Ann's Immaterium

Mostly physical culture but also writing, gaming, and other dark procrastinations

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Finished All Four Dwarves … but that darned Internet!

I did indeed end up burning the evening oil on the last night of the March Might & Magic Painting Challenge though as it turned out I might as well have not bothered.  I finished all four dwarves at 11:35 pm local time, took some quick pictures but when I went to my computer that was when I learned that the internet was down!

I think they’d have a fun adventuring party for a D&D dungeon crawl.

That is what I get, I suppose, for cutting it so fine.  I was going to leave them out but after several people opined that I should include them in the round-up, that is what I’m going to do.*

I kind of see the graybeard guy as their leader.**

As I mentioned in a post on February 20th, I envision the musket dwarf as some sort of magician, who uses his firearm as a focus for casting (or shooting) his spells or whatever.  So it seems fitting to include a picture of him with Cat and Toad.***  Owl, the last of the three pack of familiars, remains sadly unpainted but I hope to remedy that in April.

His profile kind of reminds me of the Old Man in the Mountain before it fell down.

Some Previous Posts Concerning the Four Dwarves

Dwarf Hammer Clip Art

* Four different people told me that I should consider cutting myself (or at least the dwarves) some slack and go ahead and put up the picture.  I have a general principle in life that if three or more people tell me they disagree with something I’ve decided, then I need to go back and give my decision more thought.  In this case, I’ll go ahead and include them.  If someone else had told me they had internet problems, I wouldn’t have hesitated and would have said, “No problem, send them and I’ll happily include them!”  After having thought about it, I don’t think anything is served by holding myself to the “higher standard” because I’m running the challenge, which was my initial instinct.

** By virtue of his size, the fact he has the biggest axe and the fanciest shield.

*** In older versions of Dungeons & Dragons, and dare I say most (but not all) literature I’ve read to date, a familiar is the little creature in question, such as a frog or cat, with some flavor of magic thrown in.  In the current version of the game, the familiar is a “spirit” that you can summon and dismiss.  The familiar to take a different form with each new summoning.  So if we go by that, having both a cat and toad painted up is useful for our friend, the dwarf marksman wizard/warlock/whatever.

While I can see the merits of a shapeshifting spirit familiar, I find that I prefer the old comfortable version of Cat and Toad rather than a spirit that can turn into a cat and toad.  Either way, I do still have the owl, that came in the package of familiars so I should probably paint it up for the April Challenge whether I plan on using it as another shapeshifting option or to represent a new friend named Owl.

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27 responses to “Finished All Four Dwarves … but that darned Internet!”

  3. A lovely little collection of stunties. And as I always said for my challenges, the main thing was to get them finished by the fonal date rather than posted. That included painting, not necessarily varnishing, and definitely not the photography and posting.

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  5. Splendid set of Dwarves there! The beards turned out really well and you got just the right contrasts in all your colors. Something I will struggle with at times. I also like how you shaded them, with a good indication of light sources and where the shadows fall. The stone bases turned out quite nice too. Great work!

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    • Thank you for all of the compliments, Faust. 🙂 I wanted to keep the bases and decided sticking with the stone floor pattern of the mini would work and be simple to paint. Some ink to accentuate the cracks between the stones and mostly just drybrushing various shades of gray and a little white here and there. Heck, cleaning out my drybrushes was more work than painting the bases!

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  7. I love all 4 of the dwarfs, they all have their own personality but all are the same family, at last i have come over and clicked follow so i may see more of your stunning work, hope you dont mind..

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    • Thank you, Steve, and welcome. I’m glad you came over. I followed your blog as well. Looks like you have a bunch of great stuff to look at; I’m looking forward to checking your blog out.

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      • Thank you, i hope its not a dissapointment, i dont get to do much but i do love what i manage to do, will check out your blog later today.

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    • Thanks, John. I didn’t like the musketeer when I first got him, but he sort of grew on me once I started painting him and noticing that he looked like the Old Man in the Mountain or a stereotypical New England fisherman (sans yellow rain gear of course) in profile.

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    • Thank you, I enjoyed working on them. They were pretty different from what I’ve done in the past. I think the last time I painted D&D style miniatures was back in the early ’80’s using Testor oil based paints.

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          • I have fond memories of having to sometimes use a pair of pliers to get the metal tops off of the glass bottles sometimes. I must like the stuff we have now better but in its day they were good enough, I guess. I get a bit of a chuckle, when I’m at mainstream craft stores, to sometimes see that old school stuff still on the shelves. Say what you want, but it has certainly stood the test of time, lol.

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            • Oh yea, I forgot how the tops would get stuck sometimes. The paints were ok, and kind of interesting. I’ll also stop and take a look at them in the store sometimes. But the cheapo plastic brush I got, was just torture.

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  10. I’m back, I wondered of to see who Old man in the mountain was, thanks Ann a very interesting story and you are right there is a similarity and the dwarves are great .

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    • Thank you. I remember driving by the Old Man in the Mountain a bunch of times when I was in the area in the late-90’s and early-2000’s. I never made it back that way after it fell and I’m kind of glad I haven’t. Part of me wishes they would put it back together but another part of me thinks it is right somehow that they leave it as is. Seeing it in person was rather uncanny. I thought, the first time I saw it, that it was man made.

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    • Thank you. Heh, I had never heard of that show, but after Googling it, you are right. Too bad he didn’t have a moustache and a unibrow then he would have been a dead ringer!

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    • Thank you, Wudugast. I was going to paint their beards all similarly with the idea they were related, but then decided it would be better to do each one different for practice, since I haven’t gotten much of a chance to paint beards (or much hair in general) with my steady diet of space marines, orks, and Nurgle over the past few years.

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    • You’re the fourth person to tell me this. I think that perhaps you are right and I should include them after all. Perhaps like with some baseball statistics “with an asterisk.” 🙂

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