Sprucing up...

Little post today. I've been messing about with logos for the last couple of days and learning better ways to make them. I don't think I'll be changing careers in a hurry but I've made a nice new logo for this blog which is now in place above. Obviously based on the previous one but hopefully a little more textured. Plus I wanted to add the magnifying glass that was part of the old Spyglass logo. Hope everyone likes it :)

Selling minis and matters of size...

Okay, I'm practically famous for ranting about figure scales. It's an age old argument where the public are usually wrong but don't know it (controversial huh?). This is not a rant about that though I'll probably get back to it one of these days...

This is about photography. In particular, the photographing of miniatures for advertising purposes. There's a bit of a trend out there and it's not really an ideal one. One of the difficulties of sculpting minis is the 'conventions of scale'. This is to say that on a 28mm figure we don't accurately recreate the proportions of a real human. At 28mm the ankles would be too thin, eyes would be impossible to see and weapons would generally be ludicrously small and thin. The reality looks wrong and causes problems with casting. So, we exaggerate. Minis have big heads and hands and the facial features are blown up. Depending on the sculptor this is done to a greater or lesser extent. Some figures have a very chunky look, for example many of the historical producers work like this. The sculptor Tom Meier is known for the other end of the extreme with figures that seem at a glance to be total reality whereas they are still exaggerated, just to a much lesser extent. I understand Tom's general ethos is to get as close to reality as is practical.

Now this is all very well but with the advent of cheaper and cheaper high quality digital cameras we are often showing photographs of the figures many times larger than the figure is in reality. It was a recent figure of Tom's that brought this very much to my attention.

You can see Tom's blog here

http://thunderboltmountain.com/serendipity/

and the figure is on the blog entry for 15th January 2011.

This a true 25mm figure sculpted to fit with an older range and when we saw the pictures it's head was too large. Obviously so. Except it really wasn't. Tom explained that the figure in reality looked fine. The problem lay in the very over-sized picture of the sculpt. But this happens so much these days; figures being shown so much larger than they actually are and it amplifies the scale conventions and makes them look wrong.

This phenomena has had a curious effect on sculptors. I know I'm moving ever more in this worrisome direction and can see a lot of others doing so either consciously or subconsciously. We're sculpting to look good in the photo more than we are sculpting to look good in reality. This is not a good road to go down.

I've seen it many times. Beautiful high res shots of an immaculately sculpted figure that looks amazing and when you get it... well... yes it's still amazing but it's so skinny and tiny and without physical presence. These are often the 'fear figures' I have spoken of before. We get them and the level of detail and reality is sometimes too much.

I think we need to try and reel ourselves in on the size of the photos we show so that minis can give a better representation of themselves as to their size. Not suggesting actual size as computer monitors lack the pixels per inch count to look good at that size. But you can see them pretty well at twice their height, we don't really need to go to four times or more. It's fun to see those closeups at times but it should probably not be the first way you see a figure.

So be reasonable with your pic sizes.

Feel free to argue with me at your convenience...

Painting Tip: Black Fabric...

Thought I might throw out a nugget of my painting wisdom (such as it is) today. I'd like to offer up my favourite way of painting black fabric.

Black is a difficult colour to paint well as you'll have all kinds of fun choosing a highlight colour to mix into the black. White or grey is the obvious choice but it gives a very flat look to the black and I rarely use it. Too dull for solid items such as armour and underwhelming on cloth. I'm going to pick out cloth today. For me cloth needs a certain soft flatness to it but with a little something to lift it from the obvious grey route...

I start with a good few thinned coats of Chaos Black, usually over black primer. The coats of black paint give a nicer surface to work over than just using the primer as the basecoat (though that's a handy timesaver if painting armies). Then I layer on the highlights with thinned paint. My paint of choice for this purpose? Dwarf Flesh! Yes, it may sound a little odd but flesh tones are great for highlighting black. On the first few layers they're not noticeably different to using grey though it's perhaps a little softer. As you add more and more a warmth enters the mix and gives the fabric a faintly worn quality without making it look tatty. Give it a try, even if it's just on your paint palette.

You can see the effect on my Empire Greatsword above.

Oh, and bonus feature. For a deep and fantastical, cold black try highlighting by adding Hawk Turquoise.

Let us consider the Great Spined Dragon...

