New Projects and Announcements

Lee here with another update from the Beautiful Warfare team...

So today's post is going to be a three part blog consisting of a couple of announcements, a sneak peak at my next project as a bit of a tip for Zenith priming and a look at my latest completed project, mostly as a distraction from beginning to paint as I`m not 100% sure as to what I want to do on this next mini...

So first and foremost; the website is LIVE! yes, we now have our site up as a gallery, list of services and partnerships and a request form. The site is still in Beta stage, with a glitch or two, but for now it serves it`s purpose and looks pretty damn cool - thanks Liam! Check it out www.beautifulwarfare.ca

The second announcement is that we now have a deal with OneStopShopCardsAndGames for great rates on the Warmachine & Hordes, and potentially Malifaux. We are able to offer the lowest price on those lines of figures for anyone wanting any services, from pro-assembly through paints. The partnership is non-exclusive, and I would love to have a partnership with any other store able to offer me a token discount on any other lines of product - We are not store biased, and shop for product and play at various stores depending on product, availability and local community.

Speaking of community, One-Stop is hosting a Privateer Cup, a free weekend long tournament with tonnes of prizes! Check out the event details here. Saturday is round-robin, with one elimination from each group. Sunday is single elimination, so a potential 8 games, and a chance of prizes no matter where you are in the standings with door prizes and raffles.

Ok, ok, back to miniatures, as I said I would post a sneak peak of my next project. Excellent timing too, as the figure is featured on the CMON homepage today. As promised I`ll post a bit of a tutorial, more like a tip, on zenith priming. But first here`s a pic of the model...

Anima Tactics - Legacy of Solomon

I`m not 100% sure of the scheme I want to use yet, I do know I don`t want to use NMM, though I do want to use some similar techniques, I was thinking something along these lines, but more towards the purple tone used in the image above, or a darker blue - I know he wants it to look dark if possible. There`s also going to be some rather advanced water effects on the model, which i`m not entirely looking forward to doing, but will certainly look awesome(it takes a long time and means a lot of down time).

I`m not sure I want to do the cracked effect, it`s more the tones and feel of the shading to look at.

So looking at the schemes and techniques I've primed the model black, and given it a wide Zenith. So why use this technique? most of you probably use this technique or have tried it and understand it. Some of you probably found it not worth the extra effort, when you can probably get a base-coat down for one of the colours in roughly the same amount of time. Well I think that in a lot of cases, people have the technique in practice without really using it well. So I've given another figure a typical bad zenith...

Yeah ok it's not a great shot, all of todays pic from my table are from my phone, care of my DSLR being out of battery from the photo shoot. But if you enlarge that image it'll be pretty clear that the prime is a bit spotty, has not touched a lot of areas where the technique would help to give a bit more pop on the underside areas, and is probably a bit too heavy on the top surfaces. These are all because of one simple thing I did MAJORLY wrong. For this one, I simply held the model at an angle and gave a couple of very light dusts of white from directly above.

So why's this bad? Well you should by now know that when you're priming you don't want to hold the can still and spray at the model. To get a really nice thin, smooth prime you want to hold the can at a bit of an angle and sweep across the figure in very light coats. That's why i got the spotty effect! This of course ruins a  lot of the purpose of the technique. This also has the effect of pooling the primer too heavily in one area and risking some finer detail.

Another thing about this execution was that when you look at the way that light acts on an object and what we`re trying to do, it just isn`t accurate, and it doesn`t help on a lot of the surfaces it`d be really useful for. when you paint zenith, you`ve got to lie a little and drop that highlighting outwards from the zenith just a touch, otherwise the gradient doesn`t look right and the lighting seems a bit stark and unnatural. Think of it this way, it`s a sunny day outside, if you look at the sky, you can see that light from the sun is being refracted in the atmosphere and all other points in the sky are sending light towards you, concentrating towards the suns position.

So here`s how to do it. prime the mini black - WELL, remember the upper surfaces are going to get a few extra hits of prime so keep it light. Hold the model at an angle of about 70 degrees and sweep very quickly one way and then the other with the white, to give a very light dusting. Rotate the model about 45 degrees and repeat. Keep going, making sure the dustings are very light, the true zenith will eventually build to be the most brightly lit. Here`s an example...

So the last piece in the puzzle is scale. The larger the object you`re painting, the more you want to drop that angle down to being a side-on, to at most about 45 degrees. about 80-85 degrees is good for something ``man-sized`` and about 50-60 for something like a tank, 45 for a very large building(just enough for a shadow under window sills). I hope you all find this verbose little tip quite helpful, if not you can always send me a request to paint it for you.

Right, as promised here`s some more eye candy....

The model had every connection pinned to ensure the pose would not be damaged.

Latest completed project was done as a commission, the scheme was set to reflect the codex `flyer` image, where the model fades from light to dark. So having said that I didn`t want to fade it too heavily, and on the lower extreme`s a I used colour-matching rob contrast rather than actually fade the model int black. It`s a feature piece in the army, a caster always is, so I wanted it bright, having said that I didn`t want the basework to steal too much attention from the actual figure, so I painted that quite dark, with very few contrasting hues within the base - contr4asts were the base coat(blue) and the washes(sepia and dark brown). I also painted the small tree you can see on the lower left side of the base very drab tones so as not to pop too much against the base and mini. I think the most imortant step I did was to go back over the whole model and put an extreme shadow of purple into all the deepest creases and edges between the gold trim and red armour. It helped to make the shadows appear very dark without over darkening the figure and got a lof clean edges in between the fine detail.

Exciting times; new Commissions

Hi, it's Lee here with another update from my side of things...

