As was fully expected, people seem to be slipping a little, this is understandable at this point in the project, it’s not shiny any more, but you’re still a little way away from finishing. So, I propose delaying the next installment for a week, to give people the opportunity to relax a bit, or catch up if they’re behind. For those of you still champing at the bit, have a look at these below in the mean time, I learned from these and sitting down with a friend to learn, so hopefully it’ll be fun. Then, we’ll pick up as usual from then for the last 3-4 weeks.

Thanks all!

James.

http://www.satyrsculptingstudio.com/downloads/DWsculpting-class.pdf

http://www.one-ring.co.uk/phpBB2/kb.php?mode=article&k=91

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

All the very best,

James

Hey,

My Malice in Wonderland project was always meant to bring my passions for sculpting, painting and writing together in a glorious mix of fun.  I can’t paint my minis yet, obviously, because they haven’t been cast, but I can get on (rather overdue actually) with the task of writing the fluff that’s been sitting in my head and has been gradually coalescing into a cohesive whole.  When I sat down on christmas day to write this, I also by coincidence has a piece of writing software that I wanted to trial it, and this seemed to be a good time to do so.  Therefore, I thought I’d take a post to evaluate the software.

I installed it and set it up with no real issues, thanks to the lovely Kai, who also set this wonderful blog site up.  You can find her blog on my blogroll, Kai o nine tales.  Well worth a gander.    It’s a programme for structuring those writers who use the Snowflake method for writing.  I know a good few keen writers, and almost all of them have at least dabbled with this theory.  You can read more about it here, but suffice to say you begin with a one line summary of your book like this:

An eleven-year-old wizard tries to stop an evil sorcerer from returning to life.

(this is an example that comes with the software, reproduced for purposes of review)

and then you expand that to a paragraph:

On his eleventh birthday, orphaned Harry Potter is invited to leave his miserable life with his aunt and uncle to attend a school for witches and wizards. Harry learns that an evil wizard, Lord Voldemort, tried to kill him as a baby and lost all his own powers instead. When Harry nearly dies in a jinxed game of Quidditch, he suspects that sinister Professor Snape is responsible. When Harry has to do a detention in the forbidden forest, he witnesses a shadowy figure drinking unicorn blood, a magical life preserver. Harry sets out to stop Snape from returning Voldemort to power, only to face Voldemort himself.

and then you expand each of the sentences in the paragraph to a paragraph of its own.  Suffice to say that there are nine steps, at each you expand your thinking about your novel concept.  In one of them you flesh out each of the characters, in one of them you produce a synopsis, and in one you produce a list of scenes.  Now then, I write on my netbook, as in fact I’m doing now, and have always used open office to write with.  I know, I know, many writers are going to be muttering at my folly as they read this, quieten down in the back row!  However, that’s the way it has been, so I’m comparing my experience producing snowflakes on a word processor to this new shiny experience.  First off, I’m not the most organised of people, so having somewhere with a tab for each part of the snowflake, a little box in which to input it, so you aren’t left with the ‘blank page’ problem, and your previous one replicated in a margin on the next if necessary so you don’t have to refer back to it.  Wonderful!  At the opposite end of the process, it helps you to package your novel into a pitch, and export your synopsis as an .RTF file, so word, or your preferred flavour of word processor will work just fine with it.  Excellent.  On the other side, it’s pretty limited in terms of personalisation, for instance you are required to type in a particular font, something that isn’t ideal for someone with Dyslexia such as myself.  These are small things though, it seems to me that the main purpose of this software is to avoid the blank sheet of paper syndrome by presenting the user with a web form style page to fill in.  In short, buy it if you think the snowflake method will work for you (it does partially for me), and enjoy getting your novel started before you know it.  However, skip it if you are after some sort of full blown word processor to write your novel in, organise your scenes and plot visually the progress of your characters or if you like things to look good.

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,

Great news!  I’ve got us a way to freely and easily upload and share work in progress stuff during the course of the Sculpt along.  Wonderful!  Coolminiornot.com have set up a dedicated area on their forums for the sculpt along participants.  This is a huge boon for us as we will now be able to support one another, discuss issues as they come up, and support, coddle and kick start each other to the end of the project.

Thank you Chern-Ann, Borg, and CMON, you’re great!

You can see the forum here, why not register today (if you aren’t already), and post a thread introducing yourself and what project you’re thinking of taking on!

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

So here’s my first in my Showcase series.  To begin with I’m going to showcase my own work.   This is my blog, so it only seems fair!  Once I’ve done with my stuff, I’m going to show you some other artists projects too so that you have the opportunity to enjoy their spectacular talents.  Anyway, enough of the introduction, let’s get on with showing you my recent Astropath project.  I hope you like him!