The Great Spined Dragon; now that thing is a beast, an utter beast. The Spined Dragon is a miniature from the dim and distant past of Citadel Miniatures and has a fond place in the hearts of us old-school mini geeks. I'm not totally sure of it's release date but it appears to have surfaced around 1985. This was a period where Citadel were releasing many metal dragon figures in various sizes. At the large end was the utterly impractical Imperial Dragon (affectionately known as the Chicken Dragon as it was roughly the size of a real chicken). The Imperial was a massively multi-part metal figure that was beyond most modellers and I suspect drove the casters mental producing. It wasn't on sale for long. Citadel then produced a lot of other classic dragons and, at the large but still vaguely practical, end was the Great Spined Dragon. Cast in metal but this time in just six pieces. It also had one of the quirks of large Citadel dragons of the period. The wings were cast skeletal with no membranes. The idea was that you could add your own with paper (templates included) or putty or tissue or whatever. An awkward process which meant that it was kind of rare to see a finished, painted one that looked as good as it should.

Like many mini geeks, I love the Spined Dragon. It's beautifully sculpted but ugly as sin. This isn't a romantic ideal of a dragon, it's a gribbly and dangerous nightmare guaranteed to scare the living daylights out of unwary adventurers. I never owned the Spined Dragon. It was one of those figures that passed me by. As many of us do, I considered the Spined Dragon to be the best dragon miniature ever but you know how it is, rose-tinted glasses and all that. My good friend Neil had three of them but they were buried somewhere in his collection. This blog post is mostly due to his having recently dug them up and his turning up at my place today with two of them still in kit form. Twas quite the thrill to finally take a close look at the beast itself. And it did't disappoint. The general design and the textures were beautifully rendered but the thing that truly struck me was how much it gave the illusion of skin moving over muscle over bone. The figure just felt real and like it could exist. This instills a deep respect for the sculpture as I'm not a naturalistic sculptor myself.

The Spined Dragon was sculpted by a legend of the early years of Citadel: Nick Bibby. Mr Bibby sculpted many, many crazy creatures for them including Mordax and Kegox, two other amazing Dragons that I was fortunate enough to own at various times (though currently I have neither in my collection. Mr Bibby left the miniatures industry behind in the eighties for pastures anew. I have always heard that this was due to his developing a sever allergy to the epoxy putties used in sculpture. Not sure of the actual story there but he's gone on to be an amazing sculptor of life sized bronzes of animals that continue to show off that uncanny knack he has for believable anatomy.

And, so we come to the point of this article. Yes, I wanted to talk about one of my miniature loves but I also wanted to raise a curious point. The Great Spined Dragon was sculpted more than a quarter of a century ago and is arguably the greatest dragon miniature ever sculpted. The minis industry has moved on in staggering leaps and bounds over the years. It astounds me that that a model as old as this could still be argued to be the best ever in a straight contest. There are other arguable champions of the category. Heresy Miniatures new Dragon is a classic example. An amazing and monumental piece of work (www.heresyminiatures.com to check it out. Go buy it, it's awesome) but I can't honestly say it beats the Spined hands down. In my opinion it's the best contender but I'm constantly surprised that we've managed to go twenty five years and through a huge step up in quality in this industry without multiple examples of dragons that are clearly better.

Well, to finish I'll leave you with probably my favourite paintjob on The Great Spined Dragon. This one won a gold at the Golden Demon Awards in 1988 and was painted by David Chauvel. Beautiful.

Okay, start again...

We often get the advice to power through, not give up and various other words to the same effect. We often think these things to ourselves as well, of course and this is very true of our miniatures. This one is relevant to both painting and sculpting.

During our work we often discover that we've done something wrong or something stupid and we try to fix it. There's that bloody minded way that we will work through the problem and somehow compensate or fix it further down the line. These mistakes can be many and varied in their content but a lot of them transpire very early in the process. Maybe your armature wasn't quite right or you picked initial colours on your figure that will make it difficult to get the result you want. You can usually minimise the mistake's impact in one way or another but it tends to be a lot of annoying work and we will often spend a huge amount of time on the fixing. The five hour paint job becomes a twelve hour paintjob or you spend thirty hours on a twelve hour sculpt... and the final result is still compromised by that early mistake. This is not constructive and you're fighting against that logical piece of thought that has been nagging. Start again.

But we don't want to start again. It means going back over the same ground and, worse than that, we feel like we've failed or we're stupid. So we work extra time for an inferior result. Well, you know what? Learn to recognise when you're going to spend a huge amount of time fixing an only partially fixable problem and then suck it up. And throw the work away. Strip the mini or start the sculpt over (in the case of the sculpt keep the original as reference for what you did wrong and what you did right).

It's okay to just say 'screw it' and start over. I have done this today and I feel good about it. I spent around twelve hours on a major sculpt over the weekend and I'd made an error on it within the first ten minutes. It's not an error that would make the figure wrong but the end result would have been short of it's potential and that's not what I wanted from the sculpt. So I started over and I've learned. And the next version will be better.

