Entwife painting, part 1

Part two may or may not happen, as is tradition here on m'blog, m'lady.
    As we can see in the picture below, this particular entwife is already suffering from the Return of the Abominal Killer-Flowers (the '50s called and wanted their film title back). She can call herself lucky that this llama is tired of sculpting flowers, otherwise she'd be nearly dead by their toxic presence by now.

There's somewhat of clash between the yellows on the base and the model's colours which I have literary no idea how to deal with. I might add a lot of yellow on the green climbing-plants on her, which should tie the whole thing together.

Backside is less worked on, but looks okay, methinks.
    Should say that she is some form of rowan-tree, but I have yet to add the characteristic red berries or the very dark sticks/mini-branches that they tend to have. Her bark looks fine in my opinion.

Explosion of flowers still wait to be painted - the white dots are wood-worker's glue waiting to dry which I will then paint in flowery colours to give the impression that she tosses flowers around her.

Sculpting Entwife, part two

Might add some branches in an effort to mix her silhouette up ever so slightly. I am currently adding leaves and flowers to the legs.

Unprimed and primed... to show what's beneath.

She is supposed to throw petals around her, although it looks more like she is trying to awkwardly free herself from vines in this picture.

The main goal with this design was to make it feminine but not look like a human woman, or God forbid, a hot tree-babe. Originally I sketched her up as a mixture of a kid and an old lady - obviously something female, but nothing else: Shorter legs, elongated torso (although I am not in "the know" how they give birth) and a weaker jaw, all subtle pointers towards a female tree-person. The "hair" is an okay touch, but for some reason I keep thinking "hippie" when I see her... hm...

Sprouting entwife

See as this nagging piece of wood is sprouting and slowly comes to life.

This is a project I am doing in order to relax - it has been [in a way] a rather stressful time for me lately so I have allowed myself just to sit by the desk and add a little piece of SS and then just sit around, sketch a little bit on another project and then leave it all for a cup of coffee. Now, it is however time to let go of the hockey rink and go out on the ice on unsteady legs.

However, sometimes even physics is against you - the best laid plans and all that... the unexpected can and will sometimes happen and contingencies is a must.
    Like today: I had planned to sleep for an hour during lunch* but instead some form of workers started to work on the facade of my house. Extremely annoying sounds for around an hour before they went to lunch (right now, actually, speaking of which). Such is life when the boardmembers of the house wants to spend huge amounts of money on unnecessary projects.

Blaha-blaha...

So, so... back to the entwife. She will go around spreading deadly but beautiful flowers around her, looking happy and content, just looking like those girls in American movies who walk before the bride, throwing petals around them. 
    I have taken a lot of artistic freedoms with her design, deviating a lot from how an entwife might look according to the canon (I presume - can't say that I have ever seen a picture of an entwife). But that is the joy of our hobby, as long as you can reasonably explain a creature you've made, we've got a place for it. Just CROWBAR it in there! Wiiihooo!

Happy weekend fellow awesome hobbyists and painters and converters and forumites and termites and all you other assorted people!**

*) Losing sleep because I am unused to the amount of stress trying to start up a little company. 
**) I sound uncharacteristically cheerful towards my readers here, and I can only assume it has to do with me having slept too little the latest three or four days. Take it with a grain of salt.

Take it with a grain of salt, please.

Where did the tree-women go?

In some stories, probably unknown to both you and I, these tree-women are called "ent-wives", which can be substituted for tree-women, if you would like to steer away from copyrights and such...



EDIT: Forgot to say that the comment-issue has been fixed. I typically use various anon-thingies and google thought I was a spambot, it happened in 2009 as well. Problem fixed for the moment. Sorry for late replies!
 
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The tree-women's folly

The tree-women left the tree-men in their forests, they went farther and farther away from their husbands, following the butterflies and the beautiful flowers that sprouted up around them and which they took such great care not to trample. Not a single flower was crushed under their lumbering yet ever-so delicate roots. The tree-women cared more for blossoming flowers and beautiful little plants than boring forests. It was they who had first discovered the amazing flowers, butterflies and weird tree-like plants coloured like the rainbow. Where it all came from, they did not know, but they all loved them far more than the simple, white little flowers that grew in their husbands' forests.

The tree-women kept following the trail of flowers, caring for them, watering them and enjoying the different colours and scents. They followed the ever-growing trail of plants, walking and walking until they finally found a valley filled with all sorts of strange, nectar-filled flowers, bountiful in flies and strange bee-like insects which made sure the flowers would return the next spring, and the next and so on until eternity - or so did the tree-women believe. It was obvious that they had found the home of the strange, beautiful flowers which gave the tree-women such joy, and they settled there, despite their husbands' meek protests: We need to be together, raising saplings, we need not only joy but also work and hardships in the forest, so that a healthy forest can grow for us to live in, and for the animals to live in and especially for our saplings to grow in and into...

