Here’s wishing you the most wonderful 2010 you can imagine!

All the very best,

James

A very merry christmas to each and every one of you!

Thank you for being so friendly, keen, wonderful, supportive and generally smashing people

James

Hey,

You can now follow me on my facebook fan page.  What could be easier than to get your updates in your news feed?

don’t forget if you have an rss reader, you can subscribe to my blog, or whichever category (e.g. the sculptalong) that you wish.  You can also tell your friends about the work that’s up here with the handy logos I’ve got listed below each post.

Thanks!

James

First up, a lovely entry from Leon Field.  Leon, I love the way the text in the background alludes to the writing, and the minis are clearly shown – it can only be a good thing to show off my work as much as possible right?  Great stuff!  I know you worked hard on it and revised it loads, great dedication, and a very nice result.

Next, Adam Shefki.  Something a little busier here, which isn’t a bad thing, it has all the details on there I want to get across, and it’s got pictures of my work.  I think this one syncs really well with my site, and I’d be proud to have it win and sit at the top of my page.  Thank you for your entry, it’s awesome!

Thirdly, I have Nick Palfrey’s entry.  It’s a great one, classical and simplistic, like a blank canvas.  It’s professional and that’s really nice.  Nick has had his design worked on as well by Wayne Robinson, aka Zorg, who added to it.  He’s happy for me to count this also as nick’s entry, and that’s fine by me, given that Nick came up with the general concept.

Nick’s:

Void’s Edit:

The last finalist entry is from Tony Lindgren.  What a great banner!  I love the graphics work here, and I love your selection of images to use – they’re probably the ones I would most like to have up there.  Wonderful stuff!  A really professional piece, thank you.  I like the ‘artist’ bit, hitting all the right buttons!

Ok.  Now is the time to announce the winner.  Aaaannnnddd the winner is:

Nick Palfrey!  Many many many congratulations, you legend! (and Zorg a little too).  I have been genuinely undecided as to which to use, and it’s been with much umming and aahing and asking of friends, colleagues and fiancée that I’ve come to this decision.  I’m surprised at how hard it’s been, I’m so grateful for eachof the entries, that I feel rather bad not being able to call a tie.  I’ll  be using the Void edit I think, the griffin is a nice touch which I’d like to see on the site.

Thanks again everyone who entered, and definately to those who didn’t make the final cut, there was some great stuff there too.  Nick, the prize is on its way to you

I’ll leave you with an entry from a friend of mine which particularly made me laugh, thanks for keeping me grounded dude!

Awesome!  Thanks all,

James

Well, 12 days into my Griffinguides blog, and huzzah! I’m calling it a successful couple of weeks.  I know i look angry above, but it’s actually just me shouting.  I’m quite sanguine actually   see?  now I’m smiling!

The stats?  Just shy of 40 posts, mainly back posts (sorry about the spam!), twenty something comments, many many emails from people, a bunch of helpful comments on CMON and PB, and well over 1000 views.  Excellent.  I’m not entirely sure what a ‘view’ is, but it turns out when i view something, the count doesn’t go up, so go figure.  Like everything else about WordPress, the software underlying it, it’s probably a clever system.

You don’t care about those numbers though, and why should you?  that’s for me to worry about.  Suffice to say that I’m most grateful for everyone who has helped me out with encouragement and enquiries, it’s good to know that this has been well recieved.

So far, I’ve presented:

1.  My forthcoming ‘Malice in Wonderland’ range – That’s been fun, and I’ve had some really great feedback on improvements to the work in progress posts by email and even to my suprise, in person! Thanks!

2.  The Ninja Goblin – A fun little project I’ve brought almost to completion over the last three months or so.  Great!  Nearly there, and then I’m going to smash a ’9′ on Coolminiornot.com, a miniature rating site (for those people primarily interested in my writing!)

3.  My work in progress novel ‘Dark Beyond the Veil‘.  i’ll be providing some larger excerpts as the weeks progress, never fear!  Just because Nanowrimo has stopped, isn’t any reason for me to slouch in my dedication to my wordcount and the stroppy, hormonal teenagers I’m writing about!

4.  My ‘Design me a Banner’ competition - This has been so well recieved, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed looking over all the entries I’ve been sent so far, and if you haven’t gotten around to it yet, remember that there could be a tenner in it for you if your design is chosen, so check out the details and throw something together!

5.  Finally, the announcement that a short story of mine is to be included in the winter edition of the SI magazine. Can’t wait for you guys to read it and tell me what you think!

…and that’s the last 2 weeks!  ok, so I shan’t be updating that regularly, but you can expect continuous progress as i keep plugging away.  ‘Well then’, I don’t hear you cry (well I am sitting in a Costa Coffee on the way home from work, and literally noone aside, I assume, from the thermal imaging camera sattelite operatives from GCHQ could know that i’m here), ‘What’s next’?

well dear valued reader, allow me to spell it out more clearly.  In the following couple of weeks up to the new year, you can expect…

1.  Updates on Malice – I’ve got one to go already (the QoH has hair, woo! and her henchman is wearing a wedding ring.  So will the white rabbit…yes, I’ve finally gotten around to beginning work on the flavour text for the minis!)

