One Day Paint Job: Herne and Jonne

I should probably start a series of posts on this. Way back when, I'd give my warcasters a punitive one day paint job when they lost a game. Feora and The High Reclaimer each got one (and HR isn't that bad.) Now that I have resolved to not field any unpainted models at lunch battles, I find myself using typical tabletop techniques to get models painted as efficiently as possible so I can field them.

Like these two. I painted Jonne's (the big guy) face and arms a few days ago. Everything else on him, and everything on Herne, was done yesterday.

the Green Pants Syndicate

This was mostly an exercise in "color in the lines" along with some washes and a small bit of dry-brushing. They definitely have that "good from afar, but far from good" vibe going on. I did have a little fun with lenses though. Yes, I know the reflection angles are wonky.

This completes the mercenaries that will work for the Protectorate from Warmachine: Prime. Now I just need to work on those units...

Busy Shelf Update

Another snapshot of the busy hobby shelf, littered with old and new projects.

Front and center is a Maschinen Krieger (Ma.K) "Gustav" fighting suit, 1/35 scale. That's about 54mm scale to our kind. I still need to weather the arms and shoulders, but it's coming along nicely. The decidedly forward lean is because he's on a pin and not in final glued position. There's a clear canopy that goes on as well, but I'm debating whether to use that or not. I'm rather fond of the base, which uses photo etched brass maple leaves and barbed wire.

Just to his right is a newly painted Gutter Runner for my Skaven Blood Bowl team. To his left is the recently completed Slayer for the Dwarf team. Behind the Gutter Runner is the perennially incomplete stained glass Avatar of Menoth, making me sad. Now that I've decided to paint the models in book order, he's got a ways to go.

Also seen, a Rackham something or other, a Skull Pass Lord/Thane (primed), a very old Skaven (possibly HeroQuest) missing his weapon and a sheep that one of my daughters made from Sculpey.

Not pictured, Herne and Jonne. They are somewhere right of the Avatar and now partially painted.

TL;DR Bonus Content: I am contributing to Black Crusade 2012, the charity army build done by the same folks who brought you Storm Wardens and Heroes of Armageddon. I have a special character and a specialized unit to paint. Contribute now to maximize your chances of winning the drawings held along the way. My Malifaux crew is based with swag I won from Secret Weapon miniatures in one of those drawings.

Some Original Lead

Much like today, 2/3 remain unpainted

 Back when I was a lad into D&D and what-not, miniatures held a fascination for me. For the life of me, I don't remember where I used to buy them though. The local drug store (!) sold D&D and gaming stuff, so I suppose I could have picked these up at Uber's Drugs in Brighton, MI. Take that, search engines.

The leftmost fellow is a Ral Partha 01-099 "Armoured Giant mounted on War Elephant" from 1979. Oddly, most of the references I see for this one are catalogs from 1983 or so. The middle guy is Citadel's FTT4 "Troll in Chainmail with Scimitar." He is carrying a bound woman over his left shoulder. Looking at all the models in that sub-range, someone clearly had to sculpt a lot of troll wang. The base of the troll has this mysterious lower case 'a' on it. The top of the troll's base clearly reads "Citadel" and then something that might be "ATM". It was sculpted by Tom Meier, so I suppose that makes sense.

Troll and Giant's bases

top of Troll's base... "Citadel ATM"?

The rightmost fellow is a bit of a mystery. The top of his base is sculpted like a stone floor. The bottom has only "MP" inscribed. Something deep in my brain wants to call him an ogre. Anyone recognize him?

Blood Bowl Slayers

That's it. Team is now has maximum Slayers.

Here are the Slayers for my rapidly expanding Dwarf Blood Bowl team. For a camera snapshot edited in picasaweb, the photo isn't half bad. There's still some shine on the left one that Dullcote didn't take care of. I may need to brush on some matte later. Also, I pretty much hate the right one's foot on the ground. I should have filed away some to fix the fact that his little toe and big toe are about the same size.

These fellows were both eBay rehabilitations.

