Desert landscape - done!

A very creative week-end - the desert landscape is ready for the painting contest now!

Here are some pics of my work:

Self-made road sign before painting

Desert landscape with camel, warrior and Park & Ride sign ....

 ... and the Sufi saying: 'Trust in God, but tie your camel'.

As you can see on this pic, I added shadows to the desert ground:

As those who read this blog regularly know, I always appreciate C&C. How do you like it? Is there anything you would have done differently?

Various projects progressing

Wow, what a creative and productive week!

I was able to progress various projects.

WIP pics:

Trust in God, but tie up your camel

Desert base in progess ...

Torre de los muertos

After removing the mould lines and assembling the orcs for my Mariachi band, I printed a guitar and a violin and used it to cut out plasticard instruments (just the basics, the actual instruments will be more complicated) to be able to adjust the position of the arms holding them. I'm now going to fill the gaps with greenstuff before undercoating them. Then I'll be able to take them with me to the local GW shop to paint them (I cannot see dwarfs any more after painting so many details of my A-team dwarfs).

After hanging out in my local GW shop for a week, I had to empty my Santa Claus sock because it was far too heavy. What a nice bonus for painting work I would have done at home anyway!

I'm really looking forward to painting the two space marines and adding various bits to future bases, and paint pots and super glue will be very useful for future projects!

Which of the current projects do you like best?

Camels and orcs

Last week I took the chance to meet with my favourite gaming / painting group and progress something I find rather difficult to paint.

The camel for my desert landscape is almost done now. As soon as it is finished, I will be able to work on the desert landscape again.

The second project I'm currently working on is my 'torre de los muertos' you might already have seen on this blog as well. I'm planning to give the Duke of Bavaria another try next year (great location, competition and opportunity to meet other painters on an international level!), and this will be one of my entries.

After removing mould lines for what seemed to be countless hours, I assembled several orcs. With their sombreros and instruments, they'll be a fantastic mariachi band in the end.

Still mulling over the right approach to scratchbuild guitars and maybe an ukulele or a violin for my mariachi band and have thus not assembled them completely yet. If you have tried something similar already, I'd love to hear about your approach and experience. Any links, tutorials and comments on how you would scratchbuild these instruments would help me a lot!

Today's progress

Today the next batch of A-team dwarfs got a new fancy hair colour. In fact, I've experimented with two different tones, purple and blue.

I might highlight it further when everything else is done.

Here's another WIP pic of my SMC display base (plasticard adapted, upper part with Milliput and plasticard sanded):

What happened to the original plan (finish painting the camel, glue it to the base, start to create a desert landscape and use ardcoat to seal the entire thing)? Well, I've just undercoated the camel again after putting it into acetone again. Not my best painting day, but I've learnt a lot while trying to achieve the result I wanted ... 2 weeks to go!

Trust in God, but tie your camel II (brandnew pics)

Challenge no. 3 (get the paint off the mini) - finally done thanks to my new chemical lab. ;-)

Busy as a bee in the last few days ...

Last week-end I ordered a display base. What the company sent me was rather disappointing and not at all of the quality I had expected for 20 euros. The actual pedestal isn't fixed centrally and there is a 1 mm gap visible on one entire side and a few centimetres on two other sides of the base, pretty bad for a display base you'd like to use for a competition. I thus had to adapt it with plasticard to make up for it.

Many layers of Milliput later (camel footprint included):

Here's a pic of how it looked like after adding Milliput for the desert landscape and with both minis and a place holder for the one thing I'm going to add you wouldn't expect in the desert. As you can see, I've also started painting the camel (just a quick wet-in-wet sketch so far):

This is how the camel looked like when I got it last week:

C&C greatly appreciated!

New WIP pics tomorrow - stay tuned!

Trust in God, but tie your camel ...

That's the title of my contribution to an international painting competition, which means it will have to be complete by the end of this month. Yes, it was a spontaneous decision ... :-P
Some of you know how 'quickly' I paint ... So that is challenge no. 1 ... :-)

No. 2: Get a camel in the right scale. - Done!

It was in the mail today, and as it's a miniature produced in 1985 and obviously got a bad paint job at about the same time with I don't know which paint they used at that time (you would hear me swearing like a trooper now if I wasn't a lady this part hadn't been ***************************************CENSORED************************), it has been taking an acetone bath for hours now and I'm struggling with

No. 3: Get the paint off the camel. :-/ Acetone doesn't seem to work very well. Any recommendations what else I could use?