COVID-19 BLUES

Well, what a year this has been! I’m writing this post on election night of all times, partly as an escape from the election coverage, and partly because I, just today, remembered I still have a website. Seriously, I’ve forgotten about this place for months now as priorities have been elsewhere, and most of my hobby hopes and goals have been left for dead like those poor Night Lords in the pic up above.

Since my last update back in February, I’ve only really managed to paint up a handful of models, and most of those have been for other people. The COVID-19 lockdown forced Adepticon to cancel, which was a HUGE bummer, and it sent me on furlough for a solid month (which was pretty awesome, I’m not gonna lie!). It also sent my wife on furlough for a good five months, and forced my kids to cut their school years early, so I gave up lots of potential hobby time to spend time with the family instead, while also jumping back into a day job that had radically changed because of the pandemic. In the midst of all that craziness, both my wife and dad ended up contracting COVID-19 itself, and having the virus right in your house is unbelievably difficult to deal with. On top of all of that, I lost my mom to cancer in the midst of the lockdown, and the emotional drain that caused is something that I’ve still not recovered from.

So… yeah, this year can die in a fire! :P

The good news is, I’m finally back to painting regularly and I’ve updated the site with the few pictures of models I’ve painting since February. The bad news is, I’ve decided to lay off the commissions for a good while. While I really do enjoy painting for others, I really need to get some of my own stuff done. My poor Ghazzy’s been sitting half-finished for months now, and who could argue with him? lol

Suddenly... February!

Well, that’s one month down for the year, and my desk looks just as messy as it did the last time around. What have I been up to though?

I finished up a commission for some crossbowmen with pavaise shields to go with a an army painted on commission last year. The models were from Claymore Castings and they were painted up in the heraldry of King Magnus of Sweden. Sadly, I completely forgot to take good final pics of the army for the website, but I have uploaded a picture of the crossbowmen (and you can see them on the deck above).

I also finished a commission for a mini of an adult version of Eric the Cavalier. Don’t know who that is? Leave now, go find the old Dungeons & Dragons cartoons and binge your way through them all! That’s a good chunk of my childhood right there. :P

Anyway, the Eric model was a ton a fun to convert and paint, and I’ve uploaded a pic of him to the “Other Miniatures” gallery

As far as my own stuff goes, I did manage to get those ork buggies to a playable level:

The paint jobs are still suuuuuuuper basic, and I’ve put the Squigbuggies crew back onto stands to do more work on them, but I can put these onto the table if need be without feeling totally ashamed of them at least! :P

I’ve also managed to get a bit of repair and update work done on some older models, played a few really awesome games of Necromunda with my son (Murder Cyborg mission FTW!), and got started on a few super secret things that I’m really excited for but can’t say much about yet.

So, what’s the plan for February then? February is all about getting ready for March, because March is all about Adepticon! :D

New Year, New… Blog?

I’m not much of one for resolutions, but I’ve been meaning to start using this site’s blog feature again for a while now and the start of the year is as good a time as any for that, right? So, we’re talking more of a coincidence here rather than a commitment. At least, that’s going to be my excuse if I suddenly give this up for months at a time again!

Anyway, there’s not much sense in having a blog without a purpose, and I think that’s where I failed before. I figure this time around I’ll try to post sorta-regular updates on what I’m working on and maybe give some insight into what I’m doing and how I’m doing it. I do that via Facebook groups already for the most part, so I think I can manage that here as well.

With that in mind, let’s talk about my workspace a bit!

My hobby space is just spare closet space that I’ve built some simple shelves into, with a cheap desk and drawers for work and storage. It’s small and oddly shaped, yes, and I’d love to have an actual studio with a window to distract me and a bunch of extra space to cram in lots more boxes and shelves with lots more shit, but you really don’t need much more than this to sit down to build and paint minis. This isn’t the first closet I’ve stuck my desk into for minis either: that one was the one I produced my Golden Daemon diorama in!

Anyway, the point I want to make here is this: most people probably have an extra bit of space somewhere that they could set up shop in with just a little bit of effort. It might be a closet, a corner of the basement, a pantry, some haunted void space in a weird old house, or whatever; and it’s probably full of junk you don’t need but just don’t want to go through and toss out! It drives me nuts to see people complain that they don’t want to paint because it’s a chore to get everything out onto the kitchen table, then put it all back away after, when a more permanent solution is likely just a free hours of hard work away.

Finally, here’s what I’m currently working on:

It’s ork buggies in the foreground, with a whole mess of other crap in the back! I’m hoping to be able to play some Speed Freeks with the buggies on Sunday and then move onto other things from there, so we’ll see how that goes. 😉

Is it Orktober yet?

If you haven't guessed by now, I'm a HUGE fan of Warhammer 40k's Orks, and unless you've been livin' deep in da drops lately, you know what the recent news out of GW means. IT MEANS I AM EXCITE!!! WAAAGH!!! Expect to see more ork models hit this site over the next few months. ;)

Also, for my customers both new an old, please note that I've switched my email address to commissions@grinnialvex.com as that's been a sorely needed move that I've taken far too long to make. I was just using an old personal account before, and inquiries have been missed because of it. This change will allow me to keep things focused and tidy, which means speedier responses.

