So much news ...

I´ve received my order of Scale75 colors ... the Collection. The colors look amazing but they are different to handle as Citadel or Vallejo colors. For me it´s a practice and experience thing. So I will have to work a lot with the paints to learn how to use them in the right way. They are super matt as you can see in the picture below.
Here you can see the Old Gnome from War Griffin Miniatures. It has a lot of textures that help painting a lot. Nice structures and different materials to simulate are included too. So it´s a nice practice bust that looks amazing and is well sculpted. I ordered it in the UK at http://www.modeldisplayproducts.co.uk. The delivery to Germany was very very fast. Thank you guys for the nice service and the beautiful miniature!

Hope you enjoy!

Sascha

While I´m waiting for new bricks ...

The logistic service DHL is striking. So I have to do another project first. I ogle at the miniatures of Freebooter´s Fate for a lot of months. They look so awesome and they are made so lovingly. They are made of white metal. The miniatures will be used for gaming but they are also painting practice objects.
Actually I´ve bought two factions: the pirates and the goblin pirates. The table will be build of wood and styrofoam. You will see the progress of this project as well on this blog soon...

Here is the first miniature of the pirates faction.

Hope you enjoy!

Sascha

No more bricks for the wall ...

Now I have to wait for more Milliput. More time to paint, I guess.

Hope you enjoy!

Sascha

Another brick in the wall ...

The project goes on and the diorama is growing. See you with the next step...

Hope you enjoy!
Sascha

The start of a larger project ....

Rackham Confrontation miniatures has been finished years ago. And actually I don´t know if another company continues the program. The miniatures look fantastic although they are relatively old. They are made of tin.
Over the last weekend I finished my first Rackham miniatures and I can say that I love them. They are really nice and beautifully sculpted. Here you can see some first pictures. They will be part of a diorama. So they will get some more highlights and shadows.

No, the big black one is no Rackham Miniature. My cat Roxy had to review the quality of my painting job.
The three miniatures will be a part of a scene that shows the attack of goblins over this Orc guard. There will be at least 3-4 additional miniatures ... We will see.
In the following picture you can see the building process of the diorama. It will show a wall with a little gate in it.

Hope you enjoy!

Sascha

From now on ...

It´s done. We arrived the actual finished project. It is BlaBla from Blacksmith Miniatures. They have very characterful fantasy miniatures in their range.
BlaBla is fully casted of resin and of high quality. I did the miniature in about 8h and I´m really happy with the result.
In this case I´ve done the base with a thick cork piece and on the top there are some Army Painter Jungle Tufts. I painted the tufts with differnt layers of green and highlighted them with a very bright green at the end. Maybe I will add some colored flowers to give the grass a more realistic and friendly look. We´ll see.

Hope you enjoy!

Sascha

Winter is coming ...

My next project, and now we are on the beginning of this week, was Daenerys Targaryen the Mother of Dragons from Nuts Planet. It was hard to decide which miniature I wanted to paint. The range of this brand is so fantastic that I see there a lot of my future projects :) One other miniature of this brand is already waiting in my box: The Aquila. But before that I will do some smaller miniatures in a bigger diorama ... can´t wait till they arrive.

The Mother of Dragons is a miniature my wife chose. But I like it a lot too! Before I started, the most feared opponent was her skin. All skins I´ve done so far have been males or relatively dark. This one had to be pale and also alive. Of course I used the three color zone technique but in this case I had to be very careful. And so it came that I painted the longest time of this miniature on the skin. Sometimes shadows got to harsh or the tones of the face and the cleavage didn´t match. The highlights had to be set very smooth and so on... The hairs are much more white in my case than on the Nuts Planet cover. I think a blonde white matches more with the figure in GOT.
 The dragon on her shoulder was a lot of fun and back to the dark colors it was easier to highlight for me.
 In this special case I´m very proud of the eyes I painted. It gets better and better, I think.

Hope you enjoy!

