I would like, if I may, to take you on a strange journey. - Rocky Horror Picture Show Happy Hallowe'en boils and ghouls! To get you in the mood for this festive season, I've got a fiendish Hallowe'en quiz for you today! I actually made it for a Zoom Hallowe'en party I'm hosting for a bunch of friends, but you're all very welcome to join in here! I compiled the questions from various online quizzes (and tried to fact-check the ones I was unsure of) and made up a few of them myself. I tried to hide the text like a "spoiler" button, but it involved editing code so I'm afraid you'll have to just use the old school method of scrolling slowly, or holding a piece of paper up to the screen to hide the answers! I hope you enjoy and feel free to use them for your own physically distanced Hallowe'en parties! Hallowe’en Quiz 2020! Round 1 (Folklore) 1)      What is the word Hallowe’en an abbreviation of? All Hallows’ Eve (All Saint’s Eve) 2)      What ...

Books are a uniquely portable magic. ~Stephen King Hello one and all! Welcome to The Art of Caesura! Last year  around this time I started a new type of post that I was hoping I could turn into an annual affair, it was my Autumn Reading List. I explained at the time, that many people make a summer reading list, but with the days getting shorter and the rain getting more intense (in Ireland, anyway) I think autumn is the perfect time to cozy up with a good book.  For some semblance of structure, I will restrain myself to one fiction, one nonfiction and one graphic novel that I have read in the past year.  One last note before we launch in, if you like books check out my literary analysis of Bizzy Bear Zoo Ranger . It was a lot of fun to write, and I hope to do more in the future. Now, onwards! Fiction: The Porpoise (2019) - Mark Haddon When I pondered doing this list again this year, the first thought that came to mind was "well, I have to include The Porpoise" and the se...

Rigid, the skeleton of habit  alone  upholds the  human frame. -Virginia Woolf Welcome back to our weekly Friday meetup on The Art of Caesura! Today I have another miniature from the Conan board game, this time it's the Bone Golem.  I love the idea of a bone golem; you can just imagine bones scattered on a dry tundra from a long past battle beginning to jitter with mystical energy before assembling themselves into a hulking monstrosity.  According to Monolith , below was the initial render for this miniature. And while necessarily quite rough and static at that stage of design, I really preferred the direction they were going with it at that stage over the direction they went. By orienting the miniature "face on" (or more in the frontal plane) it really gave a greater sense of mass - which would have given them more opportunity to play with negative space between his bones etc.  Below is the same creature from a Conan video game that was in development arou...

Tis the night - the night of the grave's delight and the warlocks are at their play; ye think that without the wild winds shout, but no, it is they - it is they.  - Arthur Cleveland Coxe Hello and welcome to The Art of Caesura! We're in the middle of a few weeks of painting minis from the Conan board game, and today we have the Warlock. Today's mini was another one that I kind of just leaped into. I hadn't looked at the "box art" (below) before starting and rather relied on my instincts: Egyptian-y, evil wizard - how about purples and golds.  Looking at the art below, I think the muted snake-skin motif would work better if some of the sculpted details (in the render below, below) were more visible on the actual model.  Looking again at the render below, I actually think I preferred the original pose they gave him: with his staff pointing down rather than up. I think it better emphasized his role as a wizard rather than a combatant, but I can see how this would...

It's a swamp demon-- they're thick as bats  in the swamps beyond Black River.  You can hear them howling like damned souls  when the wind blows strong from the south on hot nights.   Beyond the Black River -  Robert E. Howard Hello one and all and welcome back to another Friday on The Art of Caesura! Today I have another gribbly from the Conan boardgame: The Swamp Demon ! Like last week's Yeti-Man-Ape , I painted this guy so quickly that I forgot to take work-in-progress shots of him, so let's just launch in! This is a fun swamp creature model with a lot of texture to it. The box art (below) paints him in a solely green palette, but - still cleaning the muck off my boots from the Preyton's swamp base - I wanted to draw some of the other colours that we see in swamps into this model.  From a base of Castellan Green, I shaded him with Athonian Camoshade. I then splodged patches of Seraphim Sepia and Agrax Earthshade on different parts of the model.  ...