Saturday, December 31, 2011

Happy new year!

The time has come. Goodbye 2011!



2011 is leaving and a new year begins. Let 2012 be at least as good as 2011!

I am celebrating new year's eve in New York (thus the photo in Times Square), and I will be in the US (San Francisco) for the first two weeks of the year because of work, so again, no miniature related activity will be done these days. Not the best way to begin the year for the blog, I know! But I will return and I'm sure I'll have a lot of stuff to share with you guys.

Enjoy in the meantime! And I wish you all a wonderful 2012.

Friday, December 30, 2011

Do Not Miss: December 2011

This great 2011 ends, and before it does, let's review the best I've seen in the internet on December 2011:

  • Normandy 1944" by Pedro Fernández: Rafa Coll shows us on his blog (as usual) the process photos of this wonderful miniature by Pedro Fernández.

  • Kifaro from Studio McVey: This new miniature is a Rhinotaur by Allan Carrasco, once again a superb sculpture. We expected no less from him!

  • Jabba the Hutt by Romain Van der Bogaert: This new release from Knightmodels is modelled by Romain and Alfonso Gozalo (Alfonso modelled Leia while Romain did everything else in the scene, including Jabba). Romain now shows us photos of the process of sculpting this wonderful kit.

  • V day by Jorge Jaldón: I saw this entry on Rafa Coll's blog. It's a beautiful diorama showing us how there is still a lot to be done in historical miniatures apart from just soldiers and weapons. This scene depicting a victory parade is just beautiful.

  • Realistic spiderwebs by Raffa: Simple but great tutorial on how to create very realistic spiderwebs, on Massive Voodoo, as always.

  • Eleriel and Alaniel by Angel Giraldez: I follow Mr. Giraldez a lot because he has a great production rate of painted figurines for artboxes and brands, but this time I was surprised by this piece, for the company Raging Heroes. It's true that the photos are very bad, but I can guess this is a great piece.

Monday, December 19, 2011

WIP Artscale Imperial Fist part 1

Today I start this WIP series of articles about the painting of this Artscale Imperial Fist created by Simon (Master of the Forge).

It is an Imperial Fist, so I will be painting him in a scheme based in yellow and black. It is a Deathwatch space marine, somehow related to the Inquisition, thus the symbol on the left shoulderpad. This will be the chosen colour scheme:

Yellow is a difficult colour to deal with so I think this is a very interesting process where you can see how I deal with it.

First of all, white priming with Gunze Sangyo flat white with an airbrush. The perfect way to prime in my opinion.


Now, first coat of sunburst yellow, the middle tone, by airbrush. I will be using the tecnique we call "reserving the lights". This means I will give this first base of yellow but not as a uniform coat all over the miniature. Instead, I will paint everything except the areas which will be in light, leaving the white coat which is underneath. This is based on the fact that lighter colours always cover better over other light colours, so I will get a brighter finish if I just paint lights over pure white instead of over a coat of the middle tone (base colour).





And after this, I'll start the shadowing process on the yellow, airbrush again. First, adding a bit of bestial brown to the yellow base.





Second shadows with more bestial brown.





Last shadows with bestial brown adding a little bit of blue, but not too much.





Once I'm satisfied with the overall yellow, I start working on the shield. Even if I am not satisfied entirely with the yellow, I would reccommend passing on to something else, because once the surrounding areas start getting some colour, we will probably see things differently. I want to paint the fist in the shield, in black colours. As it is a big surface, I'll use the airbrush again. So first of all, I'll mask the areas I don't want to paint, with masking tape and also liquid mask for the most difficult parts to mask.


I'll paint the black starting on the lightest colour and then going down progressively to the shadows. Again, this is because I find easier to paint lighter colours over white than over dark colours. So, airbrush in the lightest colour of black, which would be a mid grey to which I'll add a bit of sunburst yellow to ensure coherency with the rest of the miniature.


Adding some black to the mix, next step. This would