Artist Self Introduction: Nick Melchin

Hi there!

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 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.

 

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.

 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

A well overdue update

Hey guys,

Lee here again after a rather busy hiatus from posting. 2013 saw the studio take flight from part-time commissions, to being a full-time single artist and growing to include more artists, higher levels of work and the beginnings of 'greatness' adopting the ongoing work to paint the Drake product line.

2014 is off to a great start, with the addition of Arthur to our lineup, the studio now paints 100% of the Drake product line and has a few new commissions to show off over the next few weeks, including some collaborations! Another element I'm now putting a big focus on is 'community', which is something that really attracted me to the hobby to begin with. This year I was able to head up Drake's efforts to be a part of the GottaCon event, and to join Kelly Kim in judging the painting contest. He has put up a post covering the Small figure category on his Blog Sable and Spray, which you can find in the followed blogs section. The coverage of he other categories should be up soon - if not already up(my bad on the delay).

There are a Lot of cool things I'd really like to talk about going on at Drake, but under NDA I can' really talk about upcoming releases - so just stay tuned. What I can talk about are releases that ARE out and painting we've done. So lets look at some recent work...

We recently did a bunch of blitz work for the product line, all a bit of a rush job really. In the end I did get a bit of an extension on the project and was able to get the 5 models done in 6 days, including cleanup, assembly & basing.

5 day speed-paint

I think with a bit more time for the project I could have done substantially better, especially with the deadly whisperers, but overall I'm quite happy with the result as they turned out in the photo shoot. he Velocidron is probably the model I'm happiest with, as you can see below, he didn't turn out too badly for a rush job.

The Rivercrest Unit Commander ended up with a lot of weak points, but I Like how he shield turned out, but maybe that's just because of a little victory over a few challenges getting my TMM to head in the right direction - lesson learned regarding certain grey paints. In the coming years I'd really like to revisit the sculpting on the cape. Our newer models have far more stylish fabric areas, I'd really like to see what Adam can do if he comes back to this model.

Nothing super technical about this one, but I think I'm fairly happy with the result. I did have something in mind for the stonework, but there wasn't time for the layering and freehand involved so I went with something a bit more simple and effective. Maybe I'll do my own up when the model ships and post it back here as an update. I did forgo a bit of the TMM and left model more on the shiny side of things as it's meant to be crystallized chant energy(as are all the power marks).

And last and definitely least, the Deadly Whisperers, Princess Acadias personally trained assassins. you can see some of the newer cloth-work I was talking about previously in this post on the crouching pose.

On a similar theme, I'd like to take just a second to throw out some pics of a personal project, which is actually an elective speed-paint, so to say. This is somehing I've been working on for about 4 hours in 20-30 minute bursts. It's part of my larger menoth collection, which will be entirely done up as rusty speed paints. It's not the most brillian work i've done for sure, but for less than a half-days work I think this WIP is a good starting point.

I really was hoping to complete the model in one sitting, but I have too many commissions on my plate, so I get a few minutes in on this each day before work.

Next up lets look at some actual Commission work, you know, the guuuuud stuff. Recently I had a chance to team-up with Arthur on a mini, another Kara Sloan conversion. The concept here being not only the standard re-posing request, but to expand upon that and give her a lot more of a sniper feel. We were aiming a bit more for dark and subdued aesthetic. I did the sculpting and Arthur did the painting - Kudos Arthur, sexy stuff!

So First-up here's the sculpt without the paint.

Ok, I know, I really have to stop taking shots for the blog with this crappy phone camera. Lets see how that looks with Arthurs point and shoot.

Alright, I'm not going to exhaust myself for material in one post, I'll leave it there for today. Gord should have some pics of a collaboration I did with him coming up fairly soon so there'll be more eye-candy to come. If he doesn't throw up something soon I'll get up shot of some of the things I should have done by the end of the week - along with some announcements regarding Drake stuff.

Artist Self Introduction: Arthur Nicholson

After a brief talk with Lee, I decided it was time to make my introduction to Beautiful Warfare.  My name is Arthur and I've been painting miniatures since I was old enough to do so basically.  The short version of my modelling career starts with working for Games Workshop (as most painter's careers usually do) where I picked up the foundation of skills I would use for all miniatures to come.  From Games Workshop I moved on to entering local painting competitions, scoring a solid amount of prizes and medals from the Immortal Brush Painting Challenge in particular.

