Garden Ninja Studios

Loads of new Wedding Cake Toppers

2012-01-25T10:04:00.001-07:00

For those of you who follow this blog, you'll know about the geek wedding cake toppers that I make.

You'll also know that most of them heavily feature zombies and couples fighting off the horde.

Well, it has been a while since I've had some to post up here, so here are quite a few different couples:

This first one wanted to be the zombies themselves- so we have something a little different going on here.

This set had a few specific ideas in mind- especially the smirk on the groom, and matching the weapon to the brides own guitar.

These next two were similar in some ways, but the choice of weapons were drastically different. I'm honestly wondering if I'd prefer the shotgun over the M-4 assault rifle myself. Also, it probably is easier to fight off the horde in ABUs rather than a tux.

Of course, it is hard not to think that the ideal weapon choice was discovered by this groom.

Reaver Lords coming soon

2012-01-04T09:55:00.000-07:00

Reaver Lords is a miniatures company that is just getting started. At the time of this writing, I believe they only have a facebook page for an online presence.

However, they have previewed their first miniature: the Shadow Prince. And I've got to say, if they keep this quality up, they really have a winner:

Wyrd Puppets

2011-12-27T10:22:00.000-07:00

Well, normally I would post up some of these minis in groups, rather than having a single shot for each one.

But Janci couldn't resist getting a single shot for each and every puppet that I painted. So this is a more pic heavy post than I normally put up here.

So, here is a set of minis from Wyrd's Puppet Wars game. Players of Malifaux will recognize Zoraida's voodoo doll versions of their favorite characters.

Plastic Warbeast Kits

2011-12-19T10:38:00.000-07:00

Privateer Press has been slowly rolling out their plastic kits since they first started them with the Exemplar Cinerators, followed shortly by plastic versions of the basic warjacks for each Warmachine faction (and plastic starter box sets).

Many of us were wondering if the plastic trend was going to reach Hordes very soon, but it looked like they had other plans. Mostly, when we saw the Ravagore and Scythean many people thought it looked like they were making an Everblight plastic kit, but then the minis were released in metal.

Well, it looks like that's changing now. In February, the Everblight plastic warbeast kit will be released:

Now, I'd like to point out that I honestly can't tell the difference between these photos and ones from the more expensive metal kits. To the point where I'm not sure if I have the right photos here.

But the other factions will require a little more sculpting to create a three-in-one plastic warbeast.

Now, we have photos of the new Circle kit:

These are all clearly new sculpts, and are pretty easy to distinguish from their metal counterparts. That's not necessarily a bad thing (although those feral and pureblood metal kits are some of my favorites).

But that does mean that they are pushing forward the plastic kits. Honestly, the Circle minis would have been harder to homogenize than any of the others- Skorne Titan kits and Trollblood Dire Troll kits are certainly on the way too.

Squad Lorenzo finished

2011-12-07T10:00:00.000-07:00

Well, I finally finished all of Squad Lorenzo from my own Space Hulk set. I get distracted away from these projects of mine, sometimes it really takes me longer than it should.

Frequent readers will remember Sergeant Lorenzo

Brother Zael with his heavy flamer and lots of flammable parchment.

Brother Deino- one of the more plain Space Hulk minis from this edition (not saying a whole lot there).

Brother Goriel- who it seems has been more successful in close combat than I'd usually give the marines credit for.

And Brother Omnio. According to the fluff in the rulebook, Omnio is actually part of Squad Gideon, and Brother Valencio is part of Squad Lorenzo. However, every last scenario calls for squad Lorenzo to have three marines with power fists and storm bolters, and always puts the chainfist in squad Gideon.

So, Brother Omnio has been conscripted.

Of Mouslings and Men

2011-11-07T10:28:00.001-07:00

Ok, for anyone who might have missed them, for the past year and a half, Reaper Miniatures has been producing sets of some of the cutest little miniatures released this side of Super Dungeon Explore.

These miniatures are mostly sculpted by Gene Van Horne (although it turns out the initial run had some work by Bobby Jackson in it too).

Well, they started out with mouslings that looked like adventuring heroes:

But once all of the core character classes were all covered in the mousling world, well... they started getting pretty crazy with:

Asiago Jones Mousling

Zombie Apocalypse Mouslings (proving they have similar taste to me).

Space Mouslings

And happy drunk Mouslings

From all reports, it seems like Reaper is giving Gene Van Horne an open door for all Mousling minis. If he makes one, they'll produce it.

That's a great deal for him, as it means that he is free to create all kinds of outstanding Mousling minis.

Now I've mentioned his name twice, so if Gene Van Horne googles his own name, he might be reading this. So, Gene, if you are reading this, I'd like to put an idea into your head.

Football Mouslings!

I mean, I'd love to field a Bloodbowl or Elfball mouse team. And hopefully, you think that's awesome too.

Colette Du Bois Crew

2011-10-31T10:18:00.000-06:00

Here is a Malifaux crew that I painted recently. I used some rather bright colors on this crew, so it was important to line all of the areas to keep the minis looking crisp.

For the stockings on Collete Du Bois and Cassandra, I decided that harlequin diamonds would be pretty appropriate. When I went to shade this freehand, I treated them similar to the way I would treat jewel effects (ie, highlighting up towards the bottom).

Another point of interest is that I actually lined the lips. I do not always do this because I often want makeup to fade into the face, but I found that in this instance it allowed me some added expression on the faces (lining the lips allows you to alter the line of the mouth to extend it in a number of ways that create an expression). That is something I'll definitely be doing more of.

Cake Topper Craziness

2011-10-20T10:06:00.001-06:00

Ok, those of you who follow this blog quite a bit will know that I make cake toppers for people- and most of the ones I make are zombies or zombie fighters. I mean, nothing says we're in it for the long haul like "I'll fight off a horde of zombies with you."

I usually match the bride and groom, and make some zombies for them to battle. I was a little surprised when one of my clients decided to take this to the next level: the zombies are all members of the wedding party!

So, here are a few of the ones that I got to make for this group:

(Groomsmen)

(father of the bride)

The happy couple (it looks like he's taking on his new father in law)

Lining your minis to make them 'pop'

2011-10-11T10:23:00.000-06:00

When I first started painting (many moons ago) I learned of a technique called black lining. Basically, when you have two light colors right next to one another, the boundary between them tends to get lost, and the mini looses crispness. So, back then, the plan was to put a thin black line between the two colors, which helps them to be distinct.

Now, if you think about it for a minute, you may realize that those same lines dividing your bright colors can be used to divide other colors in the same way. Sure, you may simply want to put your darkest shading at the borders of your color, but if you try it, you'll find that outlining each portion of your mini will work some wonders.

Here is an example of a mini without an outline.

All together, there's nothing wrong with any particular color- all of them have pretty strong contrasts and decent blending. But altogether, this mini doesn't pop- and the reason is because his areas all blend into one another. Now look what happens when we add dividing lines onto the same mini:

Altogether, the lines add a crispness that he was missing without them. Each of the areas is very distinct from the others.

Now, this mini's black lines were added after he was fully painted- and as a result the lines are thicker- giving him a sort of cartoon/comic-book look.

For more realistic looks, try lining as you go. With this technique, it becomes more important that you paint the mini in a proper order.

Think of it as dressing- start with the skin, then go to the next layer of clothing up, and continue from there.

Here is a mini that uses black lines in this way:

The lines on his cloak are probably still thicker than they need to be, but overall, the effect is working quite well.

Among the top painting meta, lining is one of those techniques people just assume you use (really, go check out Marike Reimer's gallery and try to find an area she didn't outline). Note that she doesn't usually use black, but rather uses dark versions of the colors she's lining. Lining with other colors takes a little bit of the edge off of the outlines- it helps the mini look less like a comic and more realistic.

So try lining a mini with dark browns, or using extremely dark versions of the color that you are outlining, or black if you prefer the comic book look. Ultimately, you'll find that all of those little bits on the mini really start to stand out and pop.

Super Dungeon Explore pre-orders are up

2011-10-04T10:07:00.001-06:00

Although a lot of people had the opportunity to pre-order their copies of Super Dungeon Explore at Gencon and Pax, there are many more people who either don't go to the cons, or didn't pre-order there.

Finally, Sodapop Miniatures have opened up for general pre-orders. And if you did not attend the cons, this will probably be your only chance to get the limited edition SDE version of Candy and Cola.

For those of you who've missed the hype, Super Dungeon Explore is a miniatures board game dungeon crawler in the tradition of such classics like Space Crusade or Heroquest, with a bit more of a Gauntlet feel.

From their Gencon demo, I could tell that the guys at Soda Pop really know what they're doing- and they've made a dungeon crawler that doesn't take itself too seriously. The game comes with over fifty super cute chibi heroes and monsters, along with a fairly large dragon as a boss fight.

Coolmini Space Marine Competition

2011-09-09T09:28:00.001-06:00

Ok, Cool Mini or Not hosts a lot of painting competitions. I generally think of Coolmini's site as a painting competition that's always open. But it doesn't have any declared winner. (If it did, it would be Fabrizio Russo... and well earned).

When Coolmini does prize supported competitions, usually you have to buy a specific miniature- usually something new by a smaller manufacturer. I've never looked at one of their contests and said, "Oh, I already have one of those that I wanted to paint."

Except for this time. To generate buzz over their new Space Marine videogame, game developer THQ is sponsoring this competition. The best Space Marine, Chaos Space Marine and Ork are going to be awarded special edition copies of the vidoegame.

Sure, that doesn't compare to the prize support from thing like the P3 Grandmasters, Gencon Open or Crystal Brush- but you also don't have to travel to a convention to enter. And if you've been a painter for a while, the chances are that you already have a Space Marine or two you could be painting up.

Entering is free, and you can enter as many times as you like, so there's really no reason not to. I happened to be working on a few marines, so they'll be entering into the contest.

So head on over to the competition page, vote on your favorites and enter your own.

Sergeant Lorenzo

2011-09-08T10:02:00.000-06:00

Here's a mini that I painted recently for my own Space Hulk set. For the colors, I went with a dark magenta rather than the cadmium red that I normally associate with the Blood Angels. I mostly did this to have a big change from the Space Hulk sets that I've painted for commission.

After painting that up, I realized that in order to really bring forward his composition, the other colors needed to be rather light.

The jewels especially worked well to this end. Most of the time, when I paint jewel effects, I use pure black as the darkest shade. This time, I decided to use a bright base color as the darkest shade, overall giving the jewels a much brighter look.

I really feel that this helped all of the many details on this mini to pop.

Sedition Wars rules are up

2011-08-19T10:17:00.001-06:00

For those of you who stopped by the Coolmini or Not booth at Gencon, you will probably have seen Mike McVey demoing his new game.

For those of you who don't know, Mike has been in the business of miniatures for a long time- his resume includes quite a bit of time leading GW's 'Eavy Metal team, miniatures art direction at Privateer Press, and designing several of the industry standard paint lines, as well as sculpting for several major companies.

My favorite contribution might be the painting tutorials he's done. I actually got him to sign the first one that I owned (from a White Dwarf in 1992).

Currently, he's started up a company with his wife Alison called Studio McVey. They've been mostly releasing a line of limited edition resin minis that are easily among the best minis available. I could even argue that some of them are the very best. Please, go check those out. I'll wait.

Back? Yea, pretty awesome stuff. Now they're starting a line of science fiction minis, and they're starting on a game to go with it. Right now the game looks similar to Space Hulk, but with some pretty interesting infection mechanics (one of the starting factions reminds me of Halo's Flood- in a good way).

