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

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Finally an update!

Uuugh, sorry for the delayed replies, comments and posts folks. Life has kind of exploded with family, school and work and I haven’t had a chance to do much of anything!

Hello everyone. This is me in Pokemon land – just casually posing for my trainer license like a pro model.

1 thing I have been filling in my short breaks between commitments is the new Pokemon X game! I have bought and played through every Pokemon game since my original obsession with Blue way back when – and I must say, I’m between feelings on the new one.

If you don’t follow the games as I do, you may not know this already, but this is the game Nintendo announced was their start to changing the experience of the Pokemon gaming franchise. It has a big story, cut scenes, 3D animation and all that jazz (in addition to a bunch of additional internet connectivity and bonuses related).

So, here are some snaps I took of my screen while playing:

For starters, this game is a lot more customisable in regards to what you look like. So I took the general route of making my character “somewhat” like myself.
This is the wholly arrogant and obnoxious fist pump my character does when beating a trainer for plot required purposes.

I honestly don’t know if the change view makes exploring dungeons better or worse to be honest.

At least it’s pretty, I suppose?

As tradition dictates, I chose the fire starter. Now this is the second stage evolution (Braixen).

This thing actually pulls a ‘branch’ out of it’s tail and uses it like a wand. I actually hate it.

The main evil ‘TEAM’ in this game is a group named ‘Flare’. Now, don’t get me wrong, Team s always have a tendency to look rather comical.
These guys are absolutely no exception in that regard.

One of the things I do very much enjoy about this game is the customisation through hair cuts and various accessories.
For once I have a character I’m playing in Pokemon that I identify with.

At least it’s not the mushroom headed girl from Black, anyways.

And finally, another feature they have added is on occasion you encounter a sign with a camera on it. This summons a photographer to take a commemorative ‘snap shot’ of you on your adventures.
The DS responds in your hands the same way a camera would (ie. tilting the device, tilts the camera angle).

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Other than Pokemon, all the painting I have been doing has been for my Rotten Harvest entry for the Wyrd painting competition and due to rules I can’t post anything about it. 😦

The only other thing I have managed to find the time to do, is to keep up with the ‘Paint-along’ thread for free handing. As of week 3 highlighting has been completed:

I found the highlighting on this really tricky, as there was no obvious ‘light source’ for where I had done the highlighting on the coat initially!
I ended up doing a few shades of the gold/yellow colour to highlight – but it appears only one shows in this photo.

I shall have to get a better picture when I do the next round of touch ups!!

Well, Love you all!!
Sincerely,
Ellie.

My Next Challenge: Try to not break anything

It appears that I have, as of late, developed an inability to hold anything….or at least, inability to hold Infinity miniatures for any prolonged amount of time. *sigh*

Do not fear! We have come with the power of tinyness.

So I got them to around this stage (which for me is – yea pretty much done) and then what did I do? I dropped one, bent it’s whole shoulder guard/wing thing in and chipped off all the paint! (Many sounds were made, tears were shed, regrets were had).
Painting Sage attempted to rescue my work for me by quickly placing a lacquer type varnish over it that saved a lot of my paint job and returned it to me.

20 minutes later….I dropped the SAME MODEL. ON THE OTHER WING.

Really, to be honest. I shouldn’t be allowed to touch things in general.
Ah well….spent the rest of my time trying to fix his little attachments and got them sort of back to the state they were in.

I have also decided to ‘mark’ my Infinity army with my own symbol.

What have you done do us, girl? Put some weird M sign on my thighs? I’ll never be able to wear stockings again! Pssh

So it’s actually a bat. This is because I wear a lot of black and a number of people (including beloved Painting Sage) like to call me a varying range of ‘vampire’, ‘goth’ or ‘corpse bride’ haha whatever. Either way I often refer to myself as a bat so I went with a little bat.

Other than these guys I finally started painting one of the horses my friend gave me.

I appear to have the body shape and head of a Standardbred, and the feet of a Clydesdale..I’m a CLYDARDSDALE!!

I’m using him to attempt a different method of painting. I normally focus on one ‘area’ like skin and then finish it before moving onto the next – this time I’m going to block in all the base colours first and work my way out from there. Let’s see how it goes!!

I’d also like to note, he has developed this weird grainy film all over patches of him. I’m not sure what caused it, but it’s really hard to try to paint ‘smoothly’ over.

Oh last thing I should tell you all…I discovered the tiniest wontons in the world.

Like…seriously. It’s like eating a largish kidney bean. It’s so small my Infinity mini’s could use it as a decently sized pillow.
Fail Wonton company. Just fail.

