Noise Marines Have Arrived! (Plus Kickstarter News)

The Black Crusade 2012 Noise Marines I committed to paint have finally arrived. Now comes crunch time. I have about four evening to paint ten very cool looking servants of Slaanesh. Argh. Doing them any justice in four nights will be a task of Herculean scope (if Hercules was a pudgy old guy hunched over in a chair painting toys perhaps.)

Not much to look at yet

Oh my, but I do have a long way to go on them. Yikes.

Kickstarter news: 

Jack Houston and the Necronauts funded. Barely, but yay! A stop-motion point and click adventure game was too cool an idea to pass up.

John K (of Ren and Stimpy) had his cartoon "Cans Without Labels" reach the 100% mark. For a minimal contribution you can get a cartoon!

Wyrd Miniatures' Evil Baby Orphanage has 3 days left to jump in. At the $55 level you get the card game, three minis that can be Malifaux proxies, a case, poster, two expansions, and a deck of evil baby cards that can be used as a Malifaux fate deck. I doubt they will make their $100k stretch goal but you never know!

Reaper Bones continued to swell, with the baseline contribution reward growing well past 100 minis now, and options for lots of other things that would have cost a mint before. The dragon Ebonwrath (previously $70 in metal) is a $10 add-on option. Shadow Dragon ($30) and Fire Dragon ($33) add-on together for $15 (not quite reached but soon.) Fire Giant king and queen (combined price about $58) as a $10 add-on. This is the all you can eat Reaper buffet I tells ya. I just hope their sales aren't negatively impacted for the next two years because everyone has more minis than they could possible paint (ha!)

Cool Mini Or Not kick off their third campaign, Relic Knights, featuring Soda Pop Miniatures. They are certainly interesting kits but I don't think I'll be getting in on this one. I seem to be alone on this based on the fact that it's >500% funded after about two days.

Lucius the Eternal - and eye problems

I've got Lucius mostly done, but this has been a difficult week to paint. My left eye has something strange going on where the lid is all red and puffy and goopy with conjunctiva. As a result, everything looks like soft focus through that eye. As it turns out, painting with one eye in focus and one eye fuzzy is really honking difficult. My depth perception was completely messed up. In any case, Here is the current WIP.

I was going to go with blue and red cords fading to purple and pink in the ... tentacle thingy. Hobby buddy Jimmy convinced me otherwise. I had done some Nurgle work for him where I painted tentacles to look like umbilical cord. Considering how much fleshtone is already on this guy, that ended up being a nice look. Granted, it's not as precise as I would like (as in... ugh) but I couldn't really wait until my eyes were 100% to make progress on him.

In other news, Noise Marines I am also painting for Black Crusade 2012 have not arrived. They have been in transit from the UK for more than 10 days now.

Lucius Continues, Khador Cutie and Horrid Dwarf

How's that for a mixed title. Work on Lucius continues. I have enough free time in the next 10 days or so to finish both him and the unit of Noise Marines that I am expecting on my doorstep any day now.

Look out! He's armed now!

I slapped some quick paint on one of the Grind Khador runners. Isn't it adorable? 

Arms come later, after I magnetize everything.

 Lastly, I received this craptastic recast of a Dwarf Blitzer in an eBay lot. I'm going to try and make the best of it. His right hand was horribly miscast, and major surgery was required. Resculpting with an xacto knife isn't really a precision technique, but at least it looks like a hand now. We'll see if I can rescue this guy from his inauspicious roots.

I am a pale shadow of my original sculpt.

Vacation, Spy Kayak, Ant Lions and Lucius

First off, a WIP pic of Lucius for all the 40k bloglists. I'm using glazes of VGC somber gray for the black highlighting. I need to cool down the palette on the leg-faces a little. They are a little warm compared to the chest-faces. I also need to remember that I have less than a month to go, and I still have two arms and a backpack to add! Get to work, me!