This mini was a bit of a strange one.  He’s a Games Workshop Imperial Guard Astropath, for those of you who don’t know, kind of like a post apocolyptic magician.  He manipulates the warp, and that was something I wanted to really bring over in the base.  I know it’s subtle, and probably too so, but it needed to be dark and cold to bring out the glowing pendant above.  I began by airbrushing him black through greys to white using Windsor & Newton black and white ink.  Then he got a coat of Games Workshop Purity Seal, a semi-gloss varnish to seal the ink to the mini (it rubs off pretty easily).  I then got a bit of dark green ink and sprayed that over the mini in a very light coat to give the zenithal lighting some colour.  It is very important to me that the robes look lit from above as if in moonlight as well as from the yellow of the pendant.  This got another coat of purity seal, and then I cracked out the white again.  I carefully sprayed, with as low a pressure as I could, white again around the pendant.  It’s hard to describe how lightly I had to do this, but it served two purposes, the first being to land a good surface for the warm glow of the pendant OSL (Object Source Lighting), and secondly to act as a guide for where it should go.  Then, a little less lightly, I sprayed yellow ink over the top.  This coloured the OSL, and with a little overlap onto the darker sections, helped mitigate the grainyness of the white, and ease the transition between the two.  Finally, a little dot of white airbrushed back on the pendant was the highlight that was designed to further accentuate the ‘glowiness’ of the pendant.

At that point, I was able to turn the airbrush to the base.  Hurrah!  I sprayed black, dark blue, various greens, and a little yellow in patches.  I sprayed it on in dappled patterns unevenly, and very thickly.  The inks acted as retarders for the Citadel and Vallejo acrylics, and I kept going until it was clearly thickly layered and overloaded.  This probably took me about 20 minutes in total from start to finish.  As ever, most of that time was spent cleaning the airbrush between coats.  Finally I got hold of a brush.  This was the risky part, it was the eve of Golden Demon (I painted the whole model start to finish on the saturday, ready for the competition on the sunday), and I didn’t have time to fix this if it went wrong.  I swirled the brush in the thickly layered paint in a spiral pattern.  It didn’t have the desired effect, so I ditched the brush and used my finger!  Fingerpainting rules!  I just gave it a swirly pattern, and then left it to dry under a heat lamp for about 20 seconds (not too long, or the plasticard would melt and warp – been there!).

Now I was ready to crack out the brushes in earnest.  First off, the face and hands got blacked out with Citadel Chaos Black.  Then I highlighted the face sort of upside down.  I left his eyes and brow very dark, and ran W&N black ink around the top.  The glossy finish makes the shadows appear deeper.  Then I used a variety of flesh tone paints that to be honest, I can’t remember, but it definately included tallarn flesh, mecrite red, and elf flesh, all GW branded.  Now he was looking like a human being!  time to re-do the glow on the face.  I ran yellow ink over the skin again to keep the glow, and highlighted with white oil paint for a clean sharp contrast.  While I was at it, I used grey and white oils to highlight the robes, and yellow/white oils to highlight the OSL sections.  On went another coat of purity seal, and the little fella was about ready to be finished.

To tie him off, I highlighted bits of the hands and other minor details, and then superglued him to the now dry base.  I used yellow and white oils as thin bolts of lightening among the swirl on the base around the Astropath.  It enabled me to ‘lead’ the swirl directly towards his gathered robes, and provide a false perspective of depth by changing the length and bredth of the lines.  Now it was 8pm, and I wanted to finish off some other projects, so I highlighted the rim of his base, attached a magnet to the underside of his slottabase, and to the top of the plinth, sprayed and highlighted the brass etch imperial eagle design on the plinth and called it a night.  Job done!

He actually did well, especially in a group that was so hard, I hadn’t expected anything from him tbh, but he picked up a finalist pin, and in the end I reckon he actually had a pretty good chance.  Not bad for a finger painted model finished in a day!

I hope you like him, I uploaded him to CMON thanks to Alextheartist making photoshoppy goodness on my photos.  As ever with CMON, I was disappointed by the score of 7.3, but hey!  I’m not minding too much – I’m sure if my lighting/background in the photos was better he’d achieve a better score.

Anyway, let me know what you think.  It’s been a pleasure as always

James

Well, the title says it all, I need a banner for my site, I’ve kicked off a competition to design one, a bunch of good entries have already been submitted, and if you want to get in on the action, then you only have a few hours left!  get it submitted!

James

ps.  click here for the entry rules!

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…