I did quite a bit of painting over the last four or five months. Here are the latest installments to my Cryx army.

( Cut for Many Photos )

My first attempt at object source lighting. I'm not super pleased with either of them, but here they are:

I forgot to post this last weekend, but Drew got another mini featured in No Quarter Magazine this month: his Riven that he sent in for a contest.


 


He created the mini out of pieces from several different Privateer Press creatures.  It's a monster from one of their books that doesn't have a mini of its very own.  The finished product came out looking quite a lot like the concept art, and gave him a lot of the skills he needed to do the sculpting project he's currently working on.  (More on this later, I swear.)

             



More pictures here.

I just found out that World Fantasy 2009 is at the Fairmont in San Jose, California. My parents live a fifteen minute drive from there--my high school Prom and Winter Ball were both at the Fairmont. It's in a nice little area downtown, and I'll have a free place to stay. That means I'll get to go. YAY!

Unfortunately, my parents' house is very small, so I won't be able to provide a place for other people to stay. But I'm still jazzed about it. (There's also Worldcon in Denver this year, where my in-laws live. I still need to get around to buying admissions for that.)

Also, yesterday Drew and I bought a glass case to keep minis in. This was well-timed, because when we went into the Keep, Levi told us his was getting rid of his case, so we needed to clear our stuff out. This wasn't a big deal, because we'd been gradually pulling our stuff home anyway. I like having it displayed where we can actually enjoy it, rather than having it stuffed in a case at the Keep, and things kept getting damaged in that case anyway. Our case is about six feet tall and a foot and a half deep/wide, and looks gorgeous in our living room. We even installed a light in the top. It makes me happy.

We also set up display cases in the wall at the Keep to advertise, so Drew still has a few pieces there. We're getting banners printed to hang up there also. Hopefully we'll bring in a little business that way, though Drew is hard at work on a different project which I will be blogging about sometime soon. (With pictures!)

Finals are OVER and my Royal Tongue revision is OVER (for the moment) so I'm on to writing Keepers. We are very much enjoying not having school and teaching getting in the way of our career stuff. (Of course, yesterday was not a good writing day, but I have high hopes for today.)

A couple of things I forgot in my last post:

Remember that Warpwolf Drew and I entered in the Privateer Press competition?  We won.  First place.  I was hoping to get in the magazine, but I didn't actually expect to win.  The guys at the keep called us up last Thursday to ask if we knew.  We didn't.  It's awesome to see Fifi pictured on a smooth, glossy page like that.  I'm really happy about it.

We also played two games of Warmachine this weekend.  We bought a four foot sheet of vinyl at Hancock fabrics so we have a surface big enough to play on.  It works really well, actually.  I tried out my witches, and Drew played against me using trolls, and then mercs.

I won both games, even though Drew swears he wasn't going soft on me.  I'm not really sure how I managed that, other than that my witches are nasty, nasty, nasty.  We had a blast, though.  I love warmachine.  It's also nice to be able to play at home; I love the guys at the keep, but it's so much easier to learn without half the store commenting on my game.  I have a force I can play pretty well know, but it's only half painted.   :)

Sunshine makes me happy.  Today I've been in hyper-production mode, largely because of how beautiful and bright it is.  I did all those dishes, cleaned the house, mailed out another batch of thank you notes (still working on gathering addresses--all the ones I have left just need to be handed to people) picked up Drew's jacket from dry cleaning, deposited some checks, taught my class, looked for camis online, and started on my chapter that needs to be revised today.

Speaking of, I really need to get back to that.

Last weekend Drew and I did an all-night painting competition at Dragon's Keep. Voting came in today. Drew came in first, and I tied for fourth. (There were ten submissions, I think.) I was really just in it for fun, and had a blast painting. I also finally got my Lich Lord Terminus painted. Here he is:





(Click to enlarge.) I'm not thrilled with the composition, but I don't think he's that bad for a 6 PM to 2:30 AM paint job.

Update:  They just posted the rest of the minis over at the Dragon's Keep website.  (I took the pictures.  *grin*)  Drew's is Kromac with the bloody axes.  Bloody figures. 

And some minis, just recently painted:

Drew was nice enough to paint my warpwolf for me so that I could still enter it in the privateer press competition even though I got sick and didn't have time/energy to finish it. Now it's a joint entry, which has kind of a nice feel to it. The paint job is his; the concept work and conversion is mine. Yes, it is a poodle.







I'm rather proud of it, even if I didn't get to paint it myself.

I haven't gotten around to posting about wedding stuff yet...mostly because I've been busy getting life together:

An update on the life stuff:

Drew's website is ready to go...so as of this week we are officially launched. Drew's selling many of the miniatures he's painted, plus he's taking commissions. See his work at www.gardenninja.com.

My revision is going beautifully. It's been fantastically easy to pull this character from the book, which to me says that he didn't belong there to begin with. I'm down to the last 20 pages of the manuscript, which means that all I have left to do is extract him from the ending. All the scenes I've rewritten to pull him out are actually better than the originals, which makes me happy.

I'm fulfilling my promise to myself to have some fun this semester, so I've been working on a conversion of the Warmachine warpwolf.  Here's the one Drew painted, which looks infinitely better than the one on the privateer press site.



Anyway, I'm adding lots and lots of poofy curls and painting him blond and blue so he looks like a groomed poodle.  This amuses me greatly, and bothers all the guys at the Keep.  Two birds, one stone.

Also, I finished playing Fable, The Lost Chapters yesterday while I was home sick (stupid to be sick on your birthday) which was a lot of fun.  The game lets you be as good or as evil as you want, which is bad, because I have no morality when it comes to electronic people.  I killed something like 800 villagers and guards.  Oh well.

The class I'm teaching is going well, I almost have my name all changed, our financial stuff is all in place, I've been working on getting my family history into Personal Ancestral File (have 136 names in there so far...and I've only made a very small dent in my files of information.  I have literally thousands of names just sitting here, waiting to be organized) and the class I'm taking is going well too.  (Even though I missed yesterday due to being sick.  I need to make comments on those pieces I missed today.)

I've been having fun roleplaying again, too.  It's nice to be able to be involved in the game again.  Last semester I was just too exhausted and distracted.

I've also been workshopping Keepers in writing group, and the response has been amazingly positive.  (I hate the book, so I just expect everyone else to hate it too.  But they don't.)  It needs some work, of course, but overall it's going well.  Now if we can just find another girl or two to add to the critique group so I don't keep getting all-male critiques on my book that's written for teenage girls...

Phew.  No wonder I haven't been posting.  Life is good, and full of fun things, but doesn't leave a lot of room around the edges.  :)

I've finally taken pictures of the stuff I've been painting--the two models I did the day I learned and then the unit of bile thralls for my Cryx Warmachine army.

( Pictures here, if you care. )

My painting isn't great yet, but I'm still pleased with them. I'm in the middle of a Skarlock, which is an awesome model, but it's not quite finished yet.

To motivate myself to actually want to go to work this week, I've decided that all the money I make during my little stint at Jo-Ann is fun money.  This is something I'm picking up on the side, and is therefore not subject to the rules of reasonable spending. 

I am therefore going to use all the money I make this week to fund my Warmachine Army. 

Yes, I am a geek.  But now I will be a geek with a tiny undead force of doom to paint. 

Happy happy happy.