Works in Progress

I'm liking the colours on my Mousling so far. The fur especially looks very natural. It's good to occasionally do a figure which isn't violent or warlike in theme:



Here's a palette test on my Legionnaire. I'm having more doubts about my colour choices on him...



Maybe he'll look better once he's a little more fleshed out, and a little less primary. I'm thinking the blue could be more indigo.

Miniature Exchange

In my post last week I mentioned sending out several miniatures for the CoolMiniOrNot.com miniature exchange. Well, I just GOT some as well - from "Pigmented" in Pittsburgh! There are two but this cute little guy is the one I'll get started on first:



Yes, it's a mouse playing the accordion. You don't see that every day.

Chaos Archer

My Chaos Archer is finished, I think he turned out pretty well:




The bronze bits look very good with flat varnish on them - not totally corroded but not polished either. I gave the steel armour plate a gloss finish though to make it look newer. The "mud" base actually looks like mud with boot prints too, which is nice. I just sculpted it by hand from epoxy putty after the figure was fixed to the base. The flesh came out looking rather flat but that was hard to avoid with the lack of detailing on the musculature.

A note about plastic miniatures:
Metal miniatures are "spin cast" in flexible rubber molds. The mold can flex to allow a complex casting to be removed from the crevices of its mold cavity. Plastic figures are cast in steel injection molds. As a result they cannot be as complicated or detailed - since the mold is inflexible any fiddly bits would be trapped in the mold cavity. The sides of the figure tend to be especially problematic and thus details there can be distorted or just absent.

Miniature Exchange

CoolMiniOrNot.com is having a "miniature exchange". Basically, I send a mini to someone, and (a different) someone sends one to me. It's a way for everyone to try painting things we might not pick out ourselves.

My recipient is "MarkusTay", a painter in New York state. I'm sending him these:



I've done two (1, 2, 3) of these exchanges before, it's a lot of fun and a surprise gift is a good motivation to put in the extra effort and make it a great paint job.

Miscellany

Bad mini

I wanted to paint up an evil archer for my uncle for his birthday, to go with the Wood Elf archer I gave him in 2003. All I could find was this plastic "Chaos Archer" that came with my brother's "Battlemasters" war game. It's pretty poorly-molded, and has little fine detail. This is what I've done so far:



So the challenge is: make a cheap ass injection-molded piece of crap look good enough to give as a gift. Wish me luck.

Contest Entries

I recently entered the Female Miniature Painting Challenge V (more commonly known as the "Chick Challenge"). These were my entries:


(thumbnails link to my CoolMiniOrNot.com gallery pics)


I didn't win anything, but it really spurred me to paint more quickly, and more carefully. Consequently these are currently some of my highest scoring minis on CoolMini.

Molly Millions

Some sculpting. The medium is Green Stuff - 2-part epoxy putty. I've actually been working on this for a while (very very slowly since sculpting is not my forte). It will eventually be a model of the character "Molly" from William Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy - a cybernetically enhanced mercenary with blades under her fingernails and mirrored lenses surgically grafted over her eyes.

Molly Millions
32 mm





Future additions include huge lenses on the face, 80's rocker-chick shag haircut and of course hands and face. I might actually remove the combat boot and give her cowboy boots instead. The book mentions those somewhere.

Initial Public Offering

Painting Agency is my experiment at hosting my own miniature painting-oriented weblog. Here I'll post my latest creations, works in progress and links to other miniature-related websites.

"Empereur Haghendorf" by Ilyad Games
42 mm



As of April 6 I'm nearly done this guy. He's an experiment in depicting metals (gold and steel in this case) without actually using metallic paints. Survey says "it's really freaking hard". [edited May 30, 2005 - "before" pic added]