Teacher's Pet

I've been a bit quiet again, sorry.

This has partly been because the progress on the Poppy's Angels charity piece has taken time to keep tweaking the skin tones and smooth things out. It is surprising how much you need to alter your technique when working on larger scale. I want to do a bit more tidying up before I next show her, especially after seeing Bohun's recent jaw dropper! LINK

The other reason is that I have been preparing for a class that I shall be holding this weekend. I haven't taught for a couple of years now, so it's quite exciting, and I've managed to sort it that the class is being held in my own home town, which is a real bonus, especially as I know where the pubs are that sell the beer that I like! ^_^
The class came about as part of a Kickstarter by Wamp where they launched a new paintbrush line. For some reason it was thought that I would be useful in helping people actually use their new brushes! lol
The course is happening over two days of the weekend, with myself teaching on the Saturday, and my friend John Keys, aka Megazord Man.

I managed to get those wonderful Blacks & Whites of Hasslefree Miniatures to help out with the subject matter, which on this occasion is the relatively new release, Steampunk Boudi.

She's a lovely little sculpt (emphasis on little. I forget how tiny and delicate, yet characterful Kev's sculpts are), and I spent a couple of evenings this week preparing an example piece for the class to look at. The sculpt is based on the wonderful concept art of one of my favourite pinup artists, Matt Dixon

She was great fun to paint, and hopefully the students will enjoy working on her too. I had to spend a while getting their minis ready, and now I have a mini legion of tiny Boudis!

I shall very much look forward to showing off some images of what the students themselves managed during the class, so that gives me a subject for the next post straight away!

Enjoy your bank holiday! ^_^

A One-Off...

In my last update I showed the early stages of my piece for the Poppy's Angels Super Raffle.

To remind you, you can buy tickets for this raffle at the Poppy's Angel Go Fund Me page - HERE

As I understand it, for each £2 donated you get a ticket. Make sure that you add a comment with your donation saying "Super Raffle". If, of course you, just want to donate, then leave the comment section blank.

Since that last update I haven't made huge strides because I've been painting walls and building furniture. Our little man had outgrown his bed which started out as a cot 3 years ago, and his bedroom was ready to be changed from the nursery look that we created for it when we moved in. He is pirate crazy so we've had a wall papered in a really cool pirate map pattern and he's now got a single bed that he looks tiny in! Still a fair bit of finishing off to do, but his little face was a picture when he saw the room so far ^_^

What I have done is get the conversion work finished off on the Poppy's piece, get it all primed, and begun work on the scenery part. I'm glad that I got the chair all painted because the fragility of the sculpt is ridiculous! lol
The drip/lantern stand obviously needs to be set so that the post is upright and the drip itself is hanging correctly, but I just slipped it into place for the photo...

The fabric still needs some blending and texturing, plus I need to follow it on with the bit around her neck. I shall most likely do a similar, but darker tone for her underwear and stocking tops.
The colour of glow for the drip/lantern is as yet undecided, but I shall create a bit of source lighting with it accordingly.

I am very pleased to now be able to reveal that this piece has its own unique concept art too. Having already built the model, I contacted Kingdom Death's main concept artist, Lokman Lam, about the piece and he was happy to revise the original concept to match what I had done. With the blessing of Kingdom Death I shall be printing off an art card to accompany the piece, making it a true one-off original just for this event...

How cool is that?! ^_^

Got to be worth a couple of quid, wouldn't you say?! Here's that link again... LINK

My only other news right now is that I have done a Q&A on the Noobs and their Paintbrush blog, which you can find here - NOOBS & THEIR PAINTBRUSH - it's a little insight into me and my thoughts about painting.

Until the next update...

Cheers,

Scott

A moment in time...

I posted that last Friday on Facebook I woke up to find that all 5 of my latest entries onto the Coolminiornot gallery made it to the "Best of the Week" page, with 4 of them actually occupying 4 of the top 5 spots at that moment...

I commented at the time that it wouldn't stay like that, but nearly a full week on and all 5 are still there (albeit with lower scores than on this picture, but nonetheless), which gives me a lovely boost, especially after some of the sniper fun I have had in recent times on CMON.

The 4 pieces in the image are the 2 finished Ilyad barbarians, plus the group of Kingdom Death Pinups and Clio & Erato. The fifth piece was the Hasslefree Lt. Thoran mini which I finished a little while back, but just hadn't got around to final photos.

