Site back online

So I know this site has been down for ages. The reason was a sequence of server migrations and hacks, and myself adjusting to some new situations outside of the hobby. But I have been painting a few minis again and will post pictures soon.

It feels good to have the site back online

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Assassin Miniatures Witch

This is an old Assassin Miniatures Witch which has been standing on my desk primed for ages now. I decided to do a quick paintjob here in the spirit of “get some old things off the desk”. This is just something to get used to the brush again.

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Metal Magic Swamp Monster

 

This is an old Hobby Products/Metal Magic miniatures from the late 80s. I think this sculpt of a swamp monster holds up pretty well, even today. I painted this one pretty quickly. It employs a lot of washes and glazes. I even used some of the Tamiya transparent paints for glazing in between to get a bit of a translucent wet texture.

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WotC Halfling Rogue – A study in composition

I really enjoyed the kind of scenic bases people are doing more and more to support their miniatures. I was never much into this and went for very plain bases most of the time. I thought that it was time to get away from this an to experiment with scenic bases. In the following, I will share my thoughts about the process of composing this base.

The purpose of this miniature was to practice and to experiment. Thus, I selected a very simple small mini that would be quick to paint. This old D&D Halfling rogue seemed just right. The cast was somewhat bad and the pressure of the mold deformed the right half of the face quite a bit. However I like the mini for its dynamic pose and simplicity.

 

At first I thought about what would be important to make a good scenic base. From art and photography I knew that the golden ratio and the rule of thirds are often applied to give a picture some interest. So I decided to try to apply these principles in three dimensions while composing the little scene on the base.

First, I decided which components should be in the scene. The comonents for the scene are the miniature itself, a tree, and a steep rock. The reason for the tree was that I really wanted to try to build one from scratch. I chose to add the steep rock to support the dynamic pose of the miniature and to give it something it was running downward in a charging motion.

 

The model uses a round base. Thus, when dividing it according to the golden ratio, you end up with a pentagram and the points of interests would be the intersections of the lines. It turned out, that these points were too close to each other in this case. So the rolden ratio was not applicable with good results in this case.

So I divided the surface of the base into thirds horizontally and vertically. The intersection points were the points of interest according to the rule of thirds. I positioned the tree on the rear right point and the miniatures axis over the front left point. This was my layout for this plane.

Then I considered the look of the piece when inspected from the front. I decided to frame the scene by the border of the base and a line defined by the branches of the tree. As you can see in the pictures above, I tried to scale the objects in a way that the miniature was on one line, with the head at an intersection, and the tree on the other line. This was not absolutely precise, however, I think it worked out fine.

Also note that the resulting scene also creates a feeling of dynamic by breaking the straight lines with the diagonal from the upper left to the lower right.

Over all, I am quite pleased with the result of approaching the composition of the piece in such a systematic way.

The tree was scratch built from wire and modeling putty. The foliage is a miniNatur product. The paintjob is just straight forward and nothing spectacular at all. However, I tried to choose the colors in a way, that the miniature itself would stand out by using a complimentary color contrast. Well, the tree is still a little bit overwhelming, and maybe I should have made it a little smaller.

Dominic

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Heresy Miniatures – Blood Bowl Barbarian

This miniature was sitting in my “work-in-progress-cabinet” for a looong time. So while painting the Freebooter goblin, I also finished this one. The skin was done a few years ago, and I did a relatively quick job on the rest of the mini as a little side project.

Dominic

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Freebooter Miniatures Goblin – My first paintjob after a long hiatus

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This goblin is my first from-scratch paintjob after my almost four years of absence from painting.

This one was a blast and had a number of first time tires for me. For example, I experimented a lot with the skin coloring of the face. It breaks away from my older boring schemes. In addition, the weathering of the blades is my first try of weathering NMM in this way. This particular detail did not work out as I would have whished for. However overall I think I made a good number of steps forward in my painting. I am still a bit slow due to the lack of practice recently.

Dominic

 

 

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Visions in Color and Visions in Putty Galleries now on the new site

I completed the migration of the Visions in Color and visions in Putty events to the new site. You can check them out in the Visions section of this site. I am now technically prepared to run new VIC and VIP events and to host them on this site. I will continue to do some preperations for the next VIC showcase and keep you posted.

Next, I will try to find a new format for the Figmentia pages. I even got new symptoms that got submitted just before my old webhost killed the original site, which are nor yet posted on the classic pages. I hope I can make the Figmentia section even more fun than the original.

Take care,
Dominic

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Follow the site development on Twitter

I resumed to work hard on the backend of the site again. I decided to post regular updates on the progress on Twitter. Follow me at: http://twitter.com/MiniOverlord. I guess I’ll be ranting about the site development at first, and add more and more miniatures related things as time goes by and the site gets more operational.

Dominic

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