Skya

Here I was thinking if you converted the whip handle it'd make a great snake dancer.

I would say more that the blues are well done and the contrast on everything else could use punching up a notch to match them. Deeper darker shadow areas and very slightly brighter highlights. Then teh blues wouldnt stand out so much. The gem looks well done. Might want to shift the "dark spot" a little closer to the center and pull the medium blue around the edge a bit more, that'll give it a rounder feel. Definately looks like you got the color transitions on it down though.

Keep in mind also that most of the teachers will accept generic tickets if you want to wander into a class that lists as full. Often times as many as half the people wont show up.

Mmmmmm, if it was a Sunday black and white class, then my apologies. I had managed to seriously sprain my ankle the night before and it was just a bad sceen. The competition numbers have been steady the last two years but the quality has definately gone up over all. It's good to see people appreciating the venue. Unfortunately that's usually an issue with actually getting the manufacturers to get their butts in gear and actually *give* us that information. Then of course we have to get GenCon to update things in a timely matter. and trust me they are insanely busy. I think the original plan had been coverage in Dragon I'm not entirely sure what ended up happening with that though. Just getting GenCon to get the pictures we had taken and get them up on a website has been like pulling teeth, honestly. I dont know what's up in thier online department, but speed and consistancy isnt their strong point. I despise the "new" GenCon site. It's rediculously counter intuitive and navigating it's an absolute pain. Blah. But I digress, yes some sort of online presence of pictures in a public venue would definately give teh push towards making GenCon more of a "name" for painting competitions. I had noticed that we get a lot of "well Marika and Derek are entering so there's no point in me bothering" which is just abjectly silly. You cant win if you dont enter. And a lot of it's about pushing yourself personally, not about comparing yourself to the top notch. Even if you are comparing, it's about stiving for a goal. If you give up you'll never make it. Not to mention the fact that there are a number of categories in which the cometition usually isnt quite as intense.

GenCon is always a blast. I'll be there helping judge the paint competition, manning the demo tables, helping out with the paint and take and running a couple classes on source lighting. If you havent been to GenCon before check out the gencon website. If you look under the event catalog there are a whole slew of miniatures painting/sculpting workshops that you might be interested in. There are also games of every type and just exploring the dealers hall can be an entire weekends worth of activity. Then there's also the art show and the auction. In can all be a bit overwhealming. I recommend perusing the catalog, figuring out what you really want to do and then spending the rest of the time wandering aimlessly through the dealers hall. Make sure to bring yourself by the paint area and introduce yourself. We'll give you a proper welcome. :tea:

The Bodyguard isnt new. I painted him for them over two months ago. Of course it took them till this month to get the pictures up, goofs.

That's really sweet, the filligree looks appropriate on an elf. I'd have to file it of fthe wood, but still, quite nice. Any idea what size this is?

Same here

Under things that drive me a little batty I'd list the fact that if you click on a sub forum such as oh say, Miniature Matters, go read the messages there and then from the message go straight back to the main forums page it will still list Miniature Matters as having new posts. As it is I currently have to click back to the sub forum and then back to the main forum page to get it to mark as read. THe "new posts" listing under my icon on the home page has similar issues but I have to actively click the entirety of the forums as "mark as read" to get that one to update so I tend not to bother.

No, no, he's Big FATHER!

I so need a smiley for that. :evil:

Who the heck works for free? Still, there are a lot of reasonably priced proffessional painters. Unless the company is painting it them themselves, which I can certainly see, it never seems worth the bad advertising that is an iffy paint job. Bare metal is often better then advertisingthen an actual bad paint job though. I freely admit to paint snobbishness. I just usually dont let it show in public.

You see how the shadows move across the fabric on the top one? They just dont do that on the back shot of the bottom one at all and there is no feeling of texture to the cloak or the back of the pants. Not that it isnt a perfectly decent piece ( I really like the base in fact and the camoe pattern is quite nice), but the quality of the paint isnt consistent across the whole miniature which is very important.

Very cool. Would have been even better if they'd ditched the plastic flying base (hate the things) and proped it off of a tentacle or two.. but I suppose that wouldnt be a massivelt hard conversion.

Sounds good to me. Though I'd say shear laggings and gloves wouldbe easier then sheer top on that one... Never seen a sheer corset before.

In one of those very nonCatholic defenitions of proper I take it?

I think a lot of what is still there in terms of bias (ignoring teh immature boys club that is GW) is due to the fact that most of the women I see involved in miniatures dont actually play, they only paint. This tends to limit thier exposure to the gaming community, which isnt neccessarily a bad thing given that many of those gamer steroetypes exist because, well they're true. That benig said, there are actually a reasonably large number of active women in the mini painting community. When we "founded" IMMPS (Illinois Midwest Mini-Painters Society) which is our local we get together and paint on Fridays group it was half women. Over time we've added a few more guys then women, but our regular paint might is 50/50. I help Sue run the paint and take as well as the miniatures competitions at GenCon and GenCon SoCal (which are by the way a non manufacturer restricted competition) and we see even more of them there. If there's one great thing about the paint and take is it definately attracts and intrests the bored mothers and gamer wives with something that they can relate to.