Love from El

Work is dull and I have a PhotoBucket

I pretty much use PhotoBucket.com to host all of my images for various forums/blogs etc. So I thought the other night, why not upload a bunch of random things and use them to write a blog post if work turns out as slow as expected….glad I did. Work is dull.

So, a couple of random things…

Have been soaking and scrubbing some more of the miniatures given to my by a friend.

Raaaaawrrrr…rch…chu…bleeerg *furball*

I think this little guy is about as clean as he’s going to get.
The reason that the head looks SO clean is because it had actually never been put on!! In addition, the rider was never painted – so I just have him in a baggy waiting for his new fat raptor pet to get a coat.

Finally got the Infinity ALEPH figures together (my god, never again, so tiny) and then spray painted them with my Vallejo Off White. This was my first go a spray painting anything.
YIPES. So much more difficult than I had ever imagined. Half the time I think I was just blowing air in their general direction.

Then they were sprayed with a light coat of Sepia GW Wash.

Now to paint the detail!! Omg…paint…the detail. That detail is like under a 1µm in size. NOPE THEY JUST STAYING WHITE. *sigh* I’ll give it at go…but it won’t be pretty.

Last note, Painting Sage has been teaching some other people from work how to play Warmachine. So I headed around to watch the match and sip my cappuccino. Mmmm…delicious.

Well, that’s all for today it appears!! Love you all ~

~ El

Todays Adventures: Painting Sage gets a Blog!

Well, as it appears all of my waffling on about the awesome WordPress miniatures community has rubbed off on my Painting Sage and he’s made himself a blog!!

http://thewurmwood.wordpress.com <—click here for good times.

As much as I wanted him to entitle it ‘The Ramblings of a Painting Sage’ it appears he instead went with The Wurmwood. Haha.

In my most recent escapades….I continued painting Lylyth from Warmachine. Got a lot of practice painting shading on cloaks.

Look at the beautiful sway of my cloak. It flaps! Like a candle in the wiiiiinddd…ehem

Still need to learn a lot about blending. *sigh*
I keep huffing and becoming frustrated that they don’t come out as nice as they look in the pictures on the website. I wish patience was less of a virtue and more of ‘buy it now’ on ebay.

Painting Sage and I also purchased army’s for the miniatures table top game Infinity!

(Mine are the ALEPH on the left)

I absolutely COULD NOT believe how little these were when I opened the box.

Hello my dear. I hear you’re going to be painting me? Take care with my stilletos, they’re small enough to clip the wings of a fairy dancing on the head of a pin.

AAAAARG.
Putting these together was not only an exercise in patience, but also a grand learning experience in the art of ‘pinning’. Painting Sage had to step in a few times to assist me as I was flailing all over the place losing pieces of robots that could only be found with a metal detector.

But, eventually, I had a set of robots and little Aleph people.

Well, I might leave it there for today!
Oh one other piece of news, was my painting friend found these awesome free printable terrain maps and cargo containers! I don’t have a ‘great’ photo of it yet – but how cool does this look??

Ooooooh, cannot wait to play on this with my ultra tiny part people.

Love you all! Sincerely,
Ellie

Gifts, Pizza and Painting

So, well – I am the type of girl that gets heavily into her hobbies. By that I mean, I constantly read about them, want to be actively doing them, spend wild amounts (at least to my bank balance) of money on them AND talk about them.

I have been yammering on a lot to a friend of mine about Malifaux, Puppet Wars, War Machine and everything else miniature related I have been learning.
ANYWAY, long story short, the other day he comes out with this big box and gifts me all of his miniatures stuff. Apparently he was into Warhammer 40K a while back but hasn’t had much to do with it for a while and wanted it to go to a home where the mini’s would be painted and cherished.

Omg omg omg, no idea how excited I was to go through everything and start plotting bases and paint schemes.

Sooo many things!! And most of them still on their sprues!! (Is that how you spell that?)

So, I pulled out this little guy holding a big flag and thought it would be nice to paint him up really nice, and put something on the flag and gift back to the friend that gave me the box. Just to see that I was putting love into their painting and appreciate the gift.

But the skull at the top of the flag had been eaten away/melted by something?
So, here is my first attempt at making an epoxy replacement.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHA. That skull looks REDICULOUS. But alas, it was made with love…or…something. Maybe I can fix it with paint?

Well, this is his progress so far…

I also had a few in the box that my friend had painted himself.
The flags on this are just so nice, and you can see effort was put into this mini, so I don’t have it in me to strip him. My plan is to just clean up a few paint chips, and add him to my shelf.

*Disclaimer: Not painted by me.

