I got silver at Armies on Parade and I hate democracy now + what's next

The medal looks like ass tbh

 

 I hate work. Anyway now that that's out of the way, I did manage to complete my armies on parade board in time for the local GW event. The final group of minis ended up being a 11 mini strong warband, a little less than my original plan. I wanted to have a rogue doc and a third champion with a different loadout but ran into the dreadful reality that I have made myself too important at work. 

 Before we look at the finished photos, let's have a quick flashback to the early stages of building the board. The thing is based on two main components, a cheap hardware store picture frame and a chunk of polysterene packaging abandonned by a neighbor outside of the trash room (there are more personal grievances further down, don't worry). 

The polystyrene thing was my muse for this design. I imagined it as a sort of industrial basin from the jump, where the characters gathered to convert new members. The idea was to have the gang leader raise a shape out of the pool from a raised position.

 The big block jutting out was originally going to be in the center, to get a sort of pyramid shape composition with the Sphinx at the center of the group, but after trying some extra background elements off to the side, I moved the whole thing. This chunk of the project is built out of expanded polystyrene sheets, a sort of hard foam that won't warp when it absorbs liquids. I kind of haphazardly coated the thing in green stuff and milliput until it was vaguely textured like concrete, and mostly bungled it until I gave up and covered my mess in MiG arming putty for a much more convincing texture. 

The second major update you can see on that picture is the tiling. Everything here is done with textured plasticard, glued on the base form. I did try to cut the plates according to some paper patterns of the polystyrene shape I drew but that proved to be more work than eyeballing and trimming as I applied the plates. Had this been a piece for a more serious competition I would have put in the work to be more precise but in the end, this was just a local Armies on Parade thing.

 Here's the worst photo I've ever taken. Coincidentaly, it's also the only one I took of this stage. You can see the background decor I mentionned earlier, made from foam and plastic bottles. The thick piping you see here is from a Miniart plastic kit. That box was wonderful and if you're a terrain head I cannot recommend it enough. I only had the one box on hand and there were fewer angled bits than I would have liked, so I added a second round of piping out of 2mm aluminium wire.

 And here is the fucked up little man rising out of the puddle to join the gang. As a bit of a gag the base plastic model is a MESBG Goblin, something that is explicitely forbidden in the rules of Games Workshop's Armies on Parade. I knew the manager wouldn't care to apply that ruling but I was mostly curious to see if anyone would clock it and if the shitters would try to complain about it.

 I had almost no time to document the painting process unfortunately so feel free to ask questions in the comments and I'll give you the dets. So without further ado, let me show you what the finished project looks like.

 I took these final photos at the GW front desk, a much spookier backdrop than my usual messy desk. As I dropped this thing off I knew I was doomed, I was proud of this one and I fell into the trap of getting invested in the results.

 I didn't spend that much time painting the individual minis for this warband, this one was probably the longest job, at about 14 hours. As I'm getting close to finishing my fifth year doing miniatures, I feel increasingly happy with how I'm able to execute my concepts. Being in a bit of a phase of wanting to push my technique, this project was a good progress check to see if my skill had gotten to where it wouldn't undermine my concepts. And I think I'm reaching that point. All that progress has me wanting to revisit some older projects where I couldn't quite execute the ideas as well as I wished. So expect the old Necron Army to get dusted off soon.

TV head is finally done and he is absolutely my favorite guy. The armor was painted with my nice new Pro Acryl paints, almost entirely with two ivory tones glazed over black. I actually think this is my favorite way to paint right now. And, if you'll allow me to say something a little spicy, I think this is how we should teach people to paint. I don't mean when you hand people their first mini or anything, moreso that this should replace the "two thin coats" and "slapchop" as the default way to communicate the broad idea of "this is how you paint good". Not because I think it's the ultimate technique, but because practicing this actually teaches you thinning, brush control, glazing, and how transparent layers interact with one another. Is it more work ? Yes, absolutely. But it does give you the tools to do what you want with your minis, while slapchop pidgeonholes you into a very uniform look. Now, I know not everyone wants to get good at painting (this sounds insane and rude but I swear I'm going somewhere). When I moved to where I currently live, I went to a local game store to sign up to a Magic draft. Everywhere that offered was doing rare redraft at the end. I was told that it rewarded skill and being good, instead of ruining people's draft environment by having people pick the money rares. My issue with that was I didn't want to get good at drafting. I wanted to sit down on a saturday, shoot the shit, make some friends, go 0-3 and go home with maybe a couple cool rares to add to my collection. In every hobby some people feel driven to improve their work while some others just love doing it no matter what the end result. My point isn't that painting the way I'm talking about here will turn you into a champ or anything. It's that this technique gives you the keys to do more wild things, to step away from the "paint by numbers" stuff I see promoted too often, and into the realm of freestyling weird stuff, no matter what you percieve your skill level to be.

