Photos of Bologna Model Festival

by Roman aka jar

posted by roman, jarhead, kong

Big daddy P. showed a link in a forum today which is about a big fat gallery of this years Bologna Model Festival - it took place the past weekend and i just got lost in dreams while browsing through the galleries - great stuff! I hope you all enjoy!

If you hit this link you will be thrown in the middle of 345 photos of the show!

Medusa's Spy finished...

by Roman aka jar

posted by roman, jarhead, kong


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    Medusa's spy
    Several years before Perseus enters the cave of Medusa to slain her there have been many other forgotten heros sent for this task. Among them was young Nereida, another daughter of all time horny Zeus, searching her destiny by freeing the world of those Gorgons. Her will, bravery and fortune will guide her way, at least she thought that. She walked the lands to reach her goal at the cave of Medusae. While passing the wild coasts she saw Medusas cave appear more and more. Everywhere statues of heros, animals and other once alive individuals marked the way. Nereida pushed on and even as the heavens darkened and a mighty blizzard struck down from the clouds to warn her that she was getting close to great danger, she still walked on. Her heart nearly exploded in her chest from the aticpation and these thousands of souls forever edged in stone by the look of Medusas eyes. Many still stand where they have gazed upon the evil monster, forever carved in stone. Nereida came closer to a temple complex up to a coastal peak and realized the massive amount of statues - she was close. Close to the liar of the Medusa, now was the time to proof herself worthy to the gods themself and suddenly everything became still, the blizzard stopped, the air stopped to whisper and everything was calm. Even the air seemed to slipp away and breathing became hard for Nereida. In this moment she saw the little bird and knew why no one ever was able to surprise Medusa. There it was, the spy of the Medusa.

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Medusa's spy
Hasslefree Miniatures, 40mm

Additional a big booty photo that you can print and use as a poster at your painting place if you are allowed to:



After several WIP photos shown of this project this little scene is now finished. Some words of mine about the project to those who are intrested:

Model is from Hasslefree. Wonderful Artemis in 40 mm. Hope you like this little story told. Some photos somehhow show the snow very yellowish, no idea why but in real that fact won't hit you that worse. The stone dwarf in front comes from very skilled Tre' of Red Box Games (sorry Tre' for using your models as a statue - there will be something painted normal again). The little bird comes from the Busch - Little Animal Set.
The column was bought at the last years Duke of Bavaria event, is made out of gypsum, but i can't remember the company and wasn't able to find a homepage, sorry for that.


Both, snow and icicles with additional amount of gloss varnish. The birds nest was done with dry little grass and matte varnish, painted afterwards. The matte varnish was used as glue of this fine material. The two rabbits are by Mantis Miniatures, 35024 Animals - Set 6.

The project did start with Mr. V., a collector of my miniatures from Spain asked me about painting Artemis on comission. I said yes as i knew Robert aka muhani got two of these ladies and i've asked him if i could get one. After she arrived i fell in love with the model - great happy painting time these weeks as i am falling in love all the time while painting. The story around young Nereida grew around her. There was no real plan at the beginning but during some chilled painting hours with my friend Peter there came the story around Medusa with the starting thoughts of these statues. The bird and the statue have been added during the process. If you got some questions left please feel free to ask via comment. If you are intrested, here are some Work in Progress photos:

 
 
 

Feel invited to leave a comment with your oppinion, ideas, thoughts, feelings, criticism, suggestions or simply something funny! Here in the jungle or over in the voting arena for detailed view and overview. Some music to those who miss music in this posting comes here!
Keep on happy painting!
Best Regards
Roman

PS: A little preview at the model i did start during the last weekend's painting class. It was used for explanation for the class but it is always the same i am not coming very far on a class with my own models - but that is fine - early wip everywhere, bad photo :)

Back again...

by Roman aka jar

posted by roman, jarhead, kong

... again home from another Painting Class.

