Painting, Paining and Clock Work Gaming!

Hello lovely people!

Recently, I traveled to Geelong (Australia) for the Clock Work Dragon event.
This was a Warmachine Tournament charity event for raising food for the homeless.

Wait! One of these guys is a slow walker.

Although I wasn’t competing in this event – I was volunteering and running around being an all general pest with my phone camera.

The event was 3 rounds (35pt) of 6 competing teams of 5.

During the lunch intermission, everyone signed their name in front of their army (or specific model) and left for lunch allowing for painting judging to proceed.

It was AMAZING to see some of the things people had painted.
The names of the painters have been cropped out as I don’t want to be posting people’s names – but how awesome are these!? I love seeing other peoples beautiful work.

In the end, the event raised over 4000 cans of food for the homeless!!

Awesome effort from everyone! And now my upper arms know the meaning of paint when it came time to moving that from the room to the various charity cars.

AAAANY how, in Ellie land, I have been getting back into painting! I finally have some free time after settling into my new office and my new role at work.

Hello, I will be your waitress for this evening. Do you prefer to be roasted? Or fried?

Her skin did NOT come out at all how I intended. My idea was to give her a kind of purple hue to make her look a bit pasty and dead. Instead, I just ended up making her look actually skin toned.
Ugh – ah well.

Oh oh oh, my other news! Everyone, gird your loins.
PAX 2015 is upon us.

Well – love you all! See you again next time for another ‘Things I have been doing, without any coherent style of commentary’.

~Ellison

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The Random Life of Make-up and Miniatures

Well, I have no had a lot of time to paint, update or anything else for that matter.
Makes me sad.

Tears have been shed.

Well, on with the show!

So I finally have my “failed Rotten Harvest: Trick or Treat” entry mostly completed. There’s some basing detail still to finish, but here she is!!

Er, El….I know you put a lot of time into this and all but doesn’t this look kind of…broken?

Now I ended up with an unintended side effect of, as all of the elements were created and painted SEPERATELTY, I ended up with this odd miss-matched looking base and mini.
Aaah well, I guess you live and you learn yea?

Now, I still have some grass tufts to add to the base and some more shading to do but for the moment – she’s put to the side because I’m afraid if I keep working on her I’m going to try to choke her in her sleep *ehem*.

Grass tufts soon to appear here and here.

Oh and finally! I know it doesn’t really make sense as they’re different tones and all but – her colour scheme was supposed to look like Candy Corns!!
I made her some small ones out of Sculpey III (which were baked) and glued to the base.

If I try anything like this again, they’re going to have to be way smaller.

Well, other than her I have also been working on my Argus for my Circle group in Warmachine.

Can you ask the other head to close his mouth? I can smell his breath way over here.

I was debating on the colour for the “fur” of the Argus but I think it ended up being Grey as after he was primed in a grey colour, it actually appeared to match the armour colour scheme I had chosen so decided to go with that.

In addition to these, I have been spending a little time learning about Makeup.
I have never been someone to wear makeup really (I am pertinently rolling about in Black Eyeliner from the supermarket but that is literally ALL).

I’m finding this interesting as the shading with blush and bronzer etc etc all appear to match the same rules as I use when painting a face on a miniature. I’m definitely going to see if I can pull off ‘eye glowing’ or ‘zombie tone’ effect or something on my skin.

Yup, those would be the smallest damned lipsticks in the WORLD. I put a 5c piece next to them for good measure.

While on a recent trip to Melbourne, I also managed to pick up a few goodies!

That would be an expansion for Puppet Wars, Some miscellaneous Reaper Bones minis, Reaper metal Jackalopes to act as Malifaux Proxies if needed, some paints and a copy of WoW – as believe it or not, is a game I only recently started playing and I don’t have a “paid for account” as of yet.

Well, I might leave it there for today!! Don’t want to use up all my photos all at once hahaha.

~ Sincerely,
Ellie

War Machine with my good friend Wang

My painting sage is a War Machine player and on a number of occasions has been busy working away on a warjack or two while I’m set up painting my Malifaux crew.
But the game honestly intrigued me, so I asked if they would teach me how to play.