Battle for Skull Pass Slayer Lord

2006 Games Day Daemon Slayer

Blood Bowl Slayer WIP 2

This fellow got some work tonight. The skintone is interesting. I used Vallejo Game Color heavy skintone from their extra opaque line, basically their answer to GW foundation paints (just in time for GW to change absolutely everything, thank you very much.) The color is different than the color I thought they would be emulating, Tallarn Flesh, and is quite a bit colder in tone. I mixed VMC ivory in for highlights, so still pretty cold. Hey at least it wasn't white.

He's mighty pleased about something.

The team colors are blue and yellow. The figure has so much gold on it that adding yellow anywhere would seem redundant. Instead, I went for blue trousers and a blue stripe in the hair, both based on VGC extra opaque heavy blue. It's very much like Mordian Blue. The gold jewelry is currently basecoated VGC scrofulous brown. Gold metallics look so much better over a similar solid base color. I mixed a tiny bit of black into the s.brown to hit the channels in the medallions. I don't typically use black to shade (and neither should you!) but it seemed like a good choice at the time.

Once this guy is complete I will have 4 models painted and another 4 based and primed. The Skaven team all have flesh color basecoated, but only one model has a full paint job. I watch eBay for Dwarf or Skaven Blood Bowl figs, and I'm really shocked at how much they go for, especially the older Skaven. I'd love to get one of those old throwers holding the ball low and pointing, but all the lots with a fig like that have gone for $75 or so. Granted there were 10-15 figs per lot, but that's the one I really have my eye on. Deathrollers seem to be in high demand as well. I'll probably just scratch build one since that sounds like a fun project.

Warmachine: Completing Prime After 10 Years?

It's been 10 years since Warmachine: Prime was released. I started playing about 2005, shortly after the  release of Apotheosis. In honor of this auspicious decade of aggressive page 5ers beating my head in, I will audit just how well I've done at getting a set of Prime models for my faction, including any mercenaries who will work for them.

a portion of the army I keep at work for lunch battles... it's grown since this picture was taken

The High Reclaimer - fully painted!
High Exemplar Kreoss - fully painted!
Grand Scrutator Severius - fully painted!

Redeemer - fully painted!
Repenter - fully painted! 
Revenger - fully painted!
Crusader - fully painted!
Vanquisher - assembled

Choir of Menoth - 4 model squad fully painted!
Deliverers - 10 model squad primed
Holy Zealots - 10 model squad primed
Knights Exemplar - 6 model squad primed
Temple Flameguard - 6 model squad primed

Paladin of the Wall - partially painted

Herne & Jonne - purchased
Eiryss, Mage Hunter of Ios - fully painted!

So, I at least own everything from Prime, and have assembled almost all of it. I have even painted all the casters and most of the jacks. Where I fall behind seems to be the infantry units. Considering we are playing mostly 15 point lunch hour games, that's not terribly surprising.

...and just because it will make me feel better, let's do Escalation too.

Feora, Priestess of the Flame - fully painted!
Guardian - assembled, brass rod conversion for stupid bendy banner poles
Deliverer Sunburst Crew - 2 crews assembled, primed
Exemplar Seneshal - fully painted!
Monolith Bearer - primed
Flameguard Cleansers - 10 model squad primed
The Wrack - 3 models primed
Devout - primed
Reckoner - fully painted!


Captain Sam MacHorne and the Devil Dogs - not purchased
Gorman di Wulfe, Rogue Alchemist - fully painted!
Rupert Carvolo, Piper of Ord - partially painted

Dwarf Scale Issues?

I received my Games Day Slayer to add to my Blood Bowl team. Putting him next to the models I already have, he looks ... large. Very large.

Looks like someone remembered to eat his Wheaties

I don't know if he's just a large model to begin with or if the Dungeon Bowl Dwarfs and the Skull Pass Slayer are just small. I figured he'd make a pretty cool Blood Bowl Slayer, especially in contrast to the other Slayer's berserk pose. Looking at the two of them together, the contrast is more than I expected. I'll finish painting him up and see how I feel then. Maybe I just need to convert up a comically large Deathroller to make everything else on the field seem tiny.

