Saturday, November 23, 2013

How lucky am I?

I live in a town (Ames, Iowa) of 25,000 or 55,000 when school (Iowa State) is in session.

-- There is one large store with a focus on board games, with a good selection of minis, paints, and comics (though, I'm not a comics guy.)
-- There is also a smaller store which specializes in CCGs, but also has a few boardgames, but has quite a few hobby/painting/minis supplies (hey, that's me!) Including all of Gale Force Nine's basing supplies.
-- There is a regular old hobby shop where I can get many of my specialty items (such as plastic tubing, sheet styrene, brass rod, drilling bits etc.)
-- There is Hobby Lobby where I can get quite a few things to fill in the gaps.
-- And there will be one more small shop opening next week, which will specialize in comics, but will also carry a few board games and minis (and it's owned by a friend, so mostly, I can stop in and say hello.)

... And four out of those five stores are within 10-minute walking distance from me.

Black and white

I see that Vallejo is coming out with a paint set specifically for painting Black and white figures! That's what I started this blog on five or six years ago - too bad I didn't have this paint set when I painted these figures. Oh well, I guess I did fine without. Still, I might give these new paints a try- there is still a little space left over in my case of black and white gangsters.





8 comments:

  1. Your painting skills are astonishing.

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  2. Great paint job! Iowa? My dad is from there, pretty depressive state, flat and full of corn.

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    1. Full of corn and a lot of hobby shops :)
      I like it here. I'm the same distance to Minneapolis, Kansas City and Omaha, and just a little longer drive to Chicago. So I'm close enough to civilization. I've lived in the big city long enough (Washington D.C. and Los Angeles,) and Iowa is a nice reprieve.

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  3. I read black and white painted figures and think "why would you" but then I see them and think..."yep, that's very cool".
    cheers

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  4. Your black and white figs are still my favorite things you ever did. I will have to pick this Vallejo set up. I would like to do Cthulhu this way and since its so pulpy, it fits brilliantly.

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  5. Ha! It figures that after being so inspired by your work and starting my greyscale Great War project that VL would come out with dedicated paints. I can't tell you how many hours it took me to figure out a set of greys that would work - it made me completely mental! I may try them but I don't know if I could easily switch out of my established palette.

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    1. I have to switch out of my palette because it was made using the old Reaper Pro series. But the paints in the new Vallejo set are actually available individually. I went ahead and picked them up -- actually, I picked up the grays; there are also some flat browns in the set for those who like to do the sepia tone look.

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    2. I use the Reaper Pro stuff as well. When I came up with my palette I bought eight of each bottle just to be sure I had enough to tide me through my project. I'm doing some Pulp stuff in greyscale as well so perhaps I'll try the VL for that just to see how they work out.

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