About Me

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United States
My name is Jessie Carlile and I paint miniatures and love to roll dice. I began painting miniatures in 1999 and have never looked back. Painting is very relaxing and rewarding for me and I hope you enjoy the works I share on this website. I have won many awards for my work including the Silver in 2008 and 2009 Privateer Press Masters Painting Competition as well as a Gold in 2010. Enjoy your stay and if you have any questions feel free to contact me!

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Angry Elves inspired bases

Since I've been working on my Retribution again (after about a year and a half away), I wanted to make some custom bases to help unify the army when they hit the table top.  Since this is going to be a little time intensive, I went ahead and drew out some rough sketches of what I would like each base to look like.  30 MM got 11 sketches, 40 MM got 7 and and 50 received 4. 
The dark areas are going to be the parts of the bases that get the normal gravel treatment, and a busted Myrmidon head or weapon may even make its way onto a few of the bases.  The channels and orbs will follow the standard formula, metallic nodes with bluish-green glowing bits.  The actual ruins themselves will be painted similar to the way the towers are painted in the RoS rulebook.  Once the bases are made, molds will be made so I can cast them for my own use.

If any readers ever plan or are thinking of undertaking an endeavor such as this, I strongly suggest you draw out what you want to do.  I sat for a few hours just trying to throw some bases together without any plans, and needless to say, I was a little disappointed.  However, once I sat down and started drawing, ideas started coming to me, and my ideas became more concrete.  You can actually see that the 30 MM bases aren't quite as realized as the 40 and 50 MM bases are.  

I plan to start working on these soon, and will update my progress here!  

Questions and comments are welcome!

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Destor Thane 90%

Over the weekend I kept working on my Destor Thane.  Minus the base, he's close to being done, with additional shading and little detail bits being needed.
I'll go ahead and get this out of the way.  I LOVE MY AIRBRUSH.  Now that I have that out, lets get to the detail.

I painted the Thane separate from the horse, and this got rid of all the issues I encountered while painting the mount.  Next time I paint a horse, I just need to mount it to the dowel I use to normally hold my models.  

I'm not sure if I'm pleased with the metals.  They seem a little jarring compared to the smooth, pure white of the armor.  I'm considering airbrushing the metal as well, but I've heard conflicting stories about whether you should spray metallic paint with the same airbrush you use to spray flat paints.

This guy may not be on a base for a week or two, I'm planning on creating custom bases for my Retribution army.  Once I get them made, I'm going to mold and cast them, so I'll have a readily available supply of cool bases.  Look for a future post on the process.

If you have any questions or comments, please let me know!

Friday, January 18, 2013

Destor Thane WIP

I experimented a bit with my airbrush last night.
I had painted some Destors with my airbrush about a year ago, but that pretty much amounted to me laying down a base coat, then applying a Zenithal highlight.  After that I went in and added line shading and razor edge highlights with a brush.  This was good enough for me at the time, but presently I want to gain more mastery over the tool.

So, last night I cranked out this guy in about an hour.  Differently than my previous attempt, I actually applied shading with the brush and learned an interesting trick.  Keep in mind, I'm an airbrush neophyte, so I'm sure more experienced airbrushers know this.  I turned the model upside down to apply shading and the paint hit all the areas that should be shaded, while a little bit of the overspray added to the shading on areas that are not explicitly shaded or highlighted.  I then did the same thing for the highlights, but rather than a liberal application of Zenithal highlights, I applied the highlights in a more controlled fashion. 

 I learned a few things from this experiment. One, I need a better way to hold figures that I'm airbrushing.  this slipped out of my hand at one point and one of the horns is now chipped.  I need to repair it, but I'm unsure as to how to go about doing this.  I'll either mask off the area and use the airbrush again, or simply do it with a brush.  Two, I need to watch out for little scratches.  Three, the little trick I learned will be fantastically conducive to painting any Dawnguard models.  Two Scyirs, another Thane, a unit of Sentinels and Epic Vyros should be able to be painted in no time.  I'm looking forward to seeing how this applies to Myrmidons as well.

If you have any questions about the technique or colors used, please let me know in the comments!

Thursday, January 10, 2013

So, I'm easily distracted.

As anyone who read the last post will see, I've not stayed true to my attempt to make a theme force and chronicle it's progress here.  The impetus behind buying a unit of MoW Bombardiers was to work on modeling them while I was displaced from my house due to a small basement fire.  I quickly learned that I don't like working anywhere other than my workspace, what at the time of my last post was in a warehouse having soot cleaned from it.  This resulted in me getting the figures only partially assembled before tossing my hands up in frustration and quickly loosing interest.  Lack of light, lack of tools and simply the lack of being able to work comfortably stalled any desire I had to model.

Flash forward after a month and a half and I'm back in my house and reunited with my workspace.  Being used to painting almost everyday was hard to adjust to, and suddenly having the ability to paint again had me at a loss as to what to paint.  I didn't really have the drive to paint until I received Alexia and 20 Risen, along with a small contingent of other Mercs (Merry Amazon gift card Christmas to me!).  I painted the IK Alexia model to warm me up, which was awful by the way, and then moved on to her Warmachine model.  She was a vast improvement upon the previous attempt and her Risen are coming along quite nicely. 

I've also learned from my last post that I'm no good at keeping a schedule.  I have three playable painted armies, so I really have no drive to paint a cohesive force over a time period.  This just means that I'm much happier painting what I feel like, so I'm not very likely to have project posts here.  Posts will generally be "hey, look what I painted!" from here on out.  I'm not going to post a posting schedule, but I am going to try and post more regularly. 

Here's to a hobby filled 2013!