Mostly Armless

In non-painting news, I'm back from a great week at my parents' cabin in Manistique, MI. The kids loved it so much last year that we made a real point of going back this year. Wanna know something else? I really don't want to go back to work tomorrow. Sigh.

It's quite picturesque there.

Your trip starts at Michigan.org (quote from the "Pure Michigan"
ad campaign that promotes local tourism)

The cabin is right on the northern shore of Lake Michigan, and a unique feature is the abundance of ant lions. Look them up if you don't know what they are. Here is a little glimpse into how many there are:


I tried to grab video of one catching an ant, but it just wasn't very dramatic. Some captures are pretty epic, but I never managed to have my phone camera nearby when they happened.

My parents have a strange neighbor up there. While my brother and his fiance's kids were swimming, he waded out in his clothes to reprimand my brother for the children screaming (specifically the six year old girl.)  My brother (always the diplomat hur hur) assured him that the little girl had been screaming for six years and that it was unlikely that she was going to stop today. I guess hearing screaming a few hundred feet from his cabin made him hear "danger." I sympathize to a degree if he thought kids were out there alone and drowning, but the whole family was out there. Later, as my folks and brother and I were relaxing under the shade of an awning, the neighbor paddled his kayak over and stopped aligned with where we were sitting and just stared at us for something like 7 or 8 minutes, after which he paddled off.

I'm sitting in my Spy Kayak giving you the stink eye!

If he was trying to make a point, I missed it entirely.

The beach this year was littered with crayfish parts and mussel shells. Literally millions of them. It was better than dead Alewives, that's for sure.

If Nottingham was ruled by crayfish, this is what the WHFB
Realms of Battle table would look like.

I also found a rock that looked happy. Not much more to say than that.

Happy rock is happy.

For some reason this year there was bumper crop of wood ticks. We were constantly pulling those bloodsuckers off our clothes. Occasionally one managed to find some skin and chomp down to feed. My brother (such an educator) actually had all the kids gather around to demonstrate a tick searching for a feeding spot on his arm. After letting it bite, he pulled if off and demonstrated how tough they are by smashing things onto it on the tabletop. It's amazing that something the size of a grain of rice can feed on blood until it's the size of a grape. In case you were wondering, the wood tick is pretty harmless; it's the deer tick that carries Lyme disease. That variety is only about the size of a pinhead, so much harder to detect.

But now I'm back, so it's time to get back into the regular swing of things. Did I mention I don't want to go to work tomorrow? I'm pretty sure I did.

Drawing for Alien War Miniatures

Just a quick heads-up... this week's drawing in the Black Crusade 2012 charity project is a set of UAMC Marines and alien bugs from Defiance Games. Contribute to the project (link at left) and you will be entered into all these weekly drawings, as well as the big army giveaway in early August.

I haven't played Alien War, but the miniatures look like great fun. The beta rules are freely downloadable on their site.

Black Crusade 2012 Lucius WIP 2

I am motivated to get as much done as possible on Lucius before the unit of Noise Marines I will be painting arrives, so here is more WIP.

The faces are my beloved Tallarn Flesh (sniff) with my new favorite highlight mixer VMC Ivory, shaded with 50/50 Tallarn/dark flesh. One surprising realization lately is that my bottle of VGC black is glossy (or at least satin.) Trying to paint black details under strong light is nearly impossible, since the black reflects the light back at me. I need to put the bottle in the shaker for a minute or two to make sure it hasn't just settled funny, but I have a bottle of VMC black to try as well, since VMC has both a black and a glossy black. Here's hoping the non-glossy black is actually flat.

Black Crusade 2012 Contribution WIP 1

I am contributing to this year's charity army build, a link to which is located in the left column currently. Contributing something early gives you chances at lots of weekly swag drawings.

Here is the first night progress on Lucius the Eternal. I decided to go with something a little more flesh-like than the clown face of the GW studio model. This is elf flesh highlighted up with VMC ivory and dark flesh for the (what are they, scratches? scars?) and mixed in for shading.

Once again, photography excels at showing every flaw. I might need to get out the magnifying headset to get some real precision.