Hi there!
I love painting models, and I do a fine job (although I am very slow...and I hate painting units. I always devolve into painting single figures after the base colours are on... makes it hard to play anything larger than a skirmish game) but I'm going to tell you right now that my skills are not at the same level as these fellows. Where I specialize, however, is in making scenery. I've always loved little worlds, the kind that draw you all the way inside, but somehow I convinced myself at an early age that building lego, or working on the set of A Night Mare Before Christmas, or building scenery for Games Workshop were not
realistic career goals. And so I relegated model making and terrain building to
a part time hobby and pursued other interests: I traveled, I planted some
trees, I managed to get a masters degree in history and taught at a University,
but my fingers never felt complete unless there were stuck together with glue.
The dream endured. Now, after some soul searching and something of a career
change I have found a way to play with glue and foam for a living.
I first met Lee while working for Action Games Miniatures in 2013, I had been brought on originally as their terrain maker and I have made all the scenery you see in their photography but as I had been working at a model and prop shop previously Ben also asked me to step in to help with their mold making. Lee was painting the studio figures for Drake as I was mold maker we worked closely on a lot of the figures that have been produced so far. It was a great time and a super project to be a part of in those early days. Now I split my time between a model making company, Promodel Builders, and a prop company, The Little Big Workshop. The great thing about this kind of work is that I get to do everything from mold making and casting to carpentry, sculpting to soldiering, lasercutting to painting. we make anything and everything from landscapes to rubber weapons, dioramas to massing models and we will do it from scratch or use ready made stuff. So obviously a lot of what I've learned at work has carried over to my gaming and model hobby.
On the side, however, I still like to make scenery for miniature gaming and so Lee asked me to join Beautiful Warfare - I, of course, was thrilled! Unfortunately I don't have a lot of time, however, so can't normally take on large projects with tight timelines. But if you are content to wait a bit I would be stoked to make something rad for your battlefield! If you have a sculpt of a figure or a scenery piece or decoration or a weapon, I can make a mold of it and cast it for you in plastic. Or, if you want a scenic base, a centerpiece, a display board, custom table or a sweet set of scenery themed to your army I am your friend.
So that is a lot by way of introduction, you are probably saying lets see some of your stuff! Ok, lets.
These two are of a set of swamp terrain I did a few years ago.You will notice as you look at most of my stuff that I use a lot of natural products - bark, branches, rocks etc. I find that the textures these bring to a piece add that extra poppy level of detail that really catches peoples eye. I use lots of layers and tones in my painting so that all that texture has lots to offer if you look closely, and then you can hide all sorts of cool little details in the nooks and crannies.
This set illustrates one of my favourite trial and error discoveries: unfortunately after making a bunch of sweet forest stands using gnarly branches and cool twigs I realized that twigs are rather fragile and tend to break during the rough handling of gaming. However, by turning branches upside down and affixing the fragile branches to the base I didn't have to worry about fragile bits getting broken and I got some amazing mangrove like trees.
Here are a few pics of a Dungeon Bowl board that I made for my brother. He wanted it in a theme of a Japanese garden as he uses the Confrontation Uraken Goblins as his players and so I was happy to rise to the challenge and give these great figures a fun home turf to compete on. I even managed to visit the Nitobe garden at Univesity of BC to get some inspiration and get a sense of what I was trying to achieve and what styles I could draw upon, which was a huge treat.
We worked together on the design and decided to make all of the wall elements individually modular so that the maps could be infinitely variable. He allowed me full artistic freedom so I decided to play around and make the each tile section a different style of garden path layout and I made a number of the little wall sections into mini gardens which was a big treat, I really enjoyed doing the little details like the little planter boxes, fences and bamboo stands I think they add a lot of depth to the plainer hedge and stone wall sections.
These aren't the greatest photos, but they are all I have for the moment so they will have to do. I'll get some better ones off my other camera later and do a proper post solely dedicated to this build another time. As you can see this board is integrated into a frame box that folds up neatly and can safely carry the whole thing from site to site, or stow away in a closet. I really like building high quality scenery that can be stored easily and this is something I want to work more on in the future. I tinted a clear casting resin to get the water effect in the river sections, and I hand carved the stonework out of high density foam sheets for the temple platform. The rocks are driftwood and rocks for the most part.
So that is probably enough for now, I'll leave you with a bit of a teaser of a new project I am working on. This one is along similar lines to the Dungeon Bowl and was designed for use in that setting but I think these could have more wide application for RPG gaming or skirmish games or even adventure board games. I kind of have a thing for mazes as you will discover, it is a recurring theme. However, where I had carved the walls out of foam for the DB board, in this case I made a number of molds of tile pieces and wall pieces and pillar pieces and cast them and assembled the walls using the plastic casts. In the picture on the right the different colours are simply because I did not always bother to tint the resin the same way for all my castings. You can see the painted versions below.
While these are still in a prototype phases since casting the walls in pieces and assembling them is too labour intensive to be lucrative, once I perfect my design I might make some one piece molds and cast these as a for sale product... so if this interests you let me know!
