Geek Alert! My 2+ Days at ReaperCon

So May has been a busy month, with ReaperCon and the family vacation to Disney World on adjacent weekends. ReaperCon was an absolute blast. Went with my good buddy SpiderHam to two of the four day event.

Sadly, I have no pictures of my own, since my camera batteries were dead, and replacements weren't readily at hand. So, I stole some from SH...

Here I am painting. Note how SH cleverly hid my suckage behind the lamp.


SH and I at the Warlord Dungeon Crawl. It was a lot of fun getting to play with $1,000 worth of dungeon and accessories.


Definitely had a good time. I have a great wife, by the way. She gives me space to do my own thing, which, I think, is the only way I could do a marriage. I bought a bag full of bits, a couple t-shirts, four bottles of paint, and several chicken sandwiches from the on-site Sonic guy. In addition to painting and playing the dungeon crawl, we played a Warlord demo (I think SH is hooked and leaning toward's buying some Razig's Revenge - the undead pirate faction). I went to a couple painting classes with professional mini painters, and we both went to a "kit bashing" class where we built our own mini out of spare parts. We also did a speed painting competition, where we had 45 minutes to do a paint job on an out of production miniature (and I can see why it's no longer on the market - no offense to the sculptor). Oh, yeah, and we had to use a set of weird-ass colors they gave us.

The result of my speed painting efforts:



My self-built mini. It's not a terribly dignified pose, but he's very unbalanced...and also he falls backward.


All is well with the universe.

Charge!

I finally finished my first batch of Crusaders from the Warlord line. Several learning points on these: 1) Doing a brown wash over the white undercoat is dangerous if you're going to have whites and very light colors in the end product. 2) This was my first time working with gloss varnish, which I understand protects the paint job much better than matte. I used three coats of spray matte finish and one coat of brush-on varnish, but you can still see too much shine on parts of the dirt and cloth. I wonder if you can mix matte and gloss....

First Diorama

Not my best work, but definitely my most time consuming Christmas gift. I got this Old Glory antitank gun and crew for my brother in law and did my first diorama.

Minis: First Commission

So my buddy asked me to paint the cool 1940's sleuth mini he's using in his Star Wars game.



In process.



The finished product, and something for size reference.

Minis: Orcs and Goblins and Ogres, Oh My!

Finally finished (that is to say stopped) several of my Reven figures.

Minis: In process and terrain

So I did the trees today. This is the grand sum of my terrain at present, save three more 2'x2' boards to make up the total 4'x4' playing area I'll use whenever I can beg, pay, sucker, or otherwise get someone to play with me. I'm also including a shot of minis in progress. I have a number in my office still in blister packs, and another $50 worth from eBay on the way (have I mentioned I love eBay?).

Minis: Inaugural

So, I've taken up paining fantasy miniatures this summer. I grabbed some paints and some unpainted minis I had around for D&D and went to town. Now I've bought around 30 models for Reaper's Warlord skirmish game. Part of me wonders why I never tried this before. I think the answer is I until now I couldn't unclench enough to just go for it without getting frustrated that it wasn't perfect. Anyway, here's the first Warlord model I've finished:



This is the River Troll after prepping (sanding off all the flashing and mold lines), and after a black priming coat (Krylon flat black).



Here he is with his basecoat (Reaper Master Series, Vallejo)....and after a wash for shading.




Here's the finished product after highlighting and basing work. The water is E-Z water. Inaptly named, I must say, at least for a delicate operation like this. You have to heat it and it cools/hardens insanely fast. Fine for doing little pools, I'm sure, but this was ambitious.

Hopefully, my photography gets better along with my painting.