Wholesome Family Activities

So in case you're wondering what it is that I've been doing with so much of my time that I can neither blog nor call up parents at the traditional time (sorry!), here's an explanation.  In a couple of months there's a convention up in Dallas called ReaperCon.  Reaper is a company that makes miniatures, the kinds I've spent so much of my time learning to paint.  The convention sounds really cool: they will have classes, plenty of places to paint, lots of things to do and see, games to play aaaaaaand...they have a competition for painted miniatures.

 Now I have never been competitive about my painting, but I looked at a lot of entries from last year and by comparison, my most recent work seems to match up pretty well.   At least, it does when I take my time.  Plus, they have a very forgiving grading system: you get graded based on how good your mini looks, not how many better painted miniatures happened to be entered in the contest.  I'm aiming for 'bronze' rank, but even if I don't get that, you get a certificate of merit just for entering, and I would hang that up proudly on my wall. A lot of the highest-end painting really is just a function of putting in really a lot of work.  And so in that spirit, I've begun working on my entry already.  I've been taking pictures at the end of each day, to show off progress and also to give you guys a sense of how long it takes to paint one of these guys so that they look really nice.  Also to show off how good I am at this now.  :)

Here is the end of day 1:

they grey is the primer: so the only thing I managed to get done in the several hours I spent on the first day with this guy is to get down a base coat of red, white and skin tone on part of him.  Told you: long process.  You use very thin coats of paint and paint them on usually around 4 or 5 times so that your guy looks like a little person, and not a tiny figurine covered in plastic paint.  The matte finish takes work, but it's crucial for a good looking figure.

Day 2:

A few more colors make their appearance.   did the gauntlet, mask, and the like in a slightly different red color.  I have a back-story in mind where the guy stole the coat from someone on the battlefield, so the color doesn't quite match.  Also, the accessories were given to him by his evil overlords, they are the source of his power.  It's very complicated, maybe I'll write up a story for him later.

Day 3:

A lot of progress on this day.  It was Saturday, and Jess let me paint a lot during the day while she watched Tyler.  the rest of the base coat has been laid down, and I even did the shading on the back of his coat.  I think I did a pretty decent job, but this is one of my first attempts at this sort of dramatic coloring.  A cape is a pretty good place to start, though.  The places where to put the high-and-low lights are pretty obvious.

Day 4:

Oh man, I really like the progress I did today.  I painted that tatoo-thing in the center of his chest like scarification, and it came out looking really well.  I also added some shading to his gauntlet, mask, loin cloth and chest-skin.  You might not be able to tell in this picture (heck, I can't even tell unless I look under the magnifying glass Jess got me for Xmas) but I managed to individually shade each of his ab-muscles.  I'm pretty impressed with that.

And lest you think I spend all of my time cooped up in my room ignoring my parently duties and painting: here's some evidence otherwise:

There was a nice breeze today, so we got out Jessie's stunt-kite and went out to the park.  There were a lot of crashes, but Tyler thought this was one of the coolest things in the world.

Jessie took Tyler skating also this weekend, Kneecaps be damned!  He thought it was also the coolest thing in the world.  Cutest, too!

-N