Captain's Close-Ups

As promised, I took couple of close-up photos from Space Pirato Captain Gaga, Spiky Rat Pack's joint-project...

You can clearly see some of the brush strokes and blending colour borders in these shots, but that's part of the fun! I've learned a lot about painting by staring other people's close-up photos of their minis, by studying their brushwork and the way they've achieved certain colour vibrance etc.

The huge gap between my two painting sessions with this model is somehow visible in here. If you look closely, you can see how smoothly blended red stockings and sharp freehands have evolved into dirty (ref. Steve Buddle's Spyglass Asylum blogpost from last year) and strong style used eg. in base and feather. This latter style will most likely be used in my future projects more often, in some transformed form, as it feels both effective and aesthetically satisfying technique. That small perfectionist in me is still rebelling against the idea, but I bet it'll get used to it...

Hunted Is The Hunter

Some progress with Mutie Kul mini...

And then some thoughts... Relation between Kul and his skullhopper is quite simple; hopper tracks and hunts enemies, draws their gunfire at it and then Kul pops the hostile heads into gibs with his bolt pistol. This way the one that hunts the hopper will be hunted by the mutie.

Hopper will have a small flag on its shoulders - with a target sign on it - just so that it'd be more desirable and obvious target for the opposing force. This is Kul's sixth hopper... Mutie Kul himself is carrying bolt pistol, some ammunition, frag grenades and a small family coat-of-arms.

I'm quite pleased to the outcome so far, especially in my greenstuffin' "skills" (it has been some time from my last 'putting, you know). Even though I've discarded some of the details seen in the drawing, there is still relative strong bond between the miniature version and the drawn one. Not sure if I'm gonna do those feminine boots for him, after all, they're my favourite part...

Space Pirato Cpt. Gaga - Finally Finished

So, she finally made it! Took me quite some time to finish the Pirato Captain, but you know how the saying goes, "better late than never". Well, long story short, here she is, The Renegade...

I used only acrylic paints and some washes at the beginning of the painting, but in the final stages ended up using inks and varnishes to add some interesting flavour to the base and some of the other surfaces. I hit the dead end at some point with the painting and couldn't figure out how to finish her. Especially her outfit and base gave me hard time, but apparently some (actually, pretty much) time can help you at some point to figure out how to continue...

Special thanks to Mikko for his patience with me. After all, he skulpted this fantastic model which was a true pleasure to paint! Still I kept him waiting and waiting for the finished piece. Sorry mate.

Never the less, hope you like the outcome of yet another of our joint-project! More will follow...

A Peek Into The Rat Hole

Cpt. Gaga is steadily closing to finish, at last! Almost made the base ready for her. Still need to finish some little details and then, well, I'm ready to do some photoshooting...

Cpt. based

I also started some kit-bashing for my INQ project, 3D sketching Mutie Kul and his familiar, skullhopper. I think I'll take some liberties from the drawn version, otherwise I end up greenstuffing the whole thing from the scratch or hunting the bits for ages.

Mutie Kul and skullhopper...

Countess

My water colour exercise, the one that got a spark from very random situation couple of months ago, has suddenly evolved into series of 40k inspirated illustrations. The process has been very educative, giving me new perspectives to my hobby and teaching some new tricks on the way.

I was visiting my parents last weekend with my family and had a nice freefloating time to sketch another member to my Inquisitor posse, this time something little bit more elegant to stand beside those previously drawn grotesque male figures...

Countess (water colours, W&N inks, white acrylic paint and black ink pencil)

When I started sketching the Countess, I had one red line that I wanted to grab from; Femme Militants, the ones John Blanche visualized couple years ago. I saw some of the paintings live last summer and damn they were fierce! I wanted to draw something a bit similar to them, but with my own twist and touch.

There are some obvious references to Mikko's Captain Gaga sculpt too, though the similarity came by accident (sub-concious stuff I'd assume). Anyways, it gave a nice final flavour to the final piece and now she stands like another incarnation of the Lady.

So, the Countess was the fifth illustrated member of the Inquisitor posse. My long term aim is to do couple of more drawings and then start to figure out how to collect all the pieces together and build a miniature version from each one of them. In the meanwhile it's time to familiarize myself with the =I=Munda......

Rat With The Gun

Finally finished!

This project was so much fun to do! When I first suggested this project to Mr. Miller I had no idea that what would be the answer. I really was afraid that the answer would be that old classic "thanks but no thanks" but no... The answer was "That sounds like a lot of fun, let's do it!" Ian was also very supportive during the whole process, always reminding me to Not to lose my own style I think it was very important to Ian, that I would make my own interpretation rather than just trying to copy any of his characters straightforwardly. That attitude gave me lot of courage to make my own decissions to where to go.

When it comes to communicating with the artist himself, that is a story of its own. Very often the e-mails that Ian sends me, turn into very surrealistic stories, information is often encrypted inside these stories about fog bells, rabbits, dogs or birds! In fact, the little rabbit in the background came to be because of these little side stories... I felt that the composition lacked something and that rabbit fitted there perfectly.

Painting the piece was interesting challence for me, beacause I don't consider myself as painter at all. especially when i get to see Kari's paintings all the time =) In the end, there's nothing special about the paintjob, lots of Citadel washes over Zenithal basecoat. Result is far from being as good as Kari's paintings but I am still satisfied about it. I did learn so much about painting when doing this.

Mr. Miller is also fantastic writer/ poet, so when I finished this piece, I had to ask, if he could write little poem/ backround storie for this piece and he did! The poem also binds this thing together, now it includes input from both artists: making it true collaboration now ;)

One hell of a journey, thank you Ian!

The rat is also in Cmon now. Please vote for the brave rat in the frontline!

Now how on earth I will pack this for shipping...

Mood Drawing!

Had to show you this - I was thinking about mood boards while designing new stuff and started messing up with the idea about expanding the concept of mood boarding with drawing. After few hours this bastard of a technique appeared!

Image below was created using numerous sliced photographs mixed with drawing Wacom tablet. I think this could be good way to sketch for a people who don't like to draw.... pretty much like converting miniatures in digital 2D realm! First you pick legs, then torso, arms, etc... then use drawing to fill the gaps SIMPLE!!!

Nothing that haven't been done before but I hope you enjoy it anyway...

Storm Is Rising!

Just wait...

The Book

Recently I've spent handful of hours with my nose inside Emperor's Will, an awe-inspiring compilation book of Warhammer 40.000 artwork. This book is one that every enthusiastic 40k hobbyist should check out if they wish to dwell deeper in to the dark universe. The book is full of amazing, mind-opening images of paintings and illustrations made by Games Workshop's art department.

I'm not going to write another review of this tome, but if you're interested of one, I'd then recommend checking out Tears of Envy's blog.

The reason for me mentioning this book is that it has been inspiring me a lot lately, especially in my latest hobby related activity. The book also works as a proxy, reminding me of that moment I experienced the enlightenment and started re-organizing my thoughts regarding my creative side.

Speaking of creativity, here's the latest of my drawings, another member of the Imperial Inquisition...

Water colours, W&N inks, white acrylic paint and black ink pencil

Rifleman, veteran, devotee, religious fanatic, scum. These strong words shall tell his story for now. There's more to follow, I just need to finish Captain Gaga first, the one that has been lying in my drawer for too long...

O'yeah, I happened to visit my town's framing shop couple of weeks ago and for my delight they had a nice collection of painting stuff there too, one of them being nice collection of Winsor & Newton's inks. Of course I had to grab couple of them pots to take home with me so that I could finally try 'em out. I must say, they worked out pretty well, definitely something I'll try out in some of my next miniature projects...