Sascha

Kirill Kanaev and his amazing painting skills ...
Painting on instruction No.3

A Painting Buddah Legends video is a tutorial of very well known artists like Kirill Kanaev. Kirill won this year the crystal brush contest with his amazing looking home-made Space Marine. The second place has made Ben Komets who was mentioned a lot of times on this blog because he is one part of the Painting Buddah Academy. His scenery was stunning too ... unbelievable!
Back to the instruction video of Kirill. He painted the Highland Clansman from Young Miniatures. On all different materials he added special textures to simulate their specifics. For example he painted the beret of the Clansman with a lot of little dots to give it the look of felt. While I saw the video the first time I didn´t know Kirill before. Sometimes I thougt: What the .. is he doing. That looks strange, not really good. And then with every additional step the miniature got awesome ... Nothing I´m able of today :) One version of Kirill´s painted Clansmans you can see on the cover of the clansman box from Young Miniatures. He painted that too.

Here you can see my version of the Highland Clansman. Hope you enjoy!

Sascha

Miniature communities ...

I can´t say a lot of different miniature painting communities. Well you see, I´m a totally newbie! But I have the chance to participate on the Painting Buddah Academy which allows to get access to different high quality video tutorials of miniature painting. They are done of well known and very professional miniature painters like Ben Komets, Kirill Kanaev, Matt Cexwish, Fernando Ruiz, ... and more in the future. Since a couple of weeks Painting Buddah started a Slack Chat for members and promoters. Here you can talk with other painters of the miniature scene from all over the world, present your painted miniatures and get a lot of helpful advices. But the special thing is that Slack is a chat and not a forum. Everything is live and sometimes you have the chance to communicate with the artists of the videos from Painting Buddah, if they are on.
It´s a nice platform that I always run besides other activities on my desk that is also my painting table.

High contrasts ...

Two weeks ago I started with the Siege Giant of Galapagos Miniatures. They have a short range of high quality resin miniatures.
I chose the Siege Giant for two reasons. First, the Siege Giant includes a nastily goblin and I love goblins a lot. And second I wanted a miniature for practicing high contrasts. If you google this miniature you see what I mean. As I learnd so far, a miniature can´t get enough contrast and this one needs a lot of it!
Out of the packaging the Siege Giant comes with differnt accessories. There are differnt parts of the goblin as well as the giants jawbone device. Additionally there are two little miniature chains included. They are really nice and I only used one of those for my miniature. It´s nice to have for other projects... And they will come.
The casts are of high quality as I can say. There are a lot of little grains and wrinkels that can be painted. In the future there will be more Galapagos Miniatures on my table. It was a lot of fun to paint this one!

Hope you enjoy!

Sascha

And another Scale 75 followed ...

Scale75 presents a wide range of miniatures and busts with interesting themes. The ones that I held in my hands were of high quality, the resin ones as well as the ones of tin.
The next  Scale 75 miniature I did was Jessica Thunderhawk from the Steam Wars range. It comes with a large Steampunk eagle on the shoulder. A very cool miniature. Of course I tried to give this miniature a self-made base in a sandy western style.
The rock, the miniature is standing on, was made by baked layers of Milliput and FIMO. The ground of the base is a layered structure of wood and cork. A little speciality are the little rats in the front the eagle is looking at. These rats are from the Thanquol and Boneripper kit from Games Workshop. A funny coincidence is that one of these rats is handicapped and has a wheel instead of hind legs. It´s so to say also a Steampunk model.

Hope you enjoy!

Sascha

The next pilot ...

After the great experience with the Randolf bust I decided to do another bust. Busts are - for me - a good method to practice color scemes of faces, like the three tone segments of a face, the always difficult to do eyes and structures. Busts are often in the scale of 1/10 or 1/9. So have a lot of space to practise small things. I noticed that these experiences also helped to do better faces in smaller scales. Of course you cann´t do as much details in smaller scales as in bigger scales but you know what would be possible and on what details you will resign. For example I always take care now of the three color zones of a face - also on smaller scales. But I don´t paint eyes on different scales in the same way.