Most recently, in 2013, I took the trip down to Seattle for Privateer Press' Lock & Load gaming convention where my main goal was to enter and win a prize in the Formula P3 Grandmaster painting competition.  And, amazingly, through the toughest competition I've ever faced, I managed to eke out 2 gold and 1 silver medals.  One of those gold medals got me the best in show of its category: Best Group.  A trophy and some prize money later I was in No Quarter Magazine for 2 of my entries as well as my (horrible) picture taken with the other winners!

The next biggest thing for the moment in  my painting career is working for Drake and Action Games Miniatures.  Mainly specifying in the Great Mystics faction, I've painted all of the Kaymayuk and Saan figures as well as the Timor dragon.  I'm stoked at the chance to paint for a local up and coming figure company and have met some "big names" in the area in doing so.

As far as commissions go, I generally am interested in single miniatures that I can really work my magic on so to speak.  I enjoy making monsters, generals, or other key pieces in an army look the best they can.  If I were to describe my painting style I would say its crisp and clean tending to lean less toward the battle damaged and dirty look and more towards the polished and professional look (not that the former look doesn't have its place - just my preference!).  Some techniques I frequently employ are the much controversial non metallic metal schemes (NMM) as well as using feathering and wet blending to achieve an almost imperceptible blend between colors.

I've collected a few samples of my work for the purpose of this introduction.  Though some pictures may not be the most professional of photographs, I believe they show off what needs to be seen well enough.

Thanks for the read through and hopefully I will be working on some of your figures one day.

Warpwolf Stalker, gold medal winner at Lock & Load 2013, featured in No Quarter Magazine

Druid Wilder, Silver medal winner at Lock & Load 2013

Manowar Drakhun, 1st place Large Figure at Immortal Brush 2012

An ongoing personal project - 1 Bretonnian Knight per month for my son! (currently at 6 completed)

Khorne Daemon Prince, 1st place Large Sci-fi at Paintapalooza

Molik Karn, Best in Show Group Entry at Lock & Load 2013

Rise of the Dragons

Howdy space cowboys, welcome to another installment of my distraction from painting.

In my last post I promised some upcoming blog post and I apologize for delinquency there, both on my part and the other artists.... $H!* has been really crazy for all of us lately. I recently moved into a new space only to have the place flood and am now in a very bad living situation and looking for a new space. My work will be picking up speed dramatically just as soon as I find a new home for my workspace - pinkyswear! I have a total of 6 painting commissions, 2 pro assemblies and a conversion on my plate right now, with more coming soon...

That being said, and before we get into the meat of the content here I would like to put out a call for new projects for my new artists. In my last post I mentioned Arthur had joined the studio, he is now wrapping up his task list and looking for new projects.

The Meatgrinder...
So in my last post I promised to post something soon about the Rish Dragon I painted for AGM. If youère still living under a rock or refuse to take notice of anything other than 40K, or Warmachine, or whatever you may not be aware but Vancouver is now host to a new miniatures manufacturer and the studio does a lot of work for them. I am responsible for Painting the Rish force(among other things), Gord handles the Garrick and Arthur heads up the Saan force.

Recently I painted up this bad boy for their product demo shots and box art.

Click for the kickstarter update

Now if you HAVE been following Drake, you`ll notice that this miniature has actually been painted before, and that this rendition looks rather different from the previous rendition. Well the previous rendition was a pre-production model produced for gameplay videos earlier in the year, painted by non other than Chad Lascelles. Well a number of changes have been made to refine the sculpt and it needed to be repainted. 

This is now a big challenge in a way, right from the get-go. The bulk of the audience has already seen the previous version, but the paint-job still had to be what people defined as the Rish Dragon from here forward. Another challenge set by AGM was that while paintjobs had to look hot, they still had to be something anyone could replicate to a fair likeness, no matter their skill level. The paintjobs will at some stage be repeated with painting tutorials as far as I know, but now I'm just going to comment on the approach, theory and major steps...

So obviously the first stage was the cleanup and assembly, which went pretty smoothly, as the parting was done pretty damn well (minor gaps to fill, good fit on the parts, little to no pinning - I pinned the wings). Usually on a model I would do all the basing first, but as the model(like all Drake Dragons) has a scenic base, I skipped basing and primed, airbrushed a base colour and basecoated the base with Cardon Granite. 

There were a few things I really wanted to have on the model:

• I wanted it lighter than the previous version;
• I wanted, belly or palms or the ``vulnerable`` spots to be a different colour;
• I wanted the metal to be a bit more interesting than `fresh off the assembly line`;
• I wanted a lot of pop from colour contrast; 
• I wanted him to work well with the other dragons while still being unique; and
• I wanted to enhance the wings, as they are a bit lacking in detail.

