Blue period and a shot across the bow

Nobby nobby nob nob.

Painting occurred this morning as I finished off the blue Nob I started last week.  Nothing extra special here, no new techniques or anything, just old fashioned painting.  On reflection that's not entirely accurate.  I picked up a pot of Gryphonne Sepia at the FLGS last night (along with a box of Demo Corps, but that's for another day) and put it to use on the skulls and wrist wrapping.  It strikes me as a lighter, browner Devlan Mud.  A while back there was a post on Lost Hemisphere, I think a Free Time Black Hole, with a throwaway comment about a trend at their FLGS of washing Gryphonne Sepia over a white base.  The result was a sort of bone look that I found quite nice, resolved to try out, and promptly forgot about.  Fast forward to my recent change of plans to make Menoth my "halo" painted faction, plus a need to use up all of a gift card, and I figured it was time to expand the wash collection.  In this limited application I think things will work out like I want them to, but it'll take an actual, full-scale application to be certain.  Perhaps the poor neglected Sir Ekkrion will get the cobwebs dusted off so I can try it out.  To continue with the new approaches on this model, I did a healthy application of Devlan Mud at the end, but left a couple of the blue areas (left shoulder, top of the klaw) untouched to create some contrast in what was otherwise a large expanse of blue.  I also painted up the base instead of leaving it alone like the rest of the Orks.  One of these days I'll ballast up the others, put some grass on this one, and get a coat of varnish on the newest additions.  Then I'll have an honest-to-Gork completely finished Ork.  Once I've put the Dullcote on of course.

Nice box.

In other gaming news, I caught a stray remark a while back at the FLGS about ordering from Miniature Market.  My experiences with the Warstore have been documented up until now and while I've been very satisfied with them I still wanted to check out the competition.  Selection is approximately the same, at least for what I was looking at.  Miniature Market makes it a bit more onerous to add things to your cart, sending you to the cart each time you add something with no way to add multiple items at once that I saw, which is a bit of an odd move.  You'd think a vendor would make it as easy as possible to buy lots of stuff from them.  They did have one big advantage over the Warstore though: price.  Miniature Market is cheaper by a decent bit, enough to get me to put in an order with them and see how they stack up.

Blogger loves to reorient pictures.

I placed both orders the same day (Monday).  Miniature Market's box, which you may recognize as a box for cards, arrived yesterday (Thursday) while the Warstore shipped my order yesterday (Thursday).  To be fair I had apparently ordered something that was on backorder at the Warstore though I thought I had checked that everything was in stock.  I got an email on Wednesday night from Miniature Market on Wednesday night saying that one of the items I ordered was out of stock and that I'd get a refund for it, which I did.  While I like that they just sent the order along instead of holding it because the lack of the item (a Deathstalker) isn't a dealbreaker, especially since I ordered two and got the other, it would have been nice if I'd known the order would be short before it shipped so I had to option of waiting for the item to come back in stock in case it was something important.  The packaging wasn't as thorough as Warstore, which is important to me, but that might be because I was ordering blisters which are already fairly secure.  Other than the out of stock Deathstalker my order was correct and undamaged.  This opening volley turned out to be quite one-sided.  Miniature Market had better prices (both for merchandise and shipping) and got my order to me before the Warstore shipped theirs (which I placed a couple minutes before I placed the Miniature Market order).  Will I be switching online stores?  Quite possibly.

As a parting teaser I have a battle report underway, it's just taking much longer than anticipated.