The Dragonborn Comes

The Dragonborn

Who's played Skyrim? I've played Skyrim. A lot of Skyrim. More on that later. I had of course seen that Mophidius had acquired a license to produce a Skyrim miniatures game, but I have enough models. I was resisting. However, my good friend the IT guy decided to buy me one as a gift because (he's awesome?) we had talked about video games (smashing every stereotype about men who work with computers) and he knew about my Skyrim addiction. So no I'm going to have to collect a force for the main game when it comes out. Which was probably his plan all along right. We've all done that...

The Back of the Dragonborn

The painting was fairly straightforward; almost all traditional paints on this one. Browns and bones with some dry brushing to do the fur, and a bog standard brown leather recipe on the armor. I did use a tiny bit of brown contrast paint on the hat to see how it worked as a rust effect. I like how that came out. It's like a wash that stays where you put it. I'm beginning to wonder if contrast might not be better then wash in all those situations where you are trying to place it down in the recesses, rather then wash all over the model like a filter.

In many ways, the base was more interesting than the model because I wasn't sure what I was painting. I originally thought that it was one of those whippy tentacles from Apocrypha (The realm of books in the Dragonborn DLC)  but IT-guy thought it was a dragon tail from a dead off camera dragon. Which maybe it looks more like because it's got scales. But then I didn't like that idea because It's... weird because he's sitting on a table so you have to imagine the rest of the dragon. I almost took the whole tail tentacle thing off but then Helen complained that that would spoil the composition of the model. So. Not really knowing what it was, I painted it black green like a tentacle or a tail. I painted it using the new Corvus Black, which is, in fact, a very very very dark gray such as it would take a camo shade wash over the top to make a dark green. I then highlighted it up with Caliban green and then a little bit of warpstone glow.  After the model was varnished all over with my customary satin varnish out of a can, I then brushed gloss varnish onto the tail tentacle to make it look slick.

I'm not sure what it is, but I like how it looks and that's the important part.

Skyrim. Skyrim. 

A game I have apparently played for 798 hours. That's over a month of my life. I, know I have an addictive personality. I get very into... things. Games. Painting miniatures. TV Shows. People even. 

Total aside to what is allready an aside. Talking of TV shows. It's very weird to me that 'the kids' are into Evangelion now. I had a year nine student in my form try to tell me about his half baked musings on this cool new anime he had watched. I was so impossibly obsessed with that show for actuall years I think I have two diffrent sets on DVD. I think I might still have my dub only VHS copys at my parents house. There is still an Evangelion soap dish in my bathroom becuase I found it the other day and I just happened to need a soap dish. Focused like a lazer. If The Prisoner suddenly becomes popular I might start suspecting that this is all secretly a simulation designed around my personality. 

I just sort of laser focus for a while. Sometimes this is really helpful. It's whats letting me power through miniatures at the moment and feel myself getting better and better as I do it. I think it's what makes me quite good at the pastoral care part of my job because I find it quite easy to spend a lot of time getting to know hundreds of students. Can be desperately difficult when they leave mind you.

But with video games? I mean that's the absolute worst because you can just put so much time into them. The only thing I've ever been stuck on worse then Skyrim was World of Warcraft. I can't easily find out how many hours I played that for back in the day. I can tell you I nearly failed my undergraduate degree!

The bizarre thing is I'm planning to resubscribe to World of Warcraft at the end of August when WoW Classic launches. Because? Nostalgia is strong. I think we've all had that thing where we wish we could just stick a pin in a time in life and go back to it on a whim. Anyway, I have rambled long enough on what is ostensibly supposed to be a blog about a painted model and then got weirdly phycological. Well, it's my soapbox so I'll do what I like I suppose.