How to paint 5 o'clock shadow

 

Painting 5 o'clock shadow is easy: Paint the affected area gray. If you wish to highlight the shadow area, add a little bit of your base flesh color. Boom, Bob's your uncle... Hey, I actually do have an uncle "Bob."

This technique can be used for 5 o'clock shadow as well as shaved heads (such as the pate on a samurai or the short growth on a monk.)

Other painting: Mouse Guard fan art!

 

My wife wanted a painting to hang in her office, something grand, something big to fill a large space on one of the walls, something with a lot going on, or at least some details to be discovered. 

So I settled on a Mouse Guard theme, a series we both very much love. For our honeymoon, we went to Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario, and fell in love with the scenery, so I chose a vista from the park as my reference for the background of this painting. You can see the tiny patrol mice in the lower portion of the painting crossing at the rocks. 

The painting is 36" square and only took 8-10 hours using acrylic paint. I wish the paint dried faster, then I think I could do it in 6 hours :)

40mm Samurai terrain objectives

 

This is old stuff, but I wanted to re-post it since I took a new photo of all of my terrain objective pieces together. I won't get into how I made all of these, but I believe the base sizes are 120mm, if you were thinking of having a go.

I haven't added much to the collection in the past couple years, except for a couple new travellers, a samurai and a couple ashigaru, all of whom need to be assembled and painted. The collection isn't complete, however; I have two or three unfinished commissions yet with Steve Barber; once those are done, I will probably make one more big purchase -- a few more Ashigaru to complete some warbands for Test of Honour, and a few more civilians, enough to fill up the streets of a post town. I think it's about time to bring the Samurai collection to a close.

This peasant, complete with custom-hammered
yari, was the first figure I completed for my
collection of samurai by Steve Barber Models

The commissions I have left are an unarmored samurai commander/lord on his horse, a boy leading a supply horse, and an ashigaru in campaign dress (extra sandals hanging from his belt, rice rations wrapped around, a furoshiki slung over his back, and a weapon (your choice) resting over his shoulder.-- I plan to get a half dozen of them to form a small column with the commander and a supply horse or two.

The very last thing I want to add to the Samurai is a (scratch-built) tea house/inn with a fully furnished interior. I'm still busy with many other projects (miniature and real life,) so even though I say this collection is coming to a close, it is still far into the future :)

Zombicide Dragons

 I had finished the necromantic dragon (on the right) a few months ago, but only recently finished the feral dragon (on the left.) 

Both dragons were heavily drybrushed in layers (going from dark to light). To add some vareity to the skin tones, I drybrushed some purple, trying to blend the edges as best I could into the base skin color below. I blocked in the boney plates (drybrushing the highlights) on the necro dragon and the metal armor on the feral dragon. Then the details (teeth, eyes etc) were added carefully later. 

We like to create themed teams for Zombicide,
such as Santa and his Elves.

They make quite the display on the Zombicide (Black Plague) board, and add an element of gameplay that isn't too overwhelming. My wife and I looove the Zombicide series; despite its shortcomings -- lack of variety in missions, simple gameplay, repetitive nature -- we still love it for its co-op nature, and as a vehicle to allow us to field epic characters, moving, slaying, and laying waste to the hordes of walkers, runners and fatties. 

We've even made several custom characters -- including cards -- to add to our collection, which is still not yet finished being painted (but it's close!!!) Her favorite survivors/teams are the dwarves, while my favorites are the barbarians and bug guys. We're also partial to elves and good old-fashioned, run-of-the-mill, medieval fighters.