This morning, I found several emails from worried clients, asking about this email going around:
You May Have Been Caught In The PaintedFigs Financial Scam. Miniatures
Unpainted, Or Are Owed Money.
I am M.E. Shenny, I have an interest in gaming and am a journalist, so I
decided to do a little investigation into the claims made by Navin
Weeraratne.
What I discovered about Paintedfigs.com was incredible. Ranging from Navin
Weeraratne assaulting Paintedfigs staff, how his miniature suppliers, The
Warstore and every client unwittingly help Navin facilitate money
laundering and tax evasion, through to how Navin admits he was only
interested in making easy money and has long since lost interest in
running Paintedfigs.com.
I'm sorry, if you have received this email, it is because your address was appropriated by a third party during the period that I was talking to Raef Granger about on his podcast:
http://www.payloadz.com/d1/freeproducts.asp?id=1531825
Journalists turn up when you google them, if you look up M.E. Shenny you will find no evidence that he actually exists. Journalists also do not send out mass emails from sites that are clearly not news sites.
Our lawyer advises I just ignore this nonsense and carry on, and given that the email opens with an easily exposed lie, I'm inclined to agree with him.
I'm sorry you've been getting unsolicited emails, you'll like get more from that source.
Regards,
Navin
You have to forgive a little self indulgence sometimes.
Gamers spend so much time working on their homebrew settings, their characters trappings and back stories, their miniatures and their paint jobs -- which I feel makes it well deserved when we sit back and take a look at ourselves.
One may feel it a sin of ego for us to this, but you have to consider than when gamers look inward - they lose all ability to take themselves seriously. From Renn Fests; to "The Gamers" movies; to beer-and pretzel-games, we are very good at poking fun at ourselves, to the point that it takes on a life and industry of its own.
Part and parcel of this niche interest within niche interests have been the "Knights of the Dinner Table" webzine. What's started as a comic strip has grown over time into a constellation of products based around this highly successful IP.
One of these products - of course - has been some miniatures. I believe these are out of print now, so good luck with digging them out :) . Our client Scott Funk did and sent them over for us to work on, I understand this was his first time using a painting service too.
Funk is the real deal. In addition to being an ardent KoDT fan, he's also done a HUGE D20 conversion for the Robotech Chronicles, and IP that has been neglected since the Palladium days.
Anyway, here are his Knights of the Dinner Table.
Cheers,
Navin
Hi Paul,
I got your email but for some reason when I try to reply it (even by my personal mail account), I get a message fail notification:
Given the nature of your email I imagine you need me to get word to you anyway I can, and so I'm blogging my reply.
Here's my Reply:
Thank you for your email,
I'm glad you've had a chance to listen to my interview. It is odd though that you do not seem to have noticed that there is no reference to the identity of the person who conned me out of my money, whatsoever in that interview, or anywhere online. No where is that person named, or their company named.
Regards,
And for context, here is your email to me:
|
|
10:11 PM (13 hours ago)
 |
https://ssl.gstatic.com/ui/v1/icons/mail/sprite_black2.png); background-origin: initial; background-position: 0px -63px; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; height: 21px; margin-top: -3px; opacity: 0.55; vertical-align: middle; width: 21px;" />https://ssl.gstatic.com/ui/v1/icons/mail/sprite_black2.png); background-origin: initial; background-position: -42px -84px; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; height: 21px; margin-top: -3px; opacity: 0.55; vertical-align: middle; width: 21px;" /> |
||
|
|
||||
It has been brought to my attention an interview you did on http://www.jimmyjango.com/ and the subsequent publicity surrounding it.
In summary, you claimed your company was not in financial difficulty when I started in April 2010. That you did not bribe or take part in money laundering and tax evasion and that I was some sort of venture capitalist who had come into your company and stole $30,000 and various other assets.
We both know these comments are both outrageous and wildly inaccurate and I therefore demand an apology.
If you apologise now and agree to publicise the apology we can agree mutual wording and publicity, you can save face and that will be the end of the matter.
