For those of you who are regular readers of the Insider, you may not recognize my name. I’m Bill French, and I am the retailer development and support rep. But I’m not here to talk to you about who’s doing what at PP. I’m here to show you cool stuff! Which, when we get to the bottom of it, is why we’re all on this website in the first place.

One of my favorite articles to design in No Quarter Magazine is the Armory. Making the images for the templates is always a fun challenge. However, not all the factions have been represented yet, including my current project army, Minions. So I decided to get to work and make my own template for the gator army I’ve been working on.

As I have mentioned in previous Insiders, I love playing WARMACHINE and HORDES. Like many of you, I also love discussing, debating, thinking about, and most recently writing about WARMACHINE and HORDES. I consider myself very lucky that I have been allowed to write various articles for No Quarter Magazine in addition to my Quartermaster job duties.

The Cryx Scrap Thralls are some of my favorite models. I’ve been buying or trading to get them since they were first released. At this point, I have somewhere between twenty and twenty-five. My favorite thing about them is that they are built out of whatever the Necrotechs find laying around the battlefield, so no conversion is out of place. My goal is to do some sort of simple conversion for each of them. Here’s the latest batch I’ve finished painting.

Today I’d like to talk to you about one of the principles that go into designing the look of our models. The idea is called “silhouette,” and it’s very important when creating one-inch-tall models and conveying character. Simply defined, a silhouette is the visual shape of a character if you were to look at him or her with no details. Strong silhouettes allow us to pick out a model from a distance, even if we aren’t looking at its specific details, and they are very important when considering a figure’s design. Unique silhouettes mean unique characters.

In today’s Insider, I’d like to take a minute to share with you how my process for drawing concept art has changed over the years. In the past, I was a pure pencil artist. Only the feeling of graphite scratching on paper would give me the inspiration to design. Once a drawing was finished, I scanned it into the computer and then sent it off for feedback. If anything needed to be revised, the mechanical pencil came out and the process started all over again. That process produces A LOT of paper, as the boxes of drawings I have can attest.

With 2011 winding down, and the new Iron Kingdoms Role-Playing game rapidly coming together, I’ve been thinking about my own involvement with the Iron Kingdoms over the years. I’ve been playing tabletop games, mostly RPGs, for almost twenty years, although I first came to the Iron Kingdoms as a WARMACHINE player in early 2006. The setting immediately hooked me, particularly the harsh realm of the Khadorans, and as soon as I became aware that there was a whole library of Iron Kingdoms RPG books, I quickly set about tracking them down and devouring them (in the literary sense).

It’s Christmas time, and again we must wrack our brains to figure out what to get our friends and family. My family and friends can be very difficult to shop for, and some usually ask for a painted mini from me anyway. They’d rather have something personal that represents my interests, something I put the time and effort into making. It’s great to give someone a mini they can admire throughout the year, but I think it’s also nice to paint the mini with a holiday theme and turn it into an ornament!

A long time ago, at a local game store sorta far away from here, a group of gamers were in a holiday mood and came up with silly verses to a popular Christmas carol. Sadly, none of those verses were committed to paper and were presumed lost to the sands of time.