Hey,

For this week’s showcase I thought I’d show off one of my favourite minis.  He’s a bloodletter of Khorne from Games Workshop.  He’s also my highest scoring CMON mini, although if I’m honest I have some that I could have entered if I was inclined that I think could give it a run for its money.  meh.  Anyway, he’s converted from the basic plastic kit, most noteably he doesn’t have a cone head anymore, I sculpted his dorsal spikes to follow all the way over his head.  His skin is painted in a distinctive textured ‘striated’ way, and his tail was sculpted to balance out his reaching arm.

I hope you like him, he was a pleasure to work on,

James

Valkia the bloody, consort of khorne appeared in the latest incarnation of games workshop’s Warhammer Fantasy Battle Chaos Warriors army book. I was flicking through this book around the time of its release, and I spotted Valkia’s entry and the rather lovely art work that goes with it. It immediately piqued my interest, and I went away and started to sketch. I knew that I was interested in doing something large, after all she is the consort of the Chaos God himself, she has to stand out from the crowd right? So with that in mind I had a chat with the then manager of games workshop Cheltenham, and he very kindly allowed me to have the two inquisitor death cult assassin models that he happened to have lying around. They were about the right size for a 28 mm version of valkia, and I was very happy to base my model on them. Sadly, as often happens with my projects, I didn’t end up using a single component from either of those kits, however I hope you will agree that the thing I have come up with is rather more unique as a result. This is a poignant time to me, given that this project, completed almost a year ago today, marks the beginning of my interest in sculpting proper. There is a story here if you will bear with me.

Over the Christmas period, I had gone home to spend time with my family and had just returned to my caravan in Gloucester.  I was beginning to get settled in again, the fire was on, it was approximately 11:45 PM, and I was just winding down and getting ready to go to bed (I’m a night owl).  I put down my ill-fated conversion, in order to go and dig out my sculpting tools, and I heard a strange wooshing sound. I stopped for a minute and the world and, and listen hard. It’s not a sound I have heard in my caravan before. There are a cacophony of noises which encroach on my privacy in my little van, but nothing that sounded even remotely like this. Then it hits me. In sheer panic I ran through the kitchen and my worst fears were confirmed. I found myself in a rapidly rising pool of water. To cut a long story short, my pipes had frozen over the Christmas break (even my hot water tank had frozen solid), and they had warmed up when I had come home and turned the heating back on, which had caused them to expand and shear off. Now there was mains pressure water spurting from underneath my sink onto the floor of the caravan. Oh no! I had no idea what to do, I was just in blind panic. I tried to block the flow of water with towels, which was about as effective as trying to sculpt with boxing gloves. This could be a long story, and I will keep it short, the gist was, I ran out into the snow and got hold of an elderly neighbour (bless him) who came over and helped me to rig up a makeshift solution using my bath shower head adapters and a piece of hosepipe leading to the bath. My landlord wasn’t available until the following morning, and neither was a plumber, so I was left with the situation where I had to sit and watch water running from the broken pipe into the bath for at least the next 10 hours until my landlord or a plumber was able to join me and fix the situation. All the heating was off, and a thick layer of snow coated the ground outside, so you will understand that it was rather cold. Also, I had no electricity, I’m not much of a DIY expert, but I’m pretty sure that electricity and water don’t mix very well. A lot of my worldly possessions were rather damp at this point, as was I, so the only thing left to do was to wrap myself in a few dry blankets and shiver my way through the night. I had to keep myself awake though, and sculpting was at the least something that was waterproof, so I grabbed some wire and built my first armature. It then just snowballed from there, I was really learning as I went. As I said before, this is my first full sculpt, and I’m not exactly confident, and I wanted this to be an entry from Golden Demon, rather than just a test piece. You can see the final results here. She took an absolute age to finish, and there were many parts of her that I re-sculpt it and repainted a good few times. There is no doubt that she was the most ambitious project I had ever taken on at that point, and rather than give a convoluted account all of each of those things, I would point you to a forthcoming White dwarf article. Suffice to say, that this was my first full sculpt, my first attempt at using magic sculpt, my first time building and armature, my first time working with fimo, my first time working with scenic water, my first time working with pigment powders, my first time painting sheer cloth, my first time using an airbrush, one of my earliest attempts at using nonmetallic metals, the first time I had ever tried to scratch build a weapon, and the first time I had used the acetate printing method of making plaques. Whew! Okay, I know she isn’t perfect, and I wasn’t surprised that she didn’t win anything at Golden Demon, however because of all those things she remains one of the projects and about which I am most proud. I haven’t ever submitted her to cool mini or not in her painted state, partly because the sculpted version scored so poorly, and partly because it takes me an age to use photo shop to edit the image file upload. Anyway, I hope you like her, I would love to know what you think.

All the best,

James

It was a week before GD a dew months ago, and I decided I wanted to do a 40k squad and spend some more time with my airbrush.  Thus, the Tau Stealth Suits were decided on.  I wanted to do a monochrome piece, and decided to do so with just their lights and other flashy bits in colour.  I assembled the minis, and spent an age filling every last gap with putty, then I undercoated black.  I took black and white W&N inks and airbrushed them acros the models, black from underneath, white from above, and various shades of grey from the sides.  Then I got some dark blue underneath, touched up various parts with a small paintbrush, and shot them with a coat of satin varnish to seal the inks in.  I then re-undercoated all the shiny bits, the lights, dials, sensor arrays and so forth in black, and painted them all like gems, going from black to white.  What? Still no colour?  well now there is – I took the appropriately coloured ink and layered it over the gem to give it it’s distinctive rich colour.  Except for the orange lights, for them i used a tamiya paint, simply because it gave a better colour finish.  I got the airbrush out again at this point, lined all the minis up on their base and then sprayed the correct colour ink from where the light shined by removing that particular mini.  This helped tie the squad together.  This whole process had taken about 20 hours over the course of the week.  Now, nearing the deadline, I got the white oil paint out and started on the line highlights and the bright spots, blending any rough airbrushing, and mixing it with inks to highlight the reflected light from the sensor arrays and gun ports.  Apart from some quick basing, the minis were at this point complete, and I could take the trip to GDUK2009, ready to get a finalist pin, but not a trophy this year.  Doh!  aah well, bring on next year!  As ever, I’d love to know what you think, any feedback most appreciated before re-embarking on my quest for the slayer sword this year.

All the best,

James

ps.  I just can’t seem to satisfactorily photograph the colour reflecting from the armour, but if you click on the images it blows up into some (very) large ones to see the detail on.

pps.  Here is the CMON voting link if that’s something you care about

The official GW picture on CMON for voting too. Isn’t it interesting how much difference the photography makes!  One day I’ll take a satisfactory picture of one of the members of the team and upload that with a good background…One day…

The first moment I saw that the guys at GWHQ had come up with a bunch of pirate sculpts for the collectors range I knew that I had to get in on the action.  I painted for an evening or two on the human pirate of sartosa model, and lost my inspiration.  Luckily I got it back by pulling out my sculpting tools rather than my paint brushes, and started again with a few empire pieces and some milliput/greenstuff mix.  What you see below is the result.  He has proved himself to be a love/hate sort of piece, some people are full of praise for the posing and the painting, and others are pretty ambiguous.  Aah well, he was a blast to make and paint, I got to play with a whole bunch of plasticard, and freehand the wood on the horizontal planks.

Anyway, now I have some nice big clear pictures I thought I’d show him off properly

Any thoughts or feedback?

James

Definately the tallest base I’ve ever constructed!
As ever, [URL="http://www.coolminiornot.com/233600"]the CMON rating is here,[/URL]

All the very best,

James

Welcome to the third installment in my ‘Showcase’ Series.  In case you missed the others, the previous two projects are shown here and here.

I began my ‘Tharanduil’ project first thing after winning a couple of Golden Demons.  My motivation was different here, I wanted to produce something for my sister, as a wedding present.  I’ll still enter him, but that wasn’t my motivation as I designed his scheme and the base.  I wanted the base to be grand, and representative of the beauty of rivendell rather than a literal interpretation of it.  As such, several elements were worked into it, the waterfall, the cliff, the flowers, reids, pathway and the foliage.  I know this abstraction isn’t to everyone’s taste, but I hope that the overall effect will be appreciated.  I tried to go for a broadly autumnal approach. although this wasn’t religiously stuck to, and I replaced the weapons with more slimline versions.  Other points of note include the NMM scale armour, the freehand on the staff, and the olive wood plinth.  I hope you like the finished article!