So thanks for reading this far, and I hope something interested you. I like making stuff, and if you like what I make maybe I'll make something for you! Oh ya, and as a reward for reading this far here is a WIP snapshot of the most recent model I'm painting - a Confrontation Mid Nor dwarf. He is so much fun to paint, I love these evil little guys. I am pretty pleased with he skin tones I've managed to achieve. I have some highlighting left to do on the blade and the horns but other than that I think is close to being done.
Ok till next time, try not to glue your fingers together.
Cheers!
nick
I am a relatively recent addition to Beautiful Warfare and I feel a bit humbled to be in such great company. Arthur and Lee and Gord are truly great guys and top notch painters. For myself, I have been been collecting and painting models since I discovered an ad for Grenadier's Fantasy Warriors in a Dragon Magazine when I was about 11. I
still have that game, with its ranks of single pose plastic dwarves and orcs. To this day I think that sculptor Nick Lund captured
something of the essence of Dwarfitude (yes, that is a real word now because I
said so) that few have since attained: their gravity and dourness. Those dour dwarfs hooked me, and the world of Warhammer and the halls of HeroQuest pulled me down. And I never really came up for air.
I first met Lee while working for Action Games Miniatures in 2013, I had been brought on originally as their terrain maker and I have made all the scenery you see in their photography but as I had been working at a model and prop shop previously Ben also asked me to step in to help with their mold making. Lee was painting the studio figures for Drake as I was mold maker we worked closely on a lot of the figures that have been produced so far. It was a great time and a super project to be a part of in those early days. Now I split my time between a model making company, Promodel Builders, and a prop company, The Little Big Workshop. The great thing about this kind of work is that I get to do everything from mold making and casting to carpentry, sculpting to soldiering, lasercutting to painting. we make anything and everything from landscapes to rubber weapons, dioramas to massing models and we will do it from scratch or use ready made stuff. So obviously a lot of what I've learned at work has carried over to my gaming and model hobby.
On the side, however, I still like to make scenery for miniature gaming and so Lee asked me to join Beautiful Warfare - I, of course, was thrilled! Unfortunately I don't have a lot of time, however, so can't normally take on large projects with tight timelines. But if you are content to wait a bit I would be stoked to make something rad for your battlefield! If you have a sculpt of a figure or a scenery piece or decoration or a weapon, I can make a mold of it and cast it for you in plastic. Or, if you want a scenic base, a centerpiece, a display board, custom table or a sweet set of scenery themed to your army I am your friend.
So that is a lot by way of introduction, you are probably saying lets see some of your stuff! Ok, lets.
These two are of a set of swamp terrain I did a few years ago.You will notice as you look at most of my stuff that I use a lot of natural products - bark, branches, rocks etc. I find that the textures these bring to a piece add that extra poppy level of detail that really catches peoples eye. I use lots of layers and tones in my painting so that all that texture has lots to offer if you look closely, and then you can hide all sorts of cool little details in the nooks and crannies.
This set illustrates one of my favourite trial and error discoveries: unfortunately after making a bunch of sweet forest stands using gnarly branches and cool twigs I realized that twigs are rather fragile and tend to break during the rough handling of gaming. However, by turning branches upside down and affixing the fragile branches to the base I didn't have to worry about fragile bits getting broken and I got some amazing mangrove like trees.
Here are a few pics of a Dungeon Bowl board that I made for my brother. He wanted it in a theme of a Japanese garden as he uses the Confrontation Uraken Goblins as his players and so I was happy to rise to the challenge and give these great figures a fun home turf to compete on. I even managed to visit the Nitobe garden at Univesity of BC to get some inspiration and get a sense of what I was trying to achieve and what styles I could draw upon, which was a huge treat.
We worked together on the design and decided to make all of the wall elements individually modular so that the maps could be infinitely variable. He allowed me full artistic freedom so I decided to play around and make the each tile section a different style of garden path layout and I made a number of the little wall sections into mini gardens which was a big treat, I really enjoyed doing the little details like the little planter boxes, fences and bamboo stands I think they add a lot of depth to the plainer hedge and stone wall sections.
More recently I built a display and gaming board for Drake, and if you went to Victoria's Gottacon you may have seen it as they were running demos on it there.
While these are still in a prototype phases since casting the walls in pieces and assembling them is too labour intensive to be lucrative, once I perfect my design I might make some one piece molds and cast these as a for sale product... so if this interests you let me know!So thanks for reading this far, and I hope something interested you. I like making stuff, and if you like what I make maybe I'll make something for you! Oh ya, and as a reward for reading this far here is a WIP snapshot of the most recent model I'm painting - a Confrontation Mid Nor dwarf. He is so much fun to paint, I love these evil little guys. I am pretty pleased with he skin tones I've managed to achieve. I have some highlighting left to do on the blade and the horns but other than that I think is close to being done.
Ok till next time, try not to glue your fingers together.
Cheers!
nick
