Winner Announcement

Sorry it has taken a little longer than anticipated to decide on the winner of the "Name that Diorama" contest.
I decided to pass the decision to the person for whom the diorama was created and painted, and they had their work cut out with around 50 entries.

Thank you all so much for you input. There were humorous, snappy, poetic, descriptive and one or two left-field ones too. Many of them made you look at the scene from different perspectives, and the winner gives a slightly ambiguous view of the scene too, which invites you to look at the scene and decide who the title refers to.

So, the chosen entry is from Ray Miller with "The Berserker at the Bridge"

Ray gets the choice of a painted Survivor or Monster from the game, so congratulations indeed, Ray! :)

I had a personal favourite from the rather poetic Miguel Sanchez with "We passed the bridge of broken faces, we passed the stillborn sun". I'm sure that I can come up with a prize for Miguel too, not least for the sheer number of entries that he thought up!

Cheers again, and here's another look at the diorama, The Berserker at the Bridge ^_^

January busy-ness

Well, it's been a few weeks - 6 I think! - since I last posted here. I've been pretty busy with mini-updates on Facebook, mostly showing the progress on the Kingdom Death diorama that I was working on. I was also showing the progress of my own Kingdom Death:Monster character pieces which I have been working on in between commissions - just quick tabletop stuff - and I squeezed out a Hasslefree Xmas special for fun too. I had hoped to get a couple more seasonal minis done, but the diorama was the priority as it was a commission piece.

In the mean time the Facebook following passed 1000 "likes", which is just awesome! It's been 2 years almost to the day since I first started this blog up and the audience just seems to keep growing and growing. I'm amazed that so many worldwide are checking up on me and my toys! lol :)

I held a competition/giveaway when the blog reached 500 likes, so I think that I shall run another as a thank you for reaching 1000. Check out lower down what I have in mind and what I propose as a prize.

So, as a recap, this is what I've got done since the last post...

Kingdom Death:Monster

Like I said, I've been doing these in between commissions, or as little colour or texture studies - I am getting more into working textures into my paint jobs now. It's quite a nice challenge at this scale to make it believable too. So, so far I have completed two of the starting survivors - Allister & Zachary - who have each had no more than about 5 hours total paint time...

Zachary

 Allister

Then I have done the White Lion and the Butcher, which are the first two adversaries that you are likely to face in the game...

White Lion

Butcher

The lion was great fun working in that fur effect. You can kind of cheat with the blending by first airbrushing on a rough light and shade, then "scratching" on hundreds of tiny fur lines with a brush in ever lighter colours from a khaki tan start up to pure ivory.
The Butcher was more conventional painting, though I airbrushed in the reddish base colour to the majority of the model.
Both of these also had about 5 hours total paint time too. I've yet to decide what to do for basing on these two. I'm not sure whether or not to press mould something like the base from the Lion Knight (more on Lion Knights later in this post!), or just airbrush on a skull stencil. Whatever I do, I shall try to follow that through with the rest of the monsters - though the Phoenix may need something more substantial...

Xmas Mini, Paige

I've had this mini for a couple of years and felt she was long overdue a paint job. The unboxing idea just made perfect sense to me too and solved a potentially tricky basing dilemma. Again, she was a very quick and simple paint job, purely for the fun of it. So often I reach for a Hasslefree mini when I just want to have fun. It is the relatively uncluttered style that Kev gets into most of his sculpts that allow you to do as much or as little as you want, but the model will still look great. I have loads of them in the cabinet where I've just had an idea in my head and then rocked it out in a single session.

THE KD Diorama

This has been a learning journey about myself and painting projects. As a whole, I don't like being tied down to a single subject for too long. Even when I'm knocking out these survivor models, I am usually doing different colour combinations or working between wet palettes or well palettes, sometimes wet on wet blending, sometimes glazing and layering. In order to get through this piece without my head exploding I had to kind of treat it as individual projects. I needed to limit the colours in use throughout so that the end result didn't look like an explosive fart in a Skittles factory, but I wanted to paint the base and each model largely independently.
The base was planned and built largely to the client's brief, though I decided to add the rope bridge just because that was the idea that I had in my head. The idea of dismembered corpses and people turning to skeletons in the KD world is not that much of a stretch, but I did want to convey that (most of) the protagonists in the scene still found it pretty frightening. Each of the sculpts had their own characters and features to push out, but the faces for all were a joy to paint. In the end I'm quite pleased with the final look. There's lots of tea leaves in there, kebab skewers, coffee stirrers and tinfoil too! This hobby is nothing but thrifty at times! ^_^



January has already seen me on the way to completing 3 miniatures. The first is the Zachary model above, but the other two are for Paranoid Miniatures' Mythos Game in preparation for their Kickstarter and for their presence at this year's Salute. I can't show the models just yet, nor the art, as the client hasn't previewed them themselves yet. I'll be sure to show them when I get clearance though. I did the Sea Queen model for them last year, which proved quite popular. There will be 5 that I should be getting done by April for them.

