Next in a series of posts to show off minis I have painted in the past two years.
I loved the look of this mini and bought it with the point of painting it to look like a nightmare. I did the fire effect with the help of an online tutorial and lots of washes. Took a while, but I’m happy with the result.
Next in a series of posts to show off minis I have painted in the past two years.
I have been participating in a 4th ed campaign set in the world of the One Piece manga/anime. These are the two characters (We all have two so we have a proper crew without having to have too many players.) that I play.
Klesk is the first character I came up, and is, admittedly my favorite. See, I have this thing for gryffins. Maybe you can tell. Klesk was raised as a slave, given a random devil fruit so he would be a better pit fighter. It ended up being a mythical zoan type gryffin gryffin. He was released by Ophelia, the ‘at the time’ captain who he now sees as a mother figure. He is a melee, single target fighter who abuses speed, which comes from learning to fight in death matches. And yes he can fly in character. After their time in hell he has realized some of the ruthless lengths he will have to go through in order to protect his ‘family’. This mini was modeled together from three different minis by Blake and painted by me. It is surprisingly well-balanced despite its top heavy look.
Kithara is my secondary character. She came from one of my stories, redone a bit to fit into the One Piece world. She was a fishman noble who went out to become a pirate captain. She was, for a while, vying for position of captain of the Steel Fist Pirates (since it was under debate for a while). After their time in hell, Kithara has realized that there are other aspects of herself that no one has ever gotten to know because she’s hidden them. The only modding on the mini was the crest on her head and the flower, done by me.
Next in a series of posts to show off minis I have painted in the past two years.
When I bought this mini, I was going to paint her like my wind serpent, Raika, who was my raiding pet in World of Warcraft for my character Nabith for many years. But when I got it, I was in a campaign where my character was soon getting a medium flying form and the DM dropped some plot reasons that I could turn into a coutal, so I decided on that route instead. I like how it ended up.
Next in a series of posts to show off minis I have painted in the past two years.
I loved this mini, and bought her without an idea for a character. My husband used her as an NPC we allied with in the tower campaign and named her Brooklyn, so I figured that was her name from then on.
Again, I bought this mini cause it looked cool. While painting her I decided she would be a character from a story named Tiffany. I colored her armour after a bronze dragon, my favorite. She was in the same episode of the tower campaign as Brooklyn. I still haven’t used her as a PC in a campaign.
First in a series of posts to show off minis I have painted in the past two years.
I got the first mini for a character I was going to play named Varon. Later on, I found the second mini and decided that, that mini was going to be Varon. So I painted the first one using the yellow ink I figured I never would use again, and the actual Varon to look good. >.>
What happened: I took Tori to put her in the cage walker. She refused. Many. Times. I took her to do a send and receive and Sue ran over yelling that I can’t work her that hard or she’ll get too stressed and lose the baby. I took her to hose her off and walk her to cool her down. She kept walking faster than I did. I got a chain shank and we did showmanship until she started stopping when I did.
What I made it mean: Tori wouldn’t get in the cage walker because she didn’t trust me enough because I’m not a good enough trainer. I responded to her “misbehaving” with more poor trainering and I’m never going to be a good trainer because I never do anything right. I probably already made her lose her baby anyway, so I’ve ruined that. I’m just always surrounded by people who know what they’re doing because they’ve been doing this so much longer than I have, so I can never be right. And even the showmanship that I did wasn’t good, it was all higglty pigglty. Tori keeps overrunning me, but she’s perfectly happy to have me just push her back over and over, and since she’s doing that without a fuss I can’t escalate, I just do it all over and over and I never seem to get it right. Even when I finally do put her away I feel like I was just saying she was ‘good enough’ so that I could go have dinner and be done with my day.
And now I release what happened, and what I made it mean. It’s in the past and has no effect on me anymore.
So this is the ‘other’ book written by JK Rowling. I wasn’t really interested in ever reading it. It wasn’t Harry Potter and it didn’t sound like a fantasy, so why bother? Then I heard from Morgan that it was apparently a really good book. She said that all of the characters are unlikable, and yet you want to keep reading anyway. That caught my interest, because if the characters are unlikable, then the story must be something amazing. So I downloaded it on my Kindle, and gave it a shot.
I saw immediately why it’s such a popular book. The woman is a wordsmith like I have rarely seen. I don’t remember this level of craft in the Harry Potter books, but perhaps she just stuck with a particular style throughout those and tried something new in this one. Reading her words was like sailing down a smooth, crystal blue river that is lined with the most luscious garden. Now the plot might be good too, I didn’t get far enough into it to really form an opinion.
That being said, I will not be finishing the book. I think I got about 30% into it (says my Kindle) and the unlikable characters are just too much for me. I don’t read to stare into the blackness of the human soul. Probably why I hated so much reading books for school; all they care about is blackness of souls. I read (and write) fantasy. I want my characters to be heroic on top of their humanity. I don’t want to be wishing I could punch every character in the nose through the pages of the book. I want to read to enjoy myself and root for the main characters. Heck, I even like my villains to be affable. But I certainly will be going back to it on occasion to review the art she made out of those words.
Yesterday was a lot of fun. Matthew and I went to Applebee’s for my birthday lunch and I ordered myself a frozen strawberry lemonade. (I know, we’re such big spenders!) I finally started making some headway on my story (but more on that in a later post) and then had a great session in Matthew’s campaign The Eight Arms and the Empire of Sin
Then this morning the stupid Daylight Savings Time hit me. Blah. It was still a good day, I was just super tired. Then I came in for lunch and was delighted to remember Matthew had made Egg Salad for me the day before. Joy~ It totally revived me for the second half of the day. And now I’ve gotten a few things that were on my ‘to do’ list finally done. Yay for accomplishment.
So for those of you who don’t know, I have temporarily relocated myself and the important pieces of my life (namely my computer, my husband, and my cats and horse inthatorder!) to Myakka City, Florida in order to intern for six months in the breeding program of one of the top horse breeders in the country, Sue Schembri.
I (and pieces) arrived in Florida on January 2, 2013 and proceeded to move into the lovely, snug little apartment and subsequently got my butt handed to me. Things move very quickly here, and I wasn’t really ready for it. Now no one was mean about it, it’s just the speed of how things work. I am just really grateful I got here before breeding season really starts ramping up in February, because I was able to get my feet under me first.
It took me over two weeks to learn to recognize all the horses and over a month to get to the point where I know most of the routine things enough to do them under stress. Next will be learning some of the more obscure things! Yay!
So I got about halfway through the month of November, having no trouble keeping up with my word count when it hit me, that NaNoWriMo isn’t for me anymore. NaNoWriMo gets people who have not been working on that novel that they want to publish, to sit down and actually write. Well I realized that I actually had to stop working on the story I had been working on to do NaNoWriMo, which ended up being a story that I have little to no interest in because I’ve already started all of my good story ideas. So I officially quit NaNoWriMo, by telling the people that knew I was doing it, that I wasn’t anymore, and I went back to working on Shifting Winds.
And this isn’t to say that I like NaNoWriMo any less. I think it’s an amazing program that I will continue to support and may participate in again, but it’s for those people who need that push to get off their butts and write, and that’s no longer me. It helped me in the years I did participate. Now I’m to the point where I can write, so I need to work on turning my writing into the polished product it needs to be, and that is not the point of NaNoWriMo.
