Mini Pics!

It's been a while since I posted some real miniature-related content, so I'm pretty excited to post some pictures of my just-completed superhero miniature. He really isn't painted extremely well, but I think he turned out decent. The skin looked a lot worse a couple of steps ago, with way too much contrast between the darkest parts and the highlights. So I went out on a limb and tried a glaze using my mid-tone orange. A glaze is basically an extremely thinned-out layer of paint. I think I had a 2:7 ratio of paint to water before I got the right consistency. It was originally 1:7, but it was too thin so I added another drop of paint. The purple shorts are part homage to the Incredible Hulk, part tinkering around with the color wheel, and part looking at bodybuilding magazines and realizing that bodybuilders tend to wear speedos in the worst colors imaginable. I think from here I'm going to write up a character sheet for this dude using the Mutants and Masterminds rules. He could also be used in the Supersystem miniatures game.

My brother and I went to the Monster Truck show Saturday night. It was a pretty good show, very loud and filled with monster trucks, smaller trucks, and dirtbike stunts. True to form, several of the monster trucks lost axles, wheels, and two of them even caught on fire. To add to the excitement, my brother and I each picked trucks to cheer for in the elimination races, and his truck went all the way to the finals, where it lost to Grave Digger. When the smaller trucks raced, I saw that one of the trucks was sponsored by the new hobby shop in Nampa. It would appear that the guys who own the shop have their hands in a few other hobbies as well.

We also made a trip to Hobbytown to find miniatures to use as superheroes in Supersystem games. I figure it might be better to get him started on a cheaper game like Supersystem, which only requires 3 or four figures per team, rather than a Warhammer or even a Warlord army that could end up costing $100 to $1000 or more, depending on what you want to put into it. He picked Warl Hellbore, who we wrote up as a sort of shadow ninja who creates shadows and has the ability to essentially teleport through those shadows to anywhere on the map.

I picked up a Clay Golem, who I wrote up as a standard heavy-hitting brick. I've already chosen the other two characters for my team, Mr. Cranium with his robot sidekick and Killshot. I'm thinking I'll paint them up and play them as villains. There are quite a few other miniatures I want to get, but they can wait.

My brother wants a modern-looking mage (maybe something anime-inspired, as he's really into Yu-Gi-Oh) and some sort of brick. We looked at quite a few miniatures online, but he didn't see anything he really liked.

I started working on my unit of Battle Nuns. I've finished their skin, but I'm not very happy with how it turned out. They look as though they were burned badly, mauled by a back-alley plastic surgeon, and then went through a failed Lasik surgery. I can't decide if they really look that bad compared to my previous work or if I've been looking at so many nicely painted minis online lately that my confidence has waned. I think this is one of those units that I'll just have to push through and be glad I'm done with them.

Today was a rather interesting day for me. Last night my back went out on me again, causing a fair bit of pain. I was able to finish my eight hours at work and get home, but when I woke up today I could hardly move around my house. So I called in sick and went to the immediate care place. The nurse seemed had a really hard time understanding what was wrong with me, although I think I explained it (with help from my wife) in very simple terms.

I explained it something like this: "My back hurts. It's been flaring up off and on for a year, and I've been to the VA Hospital about it twice." She was unable to grasp the concept, so we had to tell her several times.

She finally understood that my back was hurting and said, "Well, what do you want us to do about it? You're just here to get pain medication, aren't you?" I told her that I would prefer to find out what is wrong with my back and work on fixing it rather than just popping pills to mask the pain. She didn't seem convinced, and went off to get the doctor.

Luckily, the doctor seemed fairly competent. He told me some stuff that I can do to help prevent further pain, prescribed a few drugs, and maybe I'll end up doing some rehab-type therapy sessions. So I should be able to return to work tomorrow.

I was able to get some stuff done on my miniatures today. While my wife was watching American Idol I cleaned mold lines off of a bunch of Warlord figures. And after she went to bed I took them out to put primer on them and touch up the primer on my previous batch of figures. Priming is always an adventure, as I have to place the minis on some sort of stable platform, put on some latex gloves, grab my spray can, and somehow get it all out the front door, over the gate into the yard, across the yard, and into the shed. In the dark. I managed to drop one part of my Duke Gerrard figure on the porch while I climbed over the gate and I also dropped the freshly primed Duke himself on the dirt and dog-hair covered floor of the shed. Luckily, he did not absorb any dirt particles and I was able to respray the parts that got dinged up. Now I've got plenty of stuff ready to paint, and I just need to get on it. If that wasn't enough, I also got paint on my last good pair of pants.

I've been looking at pictures online trying to come up with a good paint scheme for my Battle Nuns. So far I've determined that the only color combinations out there are blue/white, black/white, red/black, and red/black/white. I think I'm going to go out on a limb and try a green/brown combo for my Crusaders army. We'll see if it works out.

I also printed out the Supersystem 2nd Edition rules. I figure I can rebase and repaint Heroclix figures until I start adding some other superhero figures to my collection.