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.

1 Day Pro-paint, Pre-production Yeeve 3D print

Hello hello,

It`s Lee here with another update on my activity. Today`s post covers an 'emergency' 1-day Pro-paint of a pre-production mini for action games miniatures. The game they produce, Drake, is currently shattering it's Kickstarter goals and will be launching soon. As part of their campaign they were putting together a rules video, to demonstrate gameplay.

You can view the video here: Drake Rules Video

Ben gave me a call on Sunday saying the mini's would arrive by courier Tuesday and the video was shoot was set to start on Wednesday 10 am. I didn't realize it at the time, butt I would actually be painting a pre-production 3D print of the model. They have a lot of their lineup currently already in pre-production metal casts, but this mini is not one of them; but I digress... I was to paint the Yeev of the Rish force.

So the project was something really exciting for me as there were 3 models going in for the painting to 3 different artist, one by Nick from Else-Where games, who I will be mentioning at a later date. The other model was headed off to Chad Lascelles, who's work you will see all over the Infinity line. I was very excited to see how my work would stack up to a well-known international painter's, seriously his work is awesome.

So here's a shot of what I received at 1pm after a discussion about scheme:

I know it's really hard to see much detail from the shots above, but most of the mini is covered in a very strange texture that just wouldn't fille or sand off, and of course I had to be gentle with the prototype, as there wouldn't be time to get another one shipped from Texas in time for the next days video shoot.

The above picture shows the primed and based mini. I primed the model black and then hit it with white to help a little with some zenithful lighting. The mini had to have a lot of contrast for use in video as the shots wouldn`t be closeups. After the prime, I took the airbrush to it with a custom dark blue, I can`t remember what I used for the airbrush basecoat. The scheme needed a dark blue back and a grey belly with some flesh tone worked in, so I used the flesh on the wings, and based the wings on both sides with the same colour. Now I mentioned the texture of the printbefore at this point the texture started impacting upon my stress level as it would just suck paint up and leave exposed areas with a stippling, stripey effect, so layer after layer, after layers, after layer were applied in rapid succession to get coverage in clog up a bit of the texture to even the surface out somewhat(i know, but you totally can`t tell on the final result).

to make the wings shading I used different washes in series over the creases in the folds of the wings, Sepia on top and ogryn flesh, sepia & agryx shade on the underside, tapering towards the exposed sections. The base was primed with a very watered down Cardon granite, which is wonderful as it fills in between the gaps, gives full coverage, but doesn`t clog up detail. The horns and teeth were done with my darkest brown, with a transition to desert yellow, then hit with a heavy dose of agryx shade, tapering away from the base of the horn or tooth. The belly was painted a dark grey.

The mid-tone and highlight stages were a nightmare, moving between techniques to get around the texture issue, from a standard transparent layering technique to a brutalised version of wet-blending and then combining to ensure nice clean transitions and clean edges. at this stage I started transitioning the grey belly into the blue hide and shading the inside of the legs, feet, throat, etc. 

The highlights on the hide were brought all the way up through blues and into white, then hit over with a very watered down blue to ensure that the blue tone wasn't lost. The horns and teeth got a hit of menoth base, then brought up to full white with white scar. the grey was highlighted up using a standard layering technique with exceptionally watered down paint to ensure that little errors wouldn't show.... at this point I'd vowed never to paint a 3D print without having at least a day to fix the texture before painting... the tail was hit with an additional stage of white and then a cover of blue to make sure it stood out, as the video was going to be mostly top-down shots.

The wings were brought up through flesh tones from the GW line, then washed again, then given another watered-down hit of a very bright flesh tone in multiple layers transitioning into the extreme highlights. I think i used a watered down ulthan grey as the highlight on the belly, just picking out the edges and a giving a freehand bit of transition through the shoulder to give the impression of musculature.

The base was finished off using various mid-tone browns as dry-brushes and overpaints with a light hit of a watered down sepia wash to add a touch of red contrast to the base. The rock base was a quick effect i use on rocks all the time, using heavy Agryx shade and sepia washes in opposite directions over a grey basecoat, then dryrushed very very lightly with the grey and then highlighted lightly with a watered down white. I spent a bit of extra time adding the static grass and flock to make sure the base didn't look like a hack job.

And here's a terrible shot of the final model.

The next day I went down to the set, to help and meet the rest of the team. Unfortunately I didn't get to meet Chad, but I did get to put his work side by side with mine, here's another aweful shot from my phone:

I was very happy with myself for producing something, that was not only very comparable quality(obviously his is a little better, but they are very, very close), but that matched his scheme so closely with absolutely no direct communication, which I think definitely paid off for the video, here's a better shot of the whole army.

So I have been on here too long talking about the Yeev for too long and have to get back to my Khador commission, but I'll find some time to post about that this week before I hand the models over to the client. I have one finalised and I'm down to the details on each of the other minis and will be painting a mini a day at this point (yee-pa!) So stay tuned for that and some more from Gord. We have our next projects and will be posting in updates on those as well.

Comments always welcome, if you like our work, please share the blog, and tell your friends we are accepting new projects!

Boobies & Dragons

Boooooobs!

...yes I am now painting a Malifaux miniature with massive breasts, and looking forward to her see-through tank-top coming to life. Pics coming soon!

But now that I have your attention, I'd like to make mention of something you really need to check out. If you are in vancouver you'll know that we have a huge community of gamers, and most people play at least 10 different games, but there doesn't seem to be a huge amount of LOCAL support, products or companies. Which if you think about it is actually really odd...

How many artists do we have this city, with companies like Lions Gate Studios, EA Games, to name just a couple of the huge producers in town and exactly none of the amazing small to medium producers and design houses.



Well NO MORE ! Drake is a very unique game that truly blends the elements of a 28mm miniatures game with Collectible card game. The play is fast and interactive and allows for a millions different dynamic and adaptive types of play. Right now they are blowing up on Kickstarter and are set for a full-scale launch in April.

Right now the deals offered on Kickstarter are incredible, get a deal while it's hot, and most of all please support our first local game manufacturer. Think of it this way, this will be the first company where you can actually phone them and talk to them, or go meet the guys locally, or play with the guy who created the game and works on the rules!

I had a chance to play with him one rainy Sunday when the game was still in beta testing, very shortly before the release of the quick-start rules. Trust me this game is awesome!

Drake Kickstarter

For some or other reason the website is down today, but you can usually see some final versions of painted minis on the site, find the link in the sidebar