You think I ain't worth a dollar but I feel like a millionaire...

Yep, today was a bit special, I actually felt like a millionaire. People in Grenoble (where I live) have seen me dancing in the street with my 3 years old daughter like a mad man :

I won at something for the first time in my life...

Let me explain a bit. I'm not the competitive kind of guy. I tend to avoid competition though I never shy away from emulation. Hobby wise, competition is something I've always avoided because basically I don't have what it takes but also because in my teens, I used to live in Nantes where there was the most insane concentration of golden demon winners, people who really had a huge impact on raising the artistic and technical level of this competition... (the guys who were actually the first to go and get slayer swords outside of their own country) real monsters I mean.

Though they were all very nice to see at the local hobby shop (and even in the GW store which was quite a nice place at the time but that's another story), it was clear I was not playing in the big league.

I recently left my now famous Rooster knight at my new Hobby shop (with golden demon winners there too ^^) which has a monthly competition.

I came there this afternoon to pick my Rooster knight and to leave my last demon hunter and I just learnt that I had won January's event !

I won a 5€ voucher which is not much but the very fact I won something has made my day ! 

I know there are some really good painters amongst my readers and even some genuine golden demon winners so bear with me, I know this is no great achievement but this is just the kind of things which boost my hobby. Getting some nice comments, constructive criticism and sometimes a few thumbs up or a little prize is just priceless to me. It just means I'm not doing this alone at my desk like I used to before starting this blog.

Emulation it is, now I want to to even better because I see so much great stuf around I want to come up with my personnal best too.

As always I'm incapable of concentrating on one task alone so here are the things which are making their way at the moment :

A unit of chaos droids led by a poor necron conversion, with bases done and a slight zenithal grey spray over the black base coat. I'll just paint the edges in light grey, paint the metal areas in mithril silver and then I'll wash the whole model with diluted black and matt medium. I'll just have a few details to add (I'v recently found some very good inspiration for them so stay tuned) and they'll be good.

You can't really tell by looking at the pic above but the sensei gang is doing well for the time being and though I wanted to paint them all one by one, well, old habits die hard and all so I just came back to batch painting... All flesh parts, grey parts, blue parts and dark brown parts have been done so far.

The deostick grav-attack is nearly done, I'v found the proper reactor donors (old color pens from my daughter) for the sides so I still have to add those with some green stuffing and he's good to go to the painting range... The base has to be refined a bit but the gap filler used is heavy enough to make a good balance for the model.

Kaleb's doing well too with not much left to do. I finally came up with completely random black and white patterns which are not really artistic but which are doing the job I think :

I forgot to say that I used a little trick taught by Stygianheart which is very easy but helps a lot. I just placed a few drops of PVA glue (just try different sizes) with a drop of superglue in the middle. The result gives some convincing exploded pustules and organic shpaes depending on the amount of PVA and superglue used.

Here are the tests on some Pcard and you can see on the grav-attack above the result on a finished model.

Thanks mate, keep good tips like these coming !

Every fortune begins with a single penny...