Finally, I've added several new finished pictures to the galleries. One of which is a gang of Roller Derby Girls for the game Wild in the Streets from Slow Death Games, which is a super cool little skirmish game that makes me think of the movie The Warriors (which is all-time fav!) mashed with punk rock style and aesthetics. Go check them out! :D

Summer Fun Time!

Man, I haven't written a blog post since February? Yeah, I've thought about fixing that more than a few times, but between summer family vacation time, my day job, and my commission work, when I have a bit of free time to actually write something here, I usually end up just working on more models instead! :P

Speaking of painting models, here's a summer-themed diorama I just finished for a mini swap for the Hobby Hangout Facebook group:

Greenskins, popsickles, and water-based weaponry. What could be more summer than that? lol

Also, I just upload a picture of a box-art level commission for an Eidolon of Mathlann that I'm crazy proud of. I worked to try to match the 'Eavy Metal team artwork as closely as I could for most of it, per the client's request, while tweaking a few things here and there to make it just different enough to make it unique. Go find him in my Warhammer: Age of Sigmar gallery and take a look! :D

White Dwarf and the Golden Daemon

It's been more than a month since my last blog post. I feel like I need to keep up with this better in order to show visitors that I'm around and active, but I also feel like if I have time to sit down and write a blog post then I have time to sit down and paint. I'd rather do the latter, lol.

Anyway, anyone picking up February's issue of White Dwarf (and why aren't you, because the current iteration of White Dwarf is badass!) can see one of my models in there towards the back, and that's a damned good reason to sit down and mash a few words together!

I'm crazy proud of that, even if the pic itself is a bit dark and muddy on the page. Seeing your work published in print like this is one of the coolest feelings this hobby has to offer, and these days it's pretty much as easy as taking a good picture of a cool model and shooting it over to the White Dwarf team. 

Once upon a time, however, getting your pic in a Games Workshop publication require more herculean efforts. A few years ago, I managed to get my converted Ghazzy model in the second issue of Warhammer Visions as he earned an honorable mention in the Memphis Golden Daemon awards!

Yeah... that's clearly not a Meganob model, lol. The pic doesn't mention at all that this was an honorable mention, and was published along with a bunch of the winners. Also, my son took bronze in the Youngbloods category that year and his pic never even got published. I'm still a bit sore about that as he definitely earned it.

Going back even further, to the glory days of goblin green bases, mail-order bitz, dial-up internet, and a time when painters jealously guarded their secrets instead of filming themselves doing EVERYTHING for YouTube, I found myself in White Dwarf #285 as a gold winner in the 2003 Baltimore Golden Daemon!

Holy crapballs, how awesome is that! Not only did I take gold, but I somehow managed to beat two incredibly badass Slayer Sword winners. I can still remember Jeff congratulating me, and Robin Dews handing me that trophy.

I spent a solid three months planning and building that diorama, and another three months painting everything, all the while working on a two-foot wide roll-top desk that was shoehorned into a tiny closet. I watched the Golden Daemon judging at the Chicago Games Day the year prior, and painfully watched as one of my models got cut from the from the final group of four with a dismissive hand-wave from a judge, so I spent those six months hell-bent on not just breaking the top three but hitting the very top! I knew I had what it took, but I knew there was no way I could actually watch the judging again, lol.

Looking back at the diorama now... it's hard for me to look past all the technical flaws and missed opportunities I see all over it. That's the sort of thing that comes with fifteen years of perspective though, I suppose, and the fact that I'm a worlds-better painter these days has a big influence on those thoughts. I'm still crazy proud of it all though, and still think he overall theme and dynamic of it is still super cool though, so maybe someday I'll take a shot at recreating it all with modern standards...

Finally, as the pic in the magazine really doesn't do it justice, here are some of my own:

Wait, where'd all the time go?

Following up from my last post, the pic above is how my painting desk looked right about midnight last night, as December rolled into January and a new year presented itself like a blank canvas. All the models are finally done (some not "perfect", however, but I'm cool with that for now), and it's just about time to move on. Not without a bit of reflection first though: 

That massive pic is everything I managed to crank out over the duration of 2017, minus my Armies on Parade display board for the Nurgle stuff and around fifty Warhammer 40k orks and grots that had their skin and clothes repainted leading up to Adepticon back in a March. I'm really proud of the diversity of colors, models, and styles in this shot, especially after spending several years as the "yellow ork army guy". Really though, that's not a bad thing to be known for, 'cuz orks is da best an' yellow orks is da bestestest! :P

Anyway, I'll add pics of some of December's models to the galleries soon, so be on the lookout for that. 

We're going to need a bigger desk

Earlier this year, I made a commitment in the 1HourANight Facebook group to paint up 100 of my old, bare models by Christmas. Like most hobbyists are prone to, however, I got super distracted with other projects along the way and lost sight of this goal. So when December finally rolled around I was staring at 45, mostly random, models that still needed to be painted up to meet that Christmas deadline.

So... that's the current state of my painting desk, with a little bit of everything going on all at once, and Christmas looming like war on the horizon. 

