So what the heck have I been up to?

Hey all!

Yeah I drifted away from updating again but It is only because I have been so busy painting and building.  Soon I will show you my newest miniatures, but not all of my painting has been figure based….

In my house as a kid the one thing that pre-empted Church on Sundays was car shows. I grew up all around kustom car kulture and developed a great love of flame paintjobs, pinstriping and modification (explains some of my love of converting miniatures eh?)

Recently a few opportunities came my way. The first was a charity event where area artists were given wooden birdhouses to decorate and then have auctioned off. I have always enjoyed these monoform art projects (where every artist has the same form to work with but puts their own spin on it - check out things like the Munny or my current favorite the Vader Project for examples of this type of art show!)

So with that as my task and a limited time frame to work in I created this:

 

I did lapping flames inside of traditional hotrod flames - similar to those I did for my son’s wagon last year.

This year instead of green flames I chose to work in transparent reds mixed with diox purple to layer up the design. A couple of coats of Minwax polyshades Antique Walnut that I had left over from dipping some old minis for a demo set and it was done.  The birdhouse ended up going for a reasonable sum and was sold to the person who had convened and organized the show! That was pretty cool.

 

This leads me to the next project that took a bunch of time but was a great deal of fun.  My buddy Jeffy is building a “Rat Rod” style truck.  As he heard that I had been learning a bit about automotive pinstriping and knew of my love of cars our talks turned towards me doing some of the fun details and designs for his rod.  Being that it was a rat rod really did give me some added confidence as mistakes could be more easily dealt with or camoflauged and so I agreed.

 

The goal was to make the graphics match the roughness of the door (and the truck). He provided me with general examples of the imagery and text he wanted and it was up to me to make them look as if they had been on the truck for years and just touched up with the striping for contrast.  I actually used a salt mask (search up my articles on Dragomir and you will see this technique used on 40k vehicles) in conjunction with the stencils and abrasion. For a miniature painting technique, it worked as well as I had hoped in 1:1 scale!

 

Below you can see it with the striping started.

 

Well I have one more non miniature project to post about and then we will be back to my latest minis. This time it is my Bloodbowl  team which I have been racing to finish in time for the Lakeside Cup - My very first NAF event!!!  I will post all the pics of the team and the event over the next few weeks. WISH ME LUCK!

Fimir FTW!

So we all have them. Those projects which seem never ending because we did enough to meet a basic gaming goal but are left with a few units/models/bits left in limbo.
Almost 3 years ago I started painting an army of Zoats and Fimir.Link,  Link2,  Link3

Had a lot of fun and did quite well with them Astronomicon Award Winner

Here is the army explanation:

Background Fluff 

Since all this I had picked away at a couple more models but never really finished much of anything - which is a real shame considering that I spent nearly 3 YEARS collecting the pieces for this army!!!!!

So as a part of my resolution to finish off old projects I have picked my fimir and zoats back up and dived right on in. The first batch of fimir are pictured below and now bring my footslogger warriors up to 30. I have to touch up the bases a bit more but overall these fit nicely in with the previous ones. I think I have 10 or 15 more to go to finish off all that I have collected.

The one on the far right was painted back with the original batch the rest are new - so I think the matching is pretty seamless!

I have also started the bases for the remaining zoat destroyers, heavy destroyers and my second zoat destroyer lord. I still have a couple more destroyers and the lord that are wip as well as a set of the large metal fimir which are still in the bare metal stage. My intent had been to use these as wraiths for some variety - but in truth as they compete with my destroyers for a precious fast attack slot, they probably wont get used in anything other than Apocalypse! That being said there have been some additional rumours for the next necron codex which include more larger models being a part of the list. I will probably paint and base these in the meantime but am certainly holding out to see what the next incarnation will bring.

On a final note, you may have noticed that I added WFB and 40k as new searchable labels for my posts. I will hopefully be able to go and backdate my older posts with these labels but you will have to be patient as it will take some time!

RIP Frank Frazetta

Very sad news this week, One of my personal inspirations and favourite artists - Mr. Frank Frazetta has passed away. His work has been a definitve link between artists and dreamers for decades and is one of the main reasons I picked up my first fantasy novels as a kid. He challenged me to create the heroic , to push boundaries and to see beauty even in darkness. He will be sorely missed.