James

So after the response from my previous ‘Showcase’ article, I have decided to crack on with putting up some of my favourite projects, both from me and when I’m done (well it is my blog!), from other people whose work I really respect and adore.

This week it’s time for the ‘Sentinel in Maintenance’ piece.  This is something that I assembled and painted rather on a whim.  I know that sounds odd, but I went into a Games Workshop store, the Cheltenham one to be precise, where this project now stands proudly in the cabinet, and just decided to go ahead.

I brought a sentinel, largely as I say, on a whim, and the imperial armour how to paint tanks book.  I got it home and read it over again and again as I tried to digest some of the awesome techniques that they were suggesting.  While the subtlty of the paint scheme is somewhat hidden in these pictures, I hope a flavour of the piece can be conveyed at least.  I began by cleaning up the components I would use, just building as I went along for fun.  No complex sketching of ideas, or complex positioning of minis in a diorama for this piece, just plain ignorant old brute force.  I cut the shape of the base out of plasticard and used off cuts to form supports inside the hollow base.  Then I picked up a Forgeworld salamander command vehicle kit that was sitting unpainted in a box, and again on a whim (which I’m rather glad paid off!), I cut the corner off the cabin part and recessed that into the base.  Lots of puttying and sanding later, and all I needed to do was to clean up the titan crewman and add detailing to the floor.  The texture would be added by the airbrush, so I didn’t worry about distressing it or anything at this point.

Then came the ‘nel itself.  I assembled it in sub-assemblies, and sprayed the interior.  This had cold blues and whites sprayed across it, to contrast with the exterior, and the controls were all reassembled from plasticard and painted along with the upholstery.  The death korps helmet on the seat is genuine, I took a death korps trooper and cut away his head until the helmet was hollow.  I know you can’t see that, but I know it’s done that way!

Once the interior was done, washed with black and brown oil paints, sponged with charandon granite and highlighted white,  It was time for the exterior.  I began by airbrushing it black, grey, pink and white and adding transfers with microsol and microset  The pink gave it a rather nice slightly warm tone which it turns out helped to make the tank look green when it was then washed with a brown burnt umber Windsor and Newton series one oil paint wash.  It also got red, purple and black washes in points, along with more charandon granite sponging.  Finally a highlight of Titanium white oil paint finished the panelling off.  This paint is the purest, most vibrant white paint I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with, and I love it, I’d highly recommend it.  The mini got a coat of purity seal or eight, and then I brush painted the metallics in citadel paints, with Vallejo metal medium highlights for that extra ‘zing’.  The re-worked roll cage came out really well here I thought, and with a few coats of ‘Tamiya clear’ paint (thank you Nigel Carman!), it looked kind of oily, like it’d just been rubbed down.  I like the effect, it is reminicient of a gun mechanisms, and I wanted that mechanical potential to really carry over into the vehicle.  It may be resting now, but you wouldn’t want to meet it on the battlefield!

Finally little details got painted, the techie got painted (the helmet is simply the undercoat with purple and blue oil paint washes – fantastic stuff, I love oils!), and then bar the singing and dancing (which involved more detail work and many a coat of purity seal/w&n matt varnish), he was ready to ship off to Golden Demon.    I had a bit of an accident at the event due to a bout of extreme idiocy when I tried to superglue the piece to it’s plinth so kindly supplied by Ben Jarvis, who you would have seen waving the slayer sword around on the stage later that day.  However, the damage wasnt terminal, and he got entered fine.  I truly thought I was in with a chance with this mini, in fact he was in my humble opinion, my best chance, but sadly the judges didn’t choose him to be among the final three, simply clinching a finalist pin.  Congrats to the winners though, there was some fine stuff there, and that land speeder done by the nice spanish chap whose name I’ve forgotten off the top of my head was absolutely ace.  Very very well done!

Anyway guys and girls,  I hope you liked a peek at this piece, as ever I’d be most appreciative if you could let me know your thoughts on my painting process etc.

Thanks!

James

So here’s my first in my Showcase series.  To begin with I’m going to showcase my own work.   This is my blog, so it only seems fair!  Once I’ve done with my stuff, I’m going to show you some other artists projects too so that you have the opportunity to enjoy their spectacular talents.  Anyway, enough of the introduction, let’s get on with showing you my recent Astropath project.  I hope you like him!

