Wednesday was a long day. My boss is going on some well-deserved mini vacation and I'm attempting to keep things moving in her absence. While I consider myself a fairly smart cookie, evidently the world decided to speak a different language overnight and forgot to inform me of this "small change". Today at work I was feeling quite capable, right up until I was met with a barrage of e-mails asking for favors, files, and projects I knew nothing about. Only then did I realize that over half of our team is on vacation and/or out-of-the-office. Not wanting to start my first day flying solo hitting "Reply All" and saying the equivalent of, "I've read your e-mail three times and I still don't have a clue what the **** you're talking about" (but I daresay I thought it), I remembered that scene in Zoolander and had a good laugh. After that I jumped in and did my best to figure it all out. They say immersion is the fastest way to learn, right? Bring it on!
Fast-forward to the painting. I watched the latest episode of Tabletop while we ate dinner and I prepped my table for painting. The deck-building game "Legendary" was featured and the guest line-up this week was great-- Allie Brosh from "Hyperbole and a Half" blogging fame, Brea Grant from Heroes, and Mark Fischbach, whose voice is so nice I just want him to narrate my life. Or just talk about anything. Probably about Marias (you'll have to watch the episode-- I posted at the bottom).
Fast-forward to painting. I'm making painfully slow progress on my very first Kingdom Death miniature. I've been able to sneak about an hour's worth of painting in every few days and I've been blocking out dark sections for painting NMM armor, prepping the head and cape before I can attach it to her body, and starting on her sword. Since I'm practicing high contrast and a non-conventional skin tone with this model, I'll need to make sure I spend a good amount of time painting her armor and sword. I've started blocking out sections of the sword with some rough blending. This miniature will be stylized and I'm not too concerned about making her look too realistic. However, I will need to do some more research on swords to see exactly how I want to paint it. I'm not sure I want to place the highest highlights in the center of the blade-- that seems too obvious and boring. Maybe I'll offset it enough where it's the brightest somewhere in the top 1/3rd of the sword height to add interest. In any case, the head and cape are primed and drying and I'll pick back up where I left off this weekend. I'm hoping to get much more done on Sunday and finally start my 75mm project :) Stay tuned!
I also took the time to find "Scroll Guy" (Reaper Bones "Darkrasp") after digging around in several moving boxes. I was able to scrub him with dish soap and dry him off for a future #SpeedPaintChallenge. Hey, remember those? Yeah we should do that again. Who's in?