*insert rant mode* I dont know anything about the European GDs, but I will *not* be going to another American one. My first GD was Chicago 2003. I went with a bunch of my painter friends and we hung out and I entered my dark elf bolt thrower. It was kinda exciting it being my first major competition and all, but it was absolutely deafening, there was nothing for someone who just painted to do except oogle the emtires, and teh looks I got reminded me of what it must have been like to be a female gamer in the 80s. You'd have thought I was some kind of freak. Oh my god, it's a girl! Most immature crowd of gamers I've ever been around. Anyways the judging was just plain screwy. (Keep in mind this is coming from someone who took a gold that year.) It's redicuously biased towards what I like to call the Games Workshop style, (that is to say highly cartoony) and very wieghted towards the new models that just came out and very against basic troop models being displayed as single models. Liliana Troy painted a drop dead gorgeous high elf musician that she entered in single and I'm absolutel positive that the two reasons it didnt place were that it used non metalic metals and it was a troop plastic troop piece. There were many other judging vaguaries, but that was the one that stuck out in my mind the most. So anyways, my bolt thrower took a gold that year and they took a bunch of pictures and used it for their catalog piece. The first year that the piece was in the catalog they not only mangled my last name Myereholts or something else rediculously off base, but they got my friggen *GENDER* wrong. Do they have anyway to remotely correct this? Of course not, not even a nice little these are all the artists names we screwed up this year section on their website. (Of which tehre were a lot of mistakes. There's liek absolutely no respect for their fanbase when you cant even get names printed in the catalog correctly.) The next year they removed the little side blurb that referenced me as a guy but they *still* got my last name wrong. It's Meyer, guys. NOT Meyrs. So yeah I was more then a little ticked off at not only painting a piece for their catalog for free, but not even getting decent advertising out if it because they couldnt get my name let alone gender correct. So the next year I waffle and finally decide to go because I have good friends going and tehres some cool GD only minis I could get. What a fiasco. There's absolutely nowhere to sit where you can even hear yourself think, let alone hang out and takl to friends. The judging was just as biasedly wacked (the year after that I had a friend literally told when she asked why her piece didnt make it that it would have but she had just painted the wrong miniature) and I pretty much hated the whole thing. The only good thing was being able to buy bits at teh show. I vowed never to go back and I will not unless massive sweeping changes happen. Somehow I just dont see it happening. The reason American Games Days are not as artsy as the European ones is straight up that artsy stuff doesnt win unless it fits into their very specific veiw of what they want. Games Workshop in this country has some really screwy ideas of what constitutes good marketing, PR and customer service. Suffice to say I dont support them with my dollars, I dont frequent their stores and I have much better things to di with my time then enter thier competitions. *end rant mode*

I dunno, I really like her face, but there's a couple major issues I have with her that will mean I dont buy her. The composision is rather top heavy... hmm you know just snagging the sword off for cool bits or moving it down would fix that, gun just looks plain silly, and I really dislike the mini skirt thing.

Honestly the best I've seen are actually toy replicas of things like teh B5 or Star Trek ships.

I adore this piece. Her face is cute and quite well done, but its her back that really does it for me. The way the wings attach to her shoulders looks *good* from behind, and that tattered skirt is just sweet. I could do without the rediculously elongated legs, but it deffinately fits the anime style. Hopefully the tips of her wings wont snap off the way the horns on those annoying GDs do.

Deapening the shadows would have the same volume adding affect. It wouldnt give the hair "shine" the way a couple of highlights would, but I'd say from the sounds of it that isnt what you're going for anyways.

While I rather dislike broccolli bases, it's not all that difficult to flock over them. I do rather like "scenic" bases though. Honestly the real advantage to the brocoli base vs a slotted base is that the average gamer can pick up a mini, not even need to touch it and be able to immediately play with it.

Not sure if you're looking for critique or not, please feel free to tell me to shoosh if you're not. The overall color scheme works quite well. Her skin tones are absolutely gorgeous and her face is incredible especially given how flat I know those faces can be at times. Everything else could use another highlight, maybe two to punch it out. Hmmm, actually the hair probably only needs one, add a little skintone ore a bit of pale golden yellow depending on the over all color effect you're going for and hit the the curve areas to give the hair a bit more volume. Dennis Mize had a thing for making his hair aweful flat and hitting the bright points on the top of the head as well as the tops of the curves in the middle of the hair would really add some volume to it. For the purples, if you're going for soft (which it currently looks like you're going for) I'd recommend one or two close shades lighter on the highlights. Going for shiny I'd recommend doing in sharp highlights with a pale lavender and working another mid tone in between that and the pruple you have there. All in all a quite pleasing to look at peice, and as always feel free to ignore me entirely.

Decidedly qualifies under I can dream....