Still, a week is a lot of time, and I work great under pressure. I got this. ;) 

Converting the Great Unclean One

As promised, here's a breakdown of how I went about converting the Glotkin into a Great Unclean One!

I actually won the Glotkin model at Adepticon a couple years back as a prize from a Guidebook contest they were running. When I went to claim my prize, I was handed a giant box filled with individual minis in clampacks (think 40k heroes and Dropzone Commander ships and such) and was told I could pick one. Naturally, I dug down to the bottom of the box to see if there were any super-cool things hiding down there, and sure enough there was the Glotkin! I knew right then that I was going to turn him into a Great Unclean One, and an image formed immediately in my mind of the beasty holding a massive sword. That image is what I set out to create here.

When it finally came time to give this whole thing a shot, I built the kit according to the instructions with the obvious exception of the end of the lamprey arm, as you can see below, and added in a sort of skeleton made of styrene tube (I have TONS of it from my ork stuff!) to establish the positioning of the arm, hand, and sword.

Once the structure was established, I started bulking out the arm and hand with globs of Milliput. Milliput is nice for this as it's cheap and you can smooth it with water.

With the arm started, hobby ADD kicked in and I shifted over to working out the sword for a while. I was definitely thinking about Cloud's Buster Sword when I cut this thing out! I wanted a giant, fat, broken blade, and put the model up on some extra bases so I could have the sword actually extend below the base of the model... because that just felt cool. ;)

A blade that fat should probably be extra-thick the other way too, so I laminated three strips of card with to really bulk it out. Before that though, I split it lengthwise and added a channel in the middle by splitting and inverting a length of styrene tube in the center.

The blades edges were cut and filed with a bevel and I got out my French curve to design the crossguard. I drew out and cut half the crossguard from thick styrene card, then used that as a template to cut and mirror the rest of the pieces, then laminated those as well to thicken them up.

The blade in my mind had three rings on the face of it to form a Nurgle symbol, so out came the pipe cutter to slice up some styrene tube as uniform as possible. At this point though, I was on the fence between making these into sewer grates that were oozing grossness or possibly with worms squirming out of them, or stuffing skulls into them somehow.

Time for a bit more sculpting, this time with Apoxie Sculpt. This stuff is similar to Milliput in that it smoothes with water, but it's my favorite thing for filling in gaps on plastic models as you can feather it out super thin. I was filling gaps on other models at this point, so used it on this guy to make a thumb, bulk out the arm a bit, and to fill in stuff on the sword blade. I also decided to go with the skulls in the sword, because when GW puts out a box of several hundred skulls you tend to want to put them into everything. >,>

In the pic above, you can see that I've already wrapped the sword hilt in a strip of greenstuff, and at this point I really wanted to get that hilt seated into his hand permanently. So, I started skinning his hand in greenstuff, working from around the top where the hilt would make contact first. I also decided to make his nails out of styrene tube as I had it handy, it was the right shape, and it was super easy to do.

More greenstuff skin work. Everything added in this next pic was done in one go as I wanted to see just how much I could get done without before forced to stop in fear of wrecking something. I also decided at this point that the pinky finger was going to turn into a tentacle that would wrap around the hilt and hang over the front of the sword, because that just seemed too cool not to do.

All that was left at this point was to put it all together and finish up a few bits here and there, as well as add the pinky tentacle. I'm pretty sure I used a length of paperclip as an armature wire in there.

That's it! That last pic shows a few of the maggots I rolled out from greenstuff too. I did those will leftover blobs from the sculpting sessions, and let them cure on waxed paper so they were easy to pull up when they were cured.

Also, anyone looking to dive into sculpting with greenstuff should really look into grabbing up a set of silicone-tipped sculpting tools like these colour shapers. The silicone doesn't stick to the putty at all, so it's great for working on details.

Nurgle Daemon Gallery is Live!

Title says it all. Now to work on putting together all those conversion progress pics like I said I would...

:P

An Infestation is Brewing...

Recently, I finished a small force of Nurgle Daemons for Armies on Parade and took gold at my local GW store. I'm planning on creating a gallery for them here soon, but have a few details I'd like to tidy on them before I set about taking proper pictures of them.

One of the models, my Great Unclean One, was converted extensively and I've had a few requests to show how that all happened. Fortunately, I try to take lots of progress pictures when I'm working, so I'll put those all together, tutorial-style, in a future blog post.

In the meantime, I've added another half-dozen or so pics to the 40k orks gallery. More of those to come in the future as well!

Oh, and here's a beauty shot of the Great Unclean One himself, Gurlgolgorrogh! :D

Website Redesign

I've had this website for something like two years now and I've not done much with it at all yet. Sure, I've had some pics hanging around on it for a while, but that's really it. Not much in the way of content beyond that, and that's a shame as I've been a really productive guy during that time; I've just been posting my content elsewhere for the most part.

That acknowledged, I've decided to try to turn it all around. I've changed the place around some, added a few new pics, and thrown down my first blog post (this one!). I didn't even have a blog before to begin with, so that's new too. Woohoo!

So, watch this space, and maybe it'll do tricks or something. Tricks like updating content and being interesting...