About a year ago one of my Floridian friends got me hooked on painting itty bitty tiny people and critters made of pewter.

It tends to be a stress-relieving activity for me since the amount of detail work makes me focus and forget whatever was bothering me in the first place. Of course it's also entirely more fun than writing papers for class, so in a round about way it contributes to my stress by taking up my time. Catch 22.

I generally use Reaper miniatures as I've found that they have the greatest detail and the least amount of flaws, extra pewter from the mold (called flash), and are available in more models than I'm ever going to be able to paint. Ral Partha and J.R.R Tolkien occasionaly have miniatures I like, and Warcraft is also a good company.

Paints are acryllic, they go on over a primer base. I use car model spray primer most often, since it's readily available up here in the North East where this stuff is a little more difficult to find. Ral Partha and Citadel also have good primers. The paint is usually just the little 95 cent bottles from the craft store. They're cheap, they can be mixed, and they stay on just as well as the model paints. For metallics I use Citadel paints, from Warcraft. They're absolutely amazing (as metallics go, it's tough to find good acryllics). Personal favorites are Rotting flesh (good color after you're 8th zombie pawn) and Boltgun metal which has this amazing look to it. It usually takes me about an hour to finish a figure, although I've started using an assmebly line process for the zombies to get the damn things done faster (eight zombies is just too many corpses.)

Some figures are simple, like the death knights, since they're mostly black and dark blue with some metallic spots. Other figures, like Rianna, took me almost two hours. There are, for those of you who are wondering, four different shades of red and orange in Rianna's skirt and three different metallic shades on the coin jewlery she is wearing. It took me forever. It is also one of my favorite pieces.

My main focus thus far has been on completing a chess set based off the storyboard I run for gothic and fantsy writers;

You'll notice the gallery design is different here. To put it simply, thumbnails of miniatures are pointless since the little things are just under an 1 1/2" anyway. Thus I've divided the links into the "good" and the "bad" side of the chess board. White and Black. Whatever you'd like to call it. Good and Evil is a bit subjective at this point since my good side is made mostly up of vampires and the bad side is made of zombies. Read the board, it'll make slightly more sense. Sorta.

A white griffon with brown accents and a rider in blue and silver rapidly became a black and silver griffon with a rider in red and gold. I don't follow painting rules all that well.