My next project in April was "The Few RAF Pilot" from Life Miniatures with his cute dog on the back. I liked the painting of this bust a lot because there are differnt materials to simulate like leather, metal, linen, etc. Also the dog was a little challange because of its fur. I tried to do it as realisitic as I could. But the biggest challange was thie yellow-black air-tube that is hanging out of his mask. To do this as good as I can I needed a lot of tries. And I still could be better. But for me, at the actual stage of my skills, I´m very happy with the result.

Hope you enjoy!

Sascha

And then came Randalf ... 
Painting on Instruction No 2

Now it´s march in the painting cronic and I got my first bust to paint. Randalf Streisand from Painting Buddah. It is a exclusive sculpted miniature for the Painting Buddah program which you can buy on their shop homepage. It comes with a well made instruction video / tutorial for painting the bust. Ben Komets, a very well known guy in the miniature painting scene and winner of a lot of contests paints this miniature at the video and you can look how unbelievable smooth it could be :)
The miniature itself has been sculpted by Mati Zander. And what can I say .. the bust is awesome! The textures are so good that the bust seems to paint itself. Wrinkles, grains and other little structures are so well made that it is a pleasure to paint this bust. Maybe I will order some more in the future. It is really a fantastic thing.

Here you can see my version of Randalf Streisand. Hope you enjoy!

A dwarf on Scale 75 ...

We are now, in the cronic of my painted miniatures, in January 2015. I´ve painted and built the Hobbit thing and planned a new project. Khalgrim Gunnarson from Scale75 is a fantastic miniature. It comes with a lot of different accessories like a stone wall, a ground plate, weapons and two different heads. It is made of Resin and tin.
Tin was very hard for me at the beginning. Of course I have also tin miniatures in 40k and WHB but there I don´t care much about little paint scalings. It´s normal that it happens when you play over the time. But a model that have to look good all the time you don´t want paint scaling. So I read that you have to clean the tin in a soap sud to get rid of the fat of your fingers. After this cleanup the base coat and all other colors over it will hold much better.

As you see in the following picture I tried to do some sort of rock basing under the dwarf. It´s ok I think but there is a lot of space to the top :)
Also I tried to do NMM (Non metal metal) painting on its armor. Some parts I worked some parts not really. Something I want to practice a lot. It is a really cool effect as you can see in this picture on DakkaDakka LINK.

Hope you enjoy!

Sascha

About colors ...

While I painted the FER miniature and built the diorama I started to test different colors like Citadel Colors, Vallejo Game Colors and for some things Revell Aqua Colors. Today I paint usually with Citadel Colors that I like the most. But I will test Scale75 Colors as well in the future because I need colors that are more mat too. I´ve heard a lot from Scale75 Colors and I´m very interested. We will see.
All miniatures I painted till now (05/14/2015) I used especially Citadel Colors and some Vallejo Game Colors. I arrange them in toolboxes. I haven´t found a better solution for me yet but there are many organization systems out there. For me toolboxes work fine because you can store them somewhere else if you don´t need them. On the other hand the boxes are relatively big. Here you can see what I mean.
As you see I have a lot of differnt colors because I have the feeling you can´t have enough of them. On the other side there are a lot of colors that I don´t need a lot and on my painting table I see often old friends, like differnt flesh tones, brown tones, dark blue, green tones, brown and of course black and white. It would be interesting to get a color table of the main colors professional painters use. What do you think?

Painting on instruction ... No.1

After I had done the Hobbit scenery I wanted to do something from the Painting Buddah tutorials and I decided to paint Aanchuth the Cursed from Mierce Miniatures on a little diorama.