Painting out of left field...

One thing I'd like to do once in a while is to show off minis by other painters that speak to me in one way or another. For the most part these tend not to be the 9.9 rated paintjobs on coolminiornot (though those are obviously very nice) but from painters who aren't afraid to paint in a style contrary to what we're used to. Today I'd like to talk about two painters who have a similar visual approach to minis. Both of these painters have approached their hobby with a look that somewhat echoes cel-shading, the style typically used in traditional 2d animation . They emphasise flat, bold tones and careful colour selection.

First up is my friend Tears of Envy, the deeply talented designer of the logo for my Eolith range of miniatures and also many other projects dear to our miniature hearts such as Black Scorpion Miniatures and various projects with Mr John Blanche. Her miniatures work is based upon scrupulous neatness and small colour palettes. I'm a particular fan of her Lamenters chapter Space Marines. Lovely little force. Plus I geeked out from her using original RTB01 plastic Marines. Anyway, let me introduce you to a few of her painted pieces...



Secondly I'd like to draw your attention to the work of Martin Whitmore, evil illustrator extraordinaire (and fan of zombies in general). Martin has a similar though slightly wilder approach to painting. Again the neat base tones and carefully chosen colours though, getting back to that zombie thing, there does tend to be a fair amount of red on them... or they're carrying a chainsaw. It's also curious to note that when comparing Martin's minis to his illustrations, they have a very similar look.



Both Tears of Envy and Martin Whitmore use the NMM technique for their metals. Normally I'm not a huge fan of this but I feel it works here. The greys and yellows used tend to evoke the 'comic book' style better than true metallic paints. I know when I've painted Judge Dredd miniatures in the past I always go NMM as I prefer yellow shoulder pads on him to gold.

It's also interesting to note that they share a similar line of work. Graphic Designer and Illustrator. I think this has probably contributed to their thinking outside of the box with regards to their chosen painting styles.

All in I love these figures for the completely different look they have to most of what we see these days and I always look forward to seeing the miniatures of these two painters.

The Tears of Envy website is at www.tearsofenvy.com and she operates a rather eclectic blog at tearsofenvysblog.blogspot.com You can find more of her miniatures and her thoughts about painting in this style on there.

Martin can be found at his site www.martinwhitmore.com which is chock-full of crazy awesomeness.

And the moral of this story (seriously, I'm tired and struggling to remember)? Well, probably something about not being afraid to try something a bit different. Yeah, that sounds good.

Golden Demon versus the Open Judging System...

Golden Demon judging... oh, what fun. Golden Demon comes and Golden Demon goes. Then there's a load of us complaining about the judging. For my part it's usually that the build up was so tense that something has to blurt out afterward and it's usually complaints about the judging. I usually calm down a few days later and decide that the judging wasn't that bad after all and that, for the most part the right things won. Some of the explanations that come out as to why things didn't can be a little blunt/confusing/just plain weird but, as said, I think mostly the right stuff wins one way or another.

But this post isn't so much about the judging as much as it is about the judging system. Golden Demon uses a 'first past the post' system in that each category has first, second and third regardless of the content of said category. It throws up a lot of odd results. There's quite a groundswell, of late, suggesting that Golden Demon should adopt the Open System in one way or another. In this system entries are judged to a standard of quality. There's a bronze, silver and a gold standard and a category may have multiples of each award or indeed none if no entries live up to whichever standard. This system is used at many other major contests. Euro Militaire is a good example. It does, on the face of it, seem like a fairer system. Sounds like a plan...

Is it okay that I don't like the idea? I know a lot of the top painters are pushing for it but personally I kind of like the current system. I find an exhilaration in the unknowns of the GD system. There's something about playing the metagame of the contest, figuring out where the weaker categories will be or whether you're feeling ballsy to try and hit the heavy categories. I like that winning a demon isn't the biggest deal. It's not the demon it's what and whom you beat. I like that we discuss it at length and that we argue about it at greater length. I like that the sweetness of success is made sweeter by the times where I won nothing. I just love the whole 'what the hell is going to happen this time' of it all.

The whole contest is mad, exuberant, glorious, unfair, joyful, maddening and a hundred other words I could use in it's description. Yes I'm probably bonkers for loving it (and revelling in the few days afterward where I'll invariably hate it) but I'll probably be back this year with some entry that, in time-honoured tradition was feverishly put together at the last minute because I changed my mind a hundred times as to what I was going to paint. Maybe I should make an Ork vehicle. Haven't done one of those in ages...