Setting up the mood and preparing

A walk in the woods leads me usually to the older, nearly abandoned graveyard in my town. It's totally one of the places that gives you the right mood to start reading or painting. Let's have a look:

I'm not that good photographer that I could freeze the moment as it was then, but these pictures I take from the wilderness reminds me of certain values I should have. If the walls inside start to look too familiar and the anxiety is creeping in, open the door and take a deep breath outside. You never know where the road might lead you.... Most of the times it leads me back to my Mocca Master! Coffee! The fuel for doing nothing important even faster!
Uh, yeah, this cemetery picture I took gave me the idea for the Necromancer who is mystically called Slemmy.
 
For me preparing miniatures is also one of the 'artsy' side of the hobby, and I need to have something to fuel creativity. The best ingredients for preparing are of course coffee (Black!) and few records. Also, the workspace must have some sort of zen-feeling and the right chi flowing trough it or I end up cutting my nails or staring the walls.

I've tried to work with the smaller miniatures I own, but somehow this Skrag the Slaughterer of the Ogre tribe wanted to be prepared... Damn. He's a heavy guy with irritating casting failures. I needed to throw the metal base off from the projects, because this dude was impossible to assemble on the scenery base. The holes didn't match, and the chain connecting the cauldron and Mr. Skrag was just pain to glue to it's place. Oh well! Farewell idiotic scenery base!

I see Mr.Tom Waits photobombed these pics. He's rising from the unholy pot of massacre remains.

I gave the cauldron's victim a pair of legs. This will be nasty.

Not at it's cleanest, but there's always some sort of mess going on

Even my table is big enough to serve meal for 8 persons, It's usually full of junk I accidently gather to it. And messyness lowers my motivation to do the cleaning, so that's the reason why I do miniatures slowly. First world problems by TurskanPerkeet. If the preparation have given me good chills, it's even more fun to start paintng. And when the table is clean...

But as some wise man said - messy work table tells only it's owners bursting ideas. It would be scary to have 100% clean table, because then I know I'm losing creative mood. Mess is good, but also clean is good. Ying and Yang baby!

All hail Coffee!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUS_sjVaRjU

Halloween countdown pt.2

Okay folks. Few months ago I visited a wargames store in Joensuu, Finland, and I decided to buy those new GW paints. I only bought 2 of them and I felt embarassed because my shoppings were so tiny (finnish mentalitet I guess?). So, I also bought this Vampire Counts Necromancer which indeed is a cool mini, even there's not that much detailing or muscles or spikes or any other annoying things - only the huncbacked black magic expert.

Two days ago I raided my bitz box and found some of the Giant kit's parts, for example the running peasant and that giant's fist holding another peasant. I chopped the excess away and look at that, here we have some zombified peasants! Jolly Good!
 

 As you can see, the corpses aren't rotten yet. Fresh victims of the plague or whatever!
 Eventually I found some use for the tiny mice from the Hellpit Abomination box. Boy they are small critters....

I did this piece in the atmosphere of waiting Halloween to come, and that's why I used retro colours and tried to make this scene a bit funny too. The red eyed mice... Maybe they are the ones who are using black magic there and the hunchback freak who likes skulls was just walking buy and saw this resurrection? Who knows.

I'm lucky to have this size of candle holders - a bigger round base fits there almost perfectly. 

Halloween countdown

In our country Halloween celebrations ain't that big deal, but it's definitely getting bigger every year; Influences around the globe are finding their way to our culture - American geekyness about plastic skulls and papier mache corpses (which I find fascinating) have also landed to finnish geeks storages. Including me... Me and my friend have been crafting a bunch of Halloween prop to our party that is held at the beginning of November. In the past times this All Hallows Eve day/week has been a major part of the traditional finnish beliefs. Here All Hallows Eve was more about harvesting and getting ready to cold winter, as it was everywhere before inventing plastic skulls...

Last year's Scarecrow that we made

One of the eeriest parts in my opinion about the dead worshipping was to serve dinner to your dead relatives - people served normal dinner to the dining table (I assume that the dinner consisted of porridge and dark bread) and closed the doors so the dead had a moment in peace to enjoy the harvesting meal. Also getting drunk, shouting, acting like lunatics, breaking things and general chaos was a part of frightening the spirits and not welcoming death to your home!

So, I'm getting ready to Halloween and trying to keep up the spirit of this wonderful celebration by doing some photo-researching about the atmosphere what makes this time of Harvesting scary to us.
Also I will take few shots of the minitures I've finished lately - just to keep this blog alive and trying to include Warhammer into the spirit of Halloween. Yeah!

Last year's Scarecrow that we BURNT