The thing is, they're releasing the super-early beta rules online, and hoping to get a lot of feedback as they continue to create the system. It is hard to say how it will eventually turn out, but if you want a say, go download the Sedition Wars rules and Map.

Dark Harlequins with a splash of flouresence

2011-08-18T10:00:00.001-06:00

So, a little while ago, I received a commission to match some harlequins to an existing Dark Eldar force. My client, in this case, was very specific about the colors- mostly they would be in black and white, but they were each to have one bright color on them (selected from one of the bright colors on the Dark Eldar force).

Otherwise, the designs were up to me. I actually highly recommend treating harlequins this way. Aside from being some of the best minis that the Citadel range has to offer, they really do give you a free pass to go wild with your freehand. Reigning this in with tight color control is a terrific idea.

Since I don't play Eldar or Dark Eldar, I'll have a little more trouble finding an excuse to pick up some of these minis for myself. I do play Space Hulk, though, and I've seen some pretty strong rules for them that could easily be updated into 3rd ed. Still, they'll have to wait until some of my other projects are finished.

So, here they are:

Wyrd at Gencon

2011-08-17T10:08:00.001-06:00

Wyrd miniatures had a few nice things going for them at this past Gencon- they were revealing a new board game based on their Malifaux setting, and some pretty impressive new items for their rather successful Malifaux line.

First off, lets talk about Puppet Wars. Malifaux players will recognize all of the minis as voodoo doll versions of their characters. I didn't get a pic, but the Baby Kade puppet is actually a little larger than the Malifaux character.

The game itself features a hex board with a Master puppet leading each side. The most interesting mechanic is that you can actually disassemble a puppet (living or dead) and use a "work bench" to upgrade another puppet using the leftover bits.

And of course, the minis are this terrific blend of creepy and cute. Mostly, because that's what Wyrd does well. Good stuff.

Attendees will probably have noticed that Wyrd's prize support this year was rather fantastic. Tournaments were often rewarded with Limited Edition nightmare minis (available at the con, and online during the event).

Now, all of the new Avatar minis were spoiled on the web, and I didn't get pictures of all of those. However, there were a few others that I hadn't seen:

And last, but not least, we have Sonia Creid- alternate and avatar forms together. At some point during gameplay, she's rather likely to learn to breath fire. Or breath firey dragons. At any rate, most of the new avatar forms are pretty crazy like this.

Sodapop is doing some great work

2011-08-16T10:24:00.001-06:00

Ok, I've been home from Gencon for a week, and everything that I now am ready to post is probably old news- especially with the speed of the internet.

Still, I do want to talk about some of the very exciting things that I got to see at the con. So, we'll start out with my pic for the year- Sodapop Miniatures.

Sodapop have been giving up some great anime inspired minis for a while now. At their booth, they were taking pre-orders for Super Dungeon Explore (they had some production hiccups and couldn't release the game properly at the con).

If you haven't been following it- Super Dungeon Explore is a terrific line of cute little chibi miniatures and a vidoegame inspired dungeon crawler board game.

They also had some minis from an upcoming expansion on display. Check out the turtles:

Now, I've been following Super Dungeon for a while now, and I wasn't really surprised by the mechanics at their demo. It was really everything I wanted a dungeon crawler go be (kind of harkening back to Space Crusade, Heroquest, or Mutant Chronicle's Siege of the Citadel). It looked to me as though the game designers had played a lot of those games, and knew what worked about them (and what could be done better).

Something I knew would be at the con also were the rules for their new Relic Knight game. I play a lot of demos of miniatures games, and I am most often let down when nothing really stands out about a game. Relic Knight is the opposite of that- everything about it stood out as unique.

First off, there are miniatures. These are the anime-inspired minis we've been seeing from Sodapop for some time. Oh, and the internet doesn't really express how large Sebastian Cross' mech really is- they made an 80mm base just for him to prevent players from having to do this:

They were actually releasing a new faction at the con as well (the female demon is the first "Questing Knight" for the game. That basically means she's the first leader character without a mech). This pic is courtesy Beasts of War (because mine didn't turn out).

The game itself works off of cards- but in so many ways unlike Malifaux. The Relic Knight deck is filled with different color mana cards, and each character's card has a list of abilities and attacks that they use with the different colors. Skill numbers (like attack or defense) allow characters to draw more cards (making success more likely). But that's it- no dice at all.

They've also worked in ways to innovate the turn sequence along with everything else. This is really an exciting new game, and I'm convinced it will be taking off.

Zombie Wedding Photos?

2011-08-12T10:02:00.000-06:00

When I make cake toppers for people, I often get emails of appreciation. Sometime, I get photos of how the cake toppers turned out on top of the cake.

This one caught me by surprise- they actually recreated the scene on their wedding cake. How cool is that?

This photograph comes to us courtesy of Paper Dolls Photography, Houston Texas (and they do some great photography, too).

Unique Wedding Cake Toppers

2011-07-21T09:54:00.001-06:00

Well, a lot of people are aware that I make some pretty crazy wedding cake toppers. It's something that I do quite often, really. And the majority of toppers that I make include zombies.

I don't think that's a bad thing, by the way. I love zombies.

But I thought that this cake topper- one with no blood effects or splatter in it at all- was a pretty cool idea too. Here, we see the newly married groom getting totally pwn'd by his bride.

I also recently had a chance to do some more specific kind of zombie cake topper, recently. In this one, the couple decided to use the zombies to represent aspects of themselves- so we have one zombie in a 50's style for the dance they met at, and the other one is wearing the groom's marine uniform.

There are more angles on both of these on the Wedding Cake Topper Gallery.

It turns out I painted a lot of those...

2011-07-15T10:06:00.003-06:00

Many of my clients have me paint large forces, but the majority of them give me only a few minis at a time to paint.

That's totally understandable- painting up an Apocalypse force all at once would be pretty killer (both for my schedule, and my client's finances). But I'm pretty sure that some of my clients are playing apocalypse games with the forces they've had me paint over the course of time.

The force below is one that I've never been able to see all together- they're an enormous force of Praetorian imperial guardsmen.

Honestly, my hat is off to anyone willing to collect that many limited edition minis that haven't been available for more than a decade. That is a feat, by itself.

Then, fitting them all onto one table looks like it was another feat. The only mini that's missing from the photo is the Armorcast Titan (also no longer available, and epic enough to have his own gallery).

So, here are some pics of the whole force together:

Now, it that's too much to take in all at once, here are some broken up shots:

Khador Gun Carriage

2011-07-04T10:13:00.000-06:00

Well, I've painted up my first of the new war engines from Privateer Press, and I have it here to show off.

Looking over the rules, I'm rather glad that a war engine isn't really much different from a heavy warjack- and not an especially huge one at that. It would be easy to make these game breaking pieces, but so far I haven't seen a force that can't live without them.

The base is the size of a CD- so that should give you a sense of scale. If you'd prefer to have them compared against another miniature- this gun carriage is altogether about the size of a Space Marine rhino- actually a little smaller in total volume.

It is cast in total resin, and has tons more detail on it than the rhino kit, but that's the scale of it. Really huge for a Warmachine mini, but it isn't like we haven't seen minis be this big before.

Anyway, here he is:

40k 6th ed rumors

2011-06-29T10:16:00.001-06:00

Ok, I've been playing miniatures games for a long time, and I have to say, I didn't believe it when I first heard the rumors of the changes in Warhammer 40,000's third edition.

And they were pretty incredible too. Movement values were going to disappear entirely, and replaced by a normal 6" movement, and a faster 12" movement. They were getting rid of the psychic phase entirely. All saving throws were now unmodified, and the whole close combat section of the wargear book was going to be replaced by a couple generic categories.

I mean, that was a pretty far-fetched rumor. Of course, it was 100% true. That was the last time that I was all that skeptical of a rumor about Games Workshop's upcoming plans.

So, the rumor that Warhammer 40,000 will be entering its sixth edition next year doesn't strike me as surprising. It has been four years- which seems like a short lifespan for an edition to me, but it looks like that's the track they're on.

I honestly think that this is a bad time for a new edition-especially if the other rumors about GW's plans for reigning in independent retailers is true. With the introduction of Citadel Finecast and the corresponding price hike-coupled with a ban on European sellers shipping outside of the EU and the increasing awareness of the price differences between neighboring countries... well, 40k fans are feeling a little less loyal than usual.

Last time they introduced a new edition of 40k, they preceded it with the launch of Apocalypse- a throw everything you own on the table format designed to attract veteran players back into 40k. And from what I can tell, it worked- 5th edition went over fairly well.

But we're still waiting to see if they have a similar strategy this time.

As far as the changes go, none of them are as drastic as the changes from 2nd to 3rd edition that I mentioned above. In case you aren't interested in reading the whole article, here's an excerpt:

* the biggest rule changes:

- similar ballistic to hit chart as wound chart: compare BS to target’s speed and unit type. BS 3 hits moving infantry on 4+, but lightning fast jetbikes on 6+ and stationary tank on 2+… HUGE

- victory points are back, but with another twist: you get two victory points if an unit holds an objective for an entire game turn, if a scoring unit holds one, you get three and one if you destroy a squad leader or vehicle

- before the game there is a bidding contest for the opportunity of the first turn, if you bid more strategic points you can go first, but the enemy can spent these points on stratagems as in Cities of Death: 22 generic stratagems – for example for one point you can decide on night fighting or place an automatic gun, for four you can shift your reserves, most expensive stratagems are at 12 points and are really drastic, every unspent point can be used once a game for a reroll

- new turn sequence: prepare-movement-assault-shooting-consolidate

new phase “consolidate” phase for random movements, jetpack movements, pursuits, morale checks/effects and resolving shooting reactions

assault before shooting – big units are real roadblocks!

Complex Flesh Tones

2011-05-18T10:39:00.001-06:00

Human skin tones are one of those things that painters often have trouble with. As with eyes or other aspects of humans, we spend so much time staring at them that we’ve become experts without knowing it. When we see it simplified, we know.

Human skin tones are very complex. Just go have a look at yourself in a mirror and see if you can unlock the subtle game of many different colors that play out on your skin. Regardless of what colors are playing out on your skin, I guarantee that it is complex.

One way that I’ve found to capture the complexity of skin is done in the shading. It is very easy to fall into the habit of only using one color to shade your mini, but instead of that, try taking several colors that can be mixed into your shade color and using them individually instead.

For example with Marneus Calgar here, I took a pink flesh tone (P3 Midlund Flesh) and wanted to shade them using a medium brown (something like P3 Idrian Flesh). Rather than doing that, I found two contrasting paints that can be mixed together to make a medium brown color (in this case: P3 Skorne Red and Battledress Green).

To create the subtle interaction we’re looking for, you’ll want to add three layers of shading to the mini, rather than one flesh wash. Start out by mixing your base color with the brighter of the two colors (in this case, the Skorne Red) and thinning it down with water until it becomes a wash. Apply that to the flesh first, allow it to dry, then do the same thing with the second color. You’ll find that the two colors mostly cancel one another out, and give you a pretty interesting shading coat for your mini.

The next step is to mix the two shading color together for your last layer of shading. Again, get these to wash consistency, but this time take a fine brush and deliberately pick out the areas for the deepest shadows. Wrinkles in the skin are great, the area around the eyes and things like that are wonderful to pick out this way.

After that, reclaim some of the raised surfaces with your base color, then start highlighting up (you can mix base colors with white or use lighter flesh tones).

From there, you’ll want to add details on the face. I’ve covered detailing male faces and female faces in other posts.