New NAF Dice!

I got my very first NAF dice today! They are very cool!

....except they are invisible unless they are under strong light. So I painted them!

Ahhh. Much easier on the eyes. Well, my eyes anyway. I tried blood red for the bam's, but it was still too low contrast. Orange Fire was nicely visible, as was the bright yellow.

First Blood Bowl / Dungeon Bowl Dwarfs

I started painting the Dungeon Bowl Dwarfs. To strip the old paint job off I soaked them in Simple Green for a couple days then took an old toothbrush to them. The paint remained quite stubborn, so I tried some Vallejo airbrush cleaner. Wow, what a difference. I'll have to try that stuff on a dry painted model just to see how it works, but it was dramatically better than the Simple Green soak. I only used a couple of teaspoons of it, just enough to wet the toothbrush and scrub.

Here is my current test model as he thinks fondly back to games of yore, painted in the official Dungeon Bowl Dwarf scheme. My painting on the padding is kind of clumsy, so I might have to develop a better technique for that. The yellow is a royal pain. Maybe I'll airbrush them, but the airbrush is a royal pain too.

He dreams of oranger days.

In anticipation of getting the Dwarf team I acquired a Slayer Lord from the old Skull Pass starter box and converted him to a Blood Bowl Slayer.

He's just here for the Slaying

I'm pretty happy with how he is turning out. Since this photo I've painted the ground as grass. I like the splash of color the green gives. I've got another Slayer on the way, a Games Day Demon Slayer with a very pleased look, which should make a fun Blood Bowl mini.

So despite the fact that I have zero idea with whom I will play this game, I am getting two teams and a pitch together. I need to scrape up an 8 sided die too, I guess.

---

On the work battle front, Brian and I have resumed lunch Warmachine. So far I'm running about 50% wins, which is far better than I've done in the past. Arc node blasting works well for me, and this last game I used Feora's "Engine of Destruction" extra movement to surprise the Butcher and cut him down in a flurry of P+S 17 attacks. The big disappoint for that battle was that Rorsch got killed before Brine took even one swing at an enemy. 9 points, and all they did combined was finish off a man-o-war demo squad member.

Long Post-Hiatus Update

Slowly I crawl from under my rock, squinting at the harsh light of day. I am breaking my long silence to recount all the petty details of my existence over these months. I do not intend to do this chronologically. Most of it will be hobby related. Expect details.

My daughter asked me to convert her LEGO royal guard guy into Inuyasha. I did so. She was pleased.

My former coworker Ann Marie got married in February. I painted a wedding present for them.

My wife and children placed some extra ingredients on top of a wild rice blend I had just made. When I lifted the lid to serve, I was appalled to see this:

They had purchased freeze dried meal worms (chili flavored!) at the local candy/novelty shop and sprinkled a few on when I wasn't looking. I was sure the worms had been in dried rice, and the steaming process had simply caused them to float to the top. Nice one, family.

My stupid truck is on its last leg. We ended up buying a used Impala to replace it, but now the van is dead and needs $2k in engine work. So I still drive the truck, hoping the transmission won't give out, and Stef takes the kids to school in the new(er) car. The van will remain parked until we can fix it.

Remember the spinny bar that applications used to use back in the DOS graphic days so you'd know the program was doing something and not just locked up? / - \ | / - \ | / - \ | / - \ | / - \ | / - \ |  Yeah, I guess hour-glasses and pinwheels do that now.

Tristan (of GWpertinent and Merry Mayhem News) cued me in on the "Give Him A Goblin" thingy, wherein people from around the interwebs paint and send a goblin for a Blood Bowl team. I had previously done a Harlequin for Tristan's Necromunda gang, so I figured it would be fun. I painted this fellow up, converted from a fantasy goblin.

Supposed to be a diving catch, but commonly viewed as karate chopping

He won the "best painted" vote, and so I (unexpectedly) won a very cool prize. A Dwarf team from the 1989 Blood Bowl sister game Dungeon Bowl!

Yes, we are all individuals.

