KDM Videos... why have they stopped?

As many of you probably know, I have been chronicling my progress on a Kingdom: Death Monster painting project on my YouTube channel. In fact, not only had a been really prolific with these videos, they've been really popular which helped fuel my desire to do more. Then they stopped coming. What happened?

In short.. a serious brain fart. I had decided to save up some of my video for a couple of days before downloading it and editing it together. I did that for two days. Then on the third day I did what I normally do and formatted the memory card before I got started - completely forgetting that I still had video on the card. The video that I shot after that trying to recap everything that I'd erased felt rushed and.. bad. So I scrapped it.

On a more positive note I'm currently working on another Kingdom Death: Monster project and I'll use that to cover some of the models whose footage was lost the first time around. That should be coming within the next week.

I'm really enjoying the KDM models so I hope that you enjoy hearing about them (and seeing them).

An unhappy ending

If you've watched my latest vlog then you know that one of my two projects from September was particularly fraught with problems. From missing pieces, to lost pieces, to involuntary destruction... the hits just kept on coming.

It turns out that the delivery was pretty much the last straw for this project. The package actually made it to the porch of the client at which point IT WAS STOLEN. No joke. At this point I'm thinking that perhaps these miniatures had angered an ancient god at some point because it seems like if there was anything that could fail in this project, it did.

I cannot say how bad I feel for the client. This was not an inexpensive project and the minis were nearly in his grasp. The police say that there have been people stealing packages in his area and somebody was seen driving slowly through the neighborhood. The likelihood of the minis showing up again is pretty slim, but it's not out of the realm of possibility. If you live in Washington and happen to see anybody trying to tell some dark metallic with red and orange Convergence minis for Warmachine let me know. Maybe we can get them back for him.

I'm selling some decals

If you look above this page to the navigation area you'll notice that I've added what I refer to as a "store". It's more like a yard-sale, though. At least at the moment.

What I'm selling are some decal sets that I used to produce several years ago. Most of them are Alps-printed decals that I was able to do at home in the store. A few were actually professionally screen-printed by Microscale Industries.

I really miss having the ability to do decals. When I first started it was, like so many other businesses that I've gotten in to, something that I wanted for myself. The Alps printers were still pretty new and people were talking about making decals with them and so I invested a couple of hundred dollars to pick one up. Shortly thereafter I was printing and selling decals for models and miniatures.

My most popular decals were always the ones that I did for Space Marines. At the time GW was rather stingy with their own decal offerings so when I started printing up similar markings people began to snap them up. That went on for a number of years before I got the dreaded "nastygram" from GWs lawyers. To be fair to them they were pretty reasonable about the whole thing. I stopped selling all of the markings that were clearly based on their IP but I kept doing the ones that they had taken from heraldry or other publicly available symbology.

Sadly, Alps stopped producing the printers and as time went on they got harder and harder to replace. These days it is possible to find a printer that you could use to do this but they cost more than 10 times the price of the Alps and it's hard to imagine being able to recoup that investment.

In any case, the decals I'm selling are in mostly limited quantities. Snap them up when you can.

Full Time in 2015!

When I started doing commissions in 2010 I had all the time in the world to paint, but very few commissions. Eventually I started working full time at my game store and did the commission work on my days off. This worked well enough for me. The fact that I love to paint meant that I didn't mind spending my "free" time on it. Still, things were going to have to change eventually.

Over the past four years I've realized how much I love painting. The fact that I could continue doing commission work even though it limited the amount of time I had to hang out with friends, take trips, or even just get outside showed me that. What that means to me is that maybe this is what I should be doing while I can do it.

So, starting February 1, I will be devoting all of my time to commission painting work. I believe that it's time to make the move. I have a lot of repeat business from a number of clients (you all know who you are) and I'll be spending a lot more time looking for new ones. One of the luxuries of my old schedule was that I didn't actually need to look for work. It tended to show up when needed. On the other hand I know I've lost some jobs because I didn't have the capacity to get all of the work done in a short enough time span. As I expect to be tripling the amount of time I spend painting that should not be an issue.

At the moment I have all of the work that I'm likely to be able to complete before the end of January, but once February comes I'll be taking all of the work I can get. If you've been thinking about asking about my services, please do so. I'd love to chat with you about it.

As seen on CNBC

Back when I was doing PR work it was not uncommon for me to be quoted in articles on game related websites. These days, not so much. So when I got interviewed for CNBC (by my good friend Chis Morris) it was a pretty cool experience.

The article is about turning your hobby into a career - which is something that I've been doing for my whole life.

I entered a contest...

Back in the day I used to enter a lot of painting contests. I would win awards at local shows and such but I always found the experience to be... odd. I'm not sure that I liked the feeling of waiting for somebody else to tell me how good they thought my work was. So, even though I did win a lot of awards I eventually stopped doing it because I didn't enjoy it.

My contest entry

I recently let a friend of mine talk me into entering Privateer Press' painting contest (P3 Grandmaster something something). I think I mostly did it so that I would have an excuse to push myself a little further than I normally do. With all of my painting mainly going to paying clients I'm always balancing quality with time. This is the mini that I entered.

Overall I'm happy with it. I didn't lavish as much attention on it that I might have, but it did get a lot more attention than anything I've painted in years.

On the first day I watched the entries as they came in. I was the first one in so I had a lot of time to consider the other entries. Not too many showed up on day one. I was feeling pretty good about my chances.

By the end of the second day it was clear that, while my mini was good, there were a lot of other good entries. By by the final day it was clear that all of the best painters waited until the last minute to do their entries. Holy cow... some of those minis were incredible.

My bronze medal

In the end I got a bronze. I'm actually pretty happy about that. With all of the great painters in the competition it was nice to be recognized at all. In the final hour before the prizes were awarded there was a lot of milling around the booth of the other painters who were participating. Many of them knew one-another. I didn't know anybody. It was nice to talk with these painters about their work and feel like we were all in the same boat even though some were clearly on another level entirely.

I would say that this was a pretty positive experience for me. I'm already thinking about next year - assuming I go next year.