Below is an obituary published this week.

Obituary for Frank Frazetta, 82,

 celebrated comic artist and

illustrator

By Terence McArdleWashington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 13, 2010

Frank Frazetta, 82, the celebrated comic artist and illustrator whose ax-wielding muscular warriors, scantily clad heroines and ferocious beasts of prey graced numerous science fiction and fantasy novels, died May 10 at a hospital in Fort Myers, Fla., after a stroke.Mr. Frazetta, who started as a pencil-and-ink comic book artist, painted movie posters and rock album covers, but he was perhaps best known for the cover illustrations to the paperback reissues of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian series and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan and Pellucidar series.Mr. Frazetta’s drawings were credited with renewing the popularity of the character, a mainstay of the 1930s pulp magazine Weird Tales. He helped define the illustration style for the fantasy sub-genre known as “sword and sorcery.”

Describing Mr. Frazetta’s bold, sexually charged style, the author Donald Newlove wrote in 1977, “There’s no love of decay and fetidness — his swamps and jungles are soft green, lush, aswirl and gently vivid, germinal . . . a perfect setting for the erotic.”

Mr. Frazetta was one of the first artists in paperbacks and comics to negotiate the ownership of his artwork — a move that worked out well for him. The cover painting for a 1966 Lancer books edition of “Conan the Conqueror” sold for $1 million in a 2009 auction.

Although he left comics work in the 1960s, his later paintings influenced such artists as Richard Corben of Heavy Metal magazine and anticipated a trend toward painted graphic novels.

Inspired by Tarzan

Frank Frazzetta — he later dropped the second “z” in his surname — was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Feb. 9, 1928. As a child, he was inspired by the drawings of Hal Foster, whose work on the Tarzan comic strip would anticipate many of Mr. Frazetta’s jungle scenes.

For DC Comics, he drew the Shining Knight and, for EC Comics, he illustrated a series of science fiction stories. He had his own short-lived racing car strip, Johnny Comet, in 1952. The same year, he joined cartoonist Al Capp as an uncredited artist on Lil’ Abner, a position he held into the mid-1960s. He painted a Mad magazine ad parody in 1964 — featuring Beatles drummer Ringo Starr in an endorsement for Blecch Shampoo — that caught the eye of United Artists films. The company hired Mr. Frazetta to do a painted poster for the film “What’s New Pussycat?,” a 1965 comedy written by Woody Allen.  His later film poster credits included Roman Polanski’s “The Fearless Vampire Killers” (1967) and Clint Eastwood’s “The Gauntlet” (1977).  His work also appeared on album covers for such hard rock acts as Molly Hatchet, Nazareth and Yngwie Malmsteen — though he professed disdain for most rock music.His illustrations inspired new interest in the Conan the Barbarian franchise. Marvel Comics launched an ongoing comic book series in 1970s, and there was a 1982 movie directed by John Milius with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the title role.Not that I could ever redo Frazetta on film — he created a world and a mood that are impossible to simulate,” Milius recently told the Los Angeles Times. He added that his goal in “Conan the Barbarian” was to tell a story shaped by Frazetta and composer Richard Wagner.

After a stroke in 1995, Mr. Frazetta, a right-handed artist, continued to work first by penciling, then by teaching himself a left-handed handed brush technique.

His wife of 53 years, Eleanor “Ellie” Kelly, who served as Mr. Frazetta’s business partner, died in 2009. Survivors include four children, Alfonso Frank Frazetta, known as Frank Jr., and William Frazetta, both of East Stroudsburg, Pa., Heidi Grabin of Englewood, Fla., and Holly Frazetta of Boca Grande, Fla.; three sisters; and 11 grandchildren.

Blogging the Beasts 11

Here we go again!

Now that I no longer have to keep my “Big rare” piece in secret (and unfortunately so as It didnt get done in time for the Herdstone competition!) I would like to present what I have been working on:

First up - the Morghur rebuild:

 Before I took the first picture I had already rebuilt the staff and repaired the claw hand which wasnt too bad. The pins were still there they just had to be realigned reglued and straightened a bit.