I have a good few months of commissions ahead of me, not least because several people have asked me to work on their KD:M starting models & monsters, plus a few pinups too. I also have some different scaled work to come hopefully, which should be interesting.
In between, I also have the monstrous Lion Knight (1st) to do for a friend. I've built the base and model and got it all primed. I need to decide on the colour scheme still. I have thought that I may do the cloud of faces something similar to my Y'Sala & the Darkness piece from about 5 years ago, but we'll see. Speaking of that particular piece, there is a chance that I may be revisiting it later this year too. That is exciting for me! ^_^

So. That's me up to date...

Oh, wait. The 1000 likes competition. I so very nearly forgot ;)

The last giveaway was stuff from the grey pile. I should think that I can go one better this time. I have enough of Kingdom Death's plastic crack around the house that I really ought to go one better.

How about I give away a fully painted unique miniature for the game? The winner can choose either a custom survivor or a monster - I have several spare armour sets and monsters so there will be plenty of choice.

How do you win? Well, the diorama above has stumped me for a name. I can't decide what to call it, and neither can the client. So, I'm asking you, the reader, to think of a name. "Simple" as that!

What I need is a name either here or in the comment section attached to the original Facebook post. It can be a short couple of words or a sentence, and in English please.

I will choose the winner during the week commencing 18th January and will announce later on that week.
The painted miniature will be fitted in amongst the schedule, but I will try to get it done asap. It will come on a "basic" gaming base rather than a plinth.

Good luck everyone and thanks for all of your support!

Scott ^_^

At first I was afraid...

If you follow my Facebook feed or G+ presence you'll know I've not been idle the last 5 weeks. Far from it in fact - though I did need to take a few days off after a misunderstanding between my painting hand and a hob plate. All is fine now, and I've been pretty busy working in several different directions at once. I'm not convinced that this is the best, or most productive way of working, but it's a method that I'm going to have to get used to if I want to ever paint any of my own toys in the near future. I currently have a "promise" list of people waiting for me to decorate their toys, which is great - it's always good to be busy - but I have got to temper and balance it with wanting to do things for me.
With increased demand for my services I also came to a pragmatic decision that most of my grey pile wasn't going to get painted any time soon, so just about everything Games Workshop related that I owned was shipped off via Ebay and private sales. That provided a bit of a distraction from productivity, but also encouraged me to rearrange the man cave and put lots of stuff away, which I always finds helps my productive brain to function.
Another factor for the clear out was the eventual arrival of the huge black monolith that is Kingdom Death: Monster. I was at first just overwhelmed by the sheer number of toys in the boxes. Panic set in. How was I ever going to even make a start on them all!? It didn't help that I had made a start on a diorama involving 3 Kingdom Death models either, so I was slightly apprehensive of the job there. So when faced with 3 models, the prospect of painting more like 70 odd just made me freeze!

Time to put thoughts and plans in order. First get properly started on the diorama. So lets get to pictures...
The diorama involves the Thief sculpt, the Fighter sculpt and the Ammo Slave sculpt. The construction brief is that they are a band of adventurers on a trail beside a bog/marsh towards some upcoming peril. I thought that the recurring themes in Kingdom Death of faces, hands and lanterns needed to be represented. Lanterns are easy enough. The faces I needed to sprinkle around the ground and stones, again not too difficult. There are several grasping hands reaching out of the ground in the Thief's sculpt, so I spread them around and added one or two to the edge of the bog. To add to the trail feel, and create a bit of interest, I decided to build a rope bridge. Never done it before, but it has actually been quite a fun challenge.
This is the base so far...

I've added some corpse and skeleton debris and there's still plenty to add, like soil texture, scrubby grass and some water effect puddles, but it's taking shape.

For the models, the Ammo Slave is almost complete. I shall add pigments when she is on the base, and probably a couple of blood effects here and there...

I have just started on the Fighter sculpt...

The hair will be a totally different colour in the end, I just blocked in some tones to work over the top of.

I haven't begun work on the Thief yet, other than assembly and priming.

The priming part brings me to what else I've got up to, and that is to make a start on the pile of minis associated with Monster and figuring out how to paint them fast and not too dirty! I emptied out the first sprue of plastic, containing the 4 starting survivors, White Lion and Butcher models.
These were assembled, cleaned, filled and primed, ready for paint...

In the priming process, I then added some atmospheric preshading (you can see some parts from the diorama here too, and the Thief with her umbrella).

After that I worked on my favourite of the survivor sculpts, Allister. I wanted to paint him fast, but get a detail in that I find important to the mythos of Kingdom Death, which is the inky eyes that the people have when they "awaken" in the world. It probably made the painting slightly easier that I didn't have to paint in tiny eyes too. Anyway this is the result of about 4 hours of painting...

He needs a base, but I've batch primed a whole load of bases for the models, so he'll likely get it when they're all done, or I'll change my mind and do a load of them just because! lol

I'll try not to take 5 weeks before my next update... Sorry! ^_^