Navia Dratp in progress painting

In Progress: All I need to do is the eye detail, and maybe freehand the orange/red tattoos on his shoulder.

Recently I've been working on some Navia Dratp figures I've had primed up for the longest time.  They're part of a Japanese chess/Shogi variant where these special units can be "summoned" to the chessboard. At approximately 54mm scale, the detail on these guys are pretty nice and they're really easy to paint.  I've been using them as my practice into the world of miniature painting.  Plus the set of them were like dirt cheap since the game's been out of print for years now. The game is pretty good, lots of fun with different win conditions, but it suffered from terrible naming and probably bad marketing. And some of the character designs are just plain weird.  These two are among my favorites.  The pose on the Pterodactyl (below) is pretty dynamic too.  My painting technique here is pretty much all dry-brushing.  I haven't really moved up to blending or advanced techniques like that but it's amazing how good you can get something to look with just a simple darker color basecoat and dry-brushing up the lighter shades.  Also, this size 2 Filbert is my newest favorite brush for detailed, controlled dry-brushing. =)

probably add the red tattoos on his head an call it done!

Homebrew Shurro chess set

Shuuro is this sweet new chess alternative game I wanted to try out but given my poor grad student status I couldn't afford the $80 price tag for the 2-player base + 4-player expansion.  Really, the first thought you get when you see this is why don't people just make it themselves?  So I set out to do just that and saved $40, but that's because i scored a sweet ebay deal for 7 chess sets.  W/ithout Ebay, most likely the cheapest you can possibly build this for is ~$50.  Yeah, that's right, you need 7 chess sets for 4 player set, 5 chess sets for 2 players.  Is it worth saving $30 to spend time making it yourself?  Read on and find out!

started a new cooking blog, TastyMonkeyFood

"What?  a 2nd blog?  Madness! you can't even keep up posting on the first blog!"
That may be true, but it's always bugged me that cooking doesn't really fit with the rest topics on this blog, and people who are interested in cooking may not be interested in reading about miniature painting, and vice versa.  Also, the mix prevents me from advertising this blog on miniature gaming hobby sites.  So now i've decided to split off all cooking posts to TastyMonkeyFood (keeping with the naming trend).   If you liked all my cooking posts, check it out!