If you fail to appologise to me in writing by the 10th February 2012 and then undertake the agreed publicity of the apology, I will publish all relevent documents in my posession online. The contractual terms you agreed to, emails, your company accounts etc, that category prove your talking nonsense.
I will then use all methods at my disposal to actively publicise these documents including but not limited to your clients, your prospective clients, paypal, your bank, the IRS, Customs and through Google both directly and through their and indeed all the major search engines. Then people will be able to see for themselves what really happened.
So the choice is yours, either way this matter will be settled by the 10th February 2012.
Paul
VB Investment Group
______________________________
opening hours Monday - Friday 9am - 5pm GMT
PRIVACY & CONFIDENTIALITY
This e-mail communication is strictly confidential and intended solely for
the person or organisation to whom it is addressed. It may contain
privileged and confidential information and if you are not the intended
recipient, you must not copy, distribute or take action in reliance on it.
If you receive this e-mail in error, please advise the sender as soon as
possible and also confirm that the e-mail (and any attachments
accompanying it) has been deleted from your system.
What Paizo has shown us with Pathfinder is what Wyrd Miniatures showed us with Malifaux. You can have the nicest minis in the world sitting around, but unless you've a game of some sort to go with them, gamers tend not to be interested. To be fair, Reaper really should have got off their butts and sorted this out well before Paizo did it: it's a bit like if GW did hohum sales until the Warstore decided to create a game called "Warhammer Forty Thousand" and "Sigmar, What A Guy").
What this means for us out here is that there's more character painting to be done -- and its needs to be done in volume, cheaply, and quickly.
You would think character mini painting is a much bigger challenge than painting blocks of uniform figures, and you would be right. There are no efficiencies in painting, scale, or design. Figures need individualized attention not only from the painter but from me and Suraj (design), and this simply is not scaleable (and we've certainly learned not to mess with things that aren't scaleable).
We do manage painting blocks of characters though, but we do it by:
- using reference pictures we're asked to match or use to get general theme and feel
- hand-waves from the client towards the right direction ("make them look Arabian!")
- being left entirely to own devices ("it's clearly a jungle native in a grass skirt. Make him brown!").
Clients have the same challenges when working with a mass of individual characters a well though, so this is usually how things work out.
The problem is when we only have a few characters to deal with -- this is where things are manageable enough for the client to give detailed instructions per miniature ("red sash, yellow shoes, green eyes, black belts and pouches, etc...") but the time involved in execution starts scaling massively. This is one of the reasons we charge a minimum order free or urge people interested in just a single miniature, to try over at Coolmini.
We visited a university yesterday that we heard had a high end, 3d printing machine which nobody was using. Turned out it was no rumor. What was even more fantastic, was that they were more than happy to have us use their machine to print our miniature masters (which we'll use for making molds later).
In the picture below, the structure I am holding is printed to a 25 micrometer resolution. That's finer than my eye can pick out. The machine just needs standard, .STL, 3d design files.
Generally, working with the government out here is massively annoying, expensive, and slow. We honestly weren't expecting to find highly professional, dedicated, honest academics who were excited as we were at the prospect of us using new technologies to produce miniatures.
This is Daniel, our engineer (playing with some sort of etching and milling machine). Daniel and the head of the lab got on famously, they geeked out over technology fairs; insane machines; and German engineering like, well, wargamers over a new codex.
We'll be doing a test print with them soon. We're also working on making molds and building a casting machine, so let's see where this little project goes.
Lee Jones is an client of ours from Canada, and he is quite clearly mad.
If you take a look at our galleries, you'll see his name pop up fairly frequently. I'm pretty sure his is the largest Ork army we've ever painted, we've done several orders for it already and it looks like we'll have several more to go. The bar keeps being raised regarding what constitutes a horde army, but I'm guessing Lee is going to be one the chaps who gets a deciding say in where that bar is.
Here are some pics of some his Forge World items, I picked them because one doesn't see these every day. The centerpiece is the Marauder-conversion, he's done an excellent job of "orkifying" it.
We have some other projects we're working on for Lee, including Sisters of Battle. My hope is that they'll end up with a Hello Kitty theme and scheme, but to be fair, that's already been done.
