Old School Grenadier...

I really like Julie Guthrie as a sculptor, I think there's a certain elegance to her sculpts that few others can achieve. I'm not sure of the precise age of this sculpt - maybe from the mid 90's at a guess - pretty good for something 15+ years old. Originally from Grenadier's Personalities line, now produced by Mega Miniatures...

Anyhow this guy has been primed black and then airbrushed with mid and then light grey from the light source to begin the highlighting.

Was hoping to get a goodly amount of this finished today however some of that real life rubbish conspired against me... Flying to Sydney tomorrow so I'll get back to it next week...

'Four A' Miniatures - Sea Demon Warrior

After reworking the monumentally bad base and touching up a few other areas, the miniature's finished.
I tried out some Green Line moss from Fredericus Rex for the first time and whilst it doesn't look at all like moss on a miniature this small I think it does work well as a semi-aquatic type plant. I also mixed up some pigments with gloss varnish to make some boggy puddles.

WIP - 'Four A' Miniatures - Sea Demon Warrior

I'm not terribly fussed with anything the larger miniature producers are coming out with at the moment, I think most of the good stuff is being created by the smaller "boutique" studios. As long as Four A hold onto Paul Muller as a sculptor they'll continue to come up with cool miniatures like this guy - a Sea Demon Warrior (1 of 3).

This is still a work in progress, nearly finished but with a few tweaks still needed - in particular the base which is and absolute atrocity... Not much to add - it's basically a fun, relatively quick paintjob but using Vallejo Air Color as a brush on paint which I seem to be doing more often these days.

 

Latest Miniature Acquisitions - Kingdom Death.

Whilst browsing Frothers I believe, I saw the latest Kingdom Death releases and was, once again stunned - the Flower Knight in particular was one of the nicest sculpts I'd seen in a long time - I reckon it'd be in my top handful if I was the type of person to compile such lists...

Anyhow, being a little short on cash due to Christmas related expenditure I decided I'd hold off for a week or two before buying what I wanted thinking that if the Butcher (another brilliant sculpt) hadn't sold out in a couple of months then neither would these. Ofcourse KD sold out of the Flower Knight in a ridiculously short amount of time and the Female Survivor wasn't far behind. The search was on...

I found the Female Survivor easily enough on CMoN and snapped one up but the Flower Knight was not going to be so easily acquired . After much investigative work (checking alternative stockists on KDs site)  I contacted Taka at Full Metal Planet in Japan who had not yet received his allocation of KD minis and was able to secure the Flower Knight. :) It did end up being a little pricey but Taka's service can't be faulted - a great guy to deal with.

Both miniatures turned up yesterday (only opened the packages today) and I was certainly not disappointed - both sculpts are quite literally amazing. In my opinion Kingdom Death are at the forefront of keeping this hobby interesting, their more recent sculpts with the exception of the Sunstalker Infant are near peerless. The quality of the casting is faultless, even better than Studio McVey, it might sound more than I little wanky - but they really are a pleasure to behold...

*I've since discovered that Maelstrom Games is also a stockist for KD which is worth noting...

10mm of Goodness from Copplestone Castings...

I was looking around over at Frothers a couple of months back when I came across pics of some new 10 and 15mm miniatures by Copplestone Castings. Mark Copplestone was one of my favourite sculptors back when I first started painting so it was cool to see that his recent work in the smaller scales was as good as ever.

I ended up buying the 10mm Heroes and Halflings and the 15mm Northlander Characters... Even though I'd already seen pictures of the miniatures I was still amazed at the quality (both sculpting and casting) when they turned up. The 15mm were impressive enough but I have no idea how he manages at 10mm - they're as good as a lot of 28mm stuff...

Anyhow, gushing aside, here's a 10mm magic user on a little scenic base that I painted up mostly over the course of an afternoon. I quite enjoyed painting at this scale - it all comes together very quickly which is nice when you're such a slow painter like myself...

In-between work and being hacked to death in Dark Souls I managed to get a little more of the latest RBG dwarf finished. Still some polishing to go but it's pretty close to done.

It's been interesting playing around with NMM again. So many beautiful examples of the technique out there (especially Nakatan - definitely one of my favourite painters these days) that it can be tough getting a satisfying result when comparing it to the work of others but I'm giving it a crack...

You Will Die...

As if I didn't have little enough time to paint already - I had to make things worse by purchasing this bloody game... 

Whilst I'm certainly not a gamer I will still pick things up for a little after work stress relief if they sound particularly cool,  Dark Souls probably wasn't the wisest choice... The game's been punishing me for about 7 hours now with no stress relief in sight. That said - it is horribly addictive and I guess enjoyable in its own fashion.

I included a couple of videos - one a cool compilation of bad guys (mute it though, the music is god awful) and a second of some painful scrote narrating his journey through the tutorial stage - it is amusing if you can deal with the guys 'nails on chalkboard' voice...