Thursday, May 16, 2013

Your flight has arrived


More pictures of the Hell Drake.  Our flight to Atlanta was not hellish, however, which was nice :-)


We are now in town for CMON Expo.  I took what supplies I could on the plane to do a little brushwork on minis here and there.  I also have some of the new Secret Weapon powders (and another interesting new product!) to do some experimentation.


Many thanks to Randall for rescuing us from the airport!  We learned the hard way about the crazy tram and the baggage claim area...


Now to the Hell Drake.  While this is not the largest thing I have painted, it was by far the most complex, for all the reasons I mentioned in the previous post.


Seeing the pictures is quite different from the view I had as I was painting this.  Cathy and I talk about this effect all the time.  When you look at something as long as I was looking at this thing, you can't see the proverbial forest for the trees.

All you want to do is hack it all down with a monstrous chain saw.


The camera can become that impartial observer.  One who does not know which parts you may have struggled with, etc.  It's the closest way to see it the way another person might for the first time.

We have experienced this effect so often, we will often talk the other person down off the ledge by saying "Wait until the pictures are processed!".  I can't tell you how many times each of us has looked at the pictures and claimed that the mini was far better than we initially thought!


The Hellish Hell Drake


Everyone already knows that these are a pain in the you know what to play against, and I am pretty sure they know they are not so easy to paint, either!  As I was standing in the tournament check-in line at Adepticon, I could hear people discussing the painting of Hell Drakes each time the line moved past a board with one (or three!) of them on it.


I think I posted some WIP images of this showing how many individual parts I painted before glueing them all together.  It had to be at least 20.


Painting both sides of every wing was just a tad bit time consuming, to say the least.


I did utilize the weathering powders in more of a 'painterly' fashion on this piece.  It helped me get some interesting effects on the golds in areas that would have been very tough to reach otherwise.


I also used them more in a standard fashion for the streaks, but knowing I could actually use them to paint some of the other colors was really neat!


I have many more images that I will post over the next few days as CMON Expo plays out, so I hope you don't get sick of them!


Time to go!!