Cheers,
Navin
Raef Granger, one of the co-hosts of the D6 Generation, is striking out on his own and doing his own podcast now. He talks about why on his page here:
http://www.jimmyjango.com/2011/11/navin-interview-and-thdgps-faq.html
Some of you may remember when he started the "Jimmy Jango," era -- it was right after Russ confessed to the use of grease pencils, so quite a while ago.
My understanding from my chant with him is that he'd like to do podcasts at a more relaxed rate and focus on feature stories and interviews, profiling people in the business or key issues.
I was quite honored that he asked to interview me for his first podcast. You can find it in the link above, and download it specifically here:
http://www.payloadz.com/d1/freeproducts.asp?id=1530866
And click on the "The Navin - Paintedfigs Interview."
In it, Raef and I cover:
- how to knee-cap GW's UK sales model using a VAT loophole in the Channel Islands
- Singapore and Dubai as the great pirate ports and money havens of Asian business
- 3D Printing replacing plastic injection and pewter casting, and coming piracy impact
- General notes on starting a business, and mistakes to watch out for
- What to do when you get conned out of all your money (and what not to do).
- Gyrcopter test piloting (I'm not kidding).
Give it a listen. Raef is incisive as always and he doesn't let me get away with anything. It was good to talk to him again, and I wish him luck with his new show.
Cheers,
Navin
In 2005, Games Workshop re-released their Wood Elves army. Along with the earlier Tyranid re-release, it was the start of GW trying to take back their edge in sculpting over the upstarts Privateer Press. It was a shock for us because suddenly, GW infantry weren't easy to paint any more, and we had to up our game in terms of efficiency and techniques. To this day, the Wood Elf Glade Guard are among the most expensive, basic infantry we paint.
They're normally painted in woodlands greens and browns. It's a nice palette, suggestive of summer and greens work great with browns, and this allows you to use bright red for small or salient details. The problem for Wood Elves players though is that everyone paints them this way.
Fall (Autumn), Winter, and "Shadow Woods" are solutions people normally turn to and we've done all three. Sean here wanted us to work on some Winter scheme Wood Elves. He sent us a strong reference pic and left the rest to us.
The centerpiece here an Ultraforge Treewoman (sic). Ultraforge is a small company that has made a name for itself in recent years working on well sculpted, high quality, resin substitutes for GW models. They're stuff ins't cheap but it looks great. The Warstore offers their stuff at 20% off:
http://www.thewarstore.com/ULTRAFORGEMINIATURES.html
The Treewoman looks good but that's because the model looks good. The paint scheme we used was very simple -- the model stands out because its a good sculpt.
The rest of the painting was pretty straight forward as well. We had to use a lot of white to tie in the winter theme, but we chose to shade with blues rather than offwhites to give them a cooler toned feel -- all the way down to enchanted blue. We needed brown for the wood, but this was useful because we could tie in things like brown leather and brown hair. The cloaks on the old school bowmen threw their painter at first, till I pointed out we should just use different brown tones to pick out the leaves. He didn't do as many as I'd have liked though (I think three tones would have worked best. Two seems a bit sparse and little unnatural).
Gold and yellow stem naturally from brown, so that solved the problem of what color to use for armor and such. I think many people would have preferred silver, but this is too suggestive of High Elves too me, and I think its too neutral a color.
Paintedfigs.com
We're working on an army of forest goblins right now, and every single figure is mounted on a spider -- a giant spider, or an Arachnarok.
Adam, a client of ours for many years, wanted a custom scheme for his spiders. The Arachnarok's had their own particular look he wanted, but its the giant spiders (not very giant when you think about it) that have a scheme that really stands out. We had to do tan and black markings on them, and I feel they came out quite well.
You'll notice the Arachnarok's do not have some parts or their crew glued on -- this is because of packing concerns. These minis have to travel half way across the planet and they're not going to do that safely if they're and awkward shape.
Idle thoughts perhaps. Perhaps not.
We built some dedicated sites (or "microsites") to promote painting services for certain products. So far, we've done:
