Monster

Miniature Makers: Beyond Miniatures

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Today we’re going to look at one of the newest kids on the miniature block. Beyond Miniature is a Spanish company that was started in 2015 by Alejandro Prieto and Arnau Lazaro. These two friends began commission painting in 2012 and Beyond Miniatures has grown naturally from that partnership. They currently have only a single miniature available for sale. “The Hobgoblin” is designed by Alejandro and Arnau and is sculpted by the legendary Pedro Fernández. It’s a stunning piece and certainly creates excitement to see what else is coming in the future.

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The journey for Beyond Miniatures is only starting, but it’s a company worth keeping an eye on. Alejandro and Arnau are very open about their experience and speak about their desire to keep learning and improving wherever possible. With this welcoming attitude they should have no problem finding their way into the realms of great miniature companies.

To visit Beyond Miniatures and check out their gallery click here

 

WIP Wednesday

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Spring is here and with it comes the season of conventions and competitions! As you read this miniature painters and sculptors are scrambling to finish pieces for the Iron Painter competition hosted by Wyrd minis. The Iron Painter is a crazy difficult competition where you are given a theme and have two weeks to come up with a miniature piece that explores it. Then your miniature goes head to head against another in a round of voting. Because your doing a new piece every two weeks with no way to guess the theme, it produces a mountain of  interesting pieces to browse through. It’s too late to enter now but I’ll leave a link to the forum below to the gallery of competing pieces to look through. I believe this weeks theme was “pink”.

I am also preparing for summer competitions, albeit at a much slower pace. I’m hoping to get 4 or 5 miniatures ready for judging by August.

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Rocket is very close to being done. He has that great cartoon look I was aiming for but he’s just a tad to bright for his base. I’ll probably use some technical pigment to dirty him up and bring the piece together.

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The base is about half way there but needs to be toned way down. I’ve placed primary colors to map out what I want the ship to look like. It’s a crashed ship so there will be a good amount of dirt and scratches showing in the end.

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Ive also started on a new bust from FER miniatures. By priming him black first I can use a white primer to help me see how light would hit the miniature from a certain angle. There’s a lot of open skin on the piece so it should help me practice my skin tone and blending. As well as some unusual lighting effects.

Hopefully Rocket will be wrapped by next week and I’ll be able to post a Step by Step (with more pictures of each stage) Until then look out for another Miniature Maker showcase coming soon. And to all you competing this summer remember to have fun and good luck!

 

Check out the Iron Painter 2016 competition

 

Painting Descent 2nd Edition Goblin Archers

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Hello and happy Winter Wonderland weekend. I hope everyone on the east coast is thawed from the big blizzard that hit last week and has planned some fun activities now that it’s beautiful outside. For those of you who are working today, I’ll be joining you to ensure every game night tonight has some fantastic pizza. I spent the blizzard playing games with my friends instead of painting but I’m ok with that. Sometimes it’s good to remember that’s there’s a really fun game underneath all those figures. So let’s look at how one of those games are progressing.

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Here is the full Goblin Archer Army in all their tiny glory.

On these pieces I tried to focus on really nailing down my blending and getting bolder and brighter highlights. I’m feeling more skilled with the wet pallet now and I find myself mixing paint with a little more confidence. That isn’t to say these pieces are perfect. I’m still missing mold lines when cleaning and I rely on washes too heavily. Which makes getting bright colors that pop difficult.

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I decided to go with a cartoony lime green for the normal Goblins. But instead of slowly adding white paint to the mix for the highlights I added more yellow. I need to find myself some Ninja Turtle Minis because I want to try this skin tone again. Plus how awesome would those minis be!
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All the archers are in different stages of Michael Jackson like leans. Normally to fix this you can take a blow dryer or heat up some boiling water or uncooked rice. Then dip the mini in for a few seconds and move it to the desired position and hold until cooled. However these guys looked so ridiculous and seemed to have added personality with their positions that I decided not to fix them.

When painting I always use a color Wheel to help me plan how I want the mini to look beforehand. For these minis I chose to use Triad colors. Which for Green is Purple and for Red is Blue. You don’t have to live and die by the rules of your color wheel and you can experiment with tons of tones within a spectrum of color. But understanding color is essential to any visual art and when I started studying it there was a sudden jump in my miniature’s quality. To achieve the highlights on the clothing I simply added more and more white to my purple color mix.

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This guy took multiple tries to finish. I knew what I wanted to do with the skin tone but had trouble visualizing it after painting so many green goblins. I also had originally painted his armor brown like his brothers but quickly realized that it just faded into the orange. I went back and repainted him with grey armor, which looks much better against his skin. The point I’m trying to make is don’t give up even if you can’t fully visualize the end. Whether through practice or accident you’ll get there.
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The quiver of arrows was very difficult to get right. Any highlighting trick I used didn’t seem to bring out individual arrows. Then I took a very dark almost black blue and drew some lines in the creases. Suddenly it looked like a bunch of arrows and I just took some very light blue and picked out a couple of the tiny lines. I’m glad I stumbled upon this trick because every mini in games seems to have arrows and I always dread doing them.

After finishing the Boss Monster it was just down to the small details. I used some different shades of brown stripes to create straps and did a white highlight over dirty bone to make all the boots look furry at the top. Then everything was sprayed with crystal acrylic finish and after curing for a day a final Matt finishing spray to tone down the plastic shine look. Doing these sprays will alter your color a little (usually by darkening your colors a bit) but it’s worth it to get the protection needed when fingers will be rubbing the pieces for hours when playing. You can compensate  by making the colors a shade brighter than you want them.