A weekend full of great people and massive Happy Painting - many thanks to everyone who made this weekend special, there will be a report rolling in for sure. I still feel the jungle drums calling but my powers are fading after too less sleep and the held classes - honestly i feel like i had a box fight with a gorilla and lost in the 3rd round, 2 painting classes in 10 days, uhh uuhhh aahhh... more to come soon as the boom boom of the jungle drums still shaking the jungle canopy. Also we did manage to keep track of my start in wild wet in wet painting via video on the Arkvenger's base, bla, bla - so much to report... but ... tired ... :)

Meanwhile i want to thank Fireant for translating articles into polish like a stallion. There are many more already translated by him and for all our polish reader check out Fireants blog - he did add a portal to show you which articles already are translated and linked them up there for our polish readers. Many thanks to Fireant for his action and as it is still winter season you now can find many of the winter themed articles translated - just great, check out the flags here!

I just wanted to say that i appreciate every comment on Massive Voodoo, for sure also the new ones on the translated articles, but hey i don't understand a word in polish and don't know what is written there by you. As i am responsible for the comments on this blog i would ask you to still write in english or pay me some polish classes. I honestly ask about that and big Kong is serious - i am already thinking about deleting those comments, just because i don't understand them. Imagine your own blog commented in chinese or german or whatever language you don't understand, in germany the laws around internet responsibility are very strict so i have to act. Please help me help you :)

I now prepare a fine bed from jungle plants, lick my wounds, rest my back, regain energy and let my horses rest...already unpacking to painting joy - yeaha!








Keep on happy painting!

Kind Regards
Roman








PS: Cthulhu is for Sale here! 

The story behind the next finished miniature...

by Roman aka jar

posted by roman, jarhead, kong

Soon next week i will post the finished project called "Medusa's spy". It is about Hasslefree's Artemis seeking for Medusas head on a storytelling base. There has to be some introduction to the story so here comes some text that you all will be prepared... i hope you enjoy:

Medusa's spy

Several years before Perseus enters the cave of Medusa to slain her there have been many other forgotten heros sent for this task. Among them was young Nereida, another daughter of all time horny Zeus, searching her destiny by freeing the world of those Gorgons. Her will, bravery and fortune will guide her way, at least she thought that. She walked the lands to reach her goal at the cave of Medusae. While passing the wild coasts she saw Medusas cave appear more and more. Everywhere statues of heros, animals and other once alive individuals marked the way. Nereida pushed on and even as the heavens darkened and a mighty blizzard struck down from the clouds to warn her that she was getting close to great danger, she still walked on. Her heart nearly exploded in her chest from the aticpation and these thousands of souls forever edged in stone by the look of Medusas eyes. Many still stand where they have gazed upon the evil monster, forever carved in stone. Nereida came closer to a temple complex up to a coastal peak and realized the massive amount of statues - she was close. Close to the liar of the Medusa, now was the time to proof herself worthy to the gods themself and suddenly everything became still, the blizzard stopped, the air stopped to whisper and everything was calm. Even the air seemed to slipp away and breathing became hard for Nereida. In this moment she saw the little bird and knew why no one ever was able to surprise Medusa. There it was, the spy of the Medusa.
And a little preview again... still 1% of work to do on Monday or Tuesday and still got to make good photos as i failed yesterday, but in the end i saw things to improve on the photos and will have these tasks fullfilled with full concentration and force :) - i like booty, that is why i show you booty:


Keep on happy painting and read you next week!
May you all be blessed and have a nice weekend!
Best Regards
Roman

Joy of Painting II

by Roman aka jar

posted by roman, jarhead, kong

... this could also be titled as "Finished stuff by big gorilla hands!". The comissioned greek naked girl wandering the snow is 99% finished. Photos already made but i saw some minor things i still want to redo so the last 1% has to be done after the weekends painting class.Little preview of things ahead:



SWWWOOOMMMMM!!
This is just for David because of quoting me and challenging big kong in a really funny way :)
Gna! Gna!