Now, to be entirely honest – this is the first proper table top war game I have ever invested time into learning the correct rules for, so was very eager to head over and learn the ins and outs of robot men battling it out.

You want me to what? OH YEA RIGHT, PIECE OF CAKE!

So, what we have done is actually ‘made up’ a game play style. The story premise is that there is a piece of equipment Coleman Stryker (I call him Wang…I am unsure as to why I named him that) wants, and to win, one of the Cygnar team need to reach the part and role a 6 (with 2 dice), while my opponent surrounds me.

The reason this suits me a bit more is because I have a premise to theorize on, a story I can formulate in my head and my friend can build un-even pointed armies purely for the experience of showing me what all the different types of figures can do.

Actually LOVING doing this. Because when I’m playing, I can see it like a movie in my head, hear Wang making ‘Go get em!’ supportive yells as he skirts off around the edge with his IronClad.
I’ve so far being using Lancer and Charger to attempt to kite the enemy, but this is sometimes more effective than other times – depending on the abilities of my opponents.

Last piece of news, my friend offered to sell me the Cygnar guys (at a greatly discounted cost) as I was enjoying playing with them so much, they thought I might like to have them for my own.
Yipppeeee! Now I have ordered myself a Hayley to add to my little blue team.

Arrow to indicate most integral tool to any good gaming session. A medium cappuccino.

I want to have a go at building some terrain pieces like this as not only do they look like good fun, but so I can have my own to sometimes bring to games and help make the table look nice and pretty.

Well, that’s all my friends!

Love – Ellie

Image Heavy Post: So have a macaron

Yeaaaa…I’m one of those creepers that photographs most of their food. Am I posting it anywhere? Not particularly 90% of the time, but on occasion something pretty shows up like these beautiful McCafe Macarons. In case anyone goes and tries these bad boys – Yellow and Green are both delicious and I will be happy to live off all things lemon and pistachio for the remainder of my existence.

Ok, so I recently started getting interested in the Cygnar faction of Warmachine (this has been an on and off interest for a while) and deciding to have a go at painting my Warmachine Gungirl in small sessions when just bored watching TV or something.

Greeeey, is the colour of my heart? Cloak? Hair? Whatever…

So this is her … er… completed. I question saying ‘completed’ because even though I’ve had a go at building her a little base, she doesn’t feel finished, and I kind of regret not waiting to paint her at my friends.

I used a flash on this image to pick up the finer lines in the paint work, and as you can see – the shading on the cloak is…all over the place and not particularly following any kind of ‘light source’.
In addition her hair is too red (really) and the blue and brown badly used. I would like to say ‘but I only have a couple of colours’ and hide behind that shield of artistic excuse – but it’s really not why they ended up this way; merely a contribution to why I chose Red, Green and Blue schemes.

I also flash snapped some images of this guy (He’s an easily forgotten $3 Reaper miniature). I was using the coloured areas to practice getting a good colour blended effect going up to the highlight.
1. Looks sliiightly better without the flash on, but I’m not going to hold my breath for the diamond brush award ANY time soon
2. What am I doing wrong that it ends up so distinct like this?

All the arrows indicate which colours were used when I was trying a blending technique.
So what I was trying:
1. lightened the colour by nearly the most unnoticable amount
2. watered it down like AAAALLL hell
3. bunch of really really really thin layers slowly building up to lightest colour
4. finally washed with a watered down version of the 3rd or 2nd lightest colour (but watered down to the point that really it might as well of just been water at this point….)

—

Well, finally – I have been learning to play Warmachine (as mentioned previously) with a Cygnar team my painting mentor did up when the game first came out on the shelves.
So far, I’m thoroughly enjoying learning all about the campaigns/fluff/mechanics.

Final, last note, was just to cap off my nerd filled weekend, got given a couple of Magic the Gathering ‘learn to play’ decks a co-worked had (as I’m the only person they know that plays MTG) and used them to teach my younger cousin how to play. Seems like she enjoyed it!

Haha, hopefully she might be interested in playing some other things with me in the future too?~ Love Always,
Ellie.