Now that Christmas has passed and all presents have been given, I am liberty to post them in the world.
A local shop started selling these nice-but-plain-looking wooden boxes, you see. And as I’ve got a bit of a black and silver paint thing going on at the moment, I thought it might be quite effective to paint them up in such colours, especially as a very dear friend had a significant birthday approaching, and I couldn’t afford to get her anything exciting. And so, came the first box*:
I was really pleased with the effect, so I did another one as a Christmas present, this time on a tentacle theme for a friend of the Lovecraftian persuasion:
But the one that took me the longest, and of which I am now most proud was one I made for a friend who’s been there for me a lot over the last few years and who watches Game of Thrones with me (her husband has, too, if he’s reading, but after I made this I didn’t have time to make one for him and so got him Darth Vader chocolate/ice cube moulds instead):
When I first started this I really had no comprehension of the work it would involve, but I am nonetheless pleased with the results. You can see here the sigils of the houses of the contenders for the Iron Throne: Lannister (lion) and Stark (dire wolf) fight it out on the front, embodying more typical coat of arms poses; Baratheon (the stag) is on the side, to the right hand of the Starks, sheltering under a weirwood tree; on the back is the kraken of house Greyjoy, its tentacles sprawling with the branches of the tree onto the top; coming from the back round onto the side is the three-headed dragon of the Targaryens, with the flowers of the Tyrells just edging up the side.
Anyway, once I was finished I wanted it for myself, which I think is always a sign of a good present.
*Please excuse the poor camera skills throughout. It said it was running out of battery, so I rather rushed things… now suspect if may have been lying.
In Search of the Happiness Max 
These are so great!
Thanks! I really enjoyed making them. I’d forgotten how much I like doing 3D painting – it was nice to stretch my artistic muslces again 😀
Really nice. I like the style.
Thanks! I’m glad you like. It was good to challenge myself again – especially with the Game of Thrones one. I’ve never painted a lion, a wolf, a stag, or a kraken before. Naturally, I spent most of my childhood drawing and painting dragons, so I did that one first and grossly under-estimated how easy it would be to do the rest. But even though it was really frustrating, at times, it was still easier than I thought it would be, and it was fun to try out a more stylised, heraldic style.