They're getting chucked in the Simple Green as soon as I get them. I had already been given a Skaven Blood Bowl team by Jimmy (of Kroot-a-Saurus notoriety) a year ago so I developed a desire to really try this game out. I joined NAF to get some block dice, and made a Skaven themed pitch on which to play, mostly out of styrofoam, balsa, glue and sand that I had at home. It still needs some sort of score board.

I submitted an entry to Wyrd's Iron Painter competition. I was eliminated in round one with my scratch built robot girl. The theme was "Start Your Engines."

In retrospect it's not my strongest work, but it seemed to execute what I had in mind reasonably well.

Recently I experienced some ... difficulties. I was having problems concentrating at work. I was easily forgetting things, to the point where at the grocery store I would repeat the name of an item over and over in my head in the hopes that I would not forget it by the time I had crossed the store to its location. Often I would anyway. For entirely different reasons, my doctor did some blood work on me, and guess what? I'm diabetic! Wooo! To combat this particular malady I am losing a great deal of weight (about 25 lbs so far, another 20-30 to go), taking medication and seriously reducing carbohydrate intake. The result has been a noticeably improved state of mind, and I am now able to sit down for 30 minutes without falling asleep. What keeps me strictly adhering is the thought of sight loss or neuropathy. If I can't reverse the ailment, at least I can stave off the horrid consequences as many years as possible.

After my initial interest in Blood Bowl, Tristan turned me on to fumbbl. You can play Blood Bowl online with other stinking humans by the LRB 6 rules. 

It's huge fun but I take an awful beating at this point. Games take about 45 minutes, which is maybe twice the speed of a table top game.

My subrogation lawsuit has still not been settled. Another hearing is scheduled for June.

My family bought me (well, ordered me) a Hasegawa "Nutcracker" tank kit. I had seen the SF3D video they did in the early 80's which used larger scale versions of their models in a short combat movie. It's a little (as in "a lot") hokey, but still fun. Watch it on youtube (part 1, part 2, part 3). What more could a nerd dad ask for?

This is the studio model, not mine. I don't have mine yet.

Also on the non-gaming modeling front, the fact that anyone would make this out of this ... pleases me.

I have successfully implemented some single sign-on capabilities in Java now. I still hate dealing with SSL certs though.

Crystal Brush came and went this year, and I didn't even really notice. I suspect Golden Demon will do the same.

I attempted the Ludum Dare 23 in April. The point is to, single-handed, create a game over a weekend. I tried to use the Stencyl toolkit, but found myself struggling with the tool more than creating the game. My new mobile development language of choice for Flash/mobile is Haxe/NME.

I don't know what I would do without my phone telling me where to go every waking hour.

. . .

There. That's good for now. Time to start updating more regularly. Maybe I'll even answer my phone if someone calls. After a few months of me not answering, eventually they stopped calling.

2012 Eldar Rumors!

Take these with a grain of salt, but these are some rumored rules I've heard about a 2012 upcoming Eldar book!

Wisdom of the Ages - Eldar Farseers are masters of controlling psychic powers. Any psychic test roll of 10 or less made by Farseers automatically passes unless other modifiers negate this, especially anything by forces of the Imperium.

Made Of Freaking Glass Or Something - Eldar are frail and break if glared at harshly. All enemies re-roll rolls to wound against Eldar models. Enemies that would normally get a re-roll to wound get a second re-roll, overriding the "one re-roll" rule completely.

Ninja Throwing Star Gun Pew Pew - Eldar shuriken weapons are especially deadly against unarmored foes. Any enemy model with no armor save or invulnerable save wounded by a shuriken weapon automatically takes one wound.

Flying Tanks! - All Eldar vehicles use a "bottom" armor characteristic of 6 instead of front, side or rear when targeted by anything on the ground. Grav tanks that have disembarked troops that turn and have not moved since are exempt from this rule until they move.

I'm Pretty Sure I Have Some Art To Do - Eldar guardians can always choose to be wiped out in assault, since they'd really rather be pursuing other interests.

