New Pencils

I drew every day since posting except for Wednesday. I ordered some pencils and newsprint over the weekend as I could see myself running out of materials. I can archive things on the computer before I toss them out. The pencils and paper arrived today. I had barely started on a warmup page so I decided to turn it into a pencil test page. The paper was a cheap 50lb pad I bought years ago. I tried not to smudge the pencils for this. Tones were attempted primarily via pressure.

Freehand Circles

I do not know how much art I will be sharing. If the blog in general is any indication then not much. I found my circles were really weak when warming up today so I did a page of circles in addition to the other pages. All but one circle are freehand and done with a bik pen so I could not erase. That one circle was me trying to spin the paper which shifted during spinning so looks as off as my freehand ones.

I need to work on photographing drawings. Ballpoint seemed a good medium for testing so the extra circle page from today is what you get. I did not use the clipboard when drawing, but needed something to hold the paper for the camera. I found that when laying the paper on a table or other flat surface I can not see the view window since I can not get over the camera to look down. The lighting was better with the table view though. I had to adjust this in Gimp using a gradient map to lighten the left side of the page some.

In related news, I used up the printer paper I originally pulled to practice on when I decided to attempt drawing again. Tomorrow I have to decide if I will continue using printer paper or move to the 50lb paper I have. I made a small sketchbook using that 50lb paper and drew my first Reilly head in it so it would not continue its existence completely blank. I am trying to decide if I want to order some newsprint and graphite, or wait and see how much my practicing will move to a Wacom tablet when I buy one of the enthusiast pads soon. If I can figure out the lighting and camera then I might focus more on the traditional. Either way I will be doing a mix of both, but how much of each will determine if I need to order supplies sooner rather than later and in what amounts.

I Suck

...and the only person that cares is me.

I have been wanting to try my hand at scultping for a while now. I've sculpted bits, but never a whole model. Like every wargamer, I have ideas for what might make for a cool miniature or alternate sculpt. The desire was great enough to where I picked up a pencil to bang out some concepts. It was then I realized the pencil is not my friend any more.

Election 2016

I have not posted in a while. My painting setup I had in Spring was not working in the long term. It was blocking a closet and the room was slowly filling up with stuff. I have been shifting everything around and realized I do not have the space for everything I want to do so sort of stalled out. While this is a personal blog, it had become mostly focused on gaming and miniature painting which have both been rather scarce for me lately.

The rest of this post is mostly political. I do not know when I will be updating the blog again, but wanted to acknowledge it had been some time before I launched into my spiel. If you are here mostly for the painting or gaming then this might be where you want to stop reading.

Wednesday in Progress - 08 Jun 2016

I just realized I forgot this week's WIP, so here it is.

I did not paint last week. The final round for this year's Iron Painter is "Critters". I DNFed (Did Not Finish) last round so I am completely out of the competition. This includes the raffle. I decided to follow along this round, but I am not submitting anything to the contest.

I went through a few ideas. The prominent one was Donald Trump being piloted by one of the creatures from the Critters movies. It felt like a bit too much work for the time frame as it would require me to sculpt and paint everything. Another idea was to paint anthropomorphic models. I can do the archery scene from Robin Hood using just mice people if I wanted to, and there are other animal people in my collection as well. The idea I settled on was to replace Star Trek tribbles with critters.

Iron Painter Round 4 - Wednesday is Paused for 01 Jun 2016

I managed to do a little more work on the Monstrosity since my last blog post. It's not finished, but I am done with it for now.

Round four of Iron Painter has come and gone. The theme this round was "Armed and Dangerous". The submitted entries can be found here.

Iron Painter Round 3 Ends- Wednesday in Progress for 11 May 2016

Round 3 of Iron Painter is over. I scraped together what I had to submit an image Monday morning. I was still painting half an hour before I had to have the image submitted and spent next to no time going through pictures and making the collage for this round.

My partner for the round,Neveroddoreven, submitted a fantastic piece. He sculpted the entire model aside from the head. I really enjoy the model.

Submission Image