One interesting advantage that this method gives you is that you can use exactly the same paints on two different minis and still have slightly different flesh tones (people of the same race will have subtle differences in their flesh tones). For example, this giant was painted using exactly the same colors as Marneus Calgar, but on him the red is a little less prominent:

You can start to branch out a little after you have the basic skin down. This Fairy was shaded using a magenta color rather than a normal red- it gives her a very subtly cooler flesh tone.

Similarly, this Satyr used these techniques, but the shading was done with a much brighter green:

Of course, there’s no reason that this kind of shading would have to stop at human flesh tones:

Iron Daemon Prince

2011-05-03T10:17:00.001-06:00

I recently painted up this Iron Warriors Daemon Prince as part of a commission. I decided that I really wanted to add a little flair to the mini as a whole- so to make it stand out on the battlefield he has a nice customized base.

The base is simply green stuff over a normal base. Carving a chaos star into it is simple enough. After that, I painted it exactly the same as I have with lava cracks (including the Object Source Lighting from the ground).

The conversion is partly my work, and partly the work of my client. The mask was taken from a Defiler, while the hammer hand comes from the Cygnar plastic warjack kit (Warmachine). Altogether, I think he achieves the half mechanical look needed for the Iron Warriors.

Anyway, enough talk:

Smartmax is taking pre-orders for The Thirteenth Hour

2011-04-29T10:15:00.001-06:00

Ok, maybe I wasn't keeping up, but I didn't even know that Smartmax was interested in making games to go with their miniatures. They've been making such absolutely fantastic Victorian Horror minis that I just missed it entirely.

One of the strangest things is that their whole line of miniatures is at 1/35 scale- approximately 54mm. Really, I haven't seen anyone try to make a game using larger scale minis since Games Workshop gave up on Inquisitor.

Still, if you're interested in painting some outstanding minis at that scale, they have them.

If you're interested, they're taking orders on their game. They've called it the Thirteenth Hour, and at least the mood on their website is very strong. It will be a small scale skirmish game (which is good, because there was no way anyone was going to field a force of fifty 1/35 minis).

Of course, you might not need to have an interest in the game to want to paint some of those beauties.

Dreadnought in Silvers

2011-04-26T10:17:00.000-06:00

Just a little while ago, I got a chance to paint up a dreadnought for the Grey Knights.

Doing a mini in that much metal can be tricky- especially something like a dreadnought that needs to have two different types of silver to distinguish the machine workings from the armor. Even when you can make the silvers distinct, there are other troubles.

Often, when you're using that much silver it tends to neutral out the mini a little too much. To combat this, I created a bright lava base so that I could have a light source interacting with the rest of the miniature.

Altogether, I think this approach worked out rather well.

Get your self some Crawling Chaos

2011-04-12T09:54:00.001-06:00

Privateer Press posted up their preview of the Legion of Everblight's future battle engine. They're calling it the Throne of Everblight.

I think I might call it "the Crawling Chaos of Everblight." It might be that I'm in the middle of playing Cthulhu Saves the World, but there just seems to be something Lovecraftian about it, don't you think?

For comparison, take a look at this Nyarlathotep statue:

I could see more Lovecraftian styled Everblight.

As of right now, I understand that Privateer Press' policy is still to release one book every year, and this year it is a Warmachine book. It is possible that we'll get to see this in its full resin glory before 2012, but I'm not counting the days just yet.

More Hazard Stripes

2011-04-05T10:11:00.003-06:00

Here’s a mini that I stopped working on for a while. I got him about halfway finished, then got distracted with other projects.

Oh, other projects. Always the bane of the miniatures painter. Can’t you hear them calling to you right now?

Anyway, I got back to this guy and finally finished him off. Overall, I think he worked out pretty well for being split up over so much time.

So, here he is. As you can see, he’s painted to match an existing mercenary force, with the blue, white and hazard stripes.

Basic Techniques for beginner painters

2011-03-22T10:03:00.001-06:00

Over the years, I've taught a number of people to paint starting from scratch. It is always fun to watch someone learn a technique and be able to make their minis pop with it. And the truth is, the basic techniques are very simple, and almost everything else a painter does stems from one of those techniques.

Here is an overview of the basic techniques. This is a brief version of a lesson that I would give to any new painter as I walk them through their first mini.

- Priming - You need to cover the mini with a spray primer. The thing to remember here is that you want a very thin layer of primer on your mini- you don't want to cover up those fine details. One trick you can use is to spray the mini in short bursts, moving the spray can back and forth.

Black primed minis tend to be more forgiving, so I'd start there if I were you, but there are advantages to white primer.

- Base coating - after your prime your mini, you need to paint each area in a solid color. Painting within the lines is really the key here. I normally completely finish one area before basecoating another, but many people prefer to basecoat the entire mini before doing anything else with the colors.

- Shading with washes - If you take any acrylic paints or ink (P3 included) and add some water to it, you'll get a translucent paint we call a wash. Apply a wash made from a darker color than your base coat and you'll find it naturally flows into the cracks. For a more advanced version, try applying a wash directly to the shade areas.

- Highlighting by layering - The next thing to do is to layer up with your color. Take a lighter version of base color (often made by mixing the paint with a lighter color) and apply paint directly to the raised areas on the mini. This will give your mini an added sense of depth.

- Note on colors - You can most easily accomplish the steps above by getting three versions of the same color (like a dark red, lighter red, and lightest red). When you feel confident, you'll find it is fun to mix it up (I love taking a green, shading it with red and highlighting it with a pale blue, and red often can be nicely shaded in brown). You can mix your highlight colors using anything lighter than your base color, really. For many colors, I use bone white as my mix up color (it is very light, and gives every color a sort of warm feel).

- Note on metallic paints - Metallics work exactly the same as other colors, except for one thing. They don't mix well with other paints. You can shade a metallic metal with another paint, and it will work fine, but when you are highlighting, make sure that you only use metallic paints.

Reaper does Savage Worlds

2011-03-17T09:44:00.001-06:00

Reaper miniatures has had a lot of news lately. Their latest grand announcement is that they'll be producing miniatures for the Deadlands RPG setting.

If you don't know Pinnacle Entertainment's award winning setting or the Savage Worlds game system, you might want to check it out. A mix of gothic fantasy and old west, Deadlands really has a lot to offer. And honestly, the world needs more undead gunslinger minis.

Of course, here we just might be more concerned about the minis, and Bob Ridolfi has produced some nice ones:

Here come the pigs!

2011-03-14T10:00:00.001-06:00

Ok, so the Farrow minis from Privateer Press have been available for a while, but up until now, very few had been painted by me. Well, I recently finished a commission where I got to paint a whole horde of crazy pigs, and I'm ready to share them with you.

Of course, the greatest of all pig minis is definitely the new Frankenstein's creation: the Warhog.

Reaper Releases Lunch Boxes!

2011-03-10T09:44:00.000-07:00

Ok, maybe they aren't just lunch boxes, but now if you buy any reaper box set, they'll come in their very own egg-crate filled carrying case .

Basically, they're gun cases with pretty pictures of minis on the front. But you've got to admit, they make pretty good lunch boxes. I mean, when I was in elementary school, these would have been pretty sweet:

Of course, most Reaper box sets are for large multi-piece minis rather than for sets of minis, and once you've assembled your dragon, there's no way you'll be transporting him in the lunch pale anymore.

But then again, who ever bought a Reaper multi-piece dragon and doesn't have enough minis to fill a little case like this?

More Cake Toppers and Zombies!

2011-02-21T10:11:00.001-07:00

Those of you who have been following me for a while will know that I offer a service to create custom wedding cake toppers. And they’re always some of the best projects around.

Here are some photos of the latest zombie fighters. These two are on some desperate ground right now, and I’m afraid they’ll be overrun soon.

And for the couple that wanted the bride to be the zombie, here is a set of dancers. You know it’s love when you’re tied together by spider webs.

Anyone whose new to the site can see some of my other zombie creations over on the Geek Wedding Cake Toppers page.

Worn Leather

2011-02-10T10:07:00.000-07:00

I often get compliments on the ways that I paint worn brown leather. It is actually a fairly easy process.

First, you need some way of getting a dark and fairly neutral brown base coat or shading coat. Normally, I either paint a neutral brown color on, then shade it with a brown ink, or just start out with a very dark brown. If you start out with a neutral brown with ink, then you should apply your highlight layers with a little water in them to help the lower colors show through more. If you started out with the dark brown, you should mix the dark brown into your highlight layers in order to create a smooth transition.

The next step is to highlight using a very red brown (like P3 Bloodstone or Citadel Vermin Brown). This is going to be a very prominent color, so go ahead and cover up most of the layers underneath (you just want those layers for shading).

You will now have a very red looking brown color. The next step is the trick to making your leathers look worn. Highlight using a very yellowy brown color (like Citadel’s Snakebite Leather or P3 Rucksack Tan). Keep your blending good as you highlight up and you’ll be able to maintain the illusion well.

In the end, you’ll have a brown color that is more red in the shadows and more yellow in the highlights. This gives the impression that the leather has been out in the sun and is worn.

As always, I have some finished examples:

You can also experiment with these kinds of colors on non-leather surfaces, like the brown scales on this dragon:

Instant Mold

2011-02-02T10:13:00.000-07:00

I found this out from Coolminiornot. They've just started selling stuff they're calling Instant Mold.

Apparently, this stuff is sculpable like green stuff, but it become maleable when warmed, and hardens when cooled.

The potential for this stuff was immediately obvious. You can't sculpt with it, but you can make press molds with it, and create some pretty impressive stuff.

I'm looking forward to trying it out, probably using some of Scibor's techniques in creating a press mold.

Studio McVey has a gutsy range of miniatures

2011-01-25T10:06:00.001-07:00

Honestly, looking through the Studio McVey line, you’ll find all sorts of minis that are meant for painting and nothing else. Mike and Ali McVey know what great miniatures are, and they get some of the best sculptors in the industry to make some of the most creative miniatures you’ll ever see.

The latest addition to their range is Ruby. I suppose that she could be used as a PC for anyone playingBroncosaurus Rex (or another setting inspired by Valley of the Gwangi). But there really just will never be a lot of call for a cowgirl riding a dinosaur.

Even if you’ll never use it, this mini is fantastic. The composition, attention to detail and even the setting details (like the armor plates) are just perfect.

Have a look for yourself. And stop wondering why Studio McVey took three first places for the Table Tog Gaming News Editor’s choice best mini of 2010.

Armorcast Warhound Titan

2011-01-20T10:14:00.000-07:00

I recently got a pretty outstanding commission to paint up a Warhound Titan made by Armorcast. Armorcast did official Games Workshop miniatures before Forgeworld took over their position. This particular mini had a copyright 1989 stamped onto him.

The titan is a fine miniature, but it had some issues with detail- it was basically an enlarged epic scale mini- and it came from an era in which miniatures in general were a little less loaded with detail. So he needed something to bring him up to date.

But with all of those broad areas, I just had to add in some freehand, right?

Space Hulk Brood Lord

2011-01-19T09:55:00.001-07:00

I’ve had my own Space Hulk set for over a year now. Like all painters, I have way too many projects in the works.

So here is the first of the Genestealers, the Brood Lord. The others are already started, and are going to match him. I was going for a more neutral color pallet than the one that the studio painters used (I played a little bit of Gears of War and based the colors off of one version of wretches).

Anyway, here he is:

Magnus in Hazard Stripes

2011-01-06T10:03:00.000-07:00

I've been working on a Magnus the Traitor battlegroup for a little while now, and it has been going pretty well. This project started when I just wanted to paint up a random Nomad that I had, and then continued through a Mangler for one of No Quarter Magazine's monthly competitions.