Ancient Enemy - An opponent fielding any unit aligned with the Chaos god Slaanesh may touch the Eldar player in a sensual and potentially confusing way immediately before each Eldar shooting phase.

Alright! Time to start saving my pennies for a new army!

Kamikaze Credit Where Credit Is Due

Kamikaze from Serious Sam, c. 2001

With a new Serious Sam game being released, I thought I would pay homage to the first shooter I remember that had a suicidal bomber enemy that would run kamikaze at you... and it's not Serious Sam.

I really liked PC games from the mid-90's through the early 00's. I typically had a PC that could handle them too. It was Doom that convinced me to drop my Amiga and get a PC, and from there it was a non-stop shooters, RTS, and just about any other game I could find. I was present for the birth of hardware accelerated 3D, and it was good. Demos were plentiful too, and although high speed internet was much more rare than nowadays most computer magazines had a CD of demos tucked in the sleeve. (Remember those? Printed magazines?) In 2001, FPS games had gotten a little crazy in complexity and narrative. Everyone wanted to have Doom's success, but with more thinky. Along comes this out-of-nowhere development team, from Croatia of all places, with a fun, fast, mindless romp of an FPS called Serious Sam. It was universally loved. If you didn't love it, get out of my universe. Old Man Murray even interviewed its creator. Twice.

One of the many web-based reviews was going on and on and on about how great it was, and gushed on about how original the screaming kamikaze bombers of Serious Sam were, a new enemy never seen before. Immediately, I thought to another shooter I had played, MDK, which also had screaming kamikaze bombers. MDK was released in 1997 and it wasn't a big hit, so I suppose it was a forgivable oversight on the part of the reviewer. I decided to send a quick and friendly heads-up to the reviewer... something along the lines of:

Regarding your Serious Sam review, the kamikaze bombers are very cool but this isn't the absolute first time we've seen something like them. MDK had kamikaze enemies that ran at you holding a bomb over their head. Thanks for the great web site, etc, etc.

The one-line response from the reviewer was something like:

I don't remember anything like that in MDK.

 Well, that will teach me, won't it? He doesn't remember it, therefore we may imply that it didn't happen.

Fast forward ten years, and the Amazon App Store free download of the day is "Serious Sam Kamikaze Attack" and memories of this whole forgotten exchange flood back. What was the name of that game again? What web-site was that? I may not remember the web-site that had the review, but I was able to dredge up the name MDK and here is incontrovertible proof of the MDK bomber dudes existed, via the miracle of youtube (time 5:30-6:00 roughly.)

Ha! Take that, ten year old computer game review! 
Plus, you gotta admit... MDK was pretty amazing for its time.

The Escalating Hello Kitty Project

A woman I barely know at work has seen some of my miniature painting, since I sometimes paint at lunch. She had all the usual comments and questions for someone who doesn't know much about the hobby, but seemed to appreciate the work. About a month ago she asked me to paint something Hello Kitty for her daughter's birthday.  I assumed that she wanted me to personalize a toy by painting something on it. "Sure, whatever you need," I answered.

Do you see the problem with that offer? I didn't at the time. Next thing I know I'm not only painting three Hello Kitty figures, but sculpting them as well based on a page from a coloring book. Oh, and they are big. Here is a regular terminator for scale.

He has a 3++ save against cute.

In retrospect I should have corrected the issue immediately, but instead I just ran with it like I knew that was the plan the whole time. I didn't want her to feel like I had agreed to something and was backing out just because she and I didn't have a complete understanding of what I would be able to do well. This is really the first time I've sculpted something like this. After about 20 hours of work and several serious miss-steps, I was finally able to get them together and paint them (poorly) and am delivering them today. They are by no means sturdy, so I hope they survive transport. I was fairly happy with the little dance floors I made for them.

So, the take away here (which you would think I would already know in my line of work) is to define your scope and set expectations early.

Hmmmm.... maybe I'll use what I've learned to sculpt my own Teddy for Malifaux.....

