Another week gone by and this is it, huh? Well, this October turned out surprisingly packed with, well, uh, stuff. So I’ve been trying to get Bogstop into my schedule and it just wouldn’t fit so far.
Now, admittedly, that is in part because one of the days I could reasonably reserve for these particular Frogdog-hunting-grounds was filled up with me and a friend diving deep into another PotLantern settlement, also hunting Frogdogs. This week we managed to defeat our first Slenderman Lvl1 in a truly bloody battle and a Frogdog Lvl2 before wiping to another Lvl2 afterwards.
Sooo, I am currently playing the game, just not taking overly detailed notes. The results are added to the statistics page, of course.
Anyways, with Call of Cthulhu having a rare resurgence with my group (it’s been hard getting together more than 3 sessions per year) and us being able to find the time this month twice as well.., that’s unprecedented levels of Ancient One influence, thus that takes priority for now.

So, this post was supposed to be about Glow. I found some time over the last two weeks to paint up all her different variants.

Personally I like her rawhide and final stages the most. A part of me wants to add the golden crosses onto the inside of her mantle for the final one, but that is going to be finicky as f…
The alternate legs without the armor look a lot easier to paint in retrospect.

Anyway, last week also saw the judging and announcement of the winners of the Lantern’s Reign discord painting competition. Yesterday (as of writing this) the gallery for all 3 categories got uploaded and whilst I’m a little uncertain if its just okay to, encouraged, or considered poor form to link it on your own site, it feels wrong to talk about and not link it as well. So, somebody let me know if I should take out the link.

Well, I didn’t win anything. Just going to go for real talk here, pour out the soul and whatnot, it’s strange how I expected as much, but still feel disappointed. Less so about the “not winning” part, but more so my own attitude, I guess? I felt a lot better about both my entry and the Glow figures I painted before I got my feedback from the live judging. *laughs nervously*
The entries in general were incredible and it was great seeing both the participation from fellow members of the community as well as the live judging and evaluation for future reference.

_{These are slightly outdated.}

I hope I’m not forgetting anything, but my feedback in broad strokes: learn how to take better pictures – can’t argue with that; paint more – fair enough its been a while after all; be less intense on the washes as it ‘dirtied’ the mini – I expected as much more on that later; and finally the hair was too yellow to be blonde – okay. Surely I’m oversimplifying some of the critique as my mini was fairly late in the category and the “a lot has been said already” covers potentially a lot of ground.
One of the two judges also really liked my base.

All in all that’s not too bad for the first painted mini in 4 or so years. It’s definitely better than “thin your paints”, even though I should thin them more.

I will say do not really agree with the hair part – as in it was too yellow – KDM is aesthetically an anime-game most of the time when it comes to official art, I do however have to concede that my Echoes 4 Boxer needed better hair-highlighting.
And in regards to my personal delusions about washes. I’m a bit of an odd-one I guess, as I like the reflective aspect given by the dried wash. It makes taking clean pictures of the figures near impossible though and I take that is also a large reason why its generally frowned upon? I do get what they meant about it “dirtying” the model though and I do think its the same with Glow’s rawhide stage. I’ll look into making it a little more subtle I think.
I also prefer actual metallic colors to NMM.
A daring take… I know.

It does seem the take-away is to just paint more. To gather experience and learn. And to try again next time one of these competitions roll around. APG talked about an Expansions of Death 1 competition at some point, maybe I’ll bash my face into that wall next. Now I’ll just have to find the time to paint the minis, and paint the game and do other stuff as well!
I do have to say, even with only just a handful at this point, having painted figures on the board does look great.

And finally, a quick word on my first encounter with the Slenderman. It’s been two days as of writing this since I first fought it and I have not forgot about it yet. Its a fraud!
Erm.., I’m still awed by the fight. From this first encounter, I get the feeling that it has the potential to be an incredibly frustrating experience (somewhat like the Kingsman it replaces, though due to very different reasons) but the way the fight represented the theme of memory loss was just incredible.
For instance: we had spent our first 2 rounds just closing in on the monster and it reset us all into the 4 corners again, the monster remaining in the middle like nothing had happened. It was just that we had managed to deal a wound and 2 people had switched corners. Looking past the potentially frustrating gameplay elements this represents, the whole reset aspect perfectly created this uncanny situation for our survivors. It wasn’t quite like the beginning but just close enough to feel off. Did we do this before?

The fight in general was tough, and the rest of our encounter also had this overall uncanny feeling to it and I loved it.

So.., this derailed and turned into a more traditional blog-post after all. Thank you for your time and don’t talk to weird plant-man-monsters in the woods-ocean-jungle-dark.
Amathul