Army book for Warhammer 40k - Lords of Oblivion

My friend Brian approached me a while ago with a new project idea. I've mentioned that he's an avid player of Warhammer 40k, a tabletop war game. He has put together many small armies' worth of plastic miniatures and has designed his own Chapter of Space Marines within the 40k universe: the Lords of Oblivion.

All the information pertaining to this Chapter—its history, descriptions of the major characters in the army, "fluff" as the players call it, and then all the stats and mechanics for actual gameplay—would constitute a small book. In fact, it does constitute a small book. That's where I come in.

Brian commissioned me to make a large, ornate book to hold the description of his army and all the reference material he needs during gameplay. The trick is that the pages need to be removable, in case he edits part of it later down the line. A 3-ring binder would suit this, but would break the illusion of being a real and proper book, so I decided to build the book like a photo album, using screwposts. This wonderful screwpost-construction grimoire served as my chief inspiration, and here's the working part of mine:

There's a narrow flap of paper that folds down over the screws to keep them hidden. The book will hold about 60 sheets of paper, which is more than plenty for Brian's needs.

The cover material is faux leather (vinyl)—yeah, I wish it were the real thing, too. The corner braces, however, are the real deal: chunks of metal riveted right onto the book. I took brass-plated angle braces from a hardware store and gave them a hammered finish using a ball-peen hammer. They're heavy; you really feel them as you open the book.

The gemstones are pearlescent snap heads with the snap portion filed off. They're epoxied in place and unlikely to budge. The rivets were cut off a 3/16" brass rod and peened over, and can I just say that hammered rivets are drop-dead sexy?

Brian did all the typesetting for the interior. The original plan was to print everything on parchment paper, but we ran up against a time crunch and he had to make do with a first run of plain printer paper. The lore isn't actually completely written, yet; I'm hoping that, when he finishes it up, he'll be able to do a more official run on the nice paper.

Okay, so that's all the behind-the-scenes talk out of the way... let's do a quick evaluation. Good features: The color balance between the tan leather-look and the green gemstones and ribbon is very pleasing, and the heavy use of brass finish works nicely to dress up the book.

Bad features: I really don't like the lettering on the front. The goal for the book was a Gothic/sci-fi fusion, but those letters seem more to be fighting with the leather and brass than working with it. Brass cutouts might have worked better. The result is a sort of middle-school craft project clash of ideas on the front cover which needs to be smoothed out before the book can shine, though the foundation is good. I'd also like to paint the emblem directly onto the leather, or onto a thin sheet, rather than onto cardstock as it is now, for further streamlining. That said, I think the interior looks great and it's already gotten some compliments, so yay!

Anyway, I hope you like the book! Brian has a few more projects like this one for me, so expect more sooner or later. Cheers!

Painting miniatures

A quick update on the tome: I'm planning a trip to Ann Arbor for leather, but that has to wait until next Saturday. I'll be working on cover designs until then and hopefully will have a post going up in the next few days.

In the meantime, here's something completely unrelated.

I'm really not happy unless I have about six different projects going on, enabling me to flit between them at will. For example, in addition to bookbinding, I'm learning to paint war-gaming miniatures. Most people get into this by way of playing the actual games, but I do it just because I think it's fun and a good exercise.

To be clear, here's what this involves: You start with a tiny, grey plastic or metal figurine from a place like Games Workshop or Reaper Miniatures. You apply paint. Lots of it. Many times. Sometimes, you curse. Eventually you end up with a full-color statuette in some degree of artistry. Typically, you then send the model off to war, using dice and codices to rain destruction upon other models like it.

Brian, of course, was the one who introduced me; he's an avid player of Warhammer in both its 40k and Fantasy incarnations. He probably owns models from nearly every civilization in the 40k range and, for several of them, has armies in varying degrees of completeness, all of which he paints himself (have a look: Allerka on DeviantART).

I do believe he saw in me a potential gaming disciple or reliable opponent, possibly both, but I never showed much interest in the games. He, being a cunning man, therefore tempted me, a crafty girl, by offering me models to paint. I suppose he hoped I'd paint so many models they'd just end up as an army, and then, well! I'd surely want to use that army. Unfortunately, I'm both stubborn and interested in diversifying, so I still have nothing resembling even a ragged army, just a lot of totally unrelated, meticulously painted models.

Here, for example, is an Elven sorceress, both buxom and scantily clad, not to mention clearly unable to move her legs:

I've been working on her for probably a couple months, on and off, and as you can see the paint job is very nearly complete. Really all that's wanting is to clean up a few blotchy spots and then perhaps add some embroidery to her cape.

I'm very proud of her sword, so let me show you a closeup:

There are two ways to paint a metal surface such as a sword: (1) using metallic paints, which contain tiny metal flakes to give the paint a natural shimmer, or (2) using regular nonmetallic paints, which are less flashy and require more finesse to actually look like metal. In the past I've had mixed results with metallic paints -- they tend to get out of hand and just look gaudy. I was quite sure this model didn't need any gaudy, cheap metallic tricks, so I took a stab (hurr hurr) at nonmetallics and here's the result. Easier than I expected, as it turns out.

As I was looking for advice on painting the look of steel, I stumbled across a technique for painting a chrome look. Now, the soul of artistry is getting distracted by sorta cool things you're not sure you could ever use but they're cool, dammit. So, naturally, I grabbed the first suitable model I could find to practice on and achieved... well, kind of a chrome look on the leg and back plates of this Tyrannid bug.

So, that still needs some work before it's as convincing as, I don't know, this pantswetting chrome warrior. But it'd be a boring world if everything we tried went just right the first time.

Hm... I had more to share, but it's rather late, so that'll have to do for now. Perhaps I'll post again tomorrow. Until then, be crafty!