In the box I found a few choice items I was really excited about…

Do you see? DO YOU SEE? PONIES.

There were a couple of horse and rider sets already painted in the box so I decided to fix and strip them first. As they were mostly a single thick coat of black it took forever scrubbing, and it ended up actually leaving tiny little ‘bubble’ type holes all through out the horses saddle.
So I green stuffed the saddle and top of tail and sanded it back, after having soaked and scrubbed with Simple Green.

Now, my first pony is up to the stage of priming and painting.

PONY. SO EXCITED TO PAINT THIS PONY. EHEHEHEHE.

Well, I can smell my pizza has now finished cooking – so I shall see you all soon. Post more miniatures everyone 😀 !

Love always,
Ellison

Photos, Photos la la la

Anyone remember that song? Onions, onions lalala, Onions, oniona da da da – doo doop do do doop doo do.

Yeeaaaaaa….anyway.

Ok, so as I said in my last post, tried to get some nicer photos of my (almost) finished Malifaux crew so far.
I say ‘almost’ because le tiger still needs some grass, and everyone’s getting some tufts.

Firstly, Miranda…

As a side note, Wyrd have changed her design to now wear an executioner type mask and have cheerleader pigtails. I feel this Miranda would not be impressed with pigtails…

And then my Tiny-Dragon!!

I’m so happy with how his mouth turned out, despite using the wrong colours for it.

And little le Tiger.

Still not really happy with the heads, they don’t stand out enough. But I honestly have no idea how to fix them.

Finalllllllyyyy, a progress shot of Marcus.

Why everyone else get to be semi-pretty, but when it comes to me – I have to look like this, eh?

His clothes are now getting a coat!! Woowoo. The colours of his clothes are thankfully taking the attention away from his skin. *ehem*

Oh, as a side note, was wandering around the Wyrd forums (as I do) when I saw this on my profile.

(For non-Wyrd fans, that name is the creator of the company/games).

Dunno why this made me happy, I guess it was more ‘oooooh, what did I say that made him look at my profile??’ *beam beam beam*.
Buuuut, knowing my luck, it was a miss click when he was trying to select ‘Mark this user as a derp’ or something, haha.

~ Love from, Ellison

Minis in the Sun

This is just a little post, for like the first time in forever we actually have sun light, so I thought I’d try to get a few shots of my Malifaux crew thus far!!

Will be posting more later! Haha, I have too much fun photographing these.

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

Miniatures and puppets

Hello my friends!!

So, I received my parcel in the mail, filled with lovely miniatures things and cost more money than I really have to spend – but WHAAAAT ever.

1. Some new paints and a light grey ‘white’ wash
2. Puppet Wars Unstiched!!
3. Zombie Chihuahua
4. Wendigo
5. Rasputina (normal version)

Soooo many pieces! Aaaarg!

So, I’ve never bought a ‘kit’ like this before where you have more than 1 miniature in a set to put together like this. But according to my ‘Teaching me all things miniature’ sage, this is one of the nicest kits he’s seen and thinks it’s a great way to get me introduced to taking them all apart, cleaning and gluing together.

So far – so good. I have 12 out of 44 done.
….that seems far more painful when I say it out loud.

Well, I finally got some time to work on le tigre (as I have now named him). Now, I realise a lot of people actually main this model to look like a wolf instead, and I thought of doing that to keep things simple, but my friend assured me they could teach me to wet blend.

Oooh lookie lookie, I have a brand spanking new coat!

Wet blending was seriously the most stressful technique I have ever tried. Moving at that speed to try to get everything together while it’s still liquid on the figure was REDICULOUS.
I kept making ‘Eeep’, ‘Oh no!’ and ‘AAAAAAARG’ sounds across the table with a raised eyebrow staring back at me going ‘What ARE you doing???’. Ehem.

Stripes stripes stripes…wait, is this a prison jacket, yo? Oh no, it’s just me.

Then I did little stripes. Yeaaaaa…all those panicked sounds I was making during the wet blending were worse during this. So tiny.
Everything was finished off with a wash and that’s where I left it for the day!

I am really excited about how it’s coming along but I have to be completely honest, more than a few times it was handed to my friend to try to correct a stripe I’d just stuffed up or show me how to blend on a certain type of fur. Whenever I attempt things like this at home on my own, they never go well.

Only other news is that I’m now watching my way through Kyle XY. Anyone remember that show?

Aaah yes, your pithy maths problem is no challenge for me.

I do remember this show, although didn’t watch it when it was coming out on TV. But the show is only like 5 something years old, why does it look like it was shot in the early 90s?Well, love you all!
~ Sincerely, Ellie