Adepticon 2016 Recap

Hey all, long time no post, kids work house blah blah blah.  Anyways, even though everyone else covered their Adepticon trip a a few weeks ago, I wanted to get my annual post up here.

This year I headed to Adepticon with Funderhammer & Bill - I had just formally met Bill a couple of weeks earlier despite seeing him around our FLGS, but Funderhammer assured me that he probably wouldn't axe-murder me in my sleep, so we were good to go.  (Just kidding - Bill was a great guy & about as nice a guy as you'd ever meet.  For a 9th Age player, anyway)).

Thursday

We wanted to get to the hotel ASAP, since they were sending emails offering convention goers a $50 credit if you gave up your room - apparently they massively overbooked the hotel.  After a last-minute revision of babysitting/work plans, we got on the road Thursday morning and had a rather uneventful drive.  Funderhammer got us upgraded to a suite, and I have to admit I've had worse rooms:

After getting checked in & picking up our badges and swag bags, we headed over to a Chicago institution, Portillo's, for some dinner:

When we got back, Funderhammer & I headed to our first class, Army Speed Painting 101 with Aaron Lovejoy.  I've taken classes with Aaron at GenCon before, but usually they were geared towards competition painting or basing, not speed painting.  Aaron actually has a pretty interesting approach - were I'd consider working on a squad and doing stuff like "just paint the pants on each miniature, then just paing the boots, etc" as "speed painting" Aaron gets WAY more granular - like "just paint the front left toe of the boot" then move on to the next model in the squad.  Basically, if you're spending more than a few seconds on each "section", then you're not breaking it down far enough.  To demonstrate, Aaron assigned everyone in class a TINY fraction of a model, then started shoving identical minis into our "assembly line":

...the point being, while they weren't going to win any contests, they were definitely of passable "tabletop" quality. Later, due to the copious amounts of coffee I needed to consume to make it through the con, I converted my mini:

Friday

The next day, we headed to the dealer hall and the shopping began in earnest.  One of my first stops was the Secret Weapon Miniatures booth, were I chatted with Justin for a few minutes and picked up some weathering powders & a few of the new paints to try:

Next I stopped by the Ironheart Artisans booth to pick up a custom order that Alex was gracious enough to let me pick up at the con.  I also picked up a new set of brushes to try out:

I had also been thinking about painting a bust, and he had a pretty cool one on sale:

One of the coupons in our swag bags was a postcard to fill out with your email address that said "Bring this to the Privateer Press booth for a prize!" I was expecting a sticker or a cheap trinket, but they were giving out faction books!

(Granted, know we know that they were offloading old stock in preparation for Mk3, but it was still a nice surprise).

Next I stopped by the Battlefront booth and picked up a container of MDF blanks (I'll be doing a write-up using these soon):

Funderhammer was chatting with the guys at the CMON booth, and lamented while he'd like to try Wrath of Kings (VIG's got a starter box in their swag bags), he didn't have anyone to play the game with.  They passed along another starter box for me!

While trying to identify what the "new hotness" would be at Adepticon this year, it quickly became apparent that it was skirmish game Arena Rex.  We all bought a starter and will be trying it out more in depth in the not-too-distant future:

I made so, so many trips to the Reaper booth for paints this year - I don't think this is even close to all of the ones I picked up:

Found a guy tucked away in the corner of the concourse selling homemade chapter banners & purity seals - while I haven't thought about Space Marines in a loooong time, these were too cool to pass up:

That night, Funderhammer & I had a couple of classes, the first of which was Painting Smoother Blends with Rhonda Bender.  This was one of those types of classes that I take every year, swear that I'm going to incorporate it into my painting, then get home and remember that I'm lazy.  But no, it was great info and Rhonda really broke it down into easily understandable steps, and I was fairly pleased with my results.

From here, we went to our next class, Painting Realistic Faces with David Powell.  David had some amazing examples of his work on hand:

Despite being hampered by several, um, "beverages" I made before we left the room, I was pretty pleased with my progress:

Saturday

The next day, my first class was Basic Technique in Finishing, Including Airbrush Technique with Caleb Wissenback.  I really haven;t kept up with my airbrushing, and have resolved to do better in the coming year.  Caleb had a lot of good advice & tips.

My next class was Airbrush 102, Airbrush Cleaning & Maintenance with Ken Schlotfeldt, the president of Badger Airbrush.  I was pleased to learn that I was doing everything (mostly) correct, and afterwards I picked up one of these cool airbrush maintenance kits from the Badger booth:

After my classes were over for the day, Funderhammer, Bill & I headed to the Privateer Press Iron Arena to get some games in:

Oooh, swanky new focus tokens!

After we were done, we realized it was our last night in town to get a "fancy" dinner, so we headed over to the Weber Grill restaurant.  When we got back to the room, Bill broke out a copy of Gloom, which was a lot of fun:

Sunday

Sunday we packed up the car and made a few trips around the convention center, where we bumped into Robe Guy:

...and while waiting for the raffle drawing, we checked out the Crystal Brush entries:

After the drawing (none of us won anything), we headed out, another Adepticon in the bag!