Author Archives: tony

Painting Diary – Chronoscope – Sasha DuBois – part six

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The Devil is in the Detail

Light grey undercoat on cuffsThis is part six in an increasingly long painting diary for my Sasha DuBois miniature.  There were five parts before this, which you can get to in order from here, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.  One of the most crucial things this diary has taught me is that no matter how good you think your painting is, no matter how well you think you covered an area, no matter how fine you think the line you just painted was, photographing it with a 7 megapixel camera and blowing it up will prove you wrong.  In some ways it’s quite handy, for example I’ve just come to the end of a session working on Sasha, and reviewing the photo’s shows me some places where I need to look a little harder and touch the various colours up a little bit.  I guess with a magnifying glass /visor I may be able to see that kind of detail, but when holding the miniature normally and painting it at the moment I can’t.

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It’s early and cold

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Been awake since 06:30 when the cats declared war under the bed and spent the next hour fighting it out to see who could be the most annoying.  Finally unable to cope at 07:30 when I got up and let them out.

Boy it’s cold this morning. Yeh I know, curious during winter.

Gradwell’s shared hosting seemed a little quicker yesterday, maybe someone fixed something, although they still haven’t updated my support ticket (technically they weren’t in the office after 1pm yesterday but it seemed to get a lot quicker after 4pm, I just wish they’d update the bloody ticket so I knew what was going on).

Seven Years and Twenty Zombies Later

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They’re done!  The little buggers.  Some of them are really terrible, some parts of some of them are bad, and some small parts are pretty ok and quite pleasing.  I played a lot with the new paints and washes and a couple of other things (I’ll blog about those later).  For now, just a short post to say the zombies are done, seven years late, but done none-the-less.

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Sorry

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Sorry about the poor performance of this site over the last few days, you may have had timeouts or the page loading without any style sheets, or just taking an absolute age to actually show up.

My web host (Gradwell) is once again suffering major performance issues on it’s shared hosting platform and so far, hasn’t commented on the problem ticket I raised yesterday.

The poor performance is most apparent between 2pm and 7pm (UK time) so if you have trouble then, try again earlier or later and hopefully this will get resolved next week.

Thanks for your patience.

The weekend already!?

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Been a bit of an odd week, was on holiday last week obviously, then working this week but from home every day other than Monday (the office would have been deserted) with holiday Thursday breaking the week up.  Was on call from Tuesday to today as well.  But didn’t really get started and then everything sort of fizzled out.

Which means it’s the weekend again already, got back from C&C’s place about 40 minutes ago after D&D, and we’re currently waiting for Bubbles to grace us with her presence after we let her out (she looked desperate) before we head to bed.

And it’s cold.

Back to our normal routine as of tomorrow with breakfasts and shopping and work and TV and life and stuff.  Hopefully more wii fit as well, and less carbohydrate.  No new years resolution from me, just a promise to myself to try and be more me, and more positive in general maybe and do the stuff I enjoy.

No more roasts!

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Thankfully the season of ‘huge roast dinners’ has come to an end and I can stop trying to cram eighteen types of vegetable onto our plates.  Don’t get me wrong, I love a good roast dinner with yorkshire puddings and nine litres of gravy, but they’re even better after a long break, we’ve managed to cram about four in during the Christmas / New Year holidays and I think we’re both pretty much done now.

On an unrelated note (er, no pun intended), I’m playing with a ‘related posts plugin’ but I’m not sure how much value it adds and how annoying it might be, so it may go away again.

Beaten by the zombie hoard

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So I didn’t finish them all, but I put in a damn good showing!  They are zombies after all and eventually, all mortals fall to them.

Four more done, only 5 of the 20 left to go!

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I’m really tired of these zombies now and it’s showing in the detail (or lack of it).  In fact, looking back at the way I cleaned them (hardly at all) and undercoated them (badly) it’s clear I wasn’t that excited about them from the start.  I bought them when it looked like I was going to give Warhammer the game a go, but that never really got off the ground.  I’ve enjoyed painting them, don’t get me wrong, but in order to enjoy it I’ve had to basically use the figures as experiments, playing with technique and colour and seeing how things look.

Five more to go … but working tomorrow and roleplaying in the evening (yay), so they won’t get touched until the weekend at the earliest.

Painting Diary – Chronoscope – Sasha DuBois – part five

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Cloak and not Dagger

First couple of washes go onThis is the fifth post in the Sasha DuBois painting diary set (the others are one, two, three and four).  I’m a bit up and down about my painting skill level at the moment (my regular normal state for anything I create), some days thinking I’m quite happy with my skill level thank you very much and other days a bit down because I feel I should be better, if I just spent a bit more time.  However, I spend as much time as I spend and I enjoy that time and at the end of the day that’s what truly matters, it’s relaxing and enjoyable.  I’m happy with being slightly better than barely average (at the moment).

At the end of the fourth post I’d just put the base coat onto the coat (this could get confusing), using scab red.  I then spent a little while (a few days) not really painting anything, and finally got back into the swing by putting a lot of effort into the zombies.  I also managed to wash and brush the coat on this mini and then put some black onto the boots (too thickly, sigh).  Anyway.

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