Painting The Stark Sworn Swords Miniatures from A Song of Ice and Fire

Over the last couple of years I have started to try my hand at painting miniatures.  I have to say that what I thought was going to be daunting has become a very enjoyable hobby.   Painting takes so much concentration and yet when you finish a model there is always a great satisfaction in seeing the final product.

There are some master painters out there and I can say I am not one of them.  However I so appreciate all the YouTube videos and tutorials available that give inspiration or even instruction on how to paint.  I just picked up some new miniatures to paint and thought I would document what I did both to help me remember what I did and to help give back to any painters looking for some ideas.  

The miniatures I am showing come from the game called A Song of Ice and Fire by CMON.  It is a game set in the Game of Thrones universe.   There are a lot of miniatures in the game and I decided to start painting the Starks faction.  The starter set for the Starks has a lot of minis just in the starter set so the first one I am trying are the Stark Sworn Swords.   

Here is my try at painting the Stark Sworn Sword minis from this starter set.  This is a game of armies so many of the minis of the sworn swords are very similar, but I will show a couple of the different models available for these Stark Sworn Swords.   Shown also is my very first try at basing miniatures.   

Priming the Stark Sworn Swords

Painting A Sworn Sword Soldier

Painting A Sworn Sword Bannerman

Painting A Sworn Sword Captain

Basing the Miniatures and Movement Tray

Astrophotography: The Elephant's Trunk Nebula (IC1396A)

The latest area of space that I tried to capture with my telescope is called the "Elephant's Trunk Nebula."   In the picture will see what looks like a darker sections that resemble an elephant trunk.  Why does it look like this?

Imagine a concentrated area of gas in space and near all that gas is a massive star.  The star ionizes that gas and that means we can see that all that gas glowing in the area.  Now within that cloud of gas there are pockets of more gas that is super dense.   These areas are so dense that even the nearby powerful star cannot penetrate to ionize the gas.  That means some of the gas will not appear to be glowing and will instead be dark.  The fun part is that that dense area of gas that is protected from ionization forms the shape of an "elephant trunk."

 You can easily see this area of gas that is glowing from the largest star in picture.  Right in the middle is a shape that resembles an elephant's trunk.  That is an area where the gas is so dense that it is protected from ionization.  Due to the shape of this dense gas it is commonly called the Elephant's Trunk Nebula.

The picture can also be be found on Astobin.

I took this picture in my backyard and was one of the first times I got to use a light filter called the Optolong L-eXtreme.  I was pretty happy with my first use as I do not normally catch as much of the red nebula color like this with only 3 hours of exposure.

The acquisition  details for this image were:

The beauty of our heavens never ceases to amaze.  Wishing you all clear skies!