The base was first drybrushed with a khaki colour, then washed once with agrax and once with sepia. it was then drybrushed with cryx bane highlight, then washeed with a watered down mix of sepia, agrax and nuln oil. I like to get any drybrushing and uncontrolled (or heavy) washing out of the way first.

So being that I wanted the colou 'pop' and the dragon is blue, I went with a sort-of 'roughly hewn' kind of metal for the armour. I didn't want to to look new or clean, but I didn't want it to look beat-up and damaged, the Rish take their armour seriously. So I started off by mixing boltgun or something with thamar black at 1:1, with a dark brown and a fox brown at a full mix ratio of 12:12:1:1. I then washed over the model twice with agrax earthshade to really dirty it up and darken into the creases. That gave me something looking like this...

So as you can see, I have a metal tone that doesn't look rusty, but doesn't look new. Then I went over the dragons skin with a mid-tone blue with a touch into the green spectrum, stegadon blue, i thought it would contrast nicely with the mix of kantor and hawk i would use for the upper-highlights. moving forward I used a very dark brown for the leather armour and took that up through snakebite for added contrast. The leather had to pop against the blue of the flesh and the red of the armour, so I took it closer to a yellow tone.

The wings, palms and areas of the mouth were done using a dark grey for a base and going up through P3`s cryx bane highlight. Despite seeming to be a grey, it`s a great paint for subtlety, as it has undertones of the yellow spectrum and can actually be quite bright(it`s good for shading and dirtying white too). I then based and washed the mouth and did out the horns spikes and claws with my standard 'dirty teeth' technique - Dragons do NOT floss. At this stage it looked like the picture above. Moving forward I wanted to pop the wings a bit more and start getting some level of shading into the armour. the wings were given a bit of shading into the recesses, which was emphasised on the under side and repeated to add shading to the shape of the wings. The wings were then given a blotchy effect to transition from the blue flesh into the wing membrane, remembering to add a few random bloches here and there to give it a bit more of an organic feel. I did my first highlights on the metal with boltgun and then pig iron, to give us something that looked a bit like this...

I thought that the detail elements of the model lacked in variation and I knew I really wanted to get more out of the model. So, calling in to the office for the go-ahead, I added gold to the model on the rings binding the straps and armour together. According the lore, metal is something that was fairly rare and hard to come by in the world of Dara, so I just wanted to make sure it fit that there was gold being used.

So to really make this model pop I came back over everything again for a second round of highlights. The gold and the metal were highlighted up using vallejo air metals, while giving washes and glazes into crevices to darken those and add to the zenithful lighting. the flesh was given a once-over with a mix of kanot and something very pale at 3:1, and the teeth and claws were given a final pop of pure white. I then added a ring of black to the base and we end up with...

Before I go, I just want to give a little bit more eye-candy and talk about a personal project. My ongoing effort into the highly technical dark eldar. Here's a shot my vehicles; note that I'm using directional lighting and a 2-tone paint effect. Please also admire the blending, this is all freehand(no airbrush). I hope to do a blog on thes, once the vehicles and a full unit are completed. I'm currently painting all models in the army simultaneously and it's painfully slow. As soon as the armour is done thing will be split by units for the detail sections.

Here's a shot of a completed infantry model that i did as a test...

...and here's the previous version of the scheme. The previous version didn't have as much green tones or take highlights as close to white as the new scheme. I also don't like the desert basing so much any more, with the scheme being so 'clean and shiny new' I wanted the chance to show off some weathering, corrosion and customization, so I'm switching the base to match my terrain at home - city ruins. I might get some work done on that soon or hire Nathan to help me out and start blogging about that too.

Thats about it for now. Hopefully Gord will throw something up here soon. I know he's just wrapped up a couple of projects. I have some other things to talk about too, so maybe we can get into a rhythm and get out a post a day next week. 

Stay tuned, there's more coming.

Something wicked this way comes...

Hi there readers, Lee here with a long overdue update.

Yes I know, outta the blue right? Where did we go?

Well the Beautiful Warfare team has been on a "working hiatus" and has been advancing the business in new ways. One of the major setbacks I've had is the profitability of miniature painting full-time. Or the lack thereof. I've had to take up part-time employment, which consequently also failed me temporarily and I had to take a 3rd line of income above that. This of course leaves little time for painting and less time for blogging, and all the other tertiary activities of running the business, but that's not to say we haven't been busy.

THE PROJECTS...

