Corvus Miniatures – painted sf & fantasy miniatures by Gerrie Schenck

Hello readers! Again quite some time has passed since my last blog post, so there’s some stuff to catch up on.

First of the painting studio is back in use. In the last post I told you about some ambitious I had setting up my painting desk again after my home renovation. Well in the end I stuck to “never change a winning team” and ended up with quite a similar setup as previously.

I made some small alterations however. The Ikea desk I use has an optional shelf attached to the back of the desk. This was useful to put another row of paint bottles on, but it also hindered the access to some of the paints below this shelf. Because of that I moved this shelf to my left now, and raised the paint rack which was on their previously, so all of my paints are now lined up in a stadium-like layout. The shelf itself I use to put work in progress and finished figures on, to keep them out of the reach of exploding paint bottles for example 🙂

In the previous blog post I also talked about creating a layout for the entire desk with Hobbyzone’s modular system. After counting how many paints I have I concluced that this was going to be quite an investment to buy paint racks for all of them. So I decided to only buy the tool rack, and re-use my previous paint racks, which I built myself out of left over floor planks. Actually they do just fine, except for the fact that some paint bottles fall over in a domino-like fashion when I clumsily take one out.

In the image above you can see some miniatures I am currently working on. I just started another batch of Mordor Orcs for my Lord of the Rings army. I am also picking the Age of Sigmar project up again (yeah still working on the 2 year old starter set 🙂 ) Quite some time went into painting this Lord Celestant on Dracoth, better pictures will come at some point in the future.

Another figure I finished is the Imperial Space Marine you’ve seen earlier this week. Kind of a quick good gaming tabletop quality paint job. Fun miniature to assemble and paint. I also filmed the entire process. For this I bought a new webcam: a Logitech C920, and a miniature tripod. In the past I used a regular compact camera for this, but this seriously limited me: I could not position the camera optimally since it was on a regular tripod and I was limited by the battery and storage capacity. Recording with the webcam is much easier, and the files are immediately where I want them: on my hard drive 🙂

The only thing remaining now is the editing of the 3+ hours of film I have. This process will be hindered by the fact that I am suffering from tendonitis in my right elbow, probably caused by using a computer mouse daily for the last 20 years. So I have cut down computer usage at home. The 8 hours I spend behind a computer at work each day should be enough for weekdays 🙂 This means I will only be able to work on the editing (and this website and my other social media ventures) during the weekends. But I hope to get it edited in the end…

That’s all for this blog post, see you soon!

Hello readers! As written in a blog post back in November my painting desks had to move to make place for a temporary living room because of the renovation works on my house. The renovation itself is going well, although we have a long way to go still. It’s difficult to make predictions right now, but as it stands now my dedicated painting setup won’t return before March. But as mentioned in te previous blog post I compiled a little survival kit to be able to some painting now and then. Let’s have a look.

Basically everything I need is in the box, except for the lamp. My tri-tube light took a bit too much space, and also isn’t as easy to setup quickly on our dinner table.

The top level stores most tools, brushes and glues, as well as some work in progress miniatures.

The insides of the box itself contains a plastic bag with some of my paints. Since the only project I am currently doing is my Mordor Lord of the Rings army, I have all the paints I need in here. Other contents: cutting mat, lamp foot, my recipe booklet, pallet, water cup.

So that’s all for this little wrap up. I have all the gear necessary here, but I noticed that the fact that I need to unpack all of this stuff, install the lamp, get some water sometimes keeps me from starting a small painting session. While previously I just had to sit on my desk and I could just resume painting where I left off without any hassle. But I understand there are plenty of you who don’t have the luxury for a dedicated setup, so all the more respect for you.

Anyway I made good progress on my Lord of the Rings army, but that’s something for a next blog post.

Oh and by the way good luck in 2017 😉