Scale Model Challenge 2016

Hi, guys and girls!

A little over a week ago I visited the Scale Model Challenge! It was a great experience!

To me, it is a social event where I can meet tons of people I know from my time in Chilling Wargamers or from Facebook. This year, their 10th anniversary. set new records in terms of visitors, traders, clubs, and contest entries.

My SMC'16 haul

The first person I met was Manuel from crazywenky.de. He brought me one of his famous Crazy Grip miniature holders! Before I had this I was always using a champagne cork or a pin vice to hold my miniatures but that isn't the most comfortable way to hold it. The Crazy Grip is a wooden handle for your miniatures. It works like a charm and feels really comfortable for long painting sessions!

The Crazy Grip!

Next, I walked over to the HUGE stand of sceneryworkshop.nl where I met up with Patrick. I've been a long time customer of his company and it was nice to finally meet him in person! He had one of the largest and most prominent stands on the event and it was obvious he put a lot of work in!

Alongside the SceneryWorkshop stand was a small stand where Maartje from magie-miniatures.blogspot.com was painting. She was trying out the Scale75 unnatural flesh colors.

For a little while, I was wandering the expo area and I walked into a table where the guys from chestnutink.blogspot.com were painting and giving demonstrations. After a demo from Francois about painting NMM steel, I was interviewed by the local newspaper about the demonstration.

I also had a very nice one-on-one talk with Kyle from http://Mr Lee's Painting Emporium. He was nice enough to give me advice on how to paint contrast in the skin of my orc bust! We spend a good 30 to 45 minutes talking about shading and highlights. It has been a huge help and it really improved how I look at the model now!

Most of my team was spend at the booth of Broken Toad and Savage Forged Minis with Kris and Dennis. Dennis is an artist who sculpts busts and miniature figures, something which in my humble opinion he is very talented at! We used to hang out in Google hangouts back when I was still a member of Chilling Wargamers, so we go back a while. Kris is known from the excellent products from Broken Toad. From pigment powders to brushes to busts, Kris has it all! And it's all beautiful!

My personal highlight was when I got to shake the hand of my source of inspiration and information. Roman from Massive Voodoo! I was kind of starstruck when I approached him because to me he is some sort of painting hero. He turned out to be a super nice guy as well!

Me and Roman! Good times!

The only "bad" thing about events like this is that they are a real-life money sink... I already started saving up for next year!

Thank you for reading my rambling... I want to write a couple of short product reviews of the goods I bought at SMC so keep a look out for those! (I promise I'll post them soon, really!)