Mermaid - study in Blue

Going through the storage case, I found a pair of miniatures I'd agreed to paint for a friend an awfully long time ago. The figure shown here is from Reaper Miniatures, #03078 "Pearl the Mermaid", sculpted by Werner Klocke as if the cheekbones didn't give that away!

Pearl's lower fins and her forearm were separate pieces, which meant that they'd gone missing in my storage case somewhere. An hour's hunting turned them up, and I experimented with epoxy putty and finally CA super-glue to fasten the pieces in place.
I tried to get a "coy, curious" expression, and the sculptor's style of heart-shaped faces helped wonderfully.
Pearl started with a coat of Armory white primer, then a wash of very thin blue ink to pick up all the contours. After that, I worked up her skin in shades of light green. (Mostly Ceramacoat hobby acrylics, although I also used some RAF Interior Green I bought to paint Spitfires with The Nephew.) The hair and lips were worked in in tints and washes of pthalocyanine green and sap green hue (both from Golden Artist acrylics).
The figure was CA'd to a standard 25mm round base, which was then coated with a slurry of fine sand and 2-part epoxy. This base treatment turned out looking exactly like the sandy sea-bottom, requiring no further paint.

After giving Pearl a coat of Testors Dull Cote to protect her, I went back in with a 40-60 mix of Satin and Matte varnish (Liquitex)to try and get the 'wet look'. Her skin received slightly more Matte than the scales...

Pearl will be returned to her owner after her long absence, and I'm going to get to work on her companions (including the little 1:300 scale buildings the gentleman asked me to paint) as soon as all the plaster work and painting in the master bedroom is done...

And there are still all those zombies on the bench in nothing but their primer!

"There & Back Again": The Colonel's Book

My brother is an officer in the Ohio Army National Guard, and his unit was mobilized for deployment to Afghanistan shortly after the first of the year. When he was last deployed overseas (Iraq, 2006), he asked me to make him a journal, in which he recorded his diary notes, reflections and the like. He packed that book to take with him on this trip as well, but it only had a couple dozen blank pages left. At his request, I made this journal as Volume II and sent it to him at his unit's preliminary training site in Louisiana. He figures he'll be ready for Volume III shortly before the unit actually leaves for Afghanistan.

The book is 9 x 12 inches (22 x 30 cm). The binding is boot-weight black leather. (About 9 Ounces, or about 3.5mm thick.)
This style of soft binding is common in Renaissance paintings, and books made in this style were the common workbook of merchants, clerks and military officers on campaign. My brother liked his because it could be carried easily in a military map-case.
The book strap is riveted to the cover with three rosette nails. These were made from a pattern from the Higgins Museum in Massachusetts, and were acquired as part of my project to build a 15th century set of brigandine body armor.
Here's the book laid open.
Each gathering of pages, called a "quire" or "signature" is stitched into the cover with heavy waxed thread.
The binding-stitching is knotted at each crossing for protection. If need be, these pages can be removed from one binding and incorporated into another book. Additional "signatures" can also be sewn into the cover to expand the book's capacity.