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! ^_^

Trick or Treat...

This update is quite a straight forward one. I finished the Halloween Twilight Knight well in advance of the actual date. The motivation to do this is two fold. The first is that I'm still waiting for the delivery of my copy of Monster, so my distractions have been reduced somewhat. The other is that I am beginning what I hope will be a really cool storytelling piece involving 3 Kingdom Death models which I don't already own (shocking as that is! lol). I'll tell more on that when I've got things mapped out, and work is underway.

So, back to the finished article...

She's also up on my galleries - Coolminiornot Link and Putty & Paint Link

And that's about it today. Though if anyone spots my big box of toys that are stuck between Germany and my house, please be nice and send it on to me!

Cheers! ^_^

Euromilitaire, at season's end...

It's October, and for me that means that I retreat to the man cave and wait out the winter, ready for Salute next year. In fairness there are absolutely loads of shows that I could attend, like Scale Model Challenge, Monte San Savino & Hussar, but finances, day job and family time just don't allow for me to disappear for 3 or 4 days right now.
I keep saying to myself that I'll go to some of these shows next year, but "next" always seems to stay one away from the actual next one! :)

So, my last show of the year was Euromilitaire, and it was a great weekend for me. My wife and I headed down to Folkestone at a leisurely pace on the Saturday morning, and I popped my entries in to the competition. The Fantasy category this year was absolutely HUGE! So much so that I had to re-organise the shelves to get my entries on and create enough space for others to do so too. Fortunately I am lucky enough to be a judge at the show, so I was allowed to do this (very carefully), as the adjoining shelves for the next category at the show (there are over 30 categories, by the way) were swamped with pieces.
The judges of the Fantasy category really had their work cut out for them, to the point that they were still deliberating over final placings a good hour AFTER the best of show had been decided!
The Euromilitaire website - LINK - gives a quick insight to the weekend, but I (as always) didn't get virtually any photos, I'll here's a link to a good gallery from Kyle Kruickshank aka Mr Lee - HERE -
there's a few of my own minis in there, but there's also plenty of rather lovely minis in there that had me gasping at times.

I decided after a little cajoling to enter 8 pieces this year, far more than I have ever done before, but I feel that I've been relatively prolific this past 12 months or so, so it was worth a punt. The result? 8 entries, 8 medals!! 2 silvers (M'Dusa and Kassandra), 2 bronzes (Steampunk Boudi and Virago), 3 Highly Commended (Clio & Erato, Dragon Huntress and Gandalf) and a Commended (Shido'ni). I'm still hunting that Gold medal, but I'm getting closer, and to get my overall standard up to a level where every piece is considered prize worthy... Wow! Happy days! :)
I drove home having competed, judged 2 categories, shopped just a little, caught up with some friends old and new, ate well, drank well, slept well and at the end felt pretty encouraged by it all.
Overall, the show seemed to be a much happier place this year. The attendance was up, the competition entries were well up, there didn't appear to be much controversy over winners and losers, and the sun shone for the whole show too! I'm already booked to be back next year...

So. Euro in the bag, like I said at the beginning, I shall now retreat to the cave and tinker away until the days start getting longer again.
I've been pretty motivated since the show to get some pieces finished off, first was the Poppy's Angels piece, "Of Saints & Angels" which I've been showing here. I have already posted her up on Putty & Paint - LINK - and she was "Editor's Choice" on the front page for a few days, which was great, mostly for the positive input for the charity involved, but also on a personal level. The raffle draw is being held today (October 2nd), so good luck to those who have entered, and thanks for donating too, as you've contributed to a great cause. On an extra positive note, Poppy herself has very recently completed all of her cancer treatments and been declared "free of cancer". Such good news, and hopefully she and her family can look forward to putting the awful past 12 months behind them. The Poppy's Angels group will continue though, with the intention to keep supporting families with child cancer. Good effort! :)

