Updates: Commissions, Personal Projects, & Northern Virginia IPMS

I attended the monthly meeting of the Northern Virginia IPMS club on Wednesday night for the first time. This was a big step for me for a couple of reasons: first, I'm a somewhat shy introvert (those two things are different!) that is uncomfortable in social situations with strangers, and two, it is only the second time I had publicly displayed my work (the first time was at the Huzzah Hobbies Painting Competition in 2012). Needless to say, everyone I talked to was very friendly and made me feel welcome! Another plus was there was five new members besides myself in attendance last night so I wasn't the only new guy. The club holds a friendly model contest every month and I brought a small selection of models to display: the TIE/Ln fighter, Darth Vader's TIE/x1 Advanced, my Deathwing Venerable Dreadnough, and a Grey Knights terminator. This was the result:

That's right, my TIE fighters one First Place in the Sci-Fi category and my space marine models won Best of Show! I was beyond excited to recieve the Best of Show reward, especially considering there was some stiff competition that night! Unfortunately, I will not be able to attend next month's meeting because of work, but I am looking forward to bringing even more models the following month.

As far as personal projects go, I'm still forging ahead on Luke's Red Five X-wing. The colored panels are complete without the use of decals. I also put two layers of Mig Productions Brown Filter to warm the model up some and give a nice foundation to begin weathering. However, I will have to coat the model in Future to put on the decals for all the little details on the model; there are numerous black squares and other stuff like that around the model that are just too small to paint. Here is how it looks presently:

On the commission front, I am awaiting an Imperial Knight-Titan and Stormraven to arrive in the mail this week. They will be painted in the same manner as the two Stormtalons I completed last month. I have also been contacted by a repeat customer to paint his soon-to-be-arriving Infinity PanOceanian force. This should be interesting as I have never painted Infinity miniature before but I know they are pretty small and packed with details. Another client contacted me earlier this week to let me know that he ordered the kit for his submarine model, the USS Michigan (SSBN-727). The kit is coming from Asia and he isn't sure when it will arrive, but when it does I am looking forward to starting on it.