I'm Not Dead Yet, In Fact I Think I'll Go For A Walk!

Contrary to popular rumors, I am still among the living. Some people say I'm antisocial, but I prefer to think of myself as elusive, like a gorilla in the mist or something. My wife's family is in town, so my painting has slowed to a halt, but I do have ten completed Stormvermin now as well as another five partially done. Everything goes fast except for painting the main armor color, because there is so much surface area to cover. I think they look good, though.

I am a step closer to completing two small warbands (750 pts. each) for the Reaper Warlord game. I already had the Necropolis starter set, and I got half of a Crusaders army this week. I didn't like the Crusaders starter set, so I made up my own list. I have Duke Gerard and three Battle Nuns. To finish the army I need to get a mage and three more Battle Nuns. The two armies total 20 figures, so hopefully I can paint them up quickly and actually play a game with some miniatures I've painted.

Even More Painting!

I started on my Stormvermin unit today, and they came out looking quite nice. At first my plan was to paint them all in GW Mithril Silver, but they looked too monochromatic and I decided to do something a little different. I left most of the armor in the shiny silver, but then I took all of my metallics and painted the trim areas in different patterns. They also had some extra armor plates that I gave the same treatment to.

One thing I wish I'd done is wait to assemble them until they were painted. I should've learned my lesson with the Clanrat shields, which are a such a paint to work around that I've started saving them for last. The Stormvermin hold their halberds so close to their bodies and faces that it's just about impossible to get a brush in and paint under there.

I also went a shade darker on their skin because the background in the book says that larger stronger Skaven have darker fur. These guys are a little bigger than the Clanrats and Plague Monks. I did a side-by-side comparison just to see how much bigger they are. Here are the photos:

We (my wife and I) transferred our characters on World of Warcraft to a new server so we could play with my sister and brother-in-law. Blizzard has started a new program that lets you transfer a character between realms for a fee. We meant to just start out on the same server and level up together, but we closed our accounts for a month and they got way ahead of us, so we decided to just transfer our old higher-level characters over. I have a level 45 Dwarf Hunter, my wife has a level 40 Night Elf Druid, my sister has a level 40ish Dwarf Priest, and my brother-in-law has a level 40 Human Warlock. It should be pretty awesome.

I added a link to my list for the Wheelchair Foundation. I go to work at 1:30 on Monday mornings, so when I go on break, there are usually some pretty interesting infomercials on the television. This Monday I saw an infomercial for this Wheelchair Foundation. It's a charity organization that sends wheelchairs out to people who need them. I was a little wary of it at first because you always hear about charities that send only a certain amount out of every dollar to people in need. But I read up on them and saw that they are partnered with my church, so I'm going to try to save up and send out some wheelchairs to people. If you read this, maybe you could go to the site and watch some of their videos. If you don't get a little misty-eyed, then you're a harder person than me. I saw a lot of people in Iraq who really could've used one of these wheelchairs. I complain about my life all the time, but I have legs that work, a car, a house, plenty of food, two stupid dogs, and a small mountain of miniatures and comic books. These people have nothing and they still keep going. I don't get up and preach too often, but I think this is worth at least a paragraph or two and a few minutes of time to go look at the site.

More Painting

First things first, I finally got back around to painting something. In this case it was the rest of my Skaven Clanrats unit that I started a couple of muonths ago. I know it was originally going to be part of a step-by-step tutorial on how I paint them, but once I got going I didn't want to lose my momentum by stopping and taking pictures. Here are a couple of pictures of the completed unit. As usual, the bases are not done yet. I think my next unit for this army will be the unit of Stormvermin.

My next order of business is in response to a comment on my previous post. John wants to know how I paint the pupils on the eyes of my pirates. The brush I've been using was ordered from the site Fernando Brushes that I've got linked in my sidebar. It's the round brush No. 1. I don't know if I recommend this, but to get a good point on it, I put the end of the brush in my mouth and spin it as I pull it back out. Then I stick the very tip of the brush in some GW Skull White paint so I have a little dot at the end. I then try to get that little dot of paint centered on the eye of the miniature. I usually spill over the edges of the eye a little, but that's okay. Then to do the pupil, I rinse my brush, get a good point on it, and dip it in some Chaos Black paint. Again, I try to get a tiny dot of black centered in the white of the eye. If it turns out funny looking, I use a little more white around the edges of the pupils to cover up some of the black until both pupils look right and are centered on the eyes. Then I take my flesh-toned paint and clean up the edges where the white spilled over out of the eyes. It's a lot easier than it sounds, but you really have to keep a steady hand and try to get the white and black centered. The most important part to making it look acceptable is the cleanup step, where you fix the edges of the black with the white paint and then fix the edges of the white paint with the flesh paint. When I mess up really badly, I just paint over it and try again.