For the main Extra Life 2017 Campaign info, start here.
Our Extra Life 2017 Campaign is chock full o prizes, and while the best way to get in on it is to donate to the campaign, there are still ways you can help us achieve our goal and win some of that sweet swag outside of monetary donations. So while our ultimate goal is fundraising for these worthy Children’s Miracle Network hospitals (CHOC specifically in our case), you can help us simply by increasing our reach and online presence. It’ll be fun too! Let’s look at some of our online goals:
For each person who liked our page between July 2017 and December 2017, you will be entered for a swag bag- a Play It Painted! patch and a set of Play it Painted dice to be awarded once we hit 500 likes or December 31st, whichever comes first.
Once we hit 50 followers on Twitch, each follower will be entered into a drawing for a swag bag- a Play It Painted! patch and a set of Play it Painted dice to be awarded once we hit 50 followers or December 31st, whichever comes first.
Once we hit 2,000 subscribers on Youtube, we will hold a special give-away for folks who have left comments in our Extra Life live-chats/comments section and subbed to the channel between October 2017 and December 31 2017.
Come and watch us paint and play!
To show your support, SHARE our social media and come watch our live painting and gaming! Leave a like and a comment and it will increase your odds of winning. Thanks for your support!
As we head into the final stretch of our Extra Life 2017 campaign, we will be raffling off clan boxes both online and in person at our local event.
The best way to enter is to donate $5 or more to our campaign, but there are other prizes you are eligible for just for supporting our channel online, which we will detail here.
Your donation of $5 or more grants you a single raffle entry for all 6 clans. If you donate $25 or more, you get 5 Entries into each raffle, and $50 or more grants you 15 entries into each raffle. Alternately, if you want a specific clan, simply enter the name of the clan in your comment and you’ll gain a number of entries equal to your donation ($5 minumum).
In addition, everyone donating and supporting will be entered into a drawing for a Ninja All Stars Core box!
To donate, hit the link below and don’t forget to comment on which clan is your favorite!
This year as in previous years we will be holding both online and in-person raffles. The following is the up to date list of items to be raffled:
Wave 1 Online:
Batman Rulebook V.1 – Albert Tecson
Limited Edition Mist from Guild Ball – Kevin
Star Lancer from Relic Knights*
Medusa from Arena Rex*
Heath Ledger Joker Knight Models Batman – Nelson Huang
Limited Edition Tater from Guild Ball (Season 2 card)*
Ninja All Stars Generic Clan (supplied unpainted)
Kunoichi Candy and Cola – Leah Belanger
Wild Card Project: Surprise me! – I’ll paint up a mini (value up to $25) for you and send it to you- Nelson Huang
Viewer’s choice: Select the topic and possibly subject for a painting or gaming stream- Nelson Huang
Arkham Knight from Knight Models (painted)
Special Ninja All Stars Clan Box Raffles (6 Clans) Click here for specific rules.
In Person Raffles
Ninja All Stars Core Box 1
Ninja All Stars Core Box 2
Knight Models Arkham City Joker Starter Set (metal)
How do the raffles work?
Every $5 you donate is essentially one entry into a single raffle
Donations of $15 or more received before October 15th are eligible for ALL raffles, but you may wish to increase your odds by focusing raffles towards a single segment or prize. If you opt to focus your raffles, you entries will double if you donate $25 or more, triple at $50 or more, and quintuple at $100 or more. So for example, let’s say you donated $50 but all you are really interested in is the Limited Edition Ancient King Miniature for Wrath of Kings. All you need to do is enter “Ancient King Only” in your comments, and you’d receive 10 x 3(triple) = 30 entries for this specific raffle, or if you donated $100, it would be 20 x 5 = 100 entries for this raffle.
Prizes marked with a * have the option of being delivered unpainted and unassembled, or fully assembled and painted. Once you win that prize, I will contact you for specifics.
For the youtube/Hangouts type rewards, you may opt for a private hangout instead of a public/recorded one.
If you do not specify any specific items in your comments, you will be included in all raffles for which your donation is eligible for.
Finally, if you can’t make a cash donation, you can still help our campaign by being a supporter!
For any questions, email freeagent088@playitpainted.com or message our Facebook Page.
Tonight was a lot less hectic than last night. I found out my favorite poke’ place now serves spam musubi, so I’m counting that in the win column! I spent a lot of time with my 3 year old son and my family, and still was able to gain some ground on our project.
