Wargaming Tradecraft: April 2012




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Headshots: Lilith 1

 I've begun painting Lilith next. For her, I'm going with a little softer colouring.

It's been a while since I've painted with a white base, and because of this, I'm using a different technique as far as the flow and order of things goes.

Headshots: Roland WIP 3

In the final instalment of my work on Roland, I take care of some of the smaller details to wrap it all up. The base still isn't done, but that'll come later... I want them all to look similar, so I'm going to base them all at the same time.

Headshots: Roland WIP 2

When last I worked on Roland, I'd completed both his skin tones and his clothed areas. A good place to start, but not really representative of his overall look.

Today, I painted up his armour, and I ended up with a fantastic looking model if I do say so myself. Still a ways before being done, but a great proof of concept for this whole project.

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Headshots: Roland WIP 1

I decided to start with Roland first. He's a larger model than the tinier female bodies without being over-sided like Brick.

This gives me a little more ability to play with the style and see what I can achieve.

Headshots: Assemblage

 The figures came in from MiniWarGaming, so I've been able to get started on the project!

First step was cleaning away all the mold lines, which always takes time, but well worth it.

Charity: Headshots from the Heart


http://www.headshotsmarathon.org

On May 26th at 1pm, a couple friends, my Wife and I will begin a 24 hour marathon of playing the video game Borderlands to raise money for the Childs Play Charity.
"A game industry charity dedicated to improving the lives of children with toys and games in our network of over 70 hospitals worldwide."- about Child's Play
The entire event will be broadcast online, hosted by more friends and volunteers. We'll have a chat room set up so that everyone can join in with the fun as well.

How to Help Out

We're taking pledges to raise money based on head shot kills. (Critical Kills) The game keeps track and we'll total things up at the end then ask you to make the donation in the final amount. (Up to your max pledge.) In testing, this could be around 3600 kills... so if you pledged 1 penny per kill, you might end up donating $36.

Of course we're also taking direct donations if you just want to give a set amount.

You can also donate stuff for us to auction off during the event. (Such as geeky or gaming related products or crafts) Or if you'd rather, you can help support the event to cover some of our expenses. (Contact us to work out details)

If you're a business or organization, we have a page dedicated to providing credit for our Sponsors. We're just getting rolling, so help us fill that site up!

If you live in the Kitchener-Waterloo area of Ontario, Canada, then feel free to Email us about volunteering during the event.

All donations and auction winnings are being accepted using the ChipIn widget, so money goes directly to the charity without going through us.

Socialize

You can also help out by advertising the event. Anything helps... a post on your site, a small banner, big banner... we appreciate it all. Winding up to the event, we'll all be posting various updates on the Headshots site as well as organizational info that might give others insight in to putting on their own events.

Follow us online:
Or add one of our banners:
Blogger users can click "Add Widget" on any of the banners here to quickly add a link to the Headshots site to your own blog.
That's Not All!

Remember how I mentioned there were going to be auctions during the event? I'm going to be painting 4 - 6 themed figures over the next month and a half.

A BIG thanks goes out to the guys and gals at MiniWarGaming, who have agreed to sponsor us! This is an awesome crew who have an online store with a wide variety of miniatures and resources (When TheWife bought my Hordebloods from them, they actually included free surprise candy) and they've also got a huge amount of videos full of battle reports, tutorials and other useful info. On a personal note, it was getting involved in their very positive forum that sparked the bug which led to me launching Wargaming Tradecraft in the first place.

They've provided the figures, so here's the plan:

The first four will be themed after the Borderlands player characters, and then time permitting I'll paint Moxxi and a young Marcus. Artistically, I'm going to try to bring that cell-shaded look to 3D figures and I'm aiming to magnetize them to be usable on their normal bases, and some larger ones for display purposes. You'll be able to watch these miniatures unfold both here and on the Headshots website.




 The miniatures themselves are from Privateer Press, and I chose them because they resemble the characters quite well. There will still be a little sculpting and modding to make them look closer, but not too much. The Mordecai character may be modelled on the Vindicare Assassin from Games Workshop, we'll see.