...during the same time the little girl wanders the snowy path to her destiny in a galaxy far, far away a supreme force is on the hunt for planets. The girl doesn't know yet that her destiny is already fullfilled from this moment on, there will be nothing left someday, no sun, no oceans, no heavens - just darkness. Millions of galaxies have died in those deep eyes. The Great Bust by Schell Sculpture Studio called Supreme Intelligence bust came to an end. The foreword i mentioned above is just my vision i had while painting this up.

This bust again has been a high honour for me to paint - it is sculpted by Jordu Schell of Schell Sculpture Studios, who some of you might know from the movie business. For example, Mr. Schell was also involved in the character design of the movie Avatar.

This bust is around 9 inches tall (including a bigger podestal) so it is rather big, but hey big model means a big brush for a gorilla and i love hitting such spots with colour and a mighty club - sometimes i did use a smaller brush too, like a sword or a dagger but i love clubbing boom boom colour boom! Evil unknown alien force conquers your soul...

Supreme Intelligence bust
Schell Sculpture Studio, ~9 inches


I hope you like my vision of this bust - i first saw it on the Website of Schell Sculpture Studio and was in love right on the spot. Below you are to find bigger photos, click to open them and you can zoom in to look at my painting strokes and lights and stuff - an upcoming Step by Step article about my painting thoughts on this bust is coming for sure when i am home from the next weekends painting class. If you like to click this photo of a model in the big voting arena please feel invited on this jungly path to overview, detail view and single big view. And beware our destiny is already written, grrrrrr - EVIL ALIEN FORCE!!

Keep on happy painting!
Best Regards and a deep Kong Fu bow to Jordu Schell...
Roman

Bigger Photos:

Preparation...

by Roman aka jar

posted by roman, jarhead, kong

Another painting class ahead in Munich for the upcoming weekend. Really looking forward to it after so much positive feedback for the past one. Today i plan to finish the greek naked girl and already did finish the Schell bust. Somehow even i know there will be more silent days ahead someday again i love those days when i have powers like a train :)

Party music is on to get this preparation and tasks fullfilled, but first i have to make the laundry :)



And something more chilled for creating millions of iceicles this afternoon :)


Oh dear, 600 subscribers straight ahead - you know what that means, don't you?
btw: Is the jungle blog running too fast for you?

Tutorial - Advanced Freehand Painting

by Roman aka jar

posted by roman, jarhead, kong

I am really some kind of Rodeo Clown, here comes the next article out of the happy painting forest. This time it is about painting a freehand again. There is already one article in the Tutorial area, a quick and simple one to paint up a flag of a gaming model.

This article now brings you an advanced technique describtion but nothing perfect yet as i did it, haha - there is still a lot to learn and practice for sure. The main difference now is that i had a plan and took my time and did take care of my Brush tip while doing concentrated painting, instead of the first article linked above where i mainly did only sketch and paint roughly. The model you are watching during the describtion is still Work in Progress. Here you can see the plan...


The miniature shield was basecoated with some Citadel Red Gore, with minimal shadows already included. So i took my sheet of plan which i did find in the depths of google and marked important spots to have a guide during painting. These spots have then been placed at the shield via a toothpick and some bleached bone, Citadel.


After this was done i took a colour that is not that saturated, like Charadon Granite of Citadel to make a simple mask out of my points. If you would go there with a strong, saturated colour it will get hard to redefine lines and areas later on, that is why i choose something more desurated to still have the option of cleaning up my sketch. Oh yes, i am sketching at the moment - i am always working from a sketch to finer detail, please remember that too when you are at home, not every brush strokes must mean you destroyed everything, sketching is fun and getting finer is hard work :)


Next i took some brighter tone to paint the main bright lines to the face, still a sketch as you all can see. I did take Citadels deneb stone of the foundation colour series to achieve that. Nothing fency, still ugly and sketchy.


