Cramming another in...

Well. Work for the year is nearly over, and soon it will be time to switch off the alarm clock and hope that the little one sleep beyond 6.30am! I am fully looking forward to some high quality family time, some nice food and drink, and hopefully to catch up/chill with some friends too.
Ideally I would like to do a bit of a 12 month summary between now and New Year, but more of that when it happens ;)

Before all that I have some recent progress to show, and also a look at what I have got planned to put together and paint between now and the spring, when I come out of the cave for my first planned show of 2015, which is Salute.

First up, the Kingdom Death Visionaries vignette is finished and photographed. I've named it "Onwards and Upwards", which is partly reference to the story in the piece of the boy leading the girl forwards towards the eerie green light, and most likely their doom. It is probably also a bit of a point to myself to look positively to 2015.

Here are some finished shots...

I'm pretty pleased with the final look of this piece as a whole. I've kind of deliberately left some of the brushwork a little "loose" at times, and then sharpened the more important details, and I'm particularly pleased with the warmer glow of the two lanterns. All in all it just about looks like what I intended in my head, so it's all good!

You can see a few more views in the Putty & Paint page - LINKY - and there's a big montage on Coolminiornot too - LINKY 2


The other Kingdom Death piece that has been on the desk is the Lion God, who has so far still only been worked on with the airbrush. I've enjoyed messing around with consistencies to create glazes, particularly with inks. I am quite looking forward to getting the actual brush onto him, but doing so much with the airbrush sees so much more progress, and should hopefully mean that I'll have just the detailing, final highlights and shades, plus maybe adding some additional points of interest. Whatever I do, this is a superb (and of course weird) sculpt to paint...

I may or may not keep working on him exclusively in the short term, but I've been rummaging in the box of unpainted toys and decided on the next two that I shall definitely work on. In an odd coincidence it appears that I've gone for two randomly apostrophe strewn sculpts in M'Dusa - a soon to be released Seb Archer sculpt for Twisted Games that I was given at Salute this year; and Shido'ni - a one-off sculpt by Christian Hardy...

Both should be reasonably challenging "technical" paint jobs, because both have plenty of really intricate details.
M'Dusa I've not decided on a scheme yet, but I'm thinking of a luxuriant red or purple in there somewhere. Shido'ni will be more sandy colours, I think. I will also probably look at putting goggle marks on her face, as she is carrying a set in her hand. O-O

After these two, I have 3 pieces in mind that I am quite excited about. All 3 are slightly larger scale and fairly different too.
The first is a very different take on a Wood Elf, by Carmine Giugliano...

You can see more views here - LINKY

The next is Sergeant Blackart's Kate...

More on her HERE

And finally, Blacksmith Miniatures' Clio & Erato piece, which I am particularly looking forward to, plus they are running a Facebook competition for painted versions of them, so I've tagged onto that too...

Find them here - LINKY

That's about all for this instalment, other than to say to keep an eye out for FIGURE PAINTER MAGAZINE's next release in the next few days, as there is an interview with yours truly. Oh, and look out for the next Kingdom Death news letter (and their gallery page), as I think that there may be another pinup article (or two, or three!!)

So, for now, Happy Time Off Time! I'm gonna go practice my sleeping ready for next week! ^_^

Slow steps towards 2015...

Hopefully this won't be my last episode before the time of turkey, toys and alcohol, but if it is... Happy Christmas and all that. Hope that you get lots of lovely stuff and get lovely and stuffed too! ^_^

I suspect that this year won't be bringing me any mini related stuff, but I'm happy with that because I'm sure that I have too much as it is! That said though, a recent visit to IKEA led me to eye spy some new display cabinets to rival the classic Detolf, all glass ones. The new ones are called Nornas, I've linked the single one, but there is also a double and some smaller wall box type ones. I feel some home improvements coming on!

In terms of minis, I've been a little off course just lately. Various illnesses for the family and myself have left me tired, the current season of Walking Dead had its mid-run finale (too much drama), Xmas shopping and so on, have all kept me away from the table or dampened the enthusiasm a touch. Oh, and I've taken up pilates too, cos I'm fed up with getting stupid back, hip and shoulder niggles all of the time...

As a result, I've obviously not made all that much progress. The Lion God hasn't moved on at all, so there's nothing to show there. The Visionaries vignette I was hoping to have complete by now has progressed, but there's a good few hours to go with it yet...