After that I had to do some straightening on the seriously mangled horn. I think I got it back into a reasonable shape though it will never be symmetrical again (meh… symmetry is for suckers I always say!) I am just crushed that I am going to have to repaint this as it was a BEAST the first time (and not in a good way) Ah well. This will be the most difficult part of the repair.

Here you can see the section of the arm that I will have to rebuild with GS - this should be the easiest of the repairs and the easiest of the repaints

So thats where he is right now!

Second the Jabberslythe!!! In the original “what to use for a jabber model” topic  I had actually made the suggestion of working with a blight drone from Forgeworld. The more I thought about it the more I really did like the idea - so I got one and did it myself!

 

In the end I had to extend the length of the whole model - using a reshaped “fan” section to create the extra matching armour segment along the back and sculpting in the torso (?) extension below (you can see in the pic beneath that I matched it up pretty nice).

 

I then chopped out the lower front end of it, adding in the mawlock mouth parts and resculpting the tech sections and lenses to be more organic.

 I used shaved and corrected balrog wings which still have some more updating/smoothing work to be done on them. I am still going to replace the wing tip claws with small nid ones that should match the front leg (?) parts. I have also used GS to create a texture over the nid armour plates to give them a finish more like that of the back armour since the pics were taken.

Here it is sitting in a box of junk waiting for me to finish it!

 

I will post a few more as it gets done and will show a few more angles of the body resculpt etc.

AND:   SUPER THANKS again to those who voted for me in the Herdstone  award for best army blog - much appreciated and glad that people like what I am posting - if there is anything important that you want me to discuss or elaborate on please do not hesitate to ask!

THINGS TO COME:

New ungors!
More Jabber!
Morghur Updates
More work on finishing/editing my mino herds
Several other armies (40K EVEN!) which I am (finally!!!) completing
And - dependant upon the synergy between the new edition and our army - more gors!!!! New models to finish old units.

FTW!

So life continues to intrude on my hobbies, but genuinely its ok.

I will not be competing in major painting comps this year but have begun the process of preparation for my entries in 2011 (12?) aside from that I have decided to try and work in a bit more gaming related stuff - which brings us to the following announcement

I WIN!!!!!

Seriosly - this has been a benchmark gaming season for me as I won best overall in both the Lost WFB Championship with my beasts in the fall and now the Lost Warhammer 40,000 Championship last weekend with Orks (yep Orks!!!!).

The Orks were my very first army and some of the models that I played with on the day of were of this vintage. Check these beauties out:

From these Blood Axe Kommando models to the golden demons - who would have thought it eh? The majority of the army is an old one including the venerable gorkamorka era ugly trukks and bikes. Even with these eyesores (man those models were ugly even when they were new) I really had genuine FUN playing this force. As such I have decided to get a few new vehicles for them, do a couple new models (A new “Mad doc Grotsnik” conversion is a must) and continue to play them from time to time

I am really proud of this dual title and would like to thank all those involved for such a great season.

I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate my buddy and teammate Mathieu Fontaine for his Gold level win in Paris at Games Day France!!! This is Mathieu’s 16th demon and is well deserved! Check out his site http://akaranseth.over-blog.com/ for more details!

Part of my own goals for the next while are to continue building my beasts in relation to the new edition of both the army book and the game itself. I have two boxes of new ungor archers which I am in the process of cleaning up and converting for the army using some ideas I had originally planned for my ungor spears in the old mixed herd format - I think the overall effect will be cool! (more to come on this)

I was keeping another little project to myself for the last while (accounting for most of my posting silence over the last while) as the web contest I was working towards required a degree of secrecy from competitors. Bad news is that this silence was for naught as I didnt finish - good news is I have a bunch of wip shots of my newest model - The JABBERSLYTHE for my Beastmen army! My next couple of posts here will deal with the creation of this gribbly monster which I am quite fond of already.

To those wondering about the current condition of my Morghur model (now the cygor for my army) he has been reassembled though he is still in need of some GS repair. Paint repairs will follow concurrent to the painting of my Jabber (something to work on while pieces are drying) While he is far from being finished and will never again be quite as good as he was - he will certainly still be a seriously Bad @$$ model and most people will never even be able to tell the difference.

With that I will sign off - but will actually be back very soon!