All the tree-women sighed wistfully over the boring tree-men who knew nothing of true beauty, of the wild colours and tempting scents of their valley - it was as if the boring tree-men were dead trunks themselves, they said to each other, smiling and throwing petals around them until they were too tired to take care of the strange flowers. Which never really seemed to be a problem because the flowers grew and grew and grew and spread faster than any plant. The tree-women could rest, drink water and stand under waterfalls, drizzled in cool water all day while the flowers did most of the work themselves.

The tree-men visited once in a while, never really allowed into the deepest part of the valley gardens, because the tree-women had finally found something they thought themselves better than their husbands at doing: Their gardens were huge, heavy and filled with strange scents. With near-to-no effort, the tree-women could make a rock come to life with plants and yellow nectar, and the tree-women did not want the tree-men to see how easily this was done; in essence, the plants nurtured themselves after very little effort from the tree-women, but the tree-women were too proud to confess to their husbands how easy it had been to build their fantastic gardens. Besides, they said, what do we need our husbands for - all we need to eat, all the shelter we need, and most importantly: All the joy and beauty we need is all around us without us doing anything!

After a while some flowers turned back to boring green, some of them started emitting queer smells and when the first tree-woman noticed how the green flowers had started flowering upon her own bark-like skin, she was seen as an especially good tree-woman, and not as an omen of bad times coming.

Obviously, the tree-women, allowed by their weak husbands to go too far from their forests, had been lured by Nature itself, to go not the way of compromise, of subservience, of trust and of tradition, but rather, just following their own feelings, of just going with what felt right at the moment: A colourful butterfly, flowers that filled their big hearts with joy, and beds of flowers so easy to bring up that it seemed the tree-women that they could spend all their days standing in a mist of delightful scents and colours without a worry and with endless days coming and going - all that had clouded their thoughts and big hearts.

The especially good tree-woman eventually rotted from the inside and she fell down for good, like any old non-living tree falling for the axe. The seemingly beautiful flowers had done their job. The green and red flowers had infested her bark and and spread it's sweet but toxic nectar into her heart and she would soon turn into nothing else but rot and decay. Even when all the other tree-women saw what had happened, they refused to accept what had happened, because even the red and green plants gave them such pleasure - and to make matters worse, no one wanted to be the first to propose a return to the lofty forests their husbands took such good care of: To admit that they were wrong or even returning to the boredom of their ancestor's forest seemed to them just plain silly. 

"Do what feels good", mother Nature told them without them ever really realizing it.

They all agreed that they were all so very free and happy in their wonderful valley garden, and that the especially good tree-woman probably had fallen asleep for good and that she obviously wanted to forever be a part of the forest of flowers. They pretended not to see her rotting body amongst the greedy, colourful flowers, which by now had started to nearly outgrow the tree-women in size.

One by one the tree-women fell and rotted, killed by the strange flowers.

The tree-men had nearly stopped returning for a good hundred years due to some disturbing times in their region, and when a tree-man finally was able to travel the long distance to see his wife, she and all the other tree-women were all gone, and instead a horrible valley of tree-flowers had sprouted, with disgusting, rotting smells and fumes, and weird, huge birds (looking more like giant insects) flew around and finally attacked the tree-man forcing his escape back to his forest.

The tree-man was not sure what had happened and fell over short after he returned to the other tree-men, he fell and started to rot soon after. The rest of the bearded, old tree-men - there were nearly no saplings left - never really understood what had happened to the tree-women, and their race would slowly die off without them ever knowing where the tree-women went.

- - -

A bit different for this blog, but the reason is stated in the last paragraph of the text below. If you read it, okay, if you did not read, that's fine.

Sorry for the barely acceptable flow in the language - I write a lot in Swedish, and the flow is different from English, in my opinion, and I do not master the English flow, to be honest. Also, there are some confusion as to where to use "was" and "were" (amongst other grammar-questions), but this story might explain a little bit what happened with the entwives and hopefully tickle my (and perhaps your) sense of curiosity: What kind of weird things live in nature's unbound valley? You see, I very much want to sculpt these things and needed something to get me started...

New Projects!

Firstly: I have been unable to comment on my own blog for a while. Not sure what's going on there, but I have had other exotic issues with the old Berta which I have every intention to solve ASAP!

New projects and a whole lot of mumbo-jumbo, just like we want it on a Friday.

Juuust right on a Friday...

But before going into the fun stuff, let's start with the shit-stuff:

I got my taxation permit for running a one-man-band, an idea that have been slowly boiling in my mind since 2011, but I wasn't good enough nor did I have the time. Now I am better at a lot of stuff - and I also have access to some awesome helpers and talented-creative-autists that will come in handy.
     The "permit" also included taxes for 4 000 SEK (roughly 410 EUR) and a little note that I was not allowed to deduct VAT-purchases before a certain date (the other picture includes one of three expenses on circa 200 EUR each)... wihooo! But, I live and I learn, and to be frank I actually laughed out loud when I got the taxation paper - who would expect anything else in the world's foremost tax-violent country?

