Painting a Chimera at GW and a New Camera

Painting a Chimera at a Games-Workshop store 

     Spent an enjoyable evening with friends at a local GW store last night.  If you're curious as to which one: Columbia, Maryland.  The store is one of those lone employee stores.  I believe the manager's name is Tony.  He's a very amiable guy, and seems to have a very genuine enthusiasm for the hobby.  Last week, I spent Wednesday evening there as well and Tony and I had a fun chat about the Southern foods and culture that we both miss being this far from home.

     As the above picture shows, I made some healthy progress on my Chimera.  I gave it a good quick overall dry brushing to bring out some edges and give the paint a bit of an older look.  In future I'm going to make sure that I do this BEFORE painting some of the details.  I then used Vallejo Charred Brown (GW Scorched Earth equivalent) and a bit of blister sponge to dab a little "rust" spots around the tank, making sure to hit corners and edges in particular.  I then took GW Gryphonne Sepia with a standard brush and added the water-rust streaks everywhere.  Very simple technique but very effective.  It's starting to really come together.  I washed the treads with GW Devlan Mud, and I'll need to dry brush some GW Bolt Gun to brighten those back up a bit.

     There's still quite a lot of work to be done on this, but I think the paint job is starting to come together.

     Here are some more shots:

Hanging out with Friends


     I've been so consumed with my work lately, that I've afforded myself very little time away from the house.  It felt great to just get out for a bit.  The four friends I met up with were my former D&D buddies so we had some catching up to do.  They're an extremely great group of gents and we always have interesting conversations.  I spectated a small sort of tutorial game of Warhammer Fantasy between two of them.  Three of us were there to provide color commentary and lots of distractions.  Good times!

New Camera

     I recently picked up a Nikon D3100, and I've been playing around with it.  The above Chimera pictures were taken with it.  I'm really enjoying it, having a "real" camera.  I just need to get used to using this puppy for miniature pictures.  You can really get some detail out of the shots, which is worrying to me a little... as this means you'll be able to see exactly what my paint jobs look like.  My experience is that sometimes there's such a thing as getting TOO close to these miniatures and things start looking... sketchy.