After this step it was time to clean up the mess. I now took some Red Gore again and did redefine the areas where the dark tone hits the red, trying to paint sharp edges. After this i took some Chaos black and did the same to the main body of the face, redefining the white lines. It is kind of simple, but it takes much time. Just paint a thin dark line beside the white line to make the white line smaller. When an accident happens and you don't hit the right spot just go back to the other colour and redefine from there.


It all dried out and i went for a glaze with Cryphon Sepia Wash by Citadel to bring it all more together. You see this glaze does transform my white into yellowish lines, just like i wanted. While it dried i've checked if it is still too ugly to be given to her hand and found out yes it is...



Waiting until everything is dry brought me to the point that i now have to rework some lines again. It is the same procedure like described above, working with reds, blacks and whites to sharpen the complete motive. You have to know that this took some time after all, sometimes i was finding myself at the balcony with daylight watching the shield and searching for massive mistakes i had done. Then hurrying back to the workbench and redifining. After this was finished i again did use a glaze of Cryphone Sepia to bring it all togehter. Put a highlight in the reds on the upper part of the shield and a gentle shadow on its red dark areas. I still found something to be cleaned up afterwards and did the procedure once more, saying this was the last one as i could do this a hundred times more to get everything sharper. Then i fixed the shield to my model by using the pin which was prepared for this action, simple glueing with shaky hands.

 
Still i got some things to do at the shield like redefining, more light shadow, working with metals and painting some damage but i wanted to look at it in the complete context of my base to have a better overview over the scene before it goes further. The shield won't be the main part, that i can tell so far... there will be a story far more important. But still a lot of plans to be executed on this vignette. Even i am happy with how everything comes together there still seems an ocean full of work ahead. Sorry for the bad photos of this article, i am not really able to do good ones with my camera as you can see, randomly sorted in quality and colour.

Closing Words
I hope my thoughts could inspire you. This is not a perfect freehand, i know that. There is still much space to improve, but for myself this one really means something as i had a plan and did execute it.Maybe next time there will be an article about a perfe... nah, i will never be able to paint a perfect freehand as i am who i am :)

Some tips for painting freehands and redefine them: Use a sharp brush with a great tip, mine is a Windsor and Newton Series 7, long, Size 1. I would not recommand using too small brushes, a smaller size is not important as it just brings problems like there is not enough water in the brushs hair and you got to "refill" it all the time, starting at different points of your freehand again and again - that might bring more accidents. A longer brush with space to keep your liquid colour floating is half the rent. Concentration will be next - don't hurry at all. I am just telling you what i found out during the process of this painting. I was listening to classic music for hours today while i did execute my plan. You got to have a plan to do advanced freehand painting. i've learned that. Robert aka Muhani tells me that he always does his freehands while listening to "Benjamin Blümchen stories", that keeps him calmed. This is just just find your own way - may this article help you. I don't use my colours too wet, i mean not too thinned glazes as if i have to hit the same line several times it is getting harder and harder. I remember repainting the nose several times because of my failure in being calmed - it is training i say to my self, nothing more, so i will train... and search if there is maybe even more, haha.  Oh dear, hard to explain... whatever it was a hell of a fun and a good feeling to have learnt something for the future. Hope my approach on thoughts could help you on your own freehands...

Skeeve added these tips via comment, many thanks for sharing your thoughts:

Great work. Just to add to it. It helps (to me) to do couple of preliminary sketches with incrementally decreasing scales on a paper first. This especially helpful if I paint original designs - "normal" scale designs are not always transferable to a miniature. It is important for complex freehands painting like this is very clear understanding what happens with your brush stroke when you touch the surface. I suppose this is what Roman calls "planing".

Here is an example.
With a brush curved lines are always easier then straight. Short lines are often easier then long. Long thin lines are probably the most difficult.

