Every year on my birthday, I take the day off from work to do something I normally don’t get much of a chance to do; traditionally this meant drawing, but this year, the one thing I’ve been pining to do more of was paint. Specifically, painting random one-off models just because they look nice. I almost never get a chance to do that anymore, so I was really looking forward to it.

I took a four-day weekend to give myself lots of time to work. On the very first day of my vacation, my website was hacked. I won’t get into the horrible details, but suffice to say that I now won’t need to think very hard to come up with a “worst birthday ever”. Yeah, I know… first world problems. 😛

In the end I only got to spend about one day out of my four-day weekend painting, but in that time, I was able to finish a single model that I’m really proud of: Theodore, the snooty English paladin my fourth-best friend Tom is playing in our Pathfinder game.

We had discussed giving him “shiny blue armor”, but I decided to take this one step further by going with fully reflective chrome, using the Sky/Earth Non-Metallic Metal technique (though mine uses metallic paints for extra shininess).

I’ve never tried this technique before, and in the end I didn’t come out with the smoothest blends in the world, but I’m still completely thrilled with the overall effect.

Certain angles are better than others. 😛

And closeups reveal the shoddy blending for all to see!

The model itself is an old Confrontation mini I picked up a few years back, reposed and with a sculpted Green Stuff head. To be honest, I actually didn’t spend that long on the conversion job– I converted the mini quite a while before I got around to painting it, and at the time I was treating it as a “bash something together quickly” conversion. As a result, it’s quite rough in certain places– the right hand doesn’t grip the sword properly, and all of the putty except for the head itself is very rushed and lopsided.

So, yeah– nice paint on top of crappy modeling. I’ll leave it to you to decide how much that hurts the end product.

This concludes my Birthday Adventure for 2013. I’m hoping that it also coincides with the conclusion of my Hacker Adventure for 2013, but I’m not counting my chickens quite yet on that front. :/

-Spud