind the winner by only one vote!  Thank you for everyone who came in and voted for my piece - I am bound and determined to improve for my next competition piece:

OK, it's not as dynamic as the last one, but I'm going to go all out on this one - glowing runes on the helm, some hard-to-clean rust on the polearm, and a much cleaner model than the last one (there were some pieces that I really should have cleaned better that were rather glaring when it came time to paint the model).  But I have cleaned the model properly this time - only the painting awaits!

Once that's done and in, I have the results for the next big figure.  After talking it over with my friends, the winner is...

Nethyrmaul.

This is going to be a beast of a figure to paint, but I feel it will be well worth the effort to bring it to life (so to speak).  Expect to see a lot of him over the next few weeks.

Finally, continuing on with the theme of bases, let's talk about sculpting your own base.  This can be anything from carving and gluing on a few balsa sticks to form a wooden stage:

To adding a bit of a rise in the middle of a swampy landscape:

Or adding on the sort of texture that you could get from a pre-sculpted base:

In most cases, this will involve the use of Greenstuff (or other constructable material), and sculpting tools to shape the base into the shape you want.  I usually stick to patterns that don't stick far up from the base, and it's a matter of applying the Greenstuff (a two-part epoxy made for modelling miniatures) and shaping it into the design you want.  With effort, this can be a truly breathtaking display - but it is not easy to reach those heights.

You can, however, reach much simpler results like what you see above with just a little effort and planning, and this can really bring out a figure in a truly unique way.

That's all from me tonight.  Tomorrow, I'll hopefully have the Mousling painted up and ready to go with my other figures, and will talk about my favorite sealing technique - a method I found online called the Bullet technique (and, boy, can it stand up to a good bit of punishment).

Feel the power!

Good evening, readers!  Not a lot new on my plate today.  I have assembled the next piece of the Skaven army (I'll post up the rest of what I have so far sometime this weekend, when I get it all set up and get pictures of it), which you can see here:

After talking with Sean from the Games Workshop store, I thought I'd take a bit to talk about basing miniatures and some of the things that I've done with them (along with how-tos on how to accomplish them), so through the next several days, I'll be digging through my Photobucket account (which you can certainly browse at your leisure here: Magius's Photobucket Library  - though do note that I haven't uploaded new pictures there for a while...  I really should rectify that...  Well, that's what this blog is for!  Also note, some figures presented are NSFW)

I'll start with one of the easier ones to do, but one that will definitely give you a very creepy vibe if you do it correctly - the Fog/Cloud base:

How this one works is after basing the model with the appropriate color (I like to use white for figures that are supposed to be in a deep fog, or normal basing if they are just walking around), you take a piece from a cotton ball, shred it out until its a good fit for the base, and glue the cotton wisps to the base.  This gives the figure the look of walking through a dense, low fog (great if you don't like painting feet, or really mess up the bottom part of the figure - or even just hate doing bases in the first place).  Really, that's about it, and it can give you some really impressive results.

Like this one, which I just painted up tonight.  Let's  give a warm welcome to one of the LE Sophie miniatures from Reaper Miniatures!  (It feels good to get a miniature finished in a single evening again):

Thank you everyone for reading, and I hope to have more to share with you all tomorrow (though I never know what I'm going to grab to paint).