Monday 21 October 2013

Painting Chee-Chee. Chee-Chee Part 4

It's time for some more miniature monkey business!

There hasn't been any dramatic progress but I've worked steadily on Chee-Chee's head to improve the contrast and definition. I've also painted up the bionic eye and skull implants so the head is pretty much all done pending any final tweaks.

This mini is going to give me the opportunity to go to town with NMM effects. I want the mechanical implants to have a hotchpotch and haphazard feel as if they've been added over a number of years. This is going to give me the opportunity to paint a wide variety of finishes in order to create the look I want.

Sounds like fun to me!






Monday 14 October 2013

Painting Chee-Chee. Chee-Chee Part 3


With the Golden Demon painting frenzy over & done I can finally turn my attention to painting Chee-Chee from Infamy Miniatures.

The delay in starting gave me plenty of time to do a little research and come to some decisions about how I want to paint him. It would have been easy to go in with a black base coat and dry brush all that fur but this felt like the wrong way to go about it. Instead I've chosen a light/mid tone base colour that gives me room to go both darker & lighter in the early stages of painting. I also want to try and get a bit of colour into the mini and decided to keep my use of black to a minimum.  

Having looked a few gorilla pictures I could see that I was going to have to go very dark with the paint job. By making Chee-Chee a silver back I had a way of breaking up all that black fur and this will also be more interesting for me to paint. Something else I discovered is that some gorillas have red/orange colouring on their head. This will be another way of introducing colour and have the added benefit of drawing attention to the head/face. 

I started off with washes & glazes and gradually built up the intensity and definition. I'm using Vallejo Dark Sea Blue as my shade colour and it seems to be working out quite well. It also leaves me with the opportunity to go darker in selected areas if I need to. In addition to this I'm using a touch of purple to shade the flesh tones and this together with the red & orange tones used else where brings a lot more interest to the colour palette.

It's still early days and things will probably change as the paint job comes together but it feels like a good start. I think this is going to be a really enjoyable project. After all what's not to like about a giant, mutated, cyborg gorilla!








Tuesday 8 October 2013

The Finished Lizardmen Skink Priest

Here are the pics of my finished Skink Priest.
Winner of the Silver Award in the Warhammer single miniature category at GDUK 2013.








You can find the Skink on cool mini here: http://www.coolminiornot.com/342773?browseid=6892658

Thursday 3 October 2013

The Finished Dark Eldar Diorama

Here are the pics of my finished Dark Eldar diorama.
Winner of the Gold Award in the Diorama category and the Slayer Sword at GDUK 2013.














You can find the Diorama on cool mini here: http://www.coolminiornot.com/342470?browseid=6858398


Wednesday 2 October 2013

The Finished Dark Eldar Hellion

Well here he finally is, my finished Dark Eldar Hellion. Winner of the Gold Award in the Warhammer 40,000 single miniature category at GDUK 2013. Am I ever glad I decided to base him up and enter him!



Looking at this mini now I can see how it marks a major point in my development. The colour scheme has something of an old school feel (that is no accident) and the painting style has a cartoonish/graphic quality that is typical of my work up to this point. I'm very happy with both of those elements and feel it's with this mini that I hit my stride and regained full control of my painting technique. It's also here that I began to explore some of the newer (to me) things like texture, OSL and NMM. For me its that combination of new and old that makes the paint job work and gives it it's character.

But as happy as I am with it, this is a mini that made me think about changing the way I use colour; and so led directly to the evolution and, I hope, refinement of my painting style. The results can be seen in my Tomb King and the Dark Eldar diorama.

The Hellion is now up at cool mini here: http://www.coolminiornot.com/342336




Tuesday 1 October 2013

1990 - 2013 spot the difference


A twenty three year gap between slayer swords really highlights how a few things have changed over the years!