Pretty awesome weekend

Wow, what a weekend... 650 miles on the clock, but most definitely worth it!

It all started on Friday when I started my long trek 'up country' to Mansfield. I decided to take a slight detour to my parents place and stayed there Friday night, which halved the driving I'd need to do on the Saturday morning (only 2 hours driving - yay!). And why was I heading to Mansfield from deepest darkest Devon?

I had managed to happen across a spare ticket to attend a painting workshop being run by Tommie Soule from Golem Painting Studio (thanks MrDee). It was being held at Maelstrom Games in Mansfield whose web store I've used a good few times in the past, but have never been to their bricks and mortar store. They have a really good set-up in an old mill with a licensed bar and plenty of gaming space. The instructors were Tommie from Golem and Mike & Ali McVey, industry legends from Studio McVey.

It was superb! Each of the three instructors spent two hours with one of three groups, and we rotated between instructors. We all had the same ready-prepped Studio McVey Broga model. I started with Mike teaching the two-brush blending technique which both he and Ali use in all of their painting. We used the cloak as an example and painted it a rich red. I then rotated onto Ali's table and we worked on the face - this was very interesting because of the amount of blue Ali uses in her flesh tones - not something I normally use. Last but by no means least, I was on Tommies table and he showed us the way he paints his phenomenal NMM, with lots of reflection and shine.

Each of these 2 hour sessions were really very interesting and well worth the long journey. Thank you to everyone involved in organising the day - it really was superb! I would definitely recommend going to another Golem masterclass - Tommie was talking about maybe a whole day on NMM. That would be an amazing opportunity for anyone attending...

<fanboy>Oh, and Mike McVey really liked my Sedition Wars diorama... how cool is that?</fanboy>

So that was the awesome Saturday.

Sunday was pretty kick-ass as well. This time we drove in the opposite direction down to Plymouth to meet up with MrDee at a superb wargaming venue called The Giant's Lair. They were having a Warhammer tournament and wanted to encourage people to paint their armies, so all entries had to be painted. We were invited to judge the painting and select an army for the 'Best Painted' award - and there were some brilliant armies on the day, including a very dark dwarf army, lit almost entirely by OSL, a Samurai themed Lizardmen army with lizard geisha, and ninja skinks, and a lovely Orc and Goblin army with custom Snotling Pump Wagons and a superb, almost radiant, green skin, but there were so many others worth a mention - it was a great turn out in my opinion!

We brought a small selection of our models with us and put them on display, and then sat and talked models for the rest of the day - met lots of new people and hopefully shared some painting tips (some of which I had learnt the previous day!). I will most definitely pop down there again - the environment was really open and spacey and the atmosphere was great - perfect for getting the creative juices flowing. Thanks for inviting us down!

Well, thats all from me for now!