All posts tagged: books

Book Released! Learn How to Build Miniatures and Improve Your Skills

Published by Joe B

Technically, my book, How to Improve Your Hobby Building Skills, was released on Kindle June 3rd, but now it is available as a paperback as well! If you wanted to learn more about the book, or how you can help, this post is for you. When I was writing the series on How to Improve Your Hobby Skills, I kept trying to balance between going too deep, and thus blowing up the size of a blog post, and covering enough details to make it helpful. This spawned the idea that I could take each part (building, painting, showcasing) and expand it into a full-sized book. It’s a crazy idea for a guy who struggled in English class! But the more I dug into what it would take to self-publish a book and all the tools to get it done, the more excited I got. What is in This Book? When I started writing this book about building miniatures, I started with thinking about what are the things hobbyists struggle with. Many of these ideas came …

I Wrote a Book! Start of a New Series

Published by Joe B

After writing on this blog for a few years now, I’ve realized that I kind of like writing. And some of you kind of like reading it. So writing a book about the hobby would make sense then yeah? So that is what I did, I wrote a book. Well, two books so far. A Free eBook If you enjoyed the How to Improve Your Hobby Skills series of posts, I hope you will like these books. Especially since the first is the three posts (Building, Painting, Showcasing) and formatted into PDF, Kindle, and eBpub books. I struggle to read books as PDFs, especially on my phone. So I felt stupid for providing only a PDF for that series of posts. Now, you can get the book (still for free) on nearly every eBook platform. Kindle, iBooks, Nook (still around), Kobo, and a few others. Even more stores through this link. Improve Your Building Skills So, getting the free book published on all these different stores was an adventure (one I’m still figuring out). But it got me …

Book Review of Color Theory by Patti Mollica

Book Review: Color Theory by Patti Mollica

Published by Joe B

While doing research for my painting basics post, I pulled out a book I’ve had on color theory. After reading through it, I thought I would provide a book review and my takeaways from this book. Color Theory by Patti Mollica is a fairly short but dense book in the Artist’s Library Series aimed at more traditional artists. What I mean by this is that the colors she mentions and tools used are the typical set used by canvas painters. So while the topic of learning color theory is helpful, we just need to translate it into painting miniatures. I am listing learning color theory as one of the things to help painters improve. By learning how colors interact and mix, you can create moods and feeling, or create focus to particular areas of the model. Book Contents At only 52 pages, it is easy to skim through Color Theory and get a sense of what it offers. Patti breaks the book down into five sections: the history of color, color basics, pigments & paints, communicating with …

Book Review: Iron Warrior by Graham McNeill

Published by Joe B

Being a bit of a fan of the Iron Warriors I was super excited when I heard about the new novella from Black Library titled “Iron Warrior“. This is another Graham McNeill store featuring Honsou and the Ultramarines continuing after the end of “Dead Sky, Black Sun.” Iron Warriors Book Review: Short Story and Disappointing Pictures The biggest selling point that got me to shell out the extra for this little book was the description that the book is “filled with many pieces of artwork, both illustrations and full-color portraits” which made me visualize an Index Astartes type of production. This ended up being my biggest disappointment of the book, the quality of the illustrations were more of the ’80 GW style of cartoony creations, but with hazard stripes to make them authentic Iron Warriors. Also, half the illustrations were of Ultramarines or imperial warriors, which is great to fill in the story and space but was disappointing when I was looking forward to a book featuring, I don’t know, maybe the Iron Warriors? The colored …