1)You need to paint a relatively long line.
Look at the whole composition. Can you approximate that long straight line by a series of curved lines? May be by a series of short straight lines? Does it have to be thin or you could make it thinner later by using "background color"?

2) You need to paint two parallel lines. What is easier to paint two thin lines next to each other or to paint one thick line and then "subtract" the space between them with a background color.
Trying this on a piece of paper first really helps optimizing painting later.

Keep on happy painting!
Best Regards
Roman

PS: A front preview so far...



Khidaryms Cynwalls

by Oli aka HonourGuard

posted by Oli, HonourGuard, silver leaf


Hey readers,

I just finished another miniature, which I painted across a long time. I tried to use the same colour sheme like I did on my dream warrior. The dream warrior is a very special miniature for me, because it was my first miniature, that won anything in a competition. Also I tried again to paint a colour gradient from red>purple>blue>black. I think on big surfaces this could be a good alternative for keeping surfaces interesting.

I also invested much time in the base, I am happy with the result. Sure a little bit to big maybe, but I think I managed to catch the lonely-fantasy-forest feeling like I wanted to have it.

I am very interested what you think about my new elve and especially how the mini fits to the base.









And here the picture of both of them.

And again a big picture, I prefer this ones, because on small pictures, my photos often look very diffuse.



Best regards

Oli

Finished Stuff and wip

by Raffa

Posted by Raffa, Picster, Capuchin,....

Heeeeey everyone!

At the moment it's pretty silent around myself....
I'm busy with a lot of stuff...  buuuut anyway i had some smaller projects finished and want to show them!

But before showing you any miniatures... check out THIS.... pure inspiration!!! A great flash movie that tells a sad story about the last of the dashkin...

So, here i go with some finished stuff.... the first is a small car... pretty small... was just for pure enjoyment of painting weathered stuff :)
The next mini is a small gift for Quentin ... i can't write up all the stuff he did for me but he's a great person :) Thanks for the great time in Brussels man!

Here is something with a little more color than usual :)
This guy is FOR SALE, if you have a nice offer, drop me a mail! 
picster (at) massivevoodoo (dot) com

... and last but not least a work in progress photo from a tau pilot.... it's still pretty early and the base will be completely remade but anyway:

So, hope you like some of the stuff!

Cheers,
Raffa

Tutorial - using material from old watches

by Roman aka jar

posted by roman, jarhead, kong

Hiho.

This time it is a long time planned article, but somehow we lost the photos or at least thought we did. Raffa did take the photos about half a year ago and now suddenly they've appeared again. This article brings you inspiration on what great material you can find in old watches.

First let me explain how you can get some old watches. There are many places you can get them, for example ebay by searching for "watch convolut", additional to that you can search on flea market or ask friends as i did while i was in school - i just asked everyone for old watches they have at home and if they want to give them to me for free, many did and so i was equipped. Just make sure they are old watches, not those new digital stuff.

Now what there is to do with old watches you finally can call your own?
It is kind of simple, rip them apart and don't hurt yourself. For ripping them apart i recommand using some fine tools like fine screw drivers for the main body. Always know it has been build together so you can disambley them as well. Sometimes you will get to the point were you might think "Damn, i am angry, this takes too long!" and you find yourself in the right mood to use more radical tools like a hammer or a calliper. Do so if you want but pay attention of not hurting yourself. This article is familiar with the content of an older article were i show how you can base with an old digital camera.

To business then...
Destroying and ripping apart in the progress...



Starting to collect the interior can make you a very happy hobby person:


Now what you can do? - some examples. First 2 bases build up by Raffa, including these tiny cog wheels and other stuff:


You can also use them not that massive like doing just a little addition to your base or model, more examples:

 
 

Final words
I hope this small article inspires you to try this on your own. For the lazy folk around: I know Hasslefree Miniatures sells such parts in a set. Not the baddest idea i think.

So far, keep on happy painting!