This mini was a bit of a strange one.  He’s a Games Workshop Imperial Guard Astropath, for those of you who don’t know, kind of like a post apocolyptic magician.  He manipulates the warp, and that was something I wanted to really bring over in the base.  I know it’s subtle, and probably too so, but it needed to be dark and cold to bring out the glowing pendant above.  I began by airbrushing him black through greys to white using Windsor & Newton black and white ink.  Then he got a coat of Games Workshop Purity Seal, a semi-gloss varnish to seal the ink to the mini (it rubs off pretty easily).  I then got a bit of dark green ink and sprayed that over the mini in a very light coat to give the zenithal lighting some colour.  It is very important to me that the robes look lit from above as if in moonlight as well as from the yellow of the pendant.  This got another coat of purity seal, and then I cracked out the white again.  I carefully sprayed, with as low a pressure as I could, white again around the pendant.  It’s hard to describe how lightly I had to do this, but it served two purposes, the first being to land a good surface for the warm glow of the pendant OSL (Object Source Lighting), and secondly to act as a guide for where it should go.  Then, a little less lightly, I sprayed yellow ink over the top.  This coloured the OSL, and with a little overlap onto the darker sections, helped mitigate the grainyness of the white, and ease the transition between the two.  Finally, a little dot of white airbrushed back on the pendant was the highlight that was designed to further accentuate the ‘glowiness’ of the pendant.

At that point, I was able to turn the airbrush to the base.  Hurrah!  I sprayed black, dark blue, various greens, and a little yellow in patches.  I sprayed it on in dappled patterns unevenly, and very thickly.  The inks acted as retarders for the Citadel and Vallejo acrylics, and I kept going until it was clearly thickly layered and overloaded.  This probably took me about 20 minutes in total from start to finish.  As ever, most of that time was spent cleaning the airbrush between coats.  Finally I got hold of a brush.  This was the risky part, it was the eve of Golden Demon (I painted the whole model start to finish on the saturday, ready for the competition on the sunday), and I didn’t have time to fix this if it went wrong.  I swirled the brush in the thickly layered paint in a spiral pattern.  It didn’t have the desired effect, so I ditched the brush and used my finger!  Fingerpainting rules!  I just gave it a swirly pattern, and then left it to dry under a heat lamp for about 20 seconds (not too long, or the plasticard would melt and warp – been there!).

Now I was ready to crack out the brushes in earnest.  First off, the face and hands got blacked out with Citadel Chaos Black.  Then I highlighted the face sort of upside down.  I left his eyes and brow very dark, and ran W&N black ink around the top.  The glossy finish makes the shadows appear deeper.  Then I used a variety of flesh tone paints that to be honest, I can’t remember, but it definately included tallarn flesh, mecrite red, and elf flesh, all GW branded.  Now he was looking like a human being!  time to re-do the glow on the face.  I ran yellow ink over the skin again to keep the glow, and highlighted with white oil paint for a clean sharp contrast.  While I was at it, I used grey and white oils to highlight the robes, and yellow/white oils to highlight the OSL sections.  On went another coat of purity seal, and the little fella was about ready to be finished.

To tie him off, I highlighted bits of the hands and other minor details, and then superglued him to the now dry base.  I used yellow and white oils as thin bolts of lightening among the swirl on the base around the Astropath.  It enabled me to ‘lead’ the swirl directly towards his gathered robes, and provide a false perspective of depth by changing the length and bredth of the lines.  Now it was 8pm, and I wanted to finish off some other projects, so I highlighted the rim of his base, attached a magnet to the underside of his slottabase, and to the top of the plinth, sprayed and highlighted the brass etch imperial eagle design on the plinth and called it a night.  Job done!

He actually did well, especially in a group that was so hard, I hadn’t expected anything from him tbh, but he picked up a finalist pin, and in the end I reckon he actually had a pretty good chance.  Not bad for a finger painted model finished in a day!

I hope you like him, I uploaded him to CMON thanks to Alextheartist making photoshoppy goodness on my photos.  As ever with CMON, I was disappointed by the score of 7.3, but hey!  I’m not minding too much – I’m sure if my lighting/background in the photos was better he’d achieve a better score.

Anyway, let me know what you think.  It’s been a pleasure as always

James