So tonight I queued up a dozen more models, 5 of 2 different kinds of aliens (not exactly sure what they are called, but 5 are small stalker like aliens and the other 5 seem to be more elite aliens) and a pair of Predaliens to try and refine the technique I used previously. As per usual with large projects, your techniques get better as you grow more accustomed to the miniature range, so these turned out much better than the previous set in my opinion. I’m even considering re-doing the first set so they match better. Anyway, I thought I’d take some time to show you my process for painting up the Aliens.
It was a long, hectic day at work with plenty of errands to run when I got home. After 3-4 laps around town and $250 out of my wallet later, I came home for dinner with my family, which always helps, and then as they settled down I snuck off to the table, an indulgence my wife selflessly endorsed, and I was grateful for.
So I turned on the camera once again to continue logging my process. Tonight was more about experimentation over completion, as I stared down 2 dozen aliens and tried to determine the best plan of attack. When I look at painting a line I’ve never painted before, I consider a few things like material, texture, sharpness of detail, size, and give some consideration of the general color scheme. This tells me what approach I might take.
Last night I began a commission that takes me into a miniatures line I’ve been interested in trying my hand at, and that is Aliens vs Predator by Prodos games. A friend and regular customer of mine got his set in and was so thrilled with the miniature quality, he described these minis as the best he had ever seen, and was anxious to get them painted and on the table.
So last night we met at our FLGS and in between catching up with some friends playing Saga, and picking up my new Union player for Guild Ball Harry the Hat, my friend handed me 6 small boxes of minis and I headed home to inspect them. I ended up doing this on my live feed, inspecting the minis and talking with my buddy Jake and our viewers.
The minis were assembled by the client, and most were attached to their round plastic bases. Normally I don’t prefer to have commissions pre-assembled, the main issue being that typically folks who assemble their models with the intent to play them immediately can rush the assembly process, typically skipping things like pinning and basing, which can cause more work and hassle for the commission painter, especially if he/she has to retroactively pin a joint that fell off during the painting process, or the model breaks trying to remove it from the slotted plastic base in order to base the miniature. These issues are much more prevalent in metal miniatures, but with AvP the miinatures are resin without tabs/slots, so this was a much more fortunate situation.
I know it’s hard, but pin your metal models!
In the case of AvP, I ended up removing them from their bases by getting a firm grip on a model’s foot and wiggling gently, which freed up most of them. For the stronger bonds I wedged my hobby knife between the foot and the base and wiggled the knife until the model popped loose.
Once all the models were loose I began mixing putty for basing. Historically I was using green stuff or Milliput, but a friend of mine recently advised Apoxie Sculpt, which you can buy on Amazon at a great price if you buy a large amount (4lbs for $32 significantly better value than most 2 part epoxy putty that is used).
With Apoxie sculpt spread across the bases, I ended up using “Steel Plate Random” base stamp from Happy Seppuku. This is my go-to pattern for industrial/sci-fi miniatures, but Happy Seppuku has a ton of great ones such as Catwalk grating or Hex tile floor. I have 5 different stamps to encompass a variety of genres, and Happy Seppuku makes so many great ones I definitely need to pick up more. They’re so cheap at $5 a pop and $32 on 4lbs of putty can net you hundreds of bases for pennies or less per piece.
As the bases were stamped and starting to harden at an hour in, that’s the perfect time to set your minis in place. Although I do keep some pre-stamped bases, making the bases fresh when you use them is more ideal. At an hour or so in, the Apoxie sculpt is no longer sticky, and its starting to harden, but it’s still compressible. I use this opportunity (specifically for plastics and resin) to attach the model to the base. I apply a tiny amount of Super Hot T glue to each foot and apply moderate pressure joining the mini to the stamped base, just enough to slightly compress the apoxie sculpt. This ensures optimum contact between the model and the stamping, (so your model doesn’t look like it’s floating on the odd toe or ball of its foot), and the putty will fully harden in contact with the mini, which can only strengthen your bond. For pre-stamped, fully hardend bases and any time I’m using metal, I still recommend pinning, but this should work out just fine.
So after all is said and done, I ended up basing close to 40 miniatures- every piece of this commission save the 2 very large Alien Crushers which did not come with bases. Next up- divide and conquer: I plan on dividing up the commission into batches to paint, starting with the largest grouping: the Aliens.