Myself and Gord have been working on some advance orders for a client who went away on vacation for a number of months, about 20 models. We've also been busy with a few personal projects and I painted up some Menoth figures for another client, but had to hand the project back incomplete(at no charge) as I just had to bring immediate cash in to pay the bills. I`m still working on my Dark Eldar, which are starting to make headway after finalizing the scheme on a model I painted up as a test and won GW`s UHC contest with. I`ve also scrapped my Menoth and Tyranid schemes and re-primed all the models for updated lists....
...anyone got some rending claws and scything talons? I need 3 of each!

OTHER WORK...

If you're on some of the Facebook groups we frequent, you may have noticed one or two posts with some models you don't recognize from any shelf in any store. I have been working with Action Games Miniatures Ltd for quite some time on their game Drake, and now with shipping deadlines around the corner, Gord has joined me on the painting team and we're working on their box art and product demo models. I`m taking on the Rish force and Gord is handling the Garrick figures, there may be some cross-pollination in the future, but for now, for continuity`s sake we`re keeping to factions. Arthur Nicholson is handling the Saan faction, and together we make up the official panting department(for now). I've also been helping the guys down there at the studio to clean up mold masters and rescue detail lost in the reduction and 3D printing stages.

AWARDS...

In the last few competitions we`ve been facing ever-stiffer competition and much bigger turnouts, making the placements that much harder to achieve and so very much more rewarding. Kelly Kim and Arthur Nicholson, have both been entering a lot more, and I must admit these are painters I very much respect, who`s work I always enjoy seeing. To be voted and placed along-side these painters is something that makes me proud.

• Paintapalooza 40K Single figure 1st place - Gord (March)
• Paintapalooza 40K Large Figure 2nd place - Lee (March)
• Trumpeter Best Painted - Gord
• UHC 1st place - Lee (July)
• Paintapalooza Fantasy Squad 1st place - Gord (August)
• Paintapalooza 40K Large Figure 2nd place - Lee (August)

NEW DIRECTION...

So we are going to be taking Beautiful Warfare in a slightly new direction. We are now going to branding not so much as a professional studio, but rather as an exclusive studio. It`s not pomp or bluster driving me to head this way though. What I mean when I say `exclusive`, is that we will be only taking on projects of interest and merrit, and the focus will be on pro and studio quality work with slightly higher fees, standardized minimum orders (within reason and allowing for those odd exceptions), etc. As part of this new direction we are now also seeking new artists, and the studio will function as a collective. We will be sharing out the work based on strengths, specialization, interest in the project and the time available of each artist to ensure the studio produces the highest caliber of work.

So our first new artist on the line-up is Arthur Nicholson. If you play in Vancouver you probably know him or have seen his work. He manages the Vancouver Elite Miniature Painters group on facebook, has written for Hand-Cannon' and is also notable for some recent awards. Most recently taking awards at the August Paintapalooza, Arthur also took a 1st place and numerous 'tokens' down at Lock and Load. As I mentioned above, he is also part of the Drake painting department.

We are still seeking new artist, priorities being for:

• Quality of work - ....
• Adaptability - Ok this one I think I may need to explain, we want people who are going to be get excited about projects and be both inspired and inspiring. People who try new things and who`s models don`t all have the exact same feel.
• Personality - as a functioning collective the group needs to get along and have a shared vision, we're not looking for employees we're looking for partners(though I will still had up the lion's share of the business end)
• Notoriety - we're looking for people who are a part of the community, or have blogs, or regularly compete at painting competitions.
• Category - tarrain specialist, mass production specialist, sculpt specialist, etc.

There will be a few things that I ask of the new artists, such as to contribute to the blog, write a bio for the website, let us include some shots of your work in the gallery, don't charge less than the minimums, etc. etc. but it`s very much going to be a work-together kind-of thang.


Thats about it for the update folks. I know, it`s a miniatures blog post and I didn`t post a single picture. it was an update of the studio, not the models. Just keep reading, We`ll be throwing up some posts about the drake stuff really soon. Comissions and personal pieces will be following shortly, but right now, with limited time that seems to be the focus. I`m going to be adding Arthur to the blog as a writer, so he may come in talk about some of his recent work.

Hang on! wait.....

....there. Better?

Current projects: Orks and Tau!

Hello all Gord here.
Just a quick update on some of my current projects.


I'm changing up some things in my Ork list and trying some new things in preparation for the next tournament, the Wet Coast GT.

So I'm building more Zapp guns and adding some big bombs for my deff koptas.

I found my deff koptas were tricky to fit into the carrying case so I ripped all the rotors off and started magnetizing them. I'm also magnetizing the new big bombs.

Also here's a little sneak peak of a commission I'm working on. Still haven't done the base or or any weathering powders.

Until next time.