Hellhounds

Who couldn't resist painting Hellhounds? Not me... and not Simon, as it turns out. He helped me on these.

Brown Hellhound with flaming hair and tail.


Simon picked the colors for this blue one one, and painted it himself. I think he did a pretty good job. I talked him through it, but the only thing I did myself was the eyes and teeth.

And, finally, the "master" Hellhound:

The body is supposed to be purple, but its hard to see in this picture. The body is a base coat plus a wash and a final drybrushing. The flaming hair is a base coat of yellow with a wash of red.

I was still uncomfortable painting facial features so I just painted the eye sockets yellow and the teeth white.

Beastmen

While painting the Beastmen I had my first feeling that I was starting to get the hang of mini painting.With the Beastmen I started to combine the techniques I'd begun learning on the previous figures and began experimenting with a new one: highlighting.

First I lay down the base coat, then I washed with a darker version of each color, then I took a lighter version of each color and tried to highlight the raised areas. Thus, each part of the figure has three tones of each color, a base coat, a dark wash and a light highlight.

It is hard to see in these pictures, but you can notice it a bit in the muscles of the arms.

You can tell I had no idea what to do with the faces, though. I just washed them and walked away.

Still, these are the first minis I painted that I felt proud of.

Skeletons

With the skeletons I started to experiment with a technique called "washing".

Washing is an easy way to bring out recessed details. It works like this:

First lay down a base coat on each part of the figure. In this case, white for the bones, brown for the bows and leathery bits and different colors for the clothes. Then, choose a darker shade of each color (or one dark brown/black) and water it down until it is the consistency of low fat milk... very runny. Saturate your brush with the wash and dab it around carefully. Because the wash is so think, it tends to collect in the recessed areas, but be rather translucent on the raised areas. Thus, the recessed areas look darker, as if they are in shadow.

I didn't do any dry brushing on the skels... they are basically just a base coat, plus a wash of red. I used red because I wanted to create a bleeding effect, as if the skeletons are seeping.

Spider

Next up, also from the game Descent, is a Spider.

The basic technique involved in both the spider and the naga are a combination of the following:

1. Basecoat with black
2. Drybrush with a lighter color to highlight the ridge details
3. Detail out other features
4. Add a puddle of "blood" because you think it'll look cool, but really it just looks like you spilled paint on the base.

My first Mini

This past May I picked up the board game Descent, which came with about 80 unpainted plastic miniature figures. I've always wanted to try painting minis, so I bought some paint & brushes and got started. Despite the fact that I suck at it, I'm really enjoying it.

Here's my first paint job, a Naga:

Let's be completely honest here... both the mini and the photography are terrible. I might as well have just dunked the thing in a bucket of paint and then drew a picture of it with a crayon.

This is really the combination of two hobbies, as I used to be really into photography. My first few pictures before this one turned out really poorly. It turns out that my normal 35mm camera with all the automatic bells & whistles was bad a focusing on tight closeup shots. So, I dug out my old totally manual Pentax K-1000 that I've had since my dad got it for me on my 18th birthday. It is much better at closeup stills, but is finicky about lighting. This whole roll isn't as well lit as I'd like. My old flash for the camera doesn't work anymore though, so I'm stuck with multiple floor lamps in my make-shift garage photo studio.

Hell... its a start...

Foot Foot Con: 2006

Last weekend was the first annual Team Foot Foot Gaming Retreat. (Named, of course, after The Shagg's 1969 international hit My Pal Foot Foot) Some time back my friend Steve decided that even though nobody in our group was a hunter, this shouldn't mean that we can't get a long weekend away from wives and children to pursue our hobby. So, he rented us a cottage on lake Huron, instructed us all to obtain the necessary permissions and made all the arrangements for a Friday morning through Sunday afternoon board gaming extravaganza.

Steve and Paul even designed an elaborate point system to determine an overall "Best Gamer" and also had a wooden plaque ordered to award to the one of us who won the most games / points (aka, the biggest geek). For his part Paul pre-made a number of really nice meals and on Saturday evening barbecued us a 10 pound salmon fillet (it was HUGE!)

So, all 7 of us arrived on Friday morning and the gaming began. On Friday, from 9am to 3am I played: Thurn and Taxis, Liberte, Santiago, Power Grid (using the Italy board), Acquire, Around the World in 80 Days and Modern Art. On Saturday from 8am to midnight there was: Puerto Rico, Struggle of Empires, Modern Art and Santiago. Finally, on Sunday from 8am to 2pm we played: Ticket to Ride Europe, Hoity Toity, For Sale and two games of Diamant.

One of the best parts of the weekend was that our cottage was on a bluff directly over looking Lake Huron. This meant that we could play a couple of games and run down to the lake to go swimming for a while before coming back up and starting another game. And, to top it all off, the weather was so nice that Paul and I slept out on the grass, under the stars both Friday and Saturday nights. Also, it turned out that this weekend was the Perseid meteor showers, so I woke up periodically each night to watch shooting stars zinging across the sky over my head.

The only downside to the weekend was Saturday's 8 hour Struggle of Empires game. SoE is a pretty aggressive game anyway, but after that long sitting around a table everyone's nerve's were fried and we were all getting pretty uptight, if not downright hostile to one another. I know I sure did my share of ranting and raving. I'm no big fan of area-influence games anyway, and Paul promised it would only last 3 hours, so after 4 or 5 hours with no end in sight, I was getting pretty edgy. I was especially embarrassed about my bitching and moaning since I ended up winning the damned thing in the end anyway. I hate getting pissed off during a game, but we all do it. However, we're used to this sort of thing happening from time to time, so afterwards we all just laughed about it, went swimming and started up a new game. At least we didn't play Mare Nostrum or Illuminati.

In the end over 130 beers were consumed (3 of which were mine... I'm more of a rum guy) and Jake took home the grand prize, has bragging rights and gets to keep the plaque until the retreat next year. I have to congratulate him again. He completely dominated the weekend with the sheer quantity of 1st and 2nd placed finishes. You da man, Jake!

But, the plaque Steve picked out has 11 more blank name-plates on it. That means at least 11 more summers of 3-day board gaming extravaganzas to look forward to! Aint nothin' finer!