Koth-Yan WIP #2

First a little more history on this guy. He was sculpted by Bob Olley who worked for many companies over the years, including Games Workshop. He was there in the late 80's early 90's sculpting under the Citadel/Iron Claw name. He sculpted a lot of stuff for them; Chaos, Beastmen, Dwarfs, Orks, Genestealers etc. But one army he did truly stands out, kind of, they're pretty short. He sculpted the now retconned Squats. And he still does today, now called "Scrunts", you can find them on his website here. So if you ever find yourself wanting to play Squats in 40k again, have no fear, you can!

Now, on to the pictures.

And don't worry about the few hard to scrape off mold lines, the varnish trick will fix them right up.

Drast the Hunched Showcase

Here is my take on Drast the Hunched, Hound of Dun Durn from Mierce Miniatures. It was originally painted for Crystal Brush 2015, I have since made a few minor adjustments.

You can vote for it on CMON here http://www.coolminiornot.com/379492?browseid=12088207

Koth-Yan WIP #1

Here is the start of my version of Koth-Yan. The history of the mini is quite interesting. Originally from Dragonblood Miniatures out of Miami, FL. Dragonblood seemed to produce stand alone minis and dioramas for painters and gamers. They then seemed to go out of business or at least went into limbo, then Cavalcade Wargames bought them and reissued the minis for a game called Shadowsea. Sometime latter is seems Cavalcade is no longer producing minis and Antimatter Games enters the scene, also from Miami, FL. They produce a game called DeepWars which is an underwater based war game. Then they start an offshoot game about an underground world which is accessible only through the oceans in DeepWars, that game is called ShadowSea and they are again reissuing the old Dragonblood miniatures. Anyway, a lot of minis in both games are really nice looking and I will probably pick up many more in the future. But for now, here is the start of my Koth-Yan.

 

I decided I wanted this guy to be more of an Asian elephant. If you are unaware, Asian elephants change when they age. As humans grow older their hair tends to turn grey or white. Similar to that, as Asian elephants grow older, their skin starts to turn pink and they develop lots of pink freckles.

Painting Faces: A Slighty Different Approach

Over the weekend multiple Crystal Brush winner David Powell made a post about painting different scales, and examples used were faces (see it here). An earlier tutorial on his blog taught me a great deal on painting faces and really upped my painting game. Thanks to his teachings I was able to achieve this

and this

and many others.

But now I'd like to introduce you to something slightly different. It's not ground breaking in any way, but I find it can be quite helpful. We as painters love to look at tutorials from other painters to learn new things and improve our craft. There are thousands of great painting tutorials out there, but there are countless tutorials on other subjects that do not involve model painting that can still be of great use. Enter the world of makeup.

Through makeup tutorials you can see a variety of different ways to shade and highlight faces. Find which colors go best with the skin tones you're painting. Learn that if you place a shadow in a spot you never thought should have a shadow, the face pops so much more. Learn how to shade and highlight any face shape you could come across. And much more...

Here are some examples:

Pirate Ogre WIP #2