Dark Prince Rising

A dark picture for a dark prince. 

Today I "finished" pVlad.  The search for something to put on his cloak continues so he's not entirely done, but with everything else painted and varnishing scheduled for the morning he's done enough.  As you can see I went with some gold trim on the armor, but kept it a little sparser than the studio model.  I also added some extra shading to the cloak, which will show whenever I figure out what I want to do with all that space.

If the picture looks a little different it's because I'm trying a new lighting setup.  Normally I flip one (or both) of my water containers over, put my model on top of said container(s), rearrange my painting lamp to shine on said model, then snap away.  While looking through pictures from the previously mentioned Meg Maples painting class over at Anything But a One, particularly the first picture, I spotted the same lamp.  Then while reading a fellow FLGS patron's blog/thread, particularly this post, I saw the same lamp again, this time used as a backdrop for taking pictures.  This seemed like a far more elegant solution than what I do, so I gave it a whirl.  The results were less than hoped for, so I'll have to pick the innovator's brain the next time our paths cross.



In unrelated news, the above linked Anything But a One is scratching one of my itches: a centralized listing of local events.  There's a tournament running in Maryland in two weeks that I'm considering, though my schedule is unknown until the Caps decide if they'd like to keep playing hockey past the first week in April.  It's a two list event, so the gears are already turning as I try out different combinations.  My first thought is for eVlad, who has been a lot of fun recently, but after thinking about how he works and trolling forums a bit, he has some fairly rough counters.  Since eVlad is infantry-heavy I'm thinking about a pButcher tier 4 list, which is all about armor and multiple wounds, but that has some real poor match-ups as well.  The gears are turning in any case.

This ends the gaming portion of the post.  The rest is about hockey, so if you're here for the tiny soldiers and have no interest in the Caps or general puck talk then shame on you and you can stop reading now.

A piece of me on the ice.  Sort of.

I've probably mentioned before that I have season tickets for the Capitals, and perhaps that my seats are right next to the maintenance pit where the ice crew sits and the Zambonis emerge.  It's also where the refs come out from, as well as the intermission entertainment and the national anthem singers.  Saturday night was the return of one Nicklas Backstrom, sidelined for half the season with a concussion after a particularly egregious, and unnecessary, elbow to the head.  After warm-ups, but before the start of the game, one of the regular anthem singers (Bob McDonald) poked his head out of the Zamboni tunnel and motioned me over.  I figured he wanted me to take a picture of him or something, but instead he told me he thought it would be neat if he wore a Backstrom jersey during the anthem.  I had a similar idea earlier in the day and was wearing my Winter Classic Backstrom jersey to the game (instead of my usual home red Laich).  Bob asked if he could borrow my jersey for the anthem, a request I was happy to oblige, and then swapped his blank red jersey for mine.  A few minutes later he's on the ice for the American and Canadian anthems (the Caps were playing Montreal that night) sporting one fine piece of apparel.  He took an extra moment when heading off the ice to show the name, which elicited a large cheer, then came off and swapped sweaters with me again.  I was happy enough helping my team out in such a small way, but in addition to this bit of vicarious participation I also got a handful of rally towels and a shirt (that might even fit) from the on-ice entertainment coordinator lady (whose exact title I'm obviously ignorant of), which was a nice bonus.

Plus the Caps won, which was an even nicer bonus, even if they did blow a 2-0 lead and had to go to the trick shot competition shoot-out to beat the worst team in the East.  Two points is two points though, and they're all very necessary at this time of year.