Tag: painted miniatures

Gryffins: In Solid Form

Laura Highcove

This is the third of a trio of posts showing off my gryffin collection.

Gryffins as Figures

A whole bunch of gryffin figures I have found in various places.

A rather typical looking gryffin (front left), a humanoid gryffin with a hammer (front right), and why yes, that is a humanoid gryffin riding a gryffin (back), thank you for asking.

Ignoring the little gold guy in front who should’ve been in the other picture, these are all pre-painted miniatures from Dungeons and Dragons. Flying gryffin (front left), stalking gryffin (front right), and lady riding sideways flying gryffin (back).



This guy is from Warhammer. Before and after pictures. I did all the modding to make it as High Elf as possible myself.

And this is Klesk, the mini for a D&D character from a 4th ED One Piece Campaign. This mini was modded pretty hard by a friend and painted by me.

I also got Sonic Boom from Skylanders. And Gilda, who was a character in the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic series.

I spotted these guys …I forget where, and while they remind me a bit more of a shisa with wings, I decided they were close enough to go in my gryffin collection.

This guy I bought a million years ago in 2003. He was meant to sit on top of your monitor. Yeah, remember when monitors wern’t flat? I do.

Gryffins in Stone

One Otakon there was a booth in the dealer’s room that sold jewelry, along with animals carved out of gemstones. I only picked up one at the time and later regretted it since the store wasn’t online anywhere for me to pick up more. It wasn’t until years later that I found them sold on ebay, so over time I collected a number of them.

I am very particular about the shape of the head. Sometimes there are ones for sale with huge bulbous heads, and I leave those ones alone. And the strawberry quartz one just ended up being bigger than the others. I didn’t realize it until it came in the mail.

And yes, that is just one more chunk of my collection. (You’re starting to think I’m crazy aren’t you? /cackles) Next post will show the rest of them.

Miniatures to Play Out a Fight Scene

Laura Highcove

So I wanted to do this post last week, and then life got in the way, so here I am getting it done now.

Last week I worked on the final fight in the Cinderella tale, which has a lot of moving parts. I decided the best way to keep track of everything was to pull out a play-mat and some miniatures and play out the positioning and movement of everyone in the fight. I took the pictures with my camera phone, so some of them are blurry, but I labeled them so you can see where everyone is.

You can see the terrain drawn onto the map if you look closely.

Yep, that says ‘large hellbeast’.

Wildrose is kiting.

omg, what is the Prince of Goldfield doing?

Everyone in a pile.

And it ended up helping me more than I thought it would to have it all laid out here. Mostly because it showed who would be able to see what better than me just picturing it in my head.

I also fell behind on my writing because of life happening last weekend, so I’ve been working hard to catch back up. Not sure if I’ll be done by May like I planned. Then I only have a month to smooth everything out for my beta readers in June. I suppose if I have to push it back a few weeks or a month it won’t be the end of the world, but I’m going to try and keep that from happening.

Drawing my Own Lines

Laura Highcove

So I have always been creative. Besides the fact that I have been writing stories since I learned to write, I have always been interested in all manor of other artistic pursuits.

I had a Lion King coloring book when I was around 12 (since that’s when The Lion King came out) that I meticulously colored. I would carefully outline each section by pressing hard with the crayon such that it left a dark line, then I would lightly color in the inside of the lines, such that there was a nice contrast.

My mother also introduced me (and my siblings) to painting ceramics. Taking entirely white figures, usually four or five inches tall, and painting them with acrylic paints. This was also a hobby for many years.

There was also my deep interest in photography, though I don’t remember when I started taking pictures, I was in a class for photography in high school, which put me in the Art Honor Society. I even got one of my pictures published in the high school’s art book.
When I began hanging around online more, after high school, I had a friend who drew pictures and I taught myself to color them in using Adobe Photoshop. I got rather good at it.

These days my main artistic hobby besides writing is painting miniatures. Both Warhammer and Reaper. Some for fun, some for D&D. You can see many of my coloring jobs in my gallery and my mini paintings among my blog posts.

But I came to notice after all these years, that many of my artistic pursuits actively used something someone else has created as a base. My creativity was in adding my own touch to it. I, basically, am very good at coloring inside the lines.

However, my writing is born completely out of myself. Though I am influenced by the ideas all around me (as it’s impossible not to be), the conclusions I draw and thus the characters and worlds I create are entirely of my own making. Writing, I realize, is entirely about drawing my own lines.

More gryffin progress

Laura Highcove

Dove into painting this bad boy. I fixed the top of the left wing from the previous picture. (See if you can find the error.) I finished painting the back end of the gryffin, which I was a little worried about, but it came out nice. Then I added the chestpiece and painted it a little. I need to finish that up, and prime the man who sits on the gryffin (Karl Franz turned into a high elf. 😀 ) and then it’ll be pretty much done.

Top of the Gryffin

Laura Highcove

Been a long while since I worked on this mini, mostly because I’ve been in Florida. I finished the detail on the bottom of the wings, but the pictures look pretty crappy. It’s hard to get a picture that shows off the detail without it being washed out.

But as for the top, the pictures at the beginning of today, and at the end of today.

High Elf Army

Laura Highcove

Last in a series of posts to show off minis I have painted in the past two years.

I like the high elves in Warhammer. They’re pretty and I like the minis, so I started painting some minis of them. Not for playing, but just for painting.

This guy took a long time to finish. There was a lot of detail. I’ve gotten a good number of compliments on him.

Just one guy in the little group of sword guys. He was the captain, so I finished him first. I am probably going to change the color of his jewel at some point, but I still like him.

I bought the dragon knight set cause they just looked so cool. It took *forever* to get these guys done. I only have the captain up here because I don’t have any good pictures of the rest of them yet.

Minis for others

Laura Highcove

Next in a series of posts to show off minis I have painted in the past two years.

My first paid commission. I painted this mini for the girlfriend of a player in the tower campaign. The pictures are pretty bad, but I don’t have the mini anymore to take better pictures.

This mini is super plain and is for one of my husband’s One Piece characters. The black pieces of Tam’s outfit actually turn a rainbow of colors based on which of his 9 personalities is active at the time. For as boring as it is, I really like it.

Near

Laura Highcove

Next in a series of posts to show off minis I have painted in the past two years.

Near was my main character for the Lich King and Cataclysm expansions in World of Warcraft. My husband was going to run an ‘evil’ campaign for which I bought this mini and planned out the character. he has since canceled that campaign since a lot of campaigns end up as ‘evil’ naturally. I still love this mini. I modeled on the horns, the bangs, and the tail.

Nightmare

Laura Highcove

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.

One Piece – Klesk and Kithara

Laura Highcove

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.