I did promise to upload some shots of the final Kara Sloan project and my Protectorate of Menoth list, but I have to delay that for a while.Firstly, I can't find my cable for my camera(my fiance's shoes cover most of our house and thankfully haven't invaded my studio yet), and I've had to sideline the Menoth for now as I've had some new work come in. Positives on that point, I have finally obtained and stripped all the last few models needed for this list and am hoping to get in a game to test out the list later this week - will report.

What I've been doing:
So first off I've got another commission I'm doing for a Khador player, cool little battle group of Kherchev the terrible and 5 Berserkers, all done out in an off-whit blue winter scheme. The project started off with some customisation and this little bit of work turned into a monster project as for some reason my drill bits kept snapping. Now that's only ever happened to me once so to have this happen to me 6 times is a big wake-up call on which products to buy and from where.

Here's the story on the customization:
So for everyone thats not aware of the berserker model, you can find it here:
http://privateerpress.com/warmachine/gallery/khador/warjacks/berserker

if you look at the arms, the "biceps" are basically a few thin pieces of material connecting some rather large weapon arms and the clients were constantly bending during play, so he wanted me to come up with something to make sure that the pose was more stable and droop effect came to a halt. now the biceps are essentially 2 pistons and a strut. I've reduced that for effect, to simply being 2 pistons, which i felt gave a greater look of this being something animated.

The next customization was to repose Kherchev to be leaping off a cast wreck marker, so I rotated the whole lower body, re-pinned the hip joint and raised the leading leg.

Just a note, I have also since changed the pose so he doesn't lean so far forward, it's actually a really nice pose you can see in the group shot below. So I've also given myself a massive headache by not wanting to wait to buy white primer, and simply priming black to help the metal shading, bad move, it made the basecoats turn into a 5-coat affair. but I now have the basecoats and shaded mid-tones down on most of the models. leaving a lot of the detail areas unpainted for now, those will be quick fill-ins once the armour is complete.

I still also have to put all the snow down on the bases, but I figured this would be a good chance to show off the colours of the base. Since the final result of the armour is going to be a very subtly blue white, I've made the bases a very subtly red shade of brown dirt.

SO, what else is going on?

Well I've been speaking with a local manufacturer and we're looking me spearheading coordination of the product from renders to casts, which is awesome! I get to bring the mini's to life, what a cool gig! Also they have some new models coming in from the casts tomorrow and have a promo video to shoot the very next day so I will be putting the Khador aside for a 1 day pro-speed-paint. Thats a real push for me, but I think I can handle it as the model isn't oo complex and will be exceptionally cast if it's anything as well cast as the last model I painted for him.

So I have a million and one things to do tonight, including a work-order with the the chief over there and finish off this mid-tone tonight, tomorrow is going to be insane, so I'll leave you all for now, and promise to upload some shots of that work when I'm allowed.

Please comment if you found Gord's rust tutorial helpful, I'm thinking of putting up a complimentary tutorial, being that I do rust the exact opposite way Gord does it anyone interested in seeing a different side of rust and being able to have a bit more of a transition into unspoiled metal?

Or how about you tell me what you want a tutorial of and I'll put one together, I have a couple cool tricks coming, up I'm just waiting for the chemistry to happen.

Commenting is good for the environment and creates employment opportunities for artists with too much work to do, please comment and support your local professional artist.

Latest project update and phone pics.

Hey tabletoppers,

Just a bit of an update here, mostly going to be pictures, so I apologize in advance they were all taken with my phone... only 5mp - BOOOO.

Ok so (the client) wanted a conversion of Kara Sloan under the P3 Cygnar line. The concept was to customize her pose into a sniping pose and then build a custom base for her so she would be posed inside a building, behind a wall and aiming out through a window. He also wanted me to include sandbags, razor wire and paint the figure at an "advanced" level with directional lighting was coming in through the window and over the wall.

Kara's base is a standard 30mm base, and for play and competition  reasons, the base needed to remain the same size, so here's what I put together for the base....

Customizing the pose wasn't too bad, though if you aren't detail oriented, I'd give the advice to get someone else to handle this customization for you. the detail lost in cutting the parts was some of the smallest detail on the model. The cutting went by pretty quick with my nifty diamond blades and Chinese knock-off dremmel.

And that's how far I got before the weekend....

Here's what I managed to get done over the weekend; now admittedly there are still some things left to do including the razor wire, font and center, so it may seem a touch incomplete, but i'll post up a much better picture of the final sometime before the hand-off this weekend.

Painted base...

Kars's first few licks of paint....

End of yesterday...

As I said, I'll upload something later in the week, when the model is complete.

Studio Photoshoot Flop

Technical Issues, oh JOY!

So we did our first sample model photo-shoot this weekend in prep for the website launch, and bombed spectacularly. Looking at the diversity of models everything looked good, looking at the quality of the shots things just didn't pan out.

Lighting issues, focus, zoom-in. I realize that for an effective product display a good representation of skill and quality is key. Looking at the minis we were shooting, we WERE trying to convey various levels of quality the client might be looking for, so some were meant to look table-top quality. However the shots of the award winning figures came out looking pretty much the same as the 'tabletop' models...take a look.

Here's an example of tabletop quality....

...and here's an example of an award winning figure:

You can't even see the green that those transitions go up to or the subtle highlights in the shadow side.

All being said and done we did get some good shots, like Gord's ork that recently won 1st place at GW's Paintapalooza:

Or one of the models from his army that won "best painted" at this year's gottacon 40K tournament:

So stay tuned everyone, there will be a post coming soon with a variety of sample shots with close-ups after the weekend. We're also in the process of writing copy for the website. The key hold ups on the website are copy and images, the framework is already built, domains and hosting acquired as well, so all going well we're looking at a full-scale launch of Beautiful Warfare by Monday, week after next.