One and a half million reasons to keep going! (My life before miniatures)

Another significant milestone was reached in the life of this blog yesterday, which is pretty amazing!

The blog surpassed 1,500,000 views yesterday!  Wow.  Many thanks to all of you loyal Wappellians who have visited here time and again to delve into the world of insanity.

Things have gotten especially crazy this week, so my original plan for this occasion was thrown out of whack.

In the process of doing all those other tasks the last few days, I stumbled across a backup disk which contained numerous paintings that I had done in the years before I started painting miniatures.

Some of these I have not seen for over 10 years.

The first image is called Solar Flare, and was painted on a Bodhran long ago.  Painting on drums was a lot of fun, since it was essentially vellum.  Of course, you had to go over the drum with a razor blade first to shave away any hairs that might still be lurking!

Most of the time, I painted in watercolors.  As most of you already know, I loved to do astronomy paintings.  This piece was called In the Shadow of Giants.

For several years, I also used an airbrush, like this painting called The Vortex.

Every so often, I would do an acrylic painting, like this one on gessoed board.  It was called the Falls of Time

Here we have another watercolor piece that also had some airbrush, called The Cauldron.  You can see the continuing legacy in all those lava bases I keep making!

This was a painting originally done for a British website back in 1997.  It became so popular, I painted it again in a larger scale.  It still hangs on my wall today, called The Beckoning.

This painting took the longest of any piece to execute.  It is not particularly large, but just transferring the drawing took 2 days.  There was probably several hundred hours put into this piece (sound familiar?)  Ironically, most of it was done using the same magnifier light that I used for the first 8+ years of miniature painting!

The title is Spirit of the North

Back to the airbrush and spacescape...

I have a few more posts of 2D art coming.  The next one will show you how many different kinds of mediums I used, from pastels to ceramic paints, and how all that influenced everything that I do today.

Well, I hope you enjoyed this, even though there were no miniatures!!!