I promptly consulted this "feel good" chart and went on with my life (consulted as in accepting that "yes, I do all these things").

Speaking of shit, these old markers for LotR: SBG finally met their doom. Their quality was obviously subpar and I never finished the project even after getting a serious start - never saw the reason to end it either. I threw it all away, off you go, I need the space for the upcoming space race to raise space for my New World Order Project. Well, I need space to store projects so I can somewhat feel free from work in the evenings, since I will run my mini-company from home.

The best part of being such a tiny guy (company-size-wise) is when you catch a really small fish, the contrast works in your favour. Hopefully, this analogy can be used in the world of miniatures.

The world (a view of the world in this case) can deceive an untrained eye... minatures... a miniature penis behind a tight skirt, as a totally unrelated and childish example, make a greater impact than an expected one when, for example, taking a shower after the gym.
    Not sure where I was going with this, but let's keep going with it:


(no, let's not) One of the new projects is just a piece of aluminium foil and some green stuff... but it has something to do with this:

(This man is really tiny, speaking of contrasts, 

and hence Donatello here is not that big)

Obviously my new project is not about killing small animals. In a sense, though, it kinda is... more on that later.

This project is not something someone (no client-item nor will I cast it up for sale) has asked me to do, I have merely started working on it as a way of relaxing from the other more demanding tasks. Next week I should have something better than some plastic clay on a metal frame.

Redoing things can be a good idea...

As some of you might know, I have been fixing some stuff with the Pack Beast (that's his name, nothing to see here copyright-gods) - also, if his name (Fudge, something-something) has any innuendo that I might have missed, enlighten me, I like humour but I prefer to be in on the joke... and not be the focal point of one due to stupidity.
     Took off both legs and did some heavy converting after consulting a trained sculptor with grand experience (bronze and such!).

Made an extra head to be cast - a slightly bigger, with detachable horn (thanks mr FoB for the suggestion) and a slightly craned neck and a weirder face.

Have been adding texture, sparingly... New head is the one without the horn attached.

Another project which I have been struggling with when it comes to making just the bare sketch of, is a creature inspired from above - I still want it to fit in the Scandinavian Midgard world (for some weird reason, Midgard can be translated into Middle-Yard, or Middle-Earth, even).
     I might even go as far as take a few minutes of your time in an upcoming update to ask for advice - this has been done before and I have yet to be dissappointed. Thanks Scott, Joshua, mr FoB and all you other hobbyists for helping in earlier cases! More on the matter in a later update.

All this paperwork, to get back to the beginning of this post, has made me drinking waaay to much coffee - and add antihistamines through the roof - hence this "funny memme- epic "-picture. Speaking of thinspiration (the small skeleton is very skinny, just skin and bones): When I sat down on my miniature balcony (it's all about minis with me) I started hating the nature for a short while, sneezing...

... and eyes running with water and flies zooming around my coffe and cream, for some reason... The project's work name will not be unveiled yet, but it is called "Nature Unbound" and it's prime inspiration can be seen in the image above this, an image I should probably refrain from posting and I will.

 However, in the end, it's all for naught and everything is a copy of a copy...

Trying to work - and clickbait!

This post is mainly clickbait to keep interest up in the blog. I do have some stuff going on but:

Also, I finished the second serious renovation of the Great Animal of Gergoroth (not copyright-infringing here), or Great Omnivore of Merdor or something along those lines.

So stay tuned for more Comic Sans, more clickbait and less content this week!

(no, seriously, I am soon back in the saddle)

Painting some Perry Miniatures: Men at Arms

Painted up, with some details still left to do (noses (used too diluted Elven Flesh), eyes on both man and beast), but I feel that the owner of these models will have to do that himself, because I am now done and done with them.

Great minds will be involved in the future.

I have now finished my extremely physically draining job and am expecting a sufficient pay check end of May, a pay check which I will use to fund my new project. A project that probably will involve a few other people than just myself, at least in a few months or years, even, if God wills (inchallah, wallah!).

In other news, Sweden have the least trust for it's media in the world... just a little sidenote.

Speaking of which... the day when Swedish media starts pushing the need for vaccines (I am all for vaccines) is the day I will start mistrusting it... just as an example...
 

George Soros, the man who fucked over the SEK in the early '90s and 

destroyed 1000's of lives; a true philanthropist... he's back with a vengence.

So, a "yay" and a "huzzah" for trustworthy politicians, leaders of NGO:s and vaccines! May you live long and prosper, you fucktards.

Peace out in pieces, you not-so-magnificient bastards!