#ReaperCon Wrap Up

It's been a couple of weeks since ReaperCon and I've been... well, honestly I've been a little down. It was inevitable, given the high that I was on for the con. I heard it described as a family reunion with people you really like, and who really like you. They're right. That's pretty much exactly how it is. It's a small community, and a relatively small con (500+ attendees) that fits fairly well into an old Best Buy, but I can't think of a more welcoming warm accepting place.





But the fun didn't stop when things wrapped up around 9...

There was late night painting in the hotel, as well as games and drinking...

but just hanging out till midnight 1am 2am at the firepit was a large part of the fun!

I took 4 classes over the weekend:
Create your own spooky tree with Julie Guthrie: This was a blast, not just because making a tree is fun, but also because getting to hang out with Julie (who's been a sculptor in the industry nearly since the beginning). Can't wait to paint this up...

Bones Convert n' Take with Reaper Bryan: This is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. There's a couple of giant bins of Bones minis, and everyone digs through for parts and assembles them in a frankenstein-esk way. This is what I ended up with.

Painting Expressive Faces and Eyes with Derek Schubert: The man literally painted 2 faces while we watched, including taking our request for having one of them have glowing eyes. I have so much room for improvement, but now I have an idea of what I need to actually do...

Hands-On Sculpting with Joe Orteza: Kind of an intro sculpting class. We worked on a feather, a leaf, a 40k purity seal, rope, chain, fur, and chainmail. Very helpful, especially given that I've got those monsters I created above that are going to need some serious greenstuff work to finish before painting.

I also took a tour of the Reaper factory. It was neat to see where the magicminis are made! Because of a traffic incident, we didn't get a whole lot of time there, so I didn't get to spend my metal trade in on the things I wanted to look for. Next time...

Friday and Saturday mornings I played in a pair of 5e games. Both were fun, and it was nice to get to be on the player side of the screen. That's a treat I don't get to enjoy very often. In one i played a quasi-undead elf necromancer, and in the other I played a mutated dragonborn bard. The bard's mission was more successful, but the DM did a good job making sure everyone at the table got to shine!

There were demos of the upcoming Conan Rise of Monsters game (CROM) being run, so I jumped into one of those too, and playing as Conan, got to toss a giant snake off a cliff. I also played a demo of Reaper's CAV game. Giant stompy robots is always fun, and while I'm not going to get into it, I enjoyed the demo and even painted a mech up at the paint and take!






In fact, this was the ONLY mini I painted the entire weekend... I made up for it by bring home a metric ton of paint... and some minis...


But as corny as it sounds, the best thing I brought home was the joy of having gotten to hang out with an amazing bunch of silly and fun people. How silly? When Bones IV was announced, I got together a group of my friends and we did this!

That's us handing our cash/credit cards/wallets to ReaperBryan.

And almost everyone from the forum got together before it was all over to get this picture.

I'm already looking forward to next year...