Speaking of photos, I reckon I've got enough done of late to start a gallery on here, so keep an eye on the menu on the right of the page for that to be added soon. :)

There are links for each of the 5 pieces below. The Putty & Paint links also include larger images of each of the Kingdom Death girls, some of which haven't previously been shown.

Vorag Champion - CMON link - http://www.coolminiornot.com/383488
                                         - P&P link - http://www.puttyandpaint.com/projects/7737

Virago - CMON link - http://www.coolminiornot.com/383489
                 - P&P link - http://www.puttyandpaint.com/projects/7738

Pinups of Death - CMON link - http://www.coolminiornot.com/383496
                         - P&P link - http://www.puttyandpaint.com/projects/7742

Clio & Erato - CMON link - http://www.coolminiornot.com/383495
                                - P&P link - http://www.coolminiornot.com/383495

Lt. Thoran - CMON link - http://www.coolminiornot.com/383490
                           - P&P link - http://www.puttyandpaint.com/projects/7739

Big thank you must go out to Julien at Blacksmith Miniatures also, because I placed second in their Clio & Erato painting competition and received a piece of original Veneri Blu art work plus a copy of their latest model, Mahe le Marin...

 
   

The art work is up on my inspirations board, whilst the pirate gobbo type will most likely be my first dedicated model for my little boy, who is currently pirate mad! :)

What was going to be a short post is now getting big! Onto what I'm doing now...

I still have the Nightmare Ram diorama on the desk, but it has lost steam lately, so I shall come back to it when I'm in the mood again.

I am also working on some KD pinups, but they aren't for show yet.

I then started on the JoeK Dragon Huntress model. I have a feeling that he has sold through on this model now (though I'm sure that she is in stock in a few stores if you look around), and I know that she is one that he has mixed feelings over, partly to do with the original sculpt's head...

I wasn't keen on the head either, so I decided to do a little transplant, adding the KD Nico head instead, plus a little collar made from some Etch Master parts. I then started painting her and got this far (which I am quite happy with I might add!)...

She is absolutely tiny, and I have to be extremely careful with the spear thing that she has, as the resin is quite brittle, but beautifully detailed. I'm thinking of doing her in a kind of Chinese/Japanese styled outfit, seeing as the new head has a kind of oriental look about her and the dragon head is also kind of like the dragons in some oriental art too.

However... I recently started to see a lot of mention of a particular page on Facebook called Poppy's Angels.
 This page has been set up to support a family whose daughter, Poppy is suffering from cancer. The dad, Paul is a member of the mini community and several painters, sculptors and mini companies are donating their wares to the cause. The guys running the group are then planning shortly to raffle (and auction too, I think?) the models and games that have been sent in. There are already some mind blowing contributions, including a special one-off bust by probably the top guy around right now, Kirill Kanaev (aka Yellow One) and of course those good eggs at Painting Buddha too, to name just two.
I felt that it wasn't just enough to click "like" and move on, as is too easy to do when you're browsing along. I have my little boy, who is my greatest blessing in life. He has had his own share of health scares, but I simply couldn't imagine the kind of gut wrenching fear that this family go through on a daily basis. I also felt that a donation, click and move on wasn't enough either. I had to get involved. Cancer is a word that resonates strongly in my family currently, and I wanted to do something that would pick up a little of what someone with cancer may have to go through.

To this end, I had a look through what I had in my pile, and a strong idea hit me. The piece below is a conversion of the piece "Distracted" from Kingdom Death. I have left the hair off for obvious reasons, she also has a scar across her breast and the part which was originally a lantern is now an IV drip. I've not yet decided exactly what the books will contain, other than it might make sense that they were some kind of family photo album. There is all kinds of symbolism that could be added, but for now this is pretty much as far as I've got. It is kind of ironic that the original piece is called distracted, as that is exactly what has happened - I've been distracted from all other works until this is done. At the bottom of the post is a link to the Poppy's Angels Go Fund Me page. You can buy tickets for the raffle to possibly own this or any of the other donations, or just to give. I hope that you do, and I shall keep you all posted on how this goes...

Thanks in advance if you do join in and I hope to have some exciting news with the next post too.

Cheers ^_^

The link - http://www.gofundme.com/vd57g8s