What I can also now show though is another of the Kingdom Death Pinups that I did a few months back with its accompanying article. This was perhaps the most recognisable of KD's models, the Twilight Knight Pinup (aka Alison)...

 

The article can be found here - LINKY 1

And further images can be found in my P&P gallery - LINKY 2 - and my CMON gallery too - LINKY 3

She was great fun to paint, and I went a little extra blingy with the remodelled sword that comes with the plastic version (it matches the Twilight sword of the male sculpt). I've painted her in the past too as a larger sculpt, so she was fun to revisit and see what progress I may have made...

Other than that, I've just completed an interview for Figure Painter Magazine, so keep an eye out for that, though I'm sure I'll mention it again when it comes out! ^o^

So, for now, keep warm, enjoy the works xmas parties, the booze and the food binges.

Cheers!

Where do we glow from here...?

Hi all.

I'm not sure whether I've made lots of progress or not much at all since my last post. The two Kingdom Death pieces that I showed in the last post both have paint on them, that much I can confirm, but I'm not sure whether I've given myself a massive workload to each piece, or made them somehow simpler.
Dealing with each piece individually, I'll start with the Lion God model. I hummed and harred about converting it and also how I would paint it. In the end I've not converted it virtually at all, barring a minor tweak of the face position, which allowed me to get on with priming it.
The colour scheme though was what I needed to decide next, and this essentially hinged on whether the pile of lanterns that he stands upon were to be alight or not...
I've decided that they will. This will make for a rather more complicated paint job, as I will need to work out which parts of the pile create a glow against his underside and go from there. There will then need to be a cold, kind of moonlit contrasting look to the top of him. Should be interesting...
I don't have any new photos though, as it's basically a more grey looking grey than the last set of photos! lol

The Visonaries vignette in comparison has moved on quite a lot more. The size of both this piece and the Lion God has led me to use the airbrush quite extensively up to this point, and in the case of this vignette has given me the opportunity to play with light effects which I shall end up pretty much copying into the Lion God.
In this case I wanted to get two very contrasting light effects into the piece while applying an overall gloomy, twilight kind of feel to the scene. To this end I wanted to make the female Visionary's lighting to be predominantly made up from the flaming skull lantern in her hand, with any areas not lit like this to be cool and subdued.
For the male Visionary, I want him to appear in the scene to be leading the pair of them towards some eerie light in the distance, so a green kind of glow is suffusing the other side of the vignette.

First of all I airbrushed the earth and stone tones of the scenery with just a bit of neutral highlighting where I expected light to fall...

 

Next I worked in some blueish shading wherever required, picked out the "global" highlight of a pale blue grey colour and added in the green and fiery source lighting (once I had stood both of the models back into the scene...

 

Up to this point I haven't touched the piece with a paintbrush, so I was quite pleased with what I had managed to create in terms of the various textures in the base and the different light effects. All of this was done with Tamiya paints by the way.

Now it is time to get the brushes out and I couldn't resist starting with the female Visionary's shield, which is just superb. I should add at this point that I think that the sculpting of both of these by JAG is just fantastic. I've mentioned in the past that his sculpting of the starting survivors for Monster are fantastic and characterful, and these two are equally as impressive.

The shield in the scene isn't getting any source lighting to the front of it, so I used a slightly warm grey (VMC Medium grey and VMC Panzer Aces Splinter Base) to highlight, and then I used Scale colour inks - blue, violet, green and red - to varying degrees to add a bit of interest to the shading of the shield...

 

 

At this stage I used some of the inks to start colouring in the cloak on both sides. I need to matt this down to see if it is any good, because the shine is horrendous at the moment!

A slightly shorter update than usual perhaps, but I've been tucked into the Walking Dead and the Leftovers in the last few weeks too, so table time has been less, plus I've been so busy with work that surfing the hobby forums, blogs and sites has been diminished somewhat too.

Oh, one other thing. Lady Grimdark picked up a win in the WAMP Synthesis competition.
I haven't entered any online contests for a while now - I used to regularly enter them on Wamp, and there is always a good competition going on there - so it was nice to place. It was a "just for fun" competition too, and Lady G was always a fun piece anyway, so all in all very pleased. ^_^

Until next time, cheers all!