Binge Watch

Our place is still a construction zone. We're in the process of having our floors replaced after the flood (and still hearing about flash flooding warnings in this week's weather report). It's difficult to paint admit the loud floor fans that create wind tunnels and dehumidifiers drying out the concrete foundation (and my paint). When I sit down to paint, I'm just angry. So I decided to binge-watch some stuff on Netflix until I was ready to paint. I watched most of the 6th season of Star Wars: Clone Wars on Netflix and the entire first season of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. At first, the characters in that show irritated me beyond belief, but I soon found it ridiculously amusing thanks to the great writing of the show's creators Robert Carlock & Tina Fey. When I later broke out in hives thanks to the filthy floors and mold/mildew/dust tornado that's the floor-drying process, I did Kimmy's "I'm not really here!" dance. It's easy to fall into a pity trap, so I'm doing my best to keep smiling until it gets better.

After that I was ready to paint. I rebuilt my painting desk setup (again), put on my noise-canceling headphones and poured a big ol' glass of wine. I decided to work on my Kingdom Death miniature and despite painting for over an hour, I didn't make much progress. My heart wasn't in it but I think the most important thing was to get painting again. 

I can't quite seem to get her leg wraps right. I started to paint them a cream-colored linen but I wanted her to look more hard-core so I started painting it like leather. I'm still not sure if I like it, but it's a start! I slapped some paint in places where I think I want to do some interesting NMM and I painted part of her bodice. She's really not going to be a show-piece-- just an experiment as my first Kingdom Death miniature. I'll play around more with the leathers and finish her back before I attach her cape and head. 

At one point I just gave up and played with my hoard of miniatures (think Scrooge McDuck in his money vault). I opened one of my Infinity Miniatures: Zerat Special Missions Sniper. Love her! I toyed with the idea of cleaning and putting her together but by this time it was almost midnight and it had been quite a day. Wish us luck tomorrow-- the floor crew is doing a moisture evaluation in the morning. If it goes well, we're getting new floors sooner rather than later and can get back to our somewhat-normal lives :) 

Flood Damage

Our house flooded on Memorial Day weekend. We're in the middle of having the damaged floors removed and new flooring put in-- it's a long process. Currently cleaning up my desk and painting so I can post some late WIP photos  

Bailey WIP · Gold Non-Metallic Metal

I'm a fast learner. I'm also a perfectionist. If something doesn't look right, it bothers me and I can't move on until I fix it. A few nights ago I did a study in Gold Non-Metallic Metal. While I've practiced Gold NMM a few times on a lady barbarian and a Minotaur, I've never felt I've quite gotten it right. I've always wanted a subdued, greenish-"muted gold" (in fact, it might even be classified as bronze at this point). In any case, I tried two different approaches recently:

  • Start with the darkest color and highlight up from there, using a less-colorful, more realistic color scheme. 
  • Start with second-brightest highlight and shade down. Use a colorful, fantasy-inspired yellow-orange palette. 

After writing about my Miniatures from 2014 and seeing how far I've come in the past year, I wanted to select a mini that I've painted before to see the difference in skill level. I chose one of my favorite Reaper sculpts from Werner Klocke, Bailey Silverbell. I painted her in 2012-- Bailey was the second miniature I ever painted. I love this sculpt and I wanted to try some challenging techniques this time around. Focusing on what I learned from my Gold NMM studies, here's what I came up with after painting the armor sections on each hip:

I even added a small dent in a section of the armor to give it some additional interest. However, after studying the images I posted to Twitter, I realized one side looks much better than the other-- the colorful version like she's wearing a breakfast pancake on her hip and I didn't paint nearly enough contrast to make it look like convincing NMM. I've seen some beautiful colorful NMM before, but after this study, I decided I like the worn, hammered metal armor look. Since I wanted the armor to match the better result, I painted over the "pancake" armor to make it consistent with the other section of armor.

After that, I started painting her knee and shoulder guards using the same approach. While the blending took a considerable amount of time, I'm extremely happy with the results. I've never been happy with NMM like this and I'm so pleased to have results I'm proud of! Her cloak is still only in the base coat phase and I'll still need to paint highlights on her bodice leathers-- she's only 30-40% complete, and it's about time to attach her right arm that holds a dagger. Plenty more to paint on this miniature!