The Miniature is well structured. That helps a lot to paint the different parts of the miniature and follow any instructions of the Painting Buddah video. As you can see I tried also to do some fur structure on the skin of the miniature. But it was very hard for me and at this time I was really happy with the result. But one thing I should have already done on this project is buying a really good brush. It is worth more than you can expect. Maybe you can :)

With a really good brush as my actual Winsor and Newton Series 7 No.1 brush the fur structures would have been much more precise. But I´m happy with the result of this stage of my painting career. The painted Aanchuth in the Painting Buddah Video was done by Matt Cexwish. It´s absolutely stunning. Maybe you already know him from the Massive Vodoo page. A really good miniature painting blog.

And here is my work ... Hope you enjoy!

Sascha

The first diorama  -  or "There and back again ..."

After watching the Basing Alchemy DVD from Painting Buddah I decided to build my first diorama. Because every try can fail I bought a relatively cost-efficient miniature: "Spirit of Adventure" from FER Miniatures. It´s a little man with a Hobbit look-alike, especially like Bilbo Baggins.
So I planned to creat a scene in that Bilbo leaves his Hobbit house.

As base I took a precasted base of wood, build a frame of plastic sheed around and filled it with a mixture of dry earth and superglue. The start of the garden was done. Then I filled the house part with styro-foam and on the top also with the dry earth - superglue mixture. Over this mixture on the roof of the building and the garden I strewed grass and leaf flocks. The chimney was build with Milliput and the smoke is cotton batting. The house wall is a mixture of sand, color and wood glue and the stones on the wall and in the garden are of Milliput. The tree in the background and the plants in the buckets are of sepiolite. I left them unpainted because I loved the original colors they had.

That´s it. Hope you enjoy!

Sascha

How it began...

My name is Sascha and I started miniature painting about one and a half year ago - if you want to call it miniature painting at this early point. I bought some Games Workshop miniatures of the Hobbit Series. Before I haven´t painted any miniatures or stuff like that. And so the first results weren´t not so good. And if I`m honest I painted miniatures for gaming and not for the painting process itself.
In the following time I painted a lot of armies of Warhammer Fantasy and 40k and my painting skill got a little bit better. Here you can see some of these miniatures. I painted them about one year ago.

Then someday I found this little video on YouTube INFAMY Miniatures Video 1 of 4 - Dr. John Watson - TMM & Gore and it changed a lot. Not that I became instantly a good painter or something like that - to be honest I am far from this goal at the moment - but at the first time I saw that somebody painted a miniature in a way I didn´t expected. It seems all so simple and effective that I thougt I could do this as well ... Well this was a mistake too. And after a while I noticed that behind this video stands a whole company that has the following goal: "Help us to help you to be a better painter". Perfect, I thougt. Excactly what I need. And I ordered a three part DVD set that includes different tutorials about miniature painting, freehands and basing (Shop).

After watching the tutorials I can not say that my skills improved as much as I thougt. No wonder you have to paint and operationalize the knowledge you get of the tutorials. I still painted only wargaming miniatures with the aim of playing. It had to work fast. The results got better, but far far away from being good.
The initial point in improving my skills have been the Painting Buddah Academy. At the moment I´m a member - a Bruddah so called - of this academy and I get constantly new painting tutorials of different miniatures. I try to follow the instructions on the same miniatures they paint and I practice a lot. At the moment I paint about 2-3 miniatures and busts a week. That´s a lot and a lot of time.

And that is what this blog is all about. You can watch how my painting skills are at the moment, what new projects I do and what experiences I´ll make. At the beginning I will show you some of my done miniatures and the stories behind the miniatures. It´s not about Painting Buddah itself, but about how a community like Painting Buddah helps a lot for training your skills and become a better painter. I´ll show you a lot of miniatures, color brands and brushs (damaged as well :) and different light sources I have used. Also there will be short reviews of this products. It all shows my point of view. I´m a beginner and not a professional. Hopefully this will show you the products from a different perspective than you get of professional miniature painters ...

Hope you enjoy!

Sascha