Minbari in Black

Now here's some old time stuff!  This goes back to the mid/late 90's.  At this point, I was doing a lot of "media" art, as it's called.

I was doing a lot of sci-fi convention art shows at the time.  My specialty in art school was painting portraits, so it seemed natural to try and do images of favorite characters!

Here's a watercolor that I painted of Mira Furlan for a convention.  I was lucky enough to have her sign the original!

Another watercolor.  I don't even remember the name of this Trek movie any more. :-)

 Tribble time!  Pesky varmints! 

And one of my favorites.  Minbari in Black.  I had a lot of fun with this one.  You can also see the airbrush work that I did.  

Yes, back in the late 90's, I had a ton of airbrush equipment.  Very fancy brushes, a nice foot pedal compressor, water traps, you name it.

Sadly, they went unused for so long, that all the hoses disintegrated!  The brushes themselves, which were tempermental enough when they were used every day, were beyond rescue.

Even the compressor was acting funny, so I put what remained in a box and gave up on it.

Looks like it's just me and the "hairy sticks" from now on!

Pacific Rim

The Pacific Theatre set for Memoir '44 is going to offer many opportunities for new game play situations, terrain, unit types, and so on.

What I have been looking forward to is all the painting and modeling experiments I can do!  We have been trying out a lot of new materials... black lava effect from Vallejo, vegetation combinations, and so on.

I will also get a chance to paint new stuff like the Japanese light tanks!  I was fortunate to have some old vegetation around that was actually the right scale to slap on the vehicles.  Very cool!  It allowed me to get the same effect I was seeing in all the reference images I found!

Why do I paint NMM?

Now that I have been able to take some pictures of a few of my Arthurian series of paintings, I thought I could use them in this post to explain why I use the Non Metallic Metal technique.

The question has been asked over and over again, and now I have pretty pictures to go along with the explanation!  Yea!

Before I get started...this is NOT a debate about NMM vs Metallics.  Please dispense any hatred at the door :-)  It does not matter to me what anyone uses.  I don't really care about the absolutes and other insanity that flies back and forth between the rival camps.

There is one reason, and one reason only why I use the technique.  I spent many years painting 2D art.  Since there are no metallic watercolors or pastels, I had to "create" the effect of metal, as artists have done for centuries.

These images are examples of knights in armor, painted in watercolors.  The principles here are exactly the same as what I do on a miniature.  Obviously, there is a "back" to the figure.  However, The concept of reflected light, horizon lines, strong contrasts and reflected colors all apply to both 2D and 3D.

The first image has a bit of Sky-Earth Non Metallic, or SE-NMM.

For this second painting in the series, the object was to show the height of the glory of Camelot.  Summer vegetation, bright colors, sunny sky, and SE-NMM.

Now we see something different from the 4th painting in the series.  The fall of Camelot.  Fall colors, grey skies, and less reflectivity and bright highlights on the armor.

Again, the idea is to reflect as much light as possible.  You have seen me do this many times in miniature form.  In some ways, it is much easier to paint the effect on a 3D miniature than to create the illusion of shape on a piece of watercolor board!

There you have it folks.  The reason why I use the Non Metallic technique.  Simply has to do with my path to miniature painting.  I hope it makes sense to you all! :-)

Stu strikes again!

I don't know where he keeps finding them, but Stu Has another 'lady friend'.

Maybe he heard the screams as the zombies closed in...

And then decided to pop a cap in some Zombie brains!

Uh, oh... Da Preacha man is at it again too.

There'll be no funny business on Preacha Man's watch.

Those zombies don't stand a chance!

From Kislev with love

This was a figure I originally made for my Adepticon army.  He was intended to be Chenkov, until I went with a Raging Heroes figure instead.

It had been so long since I made the conversion, I forgot that I used a WFB Kislev miniature and some I.G. bits!  His color scheme really matched the Highland Guard pretty well, so I will shoot some pictures of them together.

He is also here:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/321441337152?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1558.l2649

Burning bright

A few more Reaper Minis from the vault!

It's always fun to so some of the orange object source lighting on cooler flesh tones such as this.

The see through clothing effect is tricky.  Certain colors are easier to do than others.  I guess white is the easiest.  This turquoise is somewhere in the middle.  Not so bad, since the cooler greens can be reflected in the shadow areas of the skin tones as well.

I put some turquoise in the floor colors as well, so that I could make sure some of that would be reflected...

Another art chapter.

Not long before I shifted from 2D art to miniature painting, I was doing a lot of Celtic Mythology inspired paintings.  I am still trying to track down more of the images.

This one was probably the largest and most elaborate, although I can think of some others which would give it a good run for its money! :-)

This is one of a number of designs that I painted on Celtic drums (bodhrans) numerous times.

This one is Epona the Horse Goddess.  I painted a good portion of this by candlight during a big rain storm in our booth at the Ren Faire.  Not much else was going to happen anyway, so time to entertain the 'guests' trapped inside!

This is one of the very first images that I painted, called "The Caretaker"  It has puppies!