Back From ReaperCon

ReaperCon went well! I got two golds, one for the Conan diorama and another for these wizards:

The wizards are from the Bones 4 Kickstarter and painted for Reaper.

I did almost no painting while I was there. I did start her:

And I will try to get her finished up quickly, just table top quality.

I have come back motivated to work on things. So, I'm spinning up a number of projects. One is a small vignette with the dragon head I didn't use on the Conan diorama. To do it, I will need to make a pile of treasure, so I'm starting to experiment with how best to do that.

First, I tried mixing glitter into a few different type of modelling pastes:

This is not really doing what I want. The shape of the glitter is getting lost. Also, I decided it'd be better to use something else for the bulk of the pile, and then just cover the surface with the texture. So, for the next experiment I made a couple mounds of Milliput that I will cover with glitter and paste, and glitter and glue.

If that doesn't work, I got some other suggestions that I'll try.

And last, there's this guy:

The threaded rod and the chunk of wood are the handle that I used for Cthulhu last year. This is the main body of Shubniggurath. The handle is going into its big maw because that seemed like the spot that would be the least disruptive. Well, not quite; we also thought about putting it in to one of the spots for the tentacles on its back...but then I'd have had to paint it upside down, which would have been way weird.

There are many tentacles which I will paint separately and attach afterwards. This is a large figure, so I'll be starting with the airbrush. First he's gonna need a bit of gap filling where the legs and tail joined.

12!

Finished Nemesra today, with a whole week to spare before ReaperCon! Yay!

Nemesra's Base, Con't.

I went back and painted the yellow bits on the base brown instead. I'm happier with this; I think it retains the pattern detail but makes it less in-your-face, so hopefully it won't compete with the figure for attention. I left variation in the brown just because I like the way it looks. That may end up being a mistake, but..meh. I still like the way it looks.

Once that was done, I moved on to preparing her busking bowl. I picked out the best of the batch and then cut some small chunks of round green stuff to serve as coins.

They're pretty chunky for coins, but I'm going with it. Paint will help, and they need to be a little exaggerated to show up. So we'll see.

Tomorrow will be painting the bowl and coins, and hopefully putting everything together.

Nemesra's Base

This took all day.

It's not freehand. I found the pattern I wanted on the internet, printed it out at the size I wanted the tiles to be, taped it to the top of my base, and then went over the lines with a pen to press the pattern into the top of the base. Then it was just a matter of painting the colors within the shapes that were etched into the surface.

I'm concerned that it's going to be too busy and draw attention away from the figure, so I may go back and cover over the yellow with dark brown or something. That should dull it down some.

Nemesra: Jewelry Finished

Finished up the jewelry bits on Nemesra. She's effectively done, and I'm moving on to her base.

Nemesra: Jewelry, Continued

I was hoping to get through finishing all her jewelry today, but most of it is wee little beads, so it's taking a long time. But I'm at least half way through, so I guess that's good. I'm finding it difficult to get the white top highlight on there and make it visible enough without it taking over each of those little beads.

Nemesra: Jewelry

I started Nemesra's jewelry. Base coated all of it with my NMM gold color, then finished out the bangles because I wanted to see if there would be enough contrast against her skin. I suspect there isn't, but I'm not sure I'm going to change it, either. I think the gold will do way better against the dress than silver would, and I think I want it all to be the same color.

Nemesra: Veils

Shaded and highlighted Nemesra's veils.