After I finished the Epic version of Magnus for the P3 painting competition, and almost everything else in for the battlegroup, I eventually got around to painting the non-epic form.

One of the main reasons I didn't use this version of Magnus for the competition is his pose. His pose is huddled close to his sword- far less dramatic than the epic form. To combat this, I gave him a far busier paint job than the epic form had.

The biggest difference is the hazard striping on his shoulderpads. Those go a long way to break the mini up and create a sense of movement in the composition. For the same reason, I tried to emphasize his flowing cloak by adding in the dirt effects at the bottom.

Anyway, here he is:

Warmachine Battle Engines

2011-01-05T10:12:00.000-07:00

This week, Privateer Press announced that they'll be previewing a new kind of model for Warmachine: the Battle Engine.

So far, the only thing we know about these new minis that we haven't seen before is their size: they are huge! Normally Warmachine miniatures have a maximum base size of 50mm, but these monstrosities will be totting massive 120mm bases. Just have a look at this comparison picture:

And they're made from resin. This isn't the first of Privateer Press' resin miniatures- the Extreme Titan Gladiator was a resin kit (and a very large one at that). But the titan is really a collector's piece- more like their older Denegra statue.

Now, it remains to be seen just how a 120mm based miniature will affect the game. I'm personally a little skeptical that ginormous battle engines will be adding all that much to a very fine game, but Privateer Press have surprised me before with great results for ideas that seemed like they wouldn't work. So let's wait and see how they turn out.

Oh, and they're posting a new piece of concept art for a battle engine every day this week. Head on over to the Privateer Insider Blog to see what they're cooking up next.

Max the Wild

2010-12-20T09:49:00.000-07:00

I was recently commissioned to create a Malifaux mini to look like a popular children’s book character.

This sculpt will be replacing The Dreamer (a small child who is lord of the monsters of Malifaux). Once again, I have to give credit where credit is due, and this outstanding idea originated with my client.

I tried to take the very cartoonish style of a children’s picture book and convert it into the detailed and over the top style of a Malifaux miniature.

Here are the results:

Dark Angel's Marneus Calgar

2010-12-17T10:06:00.000-07:00

Just a little while ago, I got a commission to turn the Ultramarines chapter master into a Dark Angel mini. I was a little surprised just how much iconography has to be replaced, it is just crazy how many Us go onto a mini like that.

In the end, I defeated the beast, and made him work as a Dark Angel. So, here is Marneus Calgar, Master of the Dark Angels.

Geek Wedding Cake Toppers Available

2010-12-14T09:48:00.001-07:00

After doing a few customized wedding cake toppers, we’ve received a lot of interest from the community. Honestly, I think that converting cake toppers into zombie hunters or apocalypse survivors is just great.

So if you were wondering how you could get your own cake toppers made, head on over to our Geek Wedding Cake Toppers page and have a look.

Wyrd announces streamlined rulebook

2010-12-09T09:37:00.001-07:00

Wyrd Miniatures just announced a new rulebook to be available soon for Malifaux: the Malifaux Rules Manual.

This is simply a smaller version of their core rulebook- something you could easily have on hand while playing, and also a more convenient version of their core rules set (this version has been updated with their errata too).

And it will be only $15, making Malifaux the uncontested lowest buy- in for such a nice miniatures game. And they’ll have it available in PDF, so there’s simply no reason not to try out this awesome game.

Altogether, I have to say that this looks like a wonderful idea. I hope this is the sort of thing that catches on (I’d love to see a shorter version of the Hordes or Warmachine Rulebooks, for example).

By the way, if you haven’t tried out Malifaux yet, the game system is great. So far, the only really large complaint with the system is that the rulebook has had some major organization issues- a problem that Wyrd’s team were aware of.

At Gencon, they told us that they would have a solution for us. And it looks like this is it.

TGN's Reader's Choice Awards

2010-12-08T10:09:00.000-07:00

Tabletop Gaming News has just started accepting nominations for their Annual Reader’s Choice Awards.

Just in miniatures systems, this year has been a wild ride. Games Workshop updated Warhammer Fantasy Battle to its eighth incarnation, Privateer Press released a second edition for Hordes and Warmachine (along with a book every month of the year). Malifaux and Infinity have both had significant expansions, and that’s not even counting newcomers like Dust Tactics or Freebooter’s Fate.

And the minis we’ve seen this year have been splendid. I always love to look at TGN’s reader’s choice and have a look at anything I missed in the past year. And there are a lot of winners. They have a category for every prominent genre of mini, and a lot of great contestants this year.

So go over there now and nominate your favorite games and minis.

Gift Store Repaint 2: "the sequel"

2010-12-02T09:41:00.000-07:00

I painted up another gift store dragon. This time, it was a gift to my sister who collects dragons like this.

Overall, the methods were pretty much the same as for the rattle snake dragon. The face of the sculpt was less detailed than the last one, so I’m afraid it didn’t turn out quite as well.

For this dragon I used a King Snake pattern for the scales. I really like these animal patterns on dragons, I’m definitely going to try more. Maybe next I’ll start looking a gila monsters or I’ll to really far and try out something that isn’t a reptile.

Anyway, here is how he turned out.

And this time I remembered to get some before photographs- so here is what he looked like when I bought him:

The best Sculpting Tools are Home Made

2010-12-01T10:17:00.000-07:00

One of the things I like most about GenCon last summer was a cool little table that Reaper Miniatures set up right outside the exhibition hall.

At the table were seated Bobby Jackson, Patrick Keith, Gene Van Horne, Drew Williams and other professional sculptors. The reason that I liked this booth so much is that all of these guys were extremely nice folks who didn’t mind at all that I was picking their brains for sculpting advice.

One of the things I noticed was that not one of them used the sculpting tools that you get from Games Workshop or Gale Force Nine. Almost all of them had a set of tools that they had made themselves.

- The exception was Patrick Keith, who uses a Wax 5 primarily. When I asked him why, he told me that he did it so that he could recommend a tool that people can just buy.

One of the jewels that I got in all of that brain picking was that making sculpting tools is actually fairly cheap and simple- so long as you already have a Dremel Tool. I did, so that wasn’t an issue. I did have to buy a blow torch and jewelery anvil, but neither of those were expensive at all.

Bobby Jackson pointed me in the direction of the Clubhouse forum and this tutorial- and it is quite the gem. The sizes are all in metric, so if you’re living state-side you’ll have to convert them a little. But it is a very helpful tutorial, and with it, I made these:

Most of these tools are similar to the ones you can buy, but they’re all smaller and finer. In fact, the one I use the most is essentially a smaller version of a Wax 5. Overall, the details that were hard to sculpt before have become much easier, and I feel like my overall skill level has gone up.

I’m sure I’m getting a +2 circumstance bonus.

"Santa Hunter"

2010-11-18T09:40:00.000-07:00

Alright, I admit, I love some pretty strange minis. I mean, Grace is Gone is definitely on my top ten list.

So, naturally, I like to share these odd treasures with you all when I find them. Scibor Monstrous Miniatures have given us a number of wonderful holiday dwarf miniatures, such as the Easter Bunny, the Pumpkin Slayer for Halloween, and the strange Statue of Love for Valantine’s day.

So, it was inevitable that we were sometime going to see a Christmas dwarf soon. Well, here he is:

You’ve got to love the look on Santa’s face there. Although I am surprised Santa survived at all.

Zombie Apocalypse Wedding Cake Toppers

2010-11-11T09:48:00.000-07:00

One of the projects that I did a while ago was to convert a pair of cake toppers into apocalyptic figures (one was a zombie, and the other was a survivor in a gas mask).

This time, my client wanted a bride and groom fighting off the zombie horde (the clothing in this diorama matches theirs).

So, here they are:

Each time I do one of these, I have to think “Man, I wish I had this idea back when I was planning my own wedding. My wife would have loved it.”

Petey miniatures

2010-11-10T09:24:00.000-07:00

Garden Ninja is proud to announce a new licensed miniature for sale.

Petey was sculpted by Drew Olds and inspired by Schlock Mercenary by Howard Tayler. He’s available hand painted or with a patina finish, or as a plain pewter mini if you’d like to paint him yourself.

Based on Schlock Mercenary by Howard Tayler, www.schlockmercenary.com. Sculpted by Melissa Mayhew. Schlock Mercenary Copyright Howard Tayler 2000-2009 and used by permission of Howard Tayler.

Mantic Games gives away rules, Privateer fixes theirs

2010-11-09T10:05:00.002-07:00

Ok, the miniatures gaming world has two fairly important bits of news.

1- Privateer Press have just had a big update to their FAQ and Errata documents. Privateer Press have consistently been very good with updating their rules set as new problems arise, and so most likely the problems you might have had will be covered in their new document.

2- Mantic Games has found a new way to push their recently released Kings of War rules set forward. Only this time, it isn’t a PDF document, it is a free set of rules with any order of any kind from their store. It doesn’t even have to be miniatures, you may have simply bought

Mantic Games has been supplying us with some pretty nice plastic kits for about a year, and it looks as though they’re still growing. Their miniatures are all very compatible with Warhammer Fantasty Battle, but with their own rules set, the possibilities have just opened up.

Painting White

2010-11-09T10:05:00.001-07:00

White can be a tricky color to paint. You need to be careful not to make your whites too light as once you are using pure white paint, there’s absolutely no way to highlight it any further. Because of this, it is important to remember that white colors are defined by their shadows. Don’t be afraid to use pure white on large sections of the mini, so long as you leave darker colors in the shadows to define the shape.

My go-to method for most colors is to start out dark and work my way up, so that’s where we can start this. Remember to leave your earlier layers showing so that your shapes are properly defined.

There are a lot of varied looks your white can take, and it mostly depends on what color you use for your shading layers. Let’s start out with the warm whites that are used on studio Deathwing and Protectorate of Menoth troops.

If you want a warm white, you might want to start out with a medium to light beige color (like P3 Rucksack Tan or a mix of Citadel Snakebite Leather and Bleached Bone). With this method, you may want to mix your base color with a light bone color before you finally reach white. Ultimately, you can achieve something like this:

If you want to achieve a cooler white color, the method is the same, only with different colors. Start out with a medium to light gray color. If you want a very cold result, you can work this up through a very light blue (like P3 Frostbite, or Citadel’s Space Wolves Gray). If you want a less cool look, you can mix your white paint into the base gray and work it directly up to pure white.

Again, remember that your ultimate white layer is covering quite a bit of the white area.

It is best to start practicing white with miniatures where it doesn’t matter if they end up looking light beige or light gray, because the easiest mistake to make is to have too much shading or to make the shading too dark.

Now, after some practice, if you can get the blending down pat, you eventually can start to play with colors that are almost white, but not quite. It is great for doing white on white free hand. And you can try shading with different colors to see what you can do.

Here is my Madrak Ironhide with red, blue and pink shaded white for skin, and a cool white tartan with a white tartan pattern:

Crystal Brush Painting Competition

2010-11-01T10:08:00.002-06:00

If you’ve heard the buzz over at Cool Mini or Not, you’ll know that they’ve just announced that they’ll be sponsoring the Crystal Brush painting competition at Adepticon 2011.

Of course, it hasn’t happened yet, but that doesn’t mean we don’t know that it will be crazy competitive. The prize support is the unheard of sum of 10,000 to the grand prize winner, dwarfing pretty much every similar competition.