I also have been working slowly through the second collection of Kingdom Death Pinups over the past year, with the Phoenix Dancer and Lioness done and in my galleries (click on the names for links), more recently I completed the Sunstalker Dancer, but haven't shown her. This week I also completed the Leather Queen. I've followed the Lokman Lam concept art again with them and these two are in the new plastic which the Kickstarter backers have been receiving since the beginning of September. The Leather Queen is a really unusual sculpt, and definitely not the easiest to make work, as the hair and leather are all intertwined. I kind of struggled with her, but I wanted to do her so that I could do another collective shot of the pinups when they were all complete. I'm very much looking forward to the next lot, though it will be a little while before I finish the gang due to commissions and other minis that are higher up my list. I've also not yet based these latest models, as I'm contemplating doing them all on a timber plinth or similar...
The Sunstalker Dancer was a little more straightforward, though the half green hair took a little bit of thinking so as to not make it look a part of the cloak - I seem to have done a lot of green hair recently!

I've had a commission come up just lately that I'm excited about getting my teeth into, and will show soon. But, while I wait for the models to arrive, I have decided that this year I would get some seasonal models done. I have more than one Xmas model, but I also have one specific Halloween sculpt that I picked up last year and felt obliged to get done this year, and that is (unsurprisingly) the Kingdom Death Halloween Twilight Knight. I am intending to do this as quickly as I can, not through lack of interest/motivation/similar, but because I want to get straight on with the commission when it hits. I also wanted to try out the Scale paints in the airbrush for the first time, and use the PK Pro masking putty that I've had, barely used, on the desk for ages now. This is the result of about an hour of airbrushing. The black is kind of complete, barring a bit of edge highlighting and picking out a couple of folds. The photos don't really pick that out too well, but I'm not worried right now as these are not "studio" shots, as such. The orange though is much nicer and very nearly complete. This will just leave the skin, hair, sword and detailing to do, which really shouldn't take me too long to complete. While I don't like to rely on the airbrush, this does take so much donkey work out of the painting, and gives fast and effective results, so I'm happy.

I shall get some new images in the galleries soon, as I have a couple of finished models to put up. But that's me for now. It's time to prepare for hibernation! ^_^

Last Dash

Euro Militaire is imminent, so it's time to finish off/tidy up pieces for the competition and for the judges' display case - a rare privilege that I always find a little intimidating when my little ladies get to rub shoulders with extravagant dioramas and large scale pieces done through the years by some of the other judging Illuminati! ^_^

For me this means getting the Dragon Huntress finished and have a check on the condition of a couple of other pieces done since last September that I intend on entering - likely M'Dusa and Virago, maybe one or two others.

The Dragon Huntress just needs a tidy here and there having completed the painting as such last night and fully assembled everything. She's been an unexpected project piece that I've thoroughly enjoyed having effectively had her on the desk for a whole year before deciding to finally get on with it! The last piece that went like this was the Agora "Cassandra" piece from a year or so ago. These are pieces that start out as an "I'll just have a laugh and paint this the way I feel like it" and end up being a proper display piece that I've ended up trying new techniques and pushed myself on with.
I know that I say that you ought to challenge yourself with every piece, but this is one of those surprises that rewards you with the (almost) final result.

Pics thus far...

There's a couple of fixes that I can see from the photos, and some matt varnishing here and there, plus I want to do some kind of plaque or name on the plinth, but she's mostly done.

The other piece that I'm trying to get over the line, though not for competition, and that is the Poppy's Angels piece which is similarly mostly painted now, but needs some fixes and the IV drip needs to be painted and attached...

Again this has been a project that I've challenged myself with some new stuff, and in a size comparison she is easily twice the size of the Dragon Huntress - I really ought to put a ruler or coin next to the dragon huntress to show how teeny she is!

I need to have her done very soon because the raffle draw is coming up at the beginning of October. You can still donate and get your tickets, so if you are interested, go to my previous post and click on the link there - HERE IS THE PLACE TO CLICK - thanks!

The next post should have a round up from Euro plus some news of what's next. Until then have fun, and if you're coming to Euro, say hi and mine's a bitter, ta ^_^