Feast of Blades banner progress.

Hey folks!

So I was commissioned by fellow blogger Duke to create a banner for The Feast of Blades, a large "tournament of champions" style event that he is planning.  Look at the bottom of this article for some copy about the event off his blog.The short of it is that out in the great state of Colorado, a dozen or so gaming stores are holding tournaments. The winner of said tournaments will be invited to participate in The Feast of Blades,  Tournament of Champions to find the ultimate winner.  How awesome is this?? The Throne of Skulls is a national thing going on now along the same vein, but it would be cool if more local areas did the same thing. Perhaps this is something I can organize... Hmm..  If I lived in Colorado, I would be all over this. I hope if you are in that area you take the chance to get involved and have some fun! If I was not already flying all over the country this year, and bringing my new marriage to the brink, I would try to wrangle myself an honorary spot in the finals. :)

Check out these trophies:

Any way, on with the reason why I am writing today. In a previous article CLICK HERE FOR THE ARTICLE:   I spoke about my contribution to this event. Duke had initially commissioned one of my hand painted banners and I quoted my standard price, but once we spoke on the phone I realized how cool an opportunity this was, and I decided to do it for cost.  How can I not take this opportunity to help out the community!  It is an honor to create this banner for the event. I am not sure, but I think the winner will get to bring it home, or it will go to the hobby store where he hailed from.  You will have to ask Duke about his plans for it but whatever he does, I'm sure it will go to a good place.

In the picture above, I started painting the base colors.  This was a feat in itself. First of all, over the past 10 days we have had 2 or 3 snow days, and an equal number of early release and delayed openings. (I teach art and do the bulk of my work in my class room.)  This is great because I have lots of room to spread out and get work done, but at the same time, if school is out, my shop is closed.  :(  Add to that, I misplaced my box of paints... I use very high quality Liquitex, Windsor and Newton and Grumbacher acrylic paints for these banners, (among others) and keep them under lock and key.  Stuff tends to walk away because my room is sometimes used in the evenings for night school.  But I forgot where I locked them up! It turned out that the box was buried under some construction paper in the first closet I looked in.

This design is a pretty close reproduction of the sketch I created in the my PREVIOUS POST. I decided to extend the wings off the edge of the painting area, and I off set the figure and shield a bit to the left, because on the right I will paint a scroll on which the inaugural date of the event will be painted, and room will be left for winners etc.  (Originally this was going to go on the bottom, but there will be little space there now.)  This was a last minute addition so does not appear in the sketch.

I painted the scroll work Burnt Sienna, and layed down some Alisarin Crimson for the base reds of the robes. I used the Burnt Sienna on the fingers aswell, and then a layer of Bleached White.  I decided to go with Blue an Green on the shield, so I laid in some fading colors to make it look rounded.  Once the shield is done, I will go over it with black to outline the designs, then paint them normally. I did the wings with a dark grey, then a couple of lighter shades of grey. I will add more and more lighter shades all the way up to white.

The top scroll ended up a bit short, so I will be elongating it on both ends, and the bottom one did not curve enough, so I will be using black to correct it.  Both scrolls have long flowing ends that will twist around the wings and other objects in the design.  I painted the wings over them for now and will work them in again later.

So far, in case you are interested, this has been about three hours of work with sketching and painting.  I estimate about 10 hours of work time on these banners, and I suspect I will blow way past that on this one.  (That is how I come up with my quote for those who are wondering.)

Ok, back to work for me.  Check back for more updates!

Jawaballs

Posted by Duke on his blog: I wanted to take a quick moment to talk about my recent project: The Feast of Blades.  A few months ago I was working with some friends on a 40k tournament project that had the floor fall through the bottom of it after thinking about it for a little while I still felt like I wanted to organize something to help bring my community of 40k players together. 

 I live in Colorado and there are actually a lot of really good 40k players along the front range.  I noticed this when I would go to events like Wargames con (BoLScon) and noticed about a dozen or more people from Colorado were playing at the event.  The sad thing is that though a few individuals knew each other, there was absolutely no sense of community as a group.  This only made me want to do an event even more.

what is the event?

Essentially it is an invitational to a tournament of champions and this is how it works.

Currently I have 12 stores participating who will have around 10-15 people attending at each location.  On the 5th of march they will all host a 2000 pt tournament at their store.  The top players will then advance onto the final round which will be held at a central location two weeks later.  The winner of this second tournament will be crowned Champion of the Feast of Blades.

There will be prize support at both levels and if everything goes as planned everyone will get something for just coming to the finals.  In addition to all the prizes Jawaballs is making a full size hand painted banner for the overall winner to take back to his store.  His name will then be embroidered onto the banner. (pretty awesome if you ask me.)

I will provide every qualifier store with the missions to be used and the grading rubric for painting. This helps make sure that everyone who qualifies will be qualifying on the same criteria.  

All in all I am very excited about this and can't wait for march to come along.  I know there will be some speed bumps along the way, but if you knew me personally you would know that I prepare way ahead of time to help mitigate those things.

If you have any ideas or tips please throw them my way.  I didn't go into great detail simply because I didn't want to bore everyone.  

Perhaps if this year goes well I will talk about expanding.  I would love to see feast of blades qualifiers all over the country with regional semi-finals and then a finals in Denver.  Now that would be a hard core competitive/awesome  tournament.

Duke