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.

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.