Most of you who follow Play it Painted! on social media has figured out by now that we offer a commission painting service. Yet, we’ve never really clarified how it all works. Why? Because in the past, we used to take each situation and consider…
Oh wait, nevermind. I was just too lazy to sit down and spell it out. Let’s try to do that now:
Play it Painted! commissions is a painting service designed for high quality tabletop standard miniatures, delivered in a timely manner at a reasonable cost to our customers.
Extra Life 2016 is well underway and well…I jumped into the fray much later this year. It might have a little to do with this new addition to the household! Thanks to everyone who donated in year’s past, and thanks in advance to those who will continue to support us this year!
So this year’s campaign will be slightly different than previous years. We set an initial goal of $200 with a promise of opening “the vault” if this was to be reached before the official November 5th event. Well…we made it thanks to a handful of early donors and a big donation from our paint day host Comic Quest. If you are local to the Southern California/Orange County area, please check out our local event for participation.
If you can’t make the local event, don’t worry! You still have access to the vault raffles!
If you donated to the campaign prior to November 3rd, you don’t really have to worry about individual raffles, you are already in them! However, you may supplement your entries at any time simply by donating more to individual raffles at a discounted rate of 1 entry per $5.
If you are donating on or after November 3rd, you may enter raffles individually at a rate of $5/entry, or for the best value, donate $25 to be entered in all vault raffles. Specific info for each raffle will be posted on our Facebook page and updated here, so be on the lookout there for more info.
The new goal is set for $500, at which point, I’ll be raffling off my painted Castellan to everyone who helped get us there. Stay tuned on the facebook page for updates on its painting.
Some of the items to look forward to in the vault include:
Limited Edition Infinity Bounty Hunter
Limited Edition Relic Knights Wildspace Gabe and Codifier Brahe
Limited Edition NIghtmare Teddy (metal) from Malifaux
Super Dungeon Explore Kunoichi Candy miniature
Knight Models Batman the Animated Series Miniature
And more!
Thanks again for supporting us once more for Extra Life 2016. This charity carries significant importance to me as a now a two-time dad and a gamer. Your generosity is a big part of what makes gaming such a great community to be a part of.
As I write this, we have 23 days remaining in 2014.
That makes me feel that starting to write this may be a bit premature. If there’s anything I learned in this past year, a lot can change in 23 days. 2014 was a pivotal year not just for Play it Painted, but for myself on many different levels. The year is marked with significant change, it was kicked off by significant change, and at the moment I am cautiously optimistic about where these significant changes may lead us. In the past 23 days, I’ve seen my son go from being barely able to stand to now walking. All around me is change, some of it slightly traumatic, but a fair bit of it to be quite promising.
First up, there were significant changes to some of us personally. For myself, with my wife and I having our son in October of 2013 was the most important thing to happen to us since getting married in 2008. I can’t even begin to express my happiness with our new addition, and every day with our son has just been incredible. Octavius is doing very well, he’s the happiest baby I have ever known, and he grows stronger every day! I look forward to getting to know my son more as the years go by.
Also during the summer of 2014, our very own Phill Howard married his wife Faith. I’m very happy for them and we’ve already enjoyed a few couples gatherings together, and looking forward to many more. Congrats to Phill and Faith!
These significant life changes did have some bearing in our approach to Play it Painted and our strategy for 2014. In order to continue to operate as an active ambassador for tabletop gaming, we needed to become a more efficient operation. It is difficult enough for our new families and new family members to be without us when we are hosting and attending gaming events, so spending large amounts of money in addition to sacrificing time just isn’t being fair to our families our ourselves. It is reasons like this that fueled Play it Painted’s commission painting services, to help fund our hobbies and even put a little extra on the table to cover some costs on the homefront. We also needed efficiency in our shows- we needed a more unified games offering than the dozens of different games we hosted in 2013, and ideally any form of manufacturer compensation for our activities would be helpful. Finally higher priority demands on our time required us to be smarter with our actual gaming and activity time- we needed trustworthy, reliable support from our PiP teammates to ensure a high quality show without it always falling to a few to hold up the shows when others failed on their commitments.
Play It Painted! strives to offer a world class miniature gaming experience to the greater community, through hosting public events, providing new opportunities for gaming and painting, and offering commission painting services.
