Crawling back out of the woodwork...

Argh, it's been over two weeks since I last posted here - not good enough really, as I haven't been commenting enough on other people's blogs either - I hope you'll accept my apologies for that?  I have been painting, but for my next Ancible article - my deadline is the end of the month, so after that I'll be cracking on with my own projects (hopefully!).

This weekend, around attending this years Hard Rock Calling festival in Hyde Park, I did manage to do a little miniature related stuff, both research and purchasing.  Mrs Brevik and I made our usual (almost monthly) pilgrimage to the British Museum and we had a good look at the "Treasures of Heaven" exhibition they have running there at the moment:

http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/treasures_of_heaven.aspx.  

It's a nice exhibition of Christian sacred treasures (relics, etc), which gave me some good inspiration for a project or two (both fantasy and Sci-Fi).  I tried something like this a few years back when I painted Hector Rex for the Swindon GW store (apologies for the picture quality, this was taken with a phone camera...):

What I'm talking about here is the ivory chest piece and the gold box hanging from his belt.  The reliquaries in the exhibition were carved ivory, or finely worked gold and/or silver.  If I remember correctly I painted the ivory on Hector like this:

• Base coat: Bleached Bone
• Shade: Gryphonne Sepia Wash
• First highlight: Bleached Bone
• Final highlight: Bleached Bone and Skull White

Back to the exhibition, the entrance fee of £12 is a bit expensive for what you get to see, it's certainly not on the same scale as the Terracotta Army exhibit a few years ago that's for sure, and you can see similar things in the museum itself (which is free to enter).  The accompanying photo book/guide/text book/mighty tome was another £30, but as photography is forbidden in these special exhibits, it's good for remembering what we've seen and it's a useful bit of reference material, plus it's a good quality "coffee table" book too.

My other miniature related activities in London involved a trip to Orc's Nest in Covent Garden and purchasing a couple of Copplestone Castings blisters (Photos courtesy of the Copplestone Castings website):

FW3 News Team and Minders

I have no idea what the "robot butler" character (the oddity in the middle) is doing among this lot, but this little crew had me thinking about a scenario involving them trying to escape an urban setting from this group of nasties...

FW25 Hunter Aliens

These were too good to pass up...

Having inspected the contents of the blisters, they're all nice clean sculpts and should be a lot of fun to paint, although they're somewhat down the list of stuff to work on, so I might not have pictures of them for a while.

Again my apologies for not posting or commenting for a couple of weeks, hopefully I'll be back up and running soon.  Maybe in the next post I'll have something finished to show you...

Stranger things have happened.