For those interested, these are the miniatures:

http://privateerpress.com/warmachine/gallery/mercenaries/units/ogrun-assault-corps
http://privateerpress.com/warmachine/gallery/retribution-of-scyrah/solos/ghost-sniper
http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/catalog/productDetail.jsp?catId=cat1140004&prodId=prod1140033a 
http://privateerpress.com/warmachine/gallery/mercenaries/warcasters/ashlynn-delyse
http://privateerpress.com/warmachine/gallery/cygnar/solos/captain-maxwell-finn
http://privateerpress.com/warmachine/gallery/mercenaries/solos/madelyn-corbeau
http://privateerpress.com/warmachine/gallery/cygnar/warcasters/lieutenant-allister-caine-2009




Please note, that I and the Headshots team are not affiliated with 2K Games, Gearbox Games, or the Borderlands franchise.

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Finished my Krielstone Warlocks, and did some work tweaking away the lag on my website.

Honestly, haven't done much painting this week... I've got another project ramping up that I've been working on, plus the whole holiday and everything.

Expect some big news in the next few days to kick off a month and a half of solid WIP work on something new... (Ooooo....)

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FIXED: Blogger website scroll speed laggy / choppy

For a while now, I've been bothered by the choppy scrolling that I (and probably you too) have experienced while visiting Wargaming Tradecraft. I like Optimized, and I certainly don't like websites that lag.

After working on Tech Tradecraft, and seeing how smoothly it scrolled, I've been poking with the settings of Wargaming Tradecraft to try and get things to scroll smoother... you may have noticed the ugliness of the repeating background, instead of my nice static no-scroll. I was even pondering blowing away my nice theme with it's transparencies to squeeze out as much speed as I could.


Well, tonight I nailed it!

Turns out, the size (specifically, the height) of your widgets will significantly affect the performance of your Blogger website. I'm not sure how this problem / solution affects the WordPress platform, or if it's specific to all Blogger templates, or just certain ones.

I caught on to this when I increased my "Most Popular" links to 10 from 5... and the lag increased further down the page. Now, my "Topics" section was pretty big - I had it "list" formatted because it looks nicer than "cloud" and I was displaying every label, instead of selecting which to show.

Pictured left, is how they currently look, which seems to be a non-laggy respectable size. Because of the cloud "look", I've also cleaned my list of labels, only displaying the pertinent ones.

Sure enough, pictured right, the layout that INSTANTLY lags my site the moment I switch it from cloud to list. Trimming the number of labels only affects the length of the larger amount of lag your site is affected by... so it'll lag a lot, until you're past the list, then continue to lag some.

Yes, cloud is kind of ugly, but I'll choose cloud over lag any day. In theory, it might be possible to manually create links to all your label displays... maybe I'll attempt that in the future... but right now, I'm happy with my smoothly scrolling site once more. (I've also shrunk my blog-roll a bit, which also seems to help)

(Although, my archive widget can get pretty long when you open it up, and it doesn't seem to lag the site at all... so this problem may be with specific widgets, not "All long widgets lag")


** WARNING **

Blogger's bulk add/remove label features are apparently buggy... hence why I'm up later than I wanted to be.

They were adding labels to the wrong posts and deleting entire labels off EVERY post they were applied to, instead of just the selected ones... I had to manually crawl through a bunch of my posts and re-label them one at a time... ugh.

The perfect way to end a very long 4 / 04.

Krielstone Warlock - Nemesis [completed]

I've finished my first Krielstone Warlock and I must say I'm quite proud. From his armour to his staff, it turned out nicely :)

To the left is a microscopic blow-up of his face. (Loving this thing)

The following has some big photos of the finished miniature, as well as some detail shots of specifics.

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April Fools!!! http://www.wargamingtradecraft.com/2012/04/do-red-ones-go-fasta-age-old-question.html

Been under the weather this week, so while I did some painting, but between that and photoshopping the April Fools post, didn't get any WIP shots up. I did finish my first Warlock though, so I'll get that up in a few days... and a discussion on coping with failure.

In the meantime, I decided to catch up on going through some backlog, so there's some quality stuff in todays Weekly Update.

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Do Red Ones Go Fasta' ? The Age Old Question Answered

 Today I decided to finally look at answering the age old question:

Do "Red ones go fasta' " ?

After all, there are plenty of people who paint their armies red. Perhaps these people have figured out something that the rest of us haven't. If that's the case, then there are all kinds of players taking advantage of this trick in order to gain an unfair benefit during friendly games and certainly using it as an illegal tactic in tournaments.