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