The Glass Cabinet

For my birthday a few months ago, I was kindly given a glass cabinet by my wife, in another new display of her accepting my hobby and giving it some space to be shown in the house. This is quite a momentous occasion for me too, having not really publicly shown my hobby off before. It is in the downstairs bathroom though..

So here it is now mounted on the wall and starting to be filled with some of my smaller projects:

Blood bowl Orcs and a couple of Fighting Fantasy tributes:

Gaslands at the top, Buried Giant tribute and a human warband

More Fighting Fantasy tributes along the top (characters from the novels and choose your own adventure series) and of course the Freeway Fighter. Wood Elf blood bowl team beneath:

A barbarian warband based on Frank Frazetta's art and some (unfinished) Star Wars miniatures. 

Some 40k Rogue Trader along the top:

My Barbarian Warband

Here's my warband, completed. In the studio:

Roaming around a town:

Fighting renowned adversaries:

And discussing the necessity of indiscriminate killing:

The End.

Barbarians and subtleties in skintone.

The final 4 miniatures for my Barbarian warband was another adventure in flesh tone painting. We have a swarthy, female reclining assassin, an albino shaman, a ruddy female with broadsword and a two-weaponed, pallid Beserker Dwarf:

 

 The painting technique was the same on all of them (white prime, contrast base wash, highlight up with increasing amount of white added to the base Contrast paint and then glazed with reds to warm up), but they each had a different starting colour:

The paler two characters also had extra white added to their highlights from the start of the process. 

And here's the simple conversion for the shaman; a LotR goblin body and a zombie head with some greenstuffed hair and largely goblin bits on the staff:

In another project I would like to experiment with how to capture skintones other than caucasian, but for now my Barbarians are complete and I'll do some nice group photos later.

3 Citadel Tribesmen (improving my verdaccio technique)

To continue my Barbarian warband, I bought these three oop Citadel Tribesmen on ebay for £1 each plus packaging, a proper bargain in these days of higher prices for nostalgia. I see these three as initiates for the warband, not yet fully blown Barbarians, mostly because they wear trousers and also because the scale of these 80's sculpts is slightly less heroic than the other miniatures I have already painted. I also decided to go for some black hair, as this is much more in the Frank Frazetta style and looked good having all three (brothers?) looking similar as the sculpts seemed to dictate this. There's a bit of Frank Zappa about the left guy too.

I went for my usual slightly rusting metal look and decided to have some exploration of how to work mostly with browns for their clothing, including a range of different leather appearances on the hide shield to the left. 

Here's the crew all posing their best pose for the photoshoot:

I again experimented with the verdaccio style of under-painting skin tones green, thinking I could refine it and speed it up from my previous attempts on Thrud. Which I think I managed, but make your own mind up; the process:

1. Over a white undercoat I liberally applied some Camoshade with a touch of washing up liquid to help it flow. (no photo here) 

2. I then built up a series of lighter highlights, adding white to the Camoshade in the raised areas

3. Then over the highlighted green I applied a very dilute glaze of a Citadel Contrast flesh tone. This was made up of some of the paint, some additional water, medium and a touch of washing up liquid. Here you can see it halfway through application. 

4. I then highlighted up with some very thin applications of a very pale flesh tone (Elf Flesh and a lot of white, thinned) 

5. I then reapplied a few glazes of warmer reds over the nose, lips, ears and cheeks, elbows and knuckles. Basically those areas that looked too pale and needed warming up. 

6. A small, very dilute purple wash in the eye sockets and then I could work on all the details.

And there we go! I have five more models to go for the warband - I would like to do a Frazetta inspired conversion of a Barbarian leader on a sabre toothed tiger and I already have a couple more old Citadel sculpts and a converted shaman ready to paint next, so until next time...

New barbarian recruits

On my last post I forgot to mention my love of Frank Frazetta's art and how my h this was inspiring my ideas for a Barbarian warband, well I've painted some more, hopefully evocative of his style.
Three more to be precise, added to the warband; another Hasslefree model, but this one with a ice dynamic running pose, a Red Box game miniature with a head swap (the original looked far too small and besides I had this nice Spacewolf head going spare in my bits box) and a Reaper Bones wild dog to finish off:

And so you can see where some of my I spiration has come from, some classic Frazzeta: