23 July 2009

Historicon 09, Part 2

Historicon 09, Part 2: Painting

Although I've been going to Historicon (and Cold Wars and the occasional Fall In) on and off for a long time, I've only recently started participating in the painting events in the past few years. I think they are really unappreciated events on several levels. One, they are a lot of fun. Two, they are helpful in promoting & improving the visual aspect of the hobby. Three, the people running them seem to put a whole lot of work into them. Four, the events seem to be marginalized to less-traveled locations at the Host (I've had people tell me they didn't even know there were painting events going on.) At any rate, I participated in three events this time: the bring-in painting contest, one of the 1-hour speed painting events, and the Iron Paintbrush. 


Bring-In Contest

For the bring-in contest, I entered my Gallic standard bearer (almost-finished pics posted last week) in the single figure catagory (25mm scale, "master" level), and a unit of 40k terminators in the unit catagory, at the same scale and skill level. I felt a little guilty about the latter, as I'd like to enter historical figures since it's a historical convention. But they were something I had painted fairly well that I hadn't already entered in the contest before. I ended up winning a silver for each. I'm not sure what I was up against since most of the entries were picked up when I got there. But the competition has been sparse. Hopefully more people will start entering... I will do my best to encourage people. The figures I entered were things I had already painted for games. Next time I'd like to try taking my time & paining something specifically for a painting competition. We'll see if I get the time. :D As far as other entries go, two of the few figures still there when I picked mine up caught my eye. The first was this guy (not my model!): Appears to be a Mr. Potato Head 40k Ork Stompa, and truthfully looks better than the plastic kit GW just released. I love the cobbled-together details, and especially the precarious balance of the figure. Well done! I hope it won something. The other figures (pics didn't come out) were the "Best of Show" winners, a group of 15mm WWII figures. Not normally my period or scale. But these things were painted better than many larger scale figures I see, right down to little details like insignia, and even details in the terain including a beautiful map on a fallen log. The map couldn't have been any larger than 1/4" square, if even that. "Best of Show" was well deserved. 

1 Hour Speed Painting

I had some free time Friday night, and thought this would be a fun way to wind down the evening. I prodded my two Iron Paintbrush team mates and our "consigliere" into coming along. We were all given an identical figure and an hour to complete them. One difficulty is that I have become very familiar with all of my paints at home. But at the paint tent, I had to search around for colors. But that's a good thing... get out of the comfort zone and all that. So the three of us spent the next hour painting, nudging each others elbows and taunting each other. In the end, we turned out three pretty good looking figures. In fact, there were a number of really nice paintjobs. Here's my figure:

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