Thinking Outside the Box

After all of the positive feedback around the interwebs I received about my Skeletor and Panthor figures I was eager to continue on with this project. I don't have a ton of figures for mini  MotU , but there are enough to allow me some options in my gaming. I just recently finished reworking my season 1 corporation team "The Avion Warrors" for Dreadball , so their coach Stratos seemed the easy choice. As the second figure from the old Grenadier line I'd be working on, I had a decent idea of what to expect while painting. The sculpting is good but not excellent. The feet are a little bit too small and blend into the base a bit, and the mould lines are a bit of a pain. However, other than the line that runs along the top of his outstretched left arm, they were fairly manageable. He is certainly recognizable as Stratos, and that is the important thing to me. I had good results priming with gesso on Skeletor so I thought I'd do it again with Stratos. I found that...

Several months ago I finished painting my first figure from the old  SuperFigs line, Kriegshunde . I was mostly pleased with how that one turned out, and have several others from the line in my massive pile of unpainted miniatures. I needed some test subjects for priming with acrylic gesso, and these fellows were waiting on my priming board. Since I've already got plenty of cultist figures around, I decided that these would be good candidates and gave it a shot. A brief aside about acrylic gesso: it works much better than I'd expected. It shrinks a ton while it dries so you can really glop it on. I bought white, and have since done a second test adding matte medium and paint to it to create a coloured brush-on primer. It has a very nice tooth to paint over, although it may be a little rough for some of you, so I do recommend adding in a tiny bit of water to smooth it out. If you are somewhere with weather that makes spray priming outdoors a challenge, give gesso a shot! ...

Actually, several lists I guess. At least it seems that way, and all of you out there are probably not much different. Of course there are the required to-do lists like things I have to get finished at work, stuff to do around the house, the list of items for the next trip grocery shopping etc. Beyond that though it seems like there are several other lists that I've always got hovering about. Phone calls I need to make, things I need to do "sometime", and of course all of my hobby lists. I have a lot of hobbies, so I divide my time up between a lot of projects. That means that everything seems to move along slowly, glacially or not at all. Inspiration, free time and motivation all factor into the equation as well...and as much as I'd like to claim that I'm good at motivating myself, that's only true when the inspiration is at a reasonable level. If I'm not fired up about something in my hobby world, it just isn't going to happen. Even my little...

Last weekend was the third annual Calgary Horror-Con. I'd known about the convention since the beginning, but had been unable to attend during the first two years. I finally made up for that this year. On Saturday we went down to the Blackfoot Inn shortly after twelve o'clock. This year the convention had added some screening rooms and would be showing some horror films and short films throughout the event. We had gone through all of the trailers and chosen two movies to watch, one on each day. The Saturday movie we chose was called "Sick: Survive the Night." While not bad, our impressions were basically that the film was slow and almost none of the characters were very likeable. There were a few interesting twists, but still not enough to truly make the movie a worthwhile experience. I also walked through the two dealer rooms and stopped by to talk with a few folks. Travis Shewchuk (Ravenous FX) had a batch of limited edition Stargate prints available, and we c...

I have finally finished (re)painting my first season 1 team for DreadBall . In the first league I ran this spring, they were called the  Avion Yellowhawks  and I won the Trilogy Cup with them! *gasp* *shock* Then This was going to be my first serious use of Army Painter Quickshade  varnish. However, when I tried out my Soft Tone on a few old Horrorclix using the brush-on method the results were pretty good but turned out 'dirtier' looking than I wanted. The second attempt was with the soft tone varnish on my Judge Dredd zombies , which worked very well but wanting a cleaner look for my team I opted not to pursue it on my Yellowhawks. With winter weather being cold and snowy (did I mention cold?) during mid-December I couldn't spray prime, so I painted a base coat of white directly onto the figures. It took several coats of thinned down P3 Menoth White to get an even shade but it did work. An unfortunate side effect of all those coats of paint was a bit of obscu...