My Strange Children and the Waffled Cheese Sandwich

I was home with my kids last weekend, and prep for lunch started. They clamored for grilled cheese, so I dug around in the drawer that houses our Salton sandwich maker. One of the kids spotted the waffle iron in that same drawer and suggested we make the sandwiches in the waffle iron instead. Hmmm. Strange idea, but why not?

Hey, that's not a waffle

It actually worked out pretty well. Once done, the bread had a distinctly waffle-like quality to it. The sandwiches were definitely a unique twist on plain old grilled cheese.

It's a waffled cheese sandwich!

Warning though... the bread and cheese left little burned spots on the waffle iron that came out as black dots in the next waffle I made. Next time I will definitely take more care to clean the waffle iron when I'm done.

The Thing That Ate Nino

This was my Rotten Harvest entry in the "Things That Go Bump In The Night" category. Since the contest I have added a few rocks to the base, just to break up the sand texture a little.

The inspiration for this piece came from playing a game of Malifaux against a guild player using Nino Ortega. We put far too little terrain on the board, but as a new player I didn't know any better. All I remember was thinking, "Something had better eat him before he kills all my models." Behold that something.

The model is scratch built, sculpted initially from Fimo polymer clay around an aluminum foil core.

The Fimo / Sculpey version

After the Fimo was baked I used epoxy putty (green and gray) to sculpt on the features. To give the mouth some depth, teeth were sculpted on the model, and the lips were sculpted over them. Lots of watered down Milliput was used to get the body as smooth as possible but it still took a ton of sanding to get it even close to where I wanted. The little legs are based on an illustration I saw years and years ago from a book of Arthurian legend depicting a battle with a Wyrm with many short, taloned legs in a very centipede-like layout. I figure everything in Malifaux has to be at least obliquely referential to something else, right? I had intended them to lay more flat against the body, which probably would have looked better.

The original plan was to put him on a 50mm base, since that's the largest base used in Malifaux, and to have the hat sitting on the ground in front of him to suggest who the victim is. My hobby group convinced me to use a larger base to get my narrative across, which I appreciated. My stubborn insistence on using game appropriate bases limited my Space Marine vs. Howling Banshee diorama to 40mm, and for the life of me I don't know what I was thinking. After switching to the larger base size, my daughter saw the sculpted hat and declared that he should wear it. I resisted the idea for about 10 seconds until I saw the genius of it. "I ate you, and now I'm going to wear your hat." It reminded me of the very old Far Side cartoon of vultures eating some carrion, and one of them has a cowboy hat on doing his cowboy impersonation.

The translucent image of the victim was always part of the plan, but it didn't go quite as well as hoped. I'm not entirely sure what I should have done differently, but it could just as easily be an image on the outside of the stomach as the inside. Some people in the comments obviously got it, others did not.

Getting closer. Just needs his lunch painted in.

The cactus was an interesting challenge. Each lobe was sculpted separately, and the whole thing glued together with the tiniest of contact points. Touch the thing and it falls apart.

So there it is. My first fully sculpted and painted miniature. I'm pleased with it despite the flaws and lessons learned.

Wyrd Rotten Harvest Entry - Ghost Girl

This started out as an entry for the "Harrowing Harvest" duel category, with Reaper's Clarissa painted as a ghost (using the water sculpted on the base as a sort of "spectral splash") facing off against an undead hunter, utilizing OSL. The two figures just never really popped on the base together, so I decided to use Clarissa on her own. Most of the critique mentions the disconnect between the base and the mini, and this is mostly due to me having painted the mini separately and gluing to the base later. I really should have gap filled better between the "splash" and the grave, but I really didn't notice how bad it was until looking at the photos later. Most of the time my angle of viewing during painting the base (directly overhead) obscured the disconnect.

I had considered adding a tree, some clumps of grass or similar to make the base look busier, but in the end just was running too low on time. The snake (which I will post later) was my main entry, and most of the time went to him, being fully sculpted. I'll probably add some more details, clean up the OSL in some spots and then post this to CMON.


At the end of voting, she got 3rd place in her category, with which I am very pleased. Kudos to my wife for suggesting the red eyes. The original eyes were yellow-green, and Stef knew that a little touch of complementing red would give the model a nice focus point. Was she ever right!