2.  Flavour text for Malice – What a suprise, i’ve started to write it, so I’ll blog about it too.  Go figure!  In the new year I’ll be consulting an expert (well I already have, but we’ll be doing so more, and for many hours at a time) and we’ll flesh out the currently skeletal gaming mechanisms for Malice…It’ll soon be time for the Denizens of Wonderland to break out…

3.  A spectacular series of focuses, one per week every wednesday, on some of my other completed painting projects.  Ninja Gobbo will be finished, sure, but I’ll also be showing my Golden Demon winning entries, my nearly winning ones (I’ve got over 20 finalist pins in the last few years, so there’s a few of them!) and some previously unshown stuff produced for another project of mine.  Now I think of it, this brings me nicely onto the other project of mine:

4.  A miniature painting guide.  With over 100 pages, and stuffed to the brim with colour pictures, I’ve got my painting guide written.  It’s also got some absolutely breathtaking sections from other artists, now i’m working on getting all the images edited and the typesetting done, and it’ll be ready to publish.  Wonderful!  As with all of these up and coming things, expect a blog post before too long with more information and in this case, some sneak peeks!  woo hah!

5.  The results of the banner competition…some stiff competition to be sure, but are you geek enough?

6.  A sculptalong.  If you  guys want it.   It’s something I’ve been asked about a good few times, and this seems like an entertaining way to help people out. and open up the not-as-difficult-as-it-seems world of sculpting for a wider audience, with on hand support from me and others if you’re having trouble.  That’ll be coming soon if enough people want it.  I’ll guage the reactions in the next couple of weeks and take it from there.  Watch this space.

7.  Socio.  It’s a little short story I wrote that’s currently not submitted anywhere, so I thought I’d share it with you.  I figured if I could get your thoughts before it gets put back in for resubmission, then that would be just grand.

Hopefully the coming weeks will be even more exciting than the first!  Thank you so much for following, I really appreciate all the support from everyone so far.

James

ps.  Just a reminder – I’m open to commissions, just drop me a line!  I need something to do after i’ve finished with Malice, and I hate twiddling my thumbs unless there’s putty between them…

Hey,

So as is absolutely clear, I haven’t got a header for my site.  As there are so many people who are better at this stuff than I am, I thought that rather than spend a day with pain, suffering and photoshop, I’d pay someone the princely sum of £10 in cash (paypal or in person if you’re local) or vouchers (amazon etc.) to do so for me.  As such, a competition is born.  I will be selecting the best entry next Wednesday, and if that is you, then you will be able to treat yourself to an early Christmas pressie (worth approximately £10).  Wonderful!  Stick to the guidelines below, and email it to me by Wednesday at 12 noon, and all will be fine and dandy.

1. It should fit the width/depth of the space on the website, and high  resolution.
2. It can include any images from this site, of me or my work or from my CMON profile (search images from Cybersquig).  Then you’ll truly see how bad my photoshop ability is lol!
   
3. It should be clear from the header what I’m selling (my writing, sculpting and painting services)
4. It should be bold (that is, it should stand out), and it should be in keeping with the theme of the site.  Have a look around it…It’s still under construction, but you should get the picture.
5. It should have my name in it somewhere
   
6. It should be emailed to me (jamesgriffin@stroudcol.ac.uk) by Wednesday at 12 noon
7. All entries become my intellectual property when they are submitted
   
8. Also, let me know how you want your winnings!

It’s worth noting that I’ll be looking to offer a larger amount of money in the coming months to edit photographs for a book I’ve written, so keep an eye out for that, I’ll be commissioning someone £150 for that, possibly someone that has impressed me in this competition, so if that’s something that would interest you, then drop me an email through the site.

Thanks for looking,

James

Hey,

So I thought I should do some sort of ‘ooh I’ve got a blog!’ like post.  Here it is!

Ooh!

I’ve got a blog!

there we go.  No, seriously though, at the minute i’m posting my work disparately across Platoon Britannica, Coolminiornot and via email to various contacts.  I figure this will be an easy way to fix that long-winded way of doing things.  Actually my friend Kai has been bugging me to do something like this for a while so that I have somewhere to direct clients to, and I gotta say it’s about time I’ve listened to her.  Turns out she was right all along.  I hope that it will serve as a very visual representation of my work, a very personal record of my projects and a forum for discussion and critique.

As I set this up, bug Kai for constant tech support, and try to make it as good and user friendly as I can, please let me know what you think, throw any suggestions my way, or generally chat, that’d be great!

Thanks all,

James