New Concept Art, An Upcoming KS, and Streaming?? BTS #73 (Patreon)

I've been sitting on a lot of information for a while, but it's time to release the flood gates! First of all, I've recently been working on a wood elf concept art for a future miniature. Here he is to jog your memory.

He's angry, he's banished from the "nice" part of the forest, and he's the lookout. Lookout for what? Well, there are a few banished wood elves in this narrative I'm concocting and I've been working on the witch in the group with my awesome concept artist who deals with my ever-changing mind, Tatiana Vetrovna.

After giving her some descriptions, this is what she came up with. I was personally a fan of #2 the most, so we went with that and started to add some more details: 

We gave her a typical staff, a fully tree-branch arm (like some magic had gone awry), and some ritual daggers on her thigh for carving runes in her flesh and whatnot. But then, inspiration struck! While talking with Benjamin Kantor, I thought of a detail that would make this chick look like the evil witch she deserves to be, so I sent Tatiana a goofy picture of myself to illustrate my idea. 

I felt like it would be awesome if she was sucking the life force out of a woodland creature for her own strength, gripping it by the skull. I didn't know what to do with my right arm, excuse my awkwardness. Tatiana then came up with this: 

Now we're cooking with GAS! The red circles I added are other details I'd like to be floating upward to drive home the levitation look. We also ditched the staff to make it easier to produce, but also to clean up the silhouette of the character. It was feeling too cluttered. The last changes we're making are to give her a bit of a smile, and to turn the creature around so you can SEE IT SUFFERING \m/ After she's done, I have one last character to do :)

Now what's the deal with this Kickstarter? Well, I have this metal paint case that's been in my intro for several years now. It's a case that I bought from GW a long time ago that's no longer available so I figured I'd try my hand at producing it. At Adepticon 2019, a little over a year ago, I meant with Ryan who was a fan of my videos but also an incredibly capable brand manager. He knows where to go and who to talk to get things done. For my birthday this past January, Jon got the ball rolling for me with Ryan who mocked up the paint case in 3D.

This was an early mock up, whereas in reality the final thing will be determined by what type of case we can get. So far we've talked materials, colors, foam inserts, hinge types and more. I'm excited to bring a high quality paint brush case to you in the form of a Kickstarter I just don't know when it's going to be done and I'm not going to rush it. At the moment, Ryan is testing some samples and sending them my way for review. We've got big plans for various stretch goals and addons! I have my wife Amber looking into the dark arts of running a Kick Starter and I have a lot of friends who've got experience doing it that are helping me out to make sure I do it the right way.

What's this about streaming? Well, I recently picked up a piece of kit.

This is a Black Magic ATEM Mini Pro, and I bought it because I'm live streaming a friend's wedding at some point but ALSO, I'd like to start regularly streaming again and this will allow me to use multiple of my 4k cameras in a highly functional way. Part of including something in my schedule that takes time like streaming is making sure I can do it in an efficient way without taking a ton of time to set up and break down. This piece of kit is a step in the right direction to enabling that.

That's all for now. PAINT MORE MINIS!