 

Champ number 2 also turned out quite nice. I used a micron pen here to draw the banner. With the texture layer I'd added with liquid greenstuff this felt remarkably like drawing on paper. And while it doesn't necessarily I think this guy shows off the versatility of the scheme I went with pretty well. The overall palette was limited to about 9 pots, which I could have cut down more if I had the time to mix everything.

 

The aberrant was an easy enough bash, the base model being really stellar. A friend had sent me some Khorne bits and the chainsword hand was a perfect fit to sell the scifi vibe. The blade was originally going to be sculpted over the wire silouhette, but the more I looked at the armature, the more I liked it. It felt like a weird and scary power weapon, more than a traditional sword. The thinner wire running from the sword was too soft and fragile on its own, so I coated it in superglue to make it nice and rigid.

The psychic familiars were made from stock neurogauts, simply because I liked the sculpts. The first picture you see is my attempt at a little hidden scene on the side of the diorama. I found a bunch of tea lights at my local cheapo store, planning to use them for future terrain projects, but an anonymous caller suggested I use one to light the side alcove and make it even more atmospheric. The tea light is jammed in a rough cut I made at the back of the diorama, and hot glued in. Like my tile work it could have been much cleaner but the deadline encouraged me to be sloppy.

 

And we close our little tour with some grunt portraits. You can see a handful more photos on my instagram, where I encourage you to follow me because more big number = more gooder.

 Now let's talk about the Armies on Parade event itself. A few days before the exhibit I learned that it wasn't going to get judged against a rubric, but instead all the winners would be determined by a popular vote. I suddenly had no idea if this project was going to win anything. I knew it would be one of 5 entries in the diorama category, but I didn't know any of other entrants, or if the store community would be receptive to weird kitbashed bullshit for a game none of them played. 

 On the day of, I rolled in to take some pictures, drop my own votes and generally look at the cool armies. There were 35 entries across categories crammed in the tiny store. I saw some really cool projects there and had a good chat with another freehand enthusiast who had done a wonderful job on the Mirror of Slaanesh AoS model. 

 My entry was a bit of a standout among the dioramas. It was by far the smallest, both in footprint and model count. But beyond that, I felt like I was the one standing out. The GW store environment is a fucking alien planet. I watched a guy recite a fake latin prayer by heart when the cash register took a little too long to connect to the internet and I died inside. I had several of the other diorama entrants complain about my entry not being lore acurate. One of the store helpers that had been brought on to manage the event was bad mouthing another entrant to me, saying that anyone who did comissions shouldn't be allowed to enter the event, and on top of feeling bad for the comission painter who entered, I just felt really excluded. In the end, I got second in the diorama category. I'm a little baffled by the winning piece, but mostly I'm glad the diorama did resonate with a bunch of people. But man was this a bummer of an experience. I genuinely thought this sort of bizarre militant ignorance kind of attitude was reserved for facebook comment sections and reddit threads. So to see actual people recite lore at me, tell me I shouldn't be allowed to enter and shit like this was honestly demoralizing. This afternoon with the normies really made me appreciate how cool and welcoming the indie scene is by comparison. The end placement also pissed me off enough that I now want to enter real comps with proper judging, cause if I'm losing it better be to some beautiful stuff that I love looking at. It also kickstarted a project of running my own local painting open, at the game store I actually frequent, so keep an eye out for updates on my journey into event organizing.

  Anyway, Armies on Parade is over but this gang will soon hit the Necromunda tables and all will be good in the world once again. I don't want anybody to comment shit like "oh you deserved to win" or "hey, they don't know what they missed out on" cause I'm confident in my work, and I don't need gold to be happy with this project. What I want you to do is psychologically brutalize your local normies into having better taste.

 As the palette cleanser before the next big undertaking, I'm chilling and building a Skeleton army to play Age of Sigmar. This is your little peek at that project before I talk about it more in the next post. Love all of you, talk to you soon.

-Noé