We little Skinks

This is one of the first big Skink units that I painted for my Lizardmen years ago.  In fact, it is one of the units that helped me develop the Shaded Basecoat technique.

I made several more units after this (including the recent green skink tank), but this one will always be my favorite.  Something about these colors was just so fun!!!

I realized that I had never taken any individual shots of them.  I had a bunch of unit shots on the movement tray, but that was it.  So, I have been shooting and processing pictures now to rectify that :-)

Much more to come!!  Stay Tuned

Student of Conflict

Here's another installment of Cathy's Malifaux crew!

More to come!

From the Darkness...

Here are some Dark Elf Halberdiers that I painted a few years ago for CoolMiniorNot.  These are metal figures from Gamezone.

They are a bit of work to prep, but do make a nice change from the usual GW suspects.

The Cold One riders were a huge challenge, that's for sure.

I think I saw somewhere that these guys are now available in plastic.

Anyway, lots of work to do today, so that's why it is another Blast from the Past!

There is some exciting news on the painting front.  It looks like I will be getting back into airbrushes for the first time in many years.

In fact, my airbrush equipment was so old (some of it over 16 years) that most of it had corroded or generally become useless.  This had really bummed me out, but all that is about to change!

Stay tuned!  Over the coming year, I will be trying that out on all kinds of projects.

Hoist the banner!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Every Ship needs a Captain... or a Colonel

Ah, here we go.  The fearless commander of the Angel of Dominance... otherwise known as Colonel Zeke.

This was something that I sculpted in an afternoon to get ready for one of our Inquisitor RPG sessions. 

Zeke's first vehicle was a Sentinel.  He was quickly promoted to Squad leader when he was the only one who managed not to crash his Sentinel into the barracks.

Next, Zeke was transferred to the Tiny Dancer, a Chimera transport which was covered in sequins.  His job was to entice anxious Ogryn into the "Shiny box", telling them that it was part of a magic trick.  needless to say, it never ended well.

As luck would have it, Zeke was promoted to platoon leader of a squad of Griffon tanks.  Since there was a shortage in artillery vehicles, his was the only unpainted Griffon, and nobody wanted to be near this bright red primered target!  However, when the front line was breached by a mass of angry Orks, the rest of the Griffons were promptly destroyed by the oncoming horde.

When the orks caught sight of his red Griffon, they seemed to shout something along the lines of "Go Fastah!!!!" and continued on their rampage, wiping out the rest of the Imperial units in the battle.

As the sole survivor of this battle, Zeke was promoted once again to command the Angel of Dominance.

Aside from blowing away enemies of the Imperium with the Angel's significant firepower, The Colonel is interested in three things.  Drinkin', Racin', and Shootin' (not necessarily in that order), as can be seen by his tattoos.

He believes in the right to Bare Arms, although he is frequently cited for being "out of uniform".  The Colonel is not fond of Space marines, who he refers to as overgrown test tube babies.  He says they are undersexed and overdressed.

Cathy's Malifaux Ronins

OK, back to Cathy's new Malifaux crew.

Here are the three Ronin characters, which she meticulously posed on her sculpted bases.

If you remember her other designs, positioning the gals was even more delicate!  Those will come later.

It will be very cool to see these all painted!

Inside the Editing suite

OK folks.  For weeks and weeks, I was trying to figure out the best way to relay how all the editing stuff worked for the videos.  I have learned all sorts of lessons, mostly hard ones.

There is not much in the way of tutorials for this software, and it can be pretty arcane to figure out.  That is not a huge surprise, really.

My apologies for the fuzzy pics, but the program does not like other programs to be open at the same time, so snapping pics was the easiest way.  I took these a while back while working on a basing video.

Here are the opening credits.  This alone took many hours to construct, and I had to keep tweaking it so that it could be more easily repeated 53 times.  Using still images turned out to be far easier than the original idea of using rotating footage of minis

Thank goodness I didn't, since that would have taken a huge chunk of additional storage space!  It would also have added many hours of rendering time.

This is how all those individual clips are entered.  First, I constructed the entire film by linking these pieces together.

These next few steps show how those clips are brought together, with titles in between...

Here is the text block mechanic.  I will be seeing this in my nightmares for years to come.  It is a lot like the interface for the kickstarter text blocks.  You can only see a portion of it, which makes it incredibly difficult to manage!!!  

Making typos is shockingly easy.  In fact, when I go back in to try and fix those, I usually make two more.

The timing of these breaks is critical, and all the fades have to be determined by watching them.  Over and over.  And over.

Resizing them can be tough as well, since the preview window is small, and it will lag in playback when you have text blocks with shadows.  Unfortunately, the shadows are a must given how much is going on in each frame (all the paint colors, etc.)

This shows the small title sitting above the video and sound layers.

Another big surprise was the camera, which breaks up segments that are a certain length automatically.  It might be a memory management thing... I don't know.  It might only happen when filming in HD.

Sadly, this has created countless extra hours for me, as I have to merge these pieces in editing.  For whatever reason, the sound can be impacted a bit, while the picture is fine.  very frustrating!

Now we get to the closing credits.  It took 2 days to construct this template.  Again, once it was done, it could be repeated through each video.  Sorry, folks, the music choice is the same for each one, because I would have smashed my face into a wall if I had to do this again!

The Last Hurrah...

Here are the last of the images dug up from the archive.

These guys were painted about 5 years ago, which seems like a million years ago, and yesterday all at the same time...

I would imagine that it would take me a lot less time to paint these today.

So, once more, we bid goodbye to the past!