"Hako" Means "Absent" in Swahili

And I regularly live up to the name by fading away for a few weeks.

Rotten Harvest pics have been up for nearly a week. Today is probably the last day to vote, so if you are so inclined and already have an account on Wyrd's forum go take a gander. Do not create an account just to vote on stuff (specifically mine) because you'll potentially get the person disqualified for vote stacking. After the contest is over I'll post photos of my entries along with some WIP shots. I can't say I'm 100% pleased with any of my entries, but they aren't terrible overall. Only my accursed photography is terrible. Of the three entries only the ghost girl photos look halfway decent. The other two are so overexposed (is over-saturated the term?) that the qualities of the color are lost. The base on the snake looks completely yellow, much to my dismay.

So I suppose now I should start dragging myself back into life... answering my phone, returning emails, etc.

EDIT: Woo! Pulled off 3rd place in "Not Quite Dead Yet" with 21 votes for the ghost girl! I even managed to get 9 votes with the snake in his category, putting him in 5th place!

The Waiting Game

I've been waiting for the voting galleries to be open for Wyrd's Rotten Harvest. The deadline for submission was midnight on Halloween, and judging by the time it's taking to get the images anonymous and ready for comment/voting I'm guessing there are a lot of them. Some of us have been having some fun in the contest thread while we wait.

It reminds me of waiting on pins and needles a few years ago, just after my bronze Golden Demon. I eagerly awaited the White Dwarf issue showing off all the Chicago winners. For some reason, I was completely stoked by the idea of seeing something I had created appearing in glossy print, even if it was in GW's $7 advertisement magazine. After many months of waiting I mentioned how eager I was to my local GW store manager. "Oh, hey. I don't know how to tell you this, but Golden Demon coverage got discontinued this year. They're going to show all the Slayer Sword winners in one issue when all the Games Days are done, but that's it."

Hopefully this waiting won't be quite as disappointing.

Sorrows ... and more

Bill's Sorrows, about which he is pleased.

The lunch time painting continued this week, with Bill putting most of the finishing touches on his Sorrows. They are looking good! I stuck some Vallejo black lava to the base, since all other basing ideas he's had would just take too long on our big Malifaux project plan. No, we haven't made a Gantt chart. Get your PMP out of my toy soldier hobby.

"But Mike," you ask plaintively, "aren't you going to tell us what you've been working on?" Okay, but only in the vaguest of terms. I have been working on three entries for Wyrd's Rotten Harvest painting competition. Two of my entries are definitely complex... almost as complex as my Golden Demon entries have been. One of them in particular has taken me the better part of a month to get to this point, and I'm really hoping to have it done for Monday.

Additionally, I have been putting some time into a new web venture. It's just getting going but it has a lot of future potential and I'm doing all the programming, mostly in PHP, to interact with Google Docs / Google Checkout. Once I get the scaffolding around the product, I can start to fill in the details and it's going to be very, very cool.

Add-Additionally, I have been programming in the Corona SDK. The end result will be games in the Android Marketplace first and eventually the Apple AppStore. Nothing incredibly fancy, but simple games in a genre that is underrepresented in the marketplace now. Hopefully, under-representation and reasonably quick time to market can result in sales. I need to fork out $200 for the Corona Indie license, so hopefully I'll have that available after Progressive is done repeatedly violating my desiccated corpse. As it is I may be liquidating some of my minis to fund Yule-tide festivities.

Behold The Legal Process!

Yup, apparently Progressive Insurance has decided to sue me over the little mishap that I had two years ago. As it turns out, my car insurance had lapsed (by about 30 hours) when the accident happened, so under Michigan law I am apparently not covered under the "no fault" law. That means I am directly liable for all the damages paid by Progressive for the  other person's car. Whee. And the insurance company carrying my policy at the time (although not exactly that time) ... also Progressive. In fact, I'm still a customer of theirs. Go figure.

The lesson here, my little internets, is always pay your car insurance.


Also, thanks to this video for showing me how to make the curvy text in Gimp.