Maybe the guys over at Coolmini are trying to replace the Golden Daemon as the world’s premier competition, as I am very certain that a sum like that will attract the attention of many brilliant painters, and since the competition isn’t manufacturer exclusive it won’t scare away the painters who are affiliated with a company (like Eric John of Wyrd, or Matt DePietro of Privateer Press).

Coolmini has some co-sponsors for this deal, and pretty original looking trophy. All in all, the competition is going to be rough. I can’t wait to see what the competition turns out.

Avatar of Menoth

2010-11-01T10:08:00.001-06:00

Just a little while ago, I got to paint up the Avatar of Menoth for a commission. And this is one of the most interesting warjacks in Warmachine.

The mini is designed to be a walking cathedral- with ornate organ pipes replacing its smoke stacks. He has as much runic work as the Nightmare, and even some call for minor light sourcing. Altogether is a pretty impressive little piece.

Of course, he comes from the Apotheosis era of Warmachine. The minis from that book represent a great leap in the quality of Privateer Press’ minis. However, it also represents the apex of Privateer Press assembly difficulty, and this warjacks is far more difficult to put together than almost anything that came after it.

(extremes excepted).

Smog Painting compeition

2010-10-27T10:07:00.001-06:00

Smart Max have just announced a painting competition for their Smog range Victorian Horror minis.

The miniatures are, without exception, quite marvelous, and conceptually fantastic (if you like creepy Victorian stuff as much as I do).

The prize, it turns out, is a whole years worth of Smart Max releases.

So take a look at the full rules, and get painting.

Movie Marine +1 more

2010-10-27T09:57:00.000-06:00

Well, a long while ago, I got the idea into my head that I would create a force of Movie Space Marines. That’s a joke list GW made in White Dwarf #300 where ten marines and a rhino were a 1500 point army. And they’re all tougher than Rambo.

So I decided would create a tactical squad that took as much time and effort to create as your average Warhammer 40,000 force did.

I got through them at quite a pace for a while, but soon other projects started getting in the way (most notably, my entries for the P3 Grandmasters). So, just like a real force, they’ve been put off and delayed.

Well, after such a long time away, they’re back. Somehow, I decided to paint them up before my new Malifaux crew or my Blood Bowl team. I’ve finished one more, and I only have a couple of the original Movie Marines left to paint.

So, here is the latest:

2010-10-27T09:56:00.000-06:00

I had a number of requests for pictures of my dragon that show his scale.

So, here he is next to Professor Viktor Pendrake. Pendrake is on a 30mm base.

Our gaming table has 30mm squares all over it (because we usually play with minis whose bases are just slightly too large for the standard 1 inch squares).

But there you go.

Repainting a non-mini Dragon

2010-10-20T10:02:00.001-06:00

Ever since I can remember, I’ve pretty much been responsible for making miniatures for any role playing groups that I’ve been in. Mostly, because I’m the only one who thought that we needed matching miniatures for our characters.

Right now I’m taking my turn GMing our Iron Kingdoms game. I decided to make it a super epic level campaign in which the party goes after all of those godlike beyond epic monsters that they always had to avoid in our other campaigns.

That means Dragons. Now, if you’re familiar with the Iron Kingdoms setting, you’ll know that there are no dragons smaller than Colossal size in all of the IK. When I started looking for minis, I was at a bit of a loss.

I could get a huge resin dragon for somewhere between two and five hundred dollars. It would fit the bill, but that’s pretty expensive.

I could pick up one of the discontinued Wizards of the Coast Colossal Red Dragons, but they’ve been going for two hundred dollars each, and are way less interesting minis than the resin ones for the same price.

I’m so glad that my wife pointed out a third option. For around twenty to thirty dollars, you can go to an Asian gifts store and pick up one of their dust collectors.

Now these minis tend to be a little less detailed than pewter or resin minis, and the pre-paints on them tend to be horrific. Whatever you do, don’t pick one up that has glitter all over it.

But with a little love, you can turn them into great looking minis. I have a second one in my back room waiting, but here is the first one that I’ve finished:

In the end, he looks like a pretty good, and massive sized mini.

I had to do a little bit of green stuff work on him. His horns were made of rubber and needed to be re-sculpted in something that could be painted, and his eyes had pupils sculpted onto them, which I thought would look better painted on.

His base was made from half of a super cheap Wal-Mart clock, and on our game board takes up just the right number of squares for a beyond epic level massive dragon.

Malifaux Halloween Scenarios

2010-10-19T09:45:00.001-06:00

The guys at Wyrd miniatures have been giving us creepy miniature for a while now.

But this year, they have a new way to celebrate Halloween. They’ve released Halloween Story Encounters for Malifaux.

There’s a witch, a haunted cemetery and a wild pumpkin headed butcher knife wielding murderer. Fun stuff.

Eldrad's still got it after all of these years

2010-10-19T09:44:00.000-06:00

I first became interested in wargamming when I was much younger. I was a little intimidated by Warhammer 40,000 because all you could buy was the book. I knew I wanted to play the game, but I also knew that the rules didn’t come with any minis, so it seemed like an incomplete game to me.

I finally decided that I could pick the game up when Games Workshop announced that they were releasing a “Boxed Edition” of 40k. I still think it is strange that no one called it the 2nd ed back then, and honestly I was a little surprised that the rules were so different from the Rogue Trader.

Anyway, shortly after that, Games Workshop started up their codex system of updating force lists, and the first two they did were the Space Wolves and Eldar.

And in those books, we had some of the first special characters for 40k. Before them, there was Commissar Yarrik and Ghazkull Thrakka, but those two codecies made it standard.

Also, a lot of the Space Wolf special characters have never had a mini update (unlike Thrakka and Yarrik). Some of the Eldar characters could probably use an update (Jane Zarr still has the most incredible mullet). I think the most impressive one is Eldrad Ulthuan.

For a while, Eldrad was the standard mini you’d use for a farseer. GW had released a non-character farseer mini, but it was so inferior to this one that everyone just assumed they’d use this. The practice spread even more widely when GW made the special characters illegal in competitive play, but allowed the minis to represent your non-special characters.

Anyway, I got to paint up some of the old characters recently. Eldrad here followed the same color scheme that we first saw back in the 2nd ed Eldar codex. Here he is:

New Monsterpocalypse Greens

2010-10-14T09:42:00.001-06:00

There’s been a bit of hubub surrounding Monsterpocalypse lately. After the release of the Voltron two player game over the summer, it seems they haven’t slowed down. They have two player starter sets designed to look like the Voltron set (you get two random monsters from different factions, and a set of minions from the same faction).

What with the film that might actually get made (it has progressed from the “who knows” stage to the “pretty likely” stage) there’s been a lot of hubub.

But what I’m excited about are the minis. While their pre-paints aren’t always the best, Monpoc has released a good number of wonderful minis for repainting.

They’ve just posted up a bunch of new greens for us to have a look.

By the way, there’s something odd about that page. In the description, it sounds as though Privateer Press is working with the movie people to create some of the new Monpoc stuff.

That makes me wonder if we’re going to actually get miniatures based off of Tim Burton artwork. Makes me wonder.

Anyway, here are the greens:

Pale Assassin

2010-10-11T09:13:00.000-06:00

While I was at Gencon, one sculptor asked me whether I knew where to find the very best faces on any range of miniatures. My first thoughts went to Dark Sword and their fantastic line of non-heroic scaled miniatures (the faces and hands are all so delicately detailed).

He told me that the best line was Tom Meier’s Thunderbolt Mountain line. At the time, I decided that I hadn’t seen enough of TBM to decide if he knew what he was talking about.

I can’t say that he was right, but it turns out that he wasn’t wrong. Tom Meier sculpted around half of the Dark Sword miniatures line.

With that, I’ll introduce to you all a recent commission for a Dark Sword piece. This one was sculpted by Jeff Grace (another of the best sculptors out there). The colors were largely a choice of my client in this case (he sent me some drawings to match). I think she turned out rather well.

Cryx Battlegroup

2010-10-05T10:08:00.001-06:00

My wife started playing Warmachine a while ago. It turns out that she really loves the undead in all varieties, so her choice to play Cryx was easy.

I remember talking to her about choosing colors for the force, and she pulled out this crazy bright orange and teal and said that she thought the undead should be brightly colored. She actually might have gone with pink if painting Warmachine minis in pink weren’t such an institutionalized practice.

Fast forward a little, she has a brilliant looking brightly colored undead force that has started looking like Cryx to me. So, I had to pull out my books when I was commissioned to paint a few minis up in the Privateer Press studio colors.

Overall, the Bane brown/grey color scheme fits well with my style- I like the neutral pallets. So here they are, Cryx in Brown instead or bright orange:

Strangest Concept Mini Ever

2010-10-04T11:16:00.000-06:00

Ok, I have seen a lot of odd minis in my time. Miniatures sculptors, like all artists, are an odd bunch and really like to push away from what is standard and what is normal.

When they do, we get some pretty outstanding miniatures. Like Dark Age’s Contradiction, Yannik Hannebo’s Beauty and the Bot, or Kev White’s series of Libby miniatures. Great artistic renderings, all of them. Also, these are very strange minis.

But Emanuele Giovagnoni has presented to us one of the strangest concepts I’ve ever seen for a miniture. Here is “Grace is Gone” or the pregnant cyborg:

Beautiful sculpting work gave her this delicate pose that combines like eerily well with the Giger style tubes and metal plates.

But I’ll say it again: this is the strangest concept ever. By the way, you can get her from the Cool Mini store if you like strange. I know I do.

New Patrick Keith Elves

2010-09-29T10:00:00.001-06:00

Yes, all of you Blood Bowl fans out there should know the Impact Miniatures line pretty well. For the past decade or so, they’ve been doing more for Blood Bowl than Games Workshop, and by quite a long shot.

They do have their own game (called Elfball) which they support pretty well, but they also have no qualms about doing a little bit of everything.

They’ve just unveiled the beginnings of a new elven team: the Timberline elves. So far, they’re looking pretty good. Sculpted by Patrick Keith, I think these go to show just how much he’s been improving. I can’t wait to see the rest of the team show up.

Rogue Trader character minis

2010-09-27T10:07:00.000-06:00

I have to say, I’ve been very impressed by the way that Fantasy Flight has treated their license to create Warhammer 40,000 role playing games.

From the brilliant artwork and the tone of each of the books, you really do get a strong feel for the rich universe of 40k- and it is honestly more rich and worked out in the RPG books than it is in most of the 40k force books.

One interesting note, though, is that there isn’t exactly a line of Dark Heresy or Rogue Trader minis. Deathwatch has plenty, since marines are the iconic centerpiece of 40k, but there are so few women, and even fewer non-military humans that finding good minis for a 40k RPG often takes you outside the line.

Dark Age has a good line of minis in trenchcoats, and a lot of them would work brilliantly as Rogue Trader characters. Another place to look is Reaper’s Chronoscope line, where pretty much anything goes.

Here is a character I painted for a Rogue Trader campaign. She originally came from Anima Tactics, but she has so much character that she was just screaming to be role played:

Good the Battle is having an open playtest

2010-09-20T10:07:00.000-06:00

The guys over at Project Good have been working on a miniatures game system that incorporates every miniature you could possibly own.

It would seem that your two foot tall Vizeralyn the Oracle Dragon mini can go up against your Epic 40,000 imperial guardsmen. According to the rulebook, you can even use rocks or fruit if you are sad and don’t have minis.

Anyway, as part of their beta testing, they put the full rulebook up online for you to download. You can play and give them feedback to help them create a better game, or you can just play.

Anyway, happy gaming, and I hope that someone finds their 15 mm Prussians going up against a 70mm Wolverine.

Dynamic Colors

2010-09-17T10:05:00.002-06:00

When I first started painting miniatures, I had a hard time with color recipes. Early on, I found an issue of White Dwarf with some of the old ‘Eavy Metal tutorials in it (mostly from Mike McVey). It was a huge help, and got my painting on track, but it also limited me quite a bit.

For example, I found a tutorial that gave me the color recipe for Khorne Red armor (a dark red, highlighted to a lighter red and then an orange). Well, that was my red, and it was my only red for quite a while.

I’ve come a long way since then, and I’m quite a bit beyond making my own recipes. One of the things I’ve learned is that you don’t always need to stick to even similar colors when you’re shading and highlighting.

For example:

This mini has quite a bit of different shading to her. Although the white armor was done pretty strait forwardly (it has just a little bit of blue in its shading) the rest of the mini was shaded in a dark magenta.

You can see it a little in her face, her green belt or on her grey sleeves, but there’s just a bit of a dark magenta beneath those colors. The red creates an interesting warm pallet even with colors that are not normally very warm.

Here’s a more extreme example:

I used a fairly standard human flesh tone for this Satyr’s skin, but I shaded it with several different colors. Parts of him are shaded with green, parts are shaded with purple, and other parts with red.

It is also easy to see the red shading in the loin cloth color, which is highlighted up to a light blue-grey color.

The highlighting has the same variety to it. Some parts are highlighted with lighter flesh tones, but some are highlighted in blue.

Actual objects in nature often have coloring this dynamic to them. For example, the coloring we see on a face is going to be a combination of pigments, blood and anatomy under the surface and the light- both from your lightbulb and a little coming in the window. All of these things are different colors, and there’s a lot of complexity to it.

Go ahead and experiment to see what happens when you shade your red with a green or if you highlight your grey with a pink, or if you shade your ork’s flesh with a red color. You may find you like the results.

Avatar- this time a little more normal

2010-09-15T09:31:00.001-06:00

Just a little while ago, I got a nice commission to paint an Eldar Avatar. I’ve painted a few different Avatars over time, this one is based a little more on the studio color scheme than previous ones that I’ve done.

The trouble with the Avatar mini is that he can very easily become too gaudy. His lower body really demands a lava glow effect while his upper body is adorned with all kinds of ornaments and detailed armor plates. If you choose a too bright color for the mane or tabard, it can get out of control.

For this mini, I used a darker color on his mane, and balanced the white tabard with a white rune on the Avatar’s head. Overall, I think it has worked pretty well, without really deviating from the studio scheme.

Blog Moved

2010-09-12T10:46:00.002-06:00

This blog is now also available at www.gardenninja.com. You may follow us here or there!

Themed Chimeras

2010-09-09T09:36:00.003-06:00

A little while ago I received a commission to convert and paint some themed chimeras for a Praetorian Imperial Guard force.

One was meant to be the chimera for an Ogryn unit. This one shows battle damage from the inside, since the Ogryn, it seems, are afraid of the dark. You can't see it quite as well from this photo, but the back door also shows signs of abuse:

The second chimera is for the psyker squad. Rather than show the extra battle damage, this chimera is covered with scrolls, purity seals, rune plates, a few books and even a couple of eyes.

I'm still not sure if those embellishments are meant to protect the psykers from warp energies, or if they're there to protect the rest of the guardsmen from the psykers.

Object Source Lighting - Major

2010-09-06T09:47:00.002-06:00

Object source lighting (normally called OSL) is a pretty impressive technique that isn't too difficult to pull off. With OSL technique, you are trying to create the illusion that the mini is actually being lit by something on the mini rather than being lit from above. While there are several ways to do a strong OSL mini, each one gives you a different kind of light interplay.

The most straight forward OSL type is the strong, colored light. With this technique, you are trying to simulate a mini that is surrounded by darkness, with only one source of light- and that light source creates all of the color on your mini.

You need very few colors for this type of mini, and you will essentially be painting your mini in greyscale. It is sometimes best to only use two colors on a mini like this (black and the light's color). However, I prefer to use at least three colors (black, white and the color of the light) . That way, it is easy to have a very saturated color of the light without making the mini itself seem too dark.

Your color for your light source should be the lightest thing on the mini (I generally use a mix that is close to white- even for colored lights). The base coat for everything else is black.

After that, you need to highlight up toward the source of the light. For this, think of light as a particle rather than a wave. It only travels in straight lines, so take a straight tool (your brush will work) and try to draw straight lines from your light source to other parts of the mini. If you can't get a straight, unobstructed line from the light source to a certain spot on the mini, then that spot is in the shadow.

From there, the highlighting technique isn't very different from normal highlighting except that rather than highlighting towards the top of the mini (representing light from above) you are highlighting towards the source of your light. It sometimes helps to turn the mini sideways with the light source at the top so that highlighting in this way can feel more natural. Make sure that your highlights get lighter as they approach the source of the light.

When highlighting, you'll want to make sure that nothing is as light as your light source. That is an important part of the illusion you're creating. The source of light has to be lighter than the things that it is lighting, or else the eye won't be fooled into thinking that he's looking at an actual light source.

After you've done the more simple version of this with fewer colors, you might want to try out the same technique with more color. Try adding some color to the base colors on the mini (so that the flesh, metal and cloth are all a little different in color. You'll notice I did a little of this with the infernal above (his face has just a hint of purple to it).

But with the diorama below, I used quite a few different colors, and several sources of light (including moonlight coming from outside of the mini). The armor, flesh, cloth, rock and the hydra all have different base colors that were mixed into the highlighting (and all of them were highlighted toward the yellow light from the candles.

Also, since I used multiple sources of light on this mini, you'll notice quite a bit of different shadow interplay. It looks far more complicated than it is- I still used simple straight lines starting at the source of the light and highlights that got lighter as they approached the light source.

Overall, this is a technique that looks far more difficult than it is. Don't be too intimidated to try it out, you may find you're very pleased with the results.

Troll Meditation

2010-09-03T09:19:00.002-06:00

Ok, so this is one of those commissions that I have to share. A client of mine created one of the coolest reposes for the Dire Troll Mauler that I've ever seen, and had me paint it up for him.

The colors are based on an example mini that he painted (there was a little room for interpretation). Overall, I thought this mini was a fantastic one to paint.

Just to make sure I'm giving credit where credit is due, I did not convert this mini, my client did. I only did a little bit of green stuff work in small places.

Victoria Lamb original sculpts

2010-08-30T09:42:00.002-06:00

Victoria Lamb is a wonderful miniatures painter, and if you aren't already familiar with her work, you probably should go and have a look.

Ok, done there? The news is that she's just set up shop to sell her own line of miniatures. She's only just put up her store, so she doesn't have a lot of different minis yet. But the ones she has look pretty neat.

I'm particularly partial to the goblinoid fairies.

Privateer Press give us a first look at the new Unicorn faction

2010-08-27T09:09:00.002-06:00

Ok, sort of, but not really.

David Carl put up a post on Privateer Press' Insider blog, and talked about their playtesting process. One of the things he mentioned is that after the Warmachine and Hordes Mark II field tests, they decided to keep some of the playtesting groups as standard.

Honestly, I think that seems like the best way to find new groups.

Since they'd like to have more playtesting groups out there, and can't find them through another field test, overall it looks like the best thing to do is to make up some crazy new rules and see who can give them good feedback.

And that's where the unicorns come in. Yes, he posted rules for the Uniherd faction- with Rainbo as the warlock, and three warbeasts (Essence of sugar, Essence of Spice and Essence of Everything Nice).

Doesn't that make you want to start modelling unicorns? No, that's probably just me.

Gencon part 6 - Crocodile Games

2010-08-24T09:22:00.004-06:00

While at Gencon, I got to stop by Crocodile Games and speak with Chris Fitzpatrick (who is responsible for a lot down at Crocodile- most impressively he's sculpted most of their great minis).

The interesting new is that there is an official skirmish rules set for Wargods coming out. Currently, players who wish to adopt Wargods into a skirmish setting are forced to use a homebrew version (although you can find some fan made rules online).

Overall, I think that's going to be good news for players and for Wargods. I personally find the games miniatures and rules set to be quite good (the activation rules are especially original). But it is a little difficult for me to get into a rank and file formation game.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Wargods, the rule set simulates event happening in real time, where you decide what each unit is doing before any activation begins.

It may sound like it wouldn't work, or be very complicated, but the rules really are quite elegant in the end. With a few counters, the game becomes a nice balance of meta-thinking strategy- you need to guess what you're opponent will do, and at the same time look for your own best options.

Aside from their booth, Crocodile was hosting their own awards for the Gencon painting competition, hosted the finals of their world campaign, and had set out a lot of their own brilliantly sculpted miniatures.

And I got a few pics of those:

Gencon part 5 - the P3 Grandmasters Painting Competition

2010-08-20T09:11:00.004-06:00

So, Privateer Press have put together quite an impressive painting competition at Gencon. Since it was started, it has continually attracted some of the best painters in the world (several of whom attend Gencon anyway).

The categories look roughly like the Golden Daemons- there are single mini, a warjack/warbeast, a battlegroup, unit and diorama categories.

So, sometime last summer, I decided that I wanted to attend Gencon with one entry for every category. It seemed very doable when I had a year to go, so I took my time, and worked on the Gencon pieces here and there.

Of course, I wasted so much time that I was scrambling to get them all done, and finished the last of my entries at 2 am the day before my flight left. That's procrastination for you.

There was something new and interesting this year. In every previous year, the P3 judges handed out Skully trophies to the first, second and third place entries in every category. This year, they completely scrapped the second and third place trophies in favor of a medal system instead.

Each entry was judged on its own merits and given either no award, or a bronze, silver or gold medal. The best in each category, and the best in show were awarded trophies as usual.

Each of my entries was awarded a silver medal. In two categories, this would have translated directly into third place, and in another it was possibly third place (each of those only had one gold medal awarded without a trophy). In the single miniature and warjack/warbeast categories, this didn't exactly translate into anything (there were several gold medals awarded to entries other than the winner).

So I have some mixed feelings about the new system. While I would love the bragging rights that you get from getting a bronze skull trophy, getting awards for some of my entries and not others makes it seem like my painting is hit and miss. In this system, it is plain to me that my painting was at the same level for all of my entries, and it just happens that some of the categories were more competitive than others.

Ok, so enough about that. Here are the minis I entered. I'm sure I'll do a blog entry for each one soon, so I'll just give you a pic of each here:

Gencon Part 4- Privateer Press

2010-08-19T09:36:00.005-06:00

It seems that Privateer Press has become the big dog at Gencon. Their booth was always full, their tables always had plenty of players, and their staff always had someone distracting them with questions.

Privateer Press launched quite a few things at Gencon this year. First and foremost, the newest of the Extreme Sculpts, the inestimable Titan Gladiator Extreme was first unveiled online before the release at Gencon. We all looked at that monstrosity of a mini (Jason Hendricks has really outdone himself with this one, man that thing is crazy).

Those who picked one up at the con will have noticed a couple things bout it. First off, it really is as detailed in person as it looked on the web, it absolutely doesn't fit onto its base, and perhaps most astonishingly, it is made from gray resin.

Yes, this mini is the first time we've received any kind of resin from Privateer Press. The fact that they did not reveal that online beforehand makes me think that they must have wanted to do what they never had the chance to do with the plastic minis- reveal the mini first and only after everyone is sure they love it, reveal the material it is made from.

Of course, resin is pretty commonly accepted as a better material for minis than normal plastic- and especially with some of the strides forward it has been taking recently, we've been seeing more and more resin minis. And with this mini looking so nice, I suspect we won't be seeing any more metal extreme sculpts soon.

Another part of the new releases they had were the new Warmachine Battleboxes. Meant as a $50 starter box, these were announced as completely plastic kits - contradicting earlier statements about how PP was going to keep their characters and warcasters in metal. Well, it turns out that the warcasters included in the box sets were all metal minis.

For those of you who took the time to look, Matt DePetrio was painting up a new minion warlock- this one was a Gatorman. I got a pretty poor snapshot of the unfinished mini, but the style is nice.

Of course, we have no idea how he plays, but he's definitely increased my interest in the upcoming minions faction book.

Oh, and today, you can just check over at Privateer Press' website to see a 360 shot of the finished mini (also, with better photography).

Another interesting even they had was their Iron Arena. Meant to reward players who spend most of their Gencon time exploring Privateer Press events, the Iron Arena gave players points for games, and rewards for playing (if you played enough games, you even got an extreme sculpt of your choosing).

One of the best parts though were the crazy characterful scenarios that they had set up on their tables. For example, you could set up a 100 point- two warcaster force against this monstrosity of a warjack. He's huge, crazy powerful and can usually defeat a very large warmachine force without much trouble.

I heard that there was one Cryx player who beat him, but I only saw the mammoth 'jack win.

Of course, my favorite PP event was their painting competition, but I'll have to leave off blogging that until tomorrow.

Gencon part 3 - Reaper

2010-08-18T09:37:00.004-06:00

The guys at Reaper are really nice fellows.

Their booth featured a Con exclusive Sophie (as it always does) along with some prereleases on new chibi-mouse warriors that they'll be releasing soon.

In their case, they had a few upcoming miniatures that were featured in the Warlord expansion, The Savage North. Some were greens, some were pewter, and all of them looked great.

Now, I'm all kinds of in favor of getting a Frost Giant faction for Warlord, and I don't even play their game. Man, but those minis are fun to paint.

There were people playing Warlord in the tabletop areas too, and altogether that would have been enough for most miniatures companies. But Reaper goes just a little bit further.

Reaper had a table set up for their sculptors to sit and demonstrate their work to con goers. I had a chance to talk to plenty of industry sculptors, including Bobby Jackson, Patrick Keith (who is responsible for the Dwarf/Giant on the left) and Drew Williams. Great guys, and all of them were eager to share their secrets.

One thing that makes Reaper such a great company, though is that I'm not sure that Drew even does sculpting for them.

Reaper has really demonstrated that their dedication is primarily to the hobby, rather than to themselves. They're really dedicated to expanding the hobby in all directions.

They provided quite a bit of support for the Gencon open miniatures painting and sculpting competitions, as well as several painting events.

Of course, they had their full line of miniatures and paints available. But since they're Reaper, you can always find them at your local game store. Of course, at the con, there were people acting the part of the figure finder, and that was pretty cool to see.

News fro Gencon - Part 2 Wyrd and Puppet Wars

2010-08-17T09:01:00.004-06:00

There was quite the showing at the Wyrd Miniatures booth at Gencon.

For starters, they had quite a few new releases for Malifaux, including two Gencon exclusive miniatures (one is an alternate nurse, another is an oversized alternate version of an upcoming master). The new book, Rising Powers, does quite a bit to deepen the game of Malifaux, including introducing Henchmen, and a slew of new scenarios to play (along with some adjustments to older scenarios).

They also had something on display that looked eerily like their new Terraclips game tiles. I was pleased when I found that this was made from a fairly sturdy card stock (it wouldn't just break after a couple games) but the bits didn't fit together quite right.

Then again, if you asked anyone from Wyrd or from World Works about it, they'd give you quite the rant about how the manufacturer used a thinner card stock and glossy finish, which just won't do. They'll be releasing those sometime later.

They still used them for all of Wyrd's tournaments and game tables, so there's something that worked out.

Ok, but here's the big news from Wyrd. They're working on a new game called "Puppet Wars." All we currently know about this game is that it will use the new Puppet Deck of cards (which works just fine for Malifaux too) and will features this creepy and cute set of miniatures:

I have no idea if the rules are even finalized yet, and we really don't know if it will be in any way compatible with Malifaux. From the minis, it looks like they're starting up something pretty outstanding here.

Wyrd is still setting a high standard for creepiness in minis. More power to them, I say.

News from Gencon - Part 1

2010-08-16T09:52:00.002-06:00

Ok, I got back from Gencon, and I've got tons of things to share with all of you.

First off, I've got to say that the GNinja award for best booth goes to the team over at Coolminiornot.com. The Coolmini team was representing Dark Age miniatures, Soda Pop, Scibor, Enigma, Studio McVey and tons of other great lines.

And aside from inviting one of the world's greatest mini painters to do demos for all of us (Natalya Melnik, by the way, is great) they also had two demos going and a number of outstanding announcements.

For example, I got to see the Black and White proof for the new Dark Age rulebook. The new edition of the game will be converting everything into inches for us. Also, just so that you know, they've decided to post the quick start rules for free download (containing 36 pages out of their fairly short rulebook) along with the new force lists (from a second, very large forces book). Pretty nice stuff.

Oh, and if you aren't familiar with Dark Age's miniatures, they are quite fine.

Not to be eclipsed, Soda Pop miniatures announced two new games- one for their existing line of anime inspired miniatures, and one to support a brand new line of chibi minis.

The new line of chibi miniatures is called "Super Dungeon Explore." Honestly, if you have ever wondered why there weren't minis that look like Link and Zelda, this is something you need to check out.

The booth had a demo of a more rough ruleset for Super Dungeon, but the Sodapop guys are much further along in their other game, called "Relic Knight."

Relic Knight will be a small scale skirmish game, and after picking the brain of one of Sodapop's owners, I found out that it is really going to move. They wanted to simulate the way that combat in anime often moves very quickly, with some of the characters bouncing off of buildings and tearing towards each other at crazy high speeds.

Honestly, in the end it will all depend on how strong the finished rules actually are. But it does look like Relic Knight will be bringing something to the table that no other skirmish tabletop game is, and that's exciting.

Forgeworld Avatar

2010-07-28T09:45:00.002-06:00

With all the news and previews surrounding Gencon recently, I've neglected some of my own work.

I recently had an opportunity to paint a brilliant mini: the Forge World Avatar. This mini is quite the beauty.

Anyway, you'd probably rather see pics than read a rant about him:

Wyrd miniatures Gencon Exclusive revealed

2010-07-26T09:49:00.004-06:00

Wyrd Miniatures has revealed that their booth at Gencon will be featuring two exclusive miniatures for us. One is Miss Pack (an alternate nurse miniature for McMourning) and the other is an alternate version of their new Master "the Dreamer and Lord Chompy Bits."

We only have concept art for the nurse right now, and that's just how that goes. But we do have a pic of the assembled miniature for Lord Chompy Bits. And he's a crazy one.

This alternate sculpt is called the "Nightmare version" which right now looks like it follow the example of Privateer Press' Extreme Sculpts line. He's too enormous for Wyrd to just put him on sale normally (he weighs in at $60 as is) and he isn't game changing- he's more like a collectors' item.

I've heard that he will work in gameplay just fine- pretty much exactly like the Extreme line, but I don't have confirmation on that just yet.

And so far, we don't actually know what the normal version will look like.

Anyway, have a look for yourself:

Minis in the Movies

2010-07-23T09:59:00.002-06:00

A lot of films these days are adaptations of other properties, but one of the things we're seeing right now is something strange and new- adaptations of miniatures games into film.

Currently, you'll find a little buzz online about the Ultramarines film, basically because Dan Abnette wants to keep you informed (you can even find a teaser trailer).

Anyway, I think it is completely up in the air as to whether or not this semi-small project about the Warhammer 40,000 universe will be any good or not. I'm interested, mind, but it could easily end up looking like Mutant Chronicles in the end.

On the other hand, it looks like there's actually a little bit of work going into the Monsterpocalypse film. There is confirmation that Tim Burton is actually involved in the project, and likely going to direct it.

This isn't 100% confirmation that we'll ever see a Monpoc film from Tim Burton. I mean, Tim Burton got payed a million dollars for a Superman film way before Superman Returns. But Burton's involvement does mean that if it does happen, it will probably not look like the Dungeons and Dragons movie.

All of this talk about a Monpoc film made me start thinking. Why on earth would Burton want to adapt that material?

I mean to say, Monpoc has less of a story or even a setting than most miniatures games. I mean, the fluff is 100% an excuse for giant monsters to throw one another into skyescrapers. That's not a bad thing for the game, since it just accepts that that is what it is, and presents it as such.

Ultimately, Monpoc is a kind of weird to adapt because it is based on a genre of old cheesy movies. And that's probably what attracted Burton to begin with.

Tim Burton has a sort of fetish for old cheesy science fiction films. He's thrown in small tributes to them in many of his films, most notably Mars Attacks. In a Monpoc film, what we're most likely to see is a similar tribute to the Godzilla franchise.

And that can be cool.

Tor Gaming releases Growler type orcs

2010-07-21T09:51:00.002-06:00

Tor Gaming have just released some pretty nice looking minis they're calling "Orcnar Unmanns." Of course, there's just no way that I can look at something like this and not say "Dude, that's a Growler!"

On the other hand, there's simply nothing wrong with looking like a growler. I mean, Privateer Press has been doing it with their Dire Trolls for a while now (although I'm not sure whether the original pictures by Brian Snoddy came before or after Vor: the Maelstrom).

Of course, Vor: the Maelstrom was discontinued when FASA dropped out of the sky, but Ironwind Metals has picked up the slack if you're interested in the old minis.

Now, I have to say, I'm not at all disappointed to see new minis that look like Growlers. I think they look like some very fine minis, and I hope to paint some up soon.

Maybe I could use those to start up a new force for when we finally see the release of VOR 2.0.

Storm Lords Command Squad

2010-07-20T09:33:00.003-06:00

Here is an interesting unit that I got to paint just a little while ago. One of the interesting parts of this project was the sheer number of faces I got to paint for it. So many individual faces, and each of them different from the others.

This squad was painted to match a Stormlords force that I've painted in small batches for quite some time.

That is really the part that I enjoyed the most about this group, and I think they turned out rather well. I still enjoy painting new additions to the force, and especially with so many faces I can paint.

More Farrow previews for Hordes: Minions

2010-07-15T10:19:00.002-06:00

Privateer Press have given us one more preview for the outstanding new Hordes Farrow force.

I know, I've posted up their news about Farrow at pretty much every step, but just look at this mini and tell me I shouldn't. I mean, these pigs are outstanding.

Anyway, this "Gun Boar" looks like he'll be a light warbeast for the Farrow. That puts us at one Warlock and one heavy and one light 'beast for the faction. That's not much, but back when I started playing dwarves, that's all we had. I mean, we didn't really have a dwarf unit at the time, and the Farrow already have two.

So here's hoping the book is released at Gencon.

Privateer Press previews mini-warpwolves

2010-07-14T09:53:00.003-06:00

For everyone who has been interested in the Circle of Oboros warpwolf minis, Privateer Press has just previewed the miniatures for their very first non-warbeast warpwolves- called Warpborn Skinwalkers. Their fluff makes them sound like a sort of half-warpwolf unit (they are partially transformed into warpwolves, but not to the point where they decide to stop wearing clothing and using weapons).

The minis overall look rather nice, and these are definitely a type of wolf man that looks a little less Confrontation inspired. I'll really enjoy doing up these guys in my Circle colors.

This, of course, puts us one large step closer to having an all Warpwolf theme force (or two) in the upcoming Forces of Hordes: Circle Oboros book.

Rackham Sale and Aarklash Warpack testing Begins

2010-07-08T09:32:00.006-06:00

Ok, to start off, Rackham started up a sale on pretty much all of their stock this week. Everything from the Rackham Store is anywhere from 15% to 70% off.

Now, when you hear that, you're probably thinking the same thing I was thinking. There's probably one thing in the store that is 70% off, and the chances of you wanting it are pretty low.

However, I was surprised to see that Rackham has put pretty much everything in their online store on sale- and the majority of things I looked at were at 70% off.

For the record, this includes some of the finely detailed and massive resin kits that Rackham put out. Better snatch those up while they're cheap.

So, what is going on here? Minis do go on sale from time to time, but not like this. Distributors do special deals with free shipping, or buy two box sets and get the third free, but this is a little extreme. I mean, these prices look like clearance. Then again, they may be trying to lead with a loss and move their games towards center stage.

On the other hand, a little more than a month ago, the guys at Rackham Entertainment announced that they were working on a new small scale skirmish game set in the Confrontation world code-named Project Groundhog. Then their fans told them that that was a very stupid name, so they started using a working title for their new game: Aarklash Warpack.
From the descriptions, Aarklash Warpack sounds a lot like a new version of the Confrontation Skirmish game that we all miss. Set in the same world, Aarklash Warpack allows for heroes and incarnates to lead small bands against one another- all in small scale skirmishes.

While this is definitely a new rules set, it does sound rather interesting to see what Rackham does with the game.

Currently, you can sign up for their Beta Test at www.aarklash-warpack.com. Go ahead and check it out.

Salamanders Land Speeders

2010-07-02T09:13:00.004-06:00

So, I had a commission to do a few land speeders for a Salamanders force that I had already painted.

(You will have seen most of them if you follow this blog- but if you missed something, I can just link you to the Salamanders' Gallery page. As a fair warning, there are a lot of them there.)

Anyway, as part of this commission, I decided to make each land speeder unique. Sure, they should all have the same basic green on them, and the Salamanders' thematic fire emblems to keep them tied to the force as a whole, but I wanted to also give them a strong sense of individuality, setting each one apart from the other two (similar to the way I did the Drop Pods).

Anyway, enough with my babbling. Here are some photos for two land speeders.

Reaper's new Warlord Expansion

2010-06-30T10:04:00.003-06:00

So, Reaper has posted up their cover to the new expansion for their tabletop miniatures game, Warlord.

I know what a lot of you are thinking. "Well, Reaper makes great D&D minis, but do people actually play their game?" Sure, maybe no one plays locally, but that's not a reason to blow off this news.

Look at it this way, Reaper has stayed in the business with an outstanding fan base- and they get the vast majority of that through simply making great minis for painting.

So, when Reaper decides that they're going to be making eight new factions for Warlord, that's eight new lines of great minis we'll be seeing. And that is fantastic news to me.

The new factions are:

Bloodstone Gnomes
Wood Elves of Tembrithil
Dark Elves of the Darkreaches
Dwarves of Kragmarr
Black Orcs of Kargir
Frost Giants of Icingstead
Koborlas of the Nornwood
Sisterhood of the Blade

Just to make sure you caught it- there will be a Frost Giant faction. For everyone who thought that Derek Schubert's Frost Giant Queen wasn't enough, and that Tre Manor's charging Frost Giant Warrior left you wanting more, have no fear. We'll be seeing a lot of these from Reaper soon.

And if you haven't seen those two minis before, here they are:

2010-06-24T09:16:00.004-06:00

Privateer Press has released images of the green for the next Trollblood Warlock. This is Gunnbjorn- sculpted by Brian Dugas (a man responsible for a number of good sculpts from Privateer lately).

I have to say, I'm impressed with the detail work on this sculpt. The Trollbloods are really getting something that follows up with their high standards (I mean, they already have minis like Calandra and Grim Angus in that line).

So here he is- the troll with a bazooka:

Converted Abaddon (the despoiler)

2010-06-22T10:35:00.004-06:00

This was a very interesting commission that I received. My client commissioned Dave Taylor to create a new version of the classic Chaos Warmaster. The original mini was made during the 2nd edition of Warhammer 40,000- that was back when terminators fit on normal sized bases. This new Abaddon doesn't use any of the original bits, and it is rather impressive how recognizable he is.

Go ahead and read some of Dave Taylor's thoughts on the conversion- his site is pretty inspiring as he does some excellent conversion work.

For the paintjob, I went with a more subtle glow effect and metallic metals (this mini was meant to match an existing Black Legion force after all). The glow should be just bright enough to make him stand out from his fellows.

Plastic Battlegroups for Warmachine

2010-06-18T09:52:00.003-06:00

Alright, Privateer Press have just revealed their new Warmachine Mark II versions of the 'battlegroup' starter boxes.

The price is the same as before (although the minis have gotten a little bigger). The big thing that none of us expected is that the whole thing is made out of plastic.

Yep, not only does the box contain the new plastic version of the Slayer, but it also has new plastic Deathrippers, Defilers and- most shocking of all- a plastic Denegra.

And we're getting the same treatment for all of the battle boxes. New plastic light warjacks and most significantly, those resculpts that we saw in Prime MkII were all made from plastic.

I've got to admit, from the pictures I had seen of these minis before, I had no idea that they were plastic. And some are minis that I liked more than their metal counterparts. Kreoss especially.

I can see why this makes financial sense- the battle boxes have always been underpriced to get people started in the game, and the low start up cost has always been a strong selling point for Warmachine.

It is kind of a shock that there are any plastic warcasters, but if they keep doing plastic kits that look this good, I don't think it is a problem.

Now, I wonder if those plastic light 'jacks are going to be sold separately. I really prefer the new Lancer and Charger to the old ones.

The Ghillie Suit

2010-06-15T18:02:00.005-06:00

So, I recently finished a commission to convert and paint a Salamanders version of Sergeant Telion (originally of the Ultramarines). The most eccentric part of this conversion was putting Telion into a Ghillie Suit.

For those of you who don't know, a ghillie suit is a set of clothes interwoven with grass, leaves and moss that is often worn by snipers and hunters wishing to conceal themselves. The point of a ghillie suit is that it uses the natural surroundings to conceal the sniper (making it quite a bit better than normal camouflage).

In order to show this in the conversion, I made sure to highlight the terrain on the base. I gave Telion a scenic base with several varied elements creating something of a mini-diorama.

As with all camouflage on minis, I had to make sure not to make it too realistic. Telion has some very bright colors showing, making sure that the mini would pop despite his concealing cloak.

Chaos Space Marines Greater Daemon Conversion

2010-06-14T09:50:00.004-06:00

Just a little while ago, I got a really interesting commission. I was given a few GW plastic kits and told to create some kind of Greater Daemon from all of it.

One of the advantages that the current Chaos Space Marine codex has over its predecessors, is that all of your daemons can be unique entities. So there isn't very much need to use only the daemons that Citadel Miniatures actually produce. I even know of a good deal of Nurgle forces have been converting Ghoul miniatures into their daemons, and some Khorne forces have been using beastmen.

Anyway, here is a Greater Daemon for the Black Legion. He was made from Minotaur and Chaos Spawn bits, along with a generous amount of Gray Stuff.

Studio McVey keeping up the fine miniatures

2010-06-07T09:53:00.002-06:00

Mike and Alison McVey have been keeping up on their line of absolutely stunning miniatures from some of the best sculptors around. The newest addition to the Studio McVey line is this absolutely gorgeous set:

This is Y'Sala and the Darkness. Like most Studio McVey minis, they weren't really sculpted with any sort of game in mind, but honestly, you wouldn't need one for these two. Go ahead and have a look at the Studio McVey blog to learn more.

And while you're there, have a look at some of their painted miniatures. The McVeys are two of the very best painters out there.

Salamanders Ironclad Dreadnoughts

2010-06-04T09:13:00.005-06:00

As part of a commission for a Salamanders force, I painted up two Ironclad Dreadnoughts with a lot of freehand and details on them.

Part of it was to make each dreadnought stand apart from the other. The answer to that, I found, was freehand.

I tried to make the flame effects and the freehand very different on each dreadnought- especially the banner. Only one of the dreadnoughts has hazard stripe freehand on him at all, and the other one has bright flame freehand and scroll work instead.

Overall, I think the pair of them turned out quite well.

Gold and Brass Metallic Metals

2010-06-03T09:30:00.007-06:00

There are some general principles for painting metallic metals in colors other than silver.

The first thing to remember is that your metallic colors are not fundamentally different from the other colors that you have. You can still use all the same techniques that you normally do- you can layer them and highlight them up with lighter colors, you can add washes and shading with inks and darker colors.

The only big difference is that you need to keep your metallic pallet away from your other colors. You can shade, glaze and wash metallic metals with non-metallic colors, but you really can't add non-metallic highlighting. In your metallic pallet, Mithril Silver is your new white.

I generally prefer to approach metals by layering them. The most standard gold color I use starts out with a dark bronze color like Tin Bitz or Molten Bronze with some brown ink mixed in.

From there, it is best to layer up by mixing a medium gold or brass color in (like P3 Rhulic Gold or Citadel Shining Gold).

You can add in final highlights using Mithril Silver. The more you add to it, the lighter your golds will be, and they will begin to look more worn to an extent.

Now, I just gave you a strong recipe for gold. Don't let that hold you back. It is easy to find just one approach to painting gold metals and use it over and over again, but if you try to mix it up some, you'll find that there's a lot you can do.

For example, what happens if you take your dark metallic metal and mix it with your Mithril Silver? What happens if you highlight your metals with Boltgun? What if you use a blue wash over it rather than a standard brown one?

From that combination, you get some interesting metals, like the ones on this Mule:

So, now start experimenting with different color combinations. There's quite a bit of exploration to be done.

Lord Carver mini

2010-06-02T10:42:00.003-06:00

Well, I've been anxiously awaiting some great Farrow minis ever since we first heard that they'd become a new Hordes Faction. And here he is, the very first full fledged minion Warlock: Lord Carver.

Looks like a solid sculpt to me. I might have to play this faction when they come out.

Classic games can be great

2010-05-31T10:03:00.004-06:00

I first got into miniatures gaming in the early '90s with the Milton Bradley/Games Workshop joint project Space Crusade. Overall, I think the game worked rather well. Three Marine players would board a drifting space hulk infested by an odd mix of Orks, Chaos Space Marines, Genestealers and the Necrons' great grandfather. We never could figure out why every faction outside of the Imperium and Eldar could get along so swimmingly when aboard a drifting hulk.

A friend of mine took a similar path into gaming, only he did it with the Mutant Chronicles version of Space Crusade: Siege of the Citadel.

Most of the gameplay is extremely similar (almost identical in places) to Space Crusade or Heroquest. And the game concept fit into the Mutant Chronicles universe much better than Space Crusade fit into 40k.

Like Space Crusade, this is meant as an introduction to miniatures gaming- the minis aren't as high a quality as the Heartbreaker line presented in Warzone. However, the gameplay is fast and crazy, and there's a lot of screw your buddy going on as the different corporate mercenaries try to obtain their objectives (and keep their friends from getting theirs).

In one of the scenarios we played, I got to play the undead Legion and was chasing down and eating the characters with a giant monster called an Ezoghoul.

Altogether, it was a great, lighthearted game. It actually makes me want to reconstruct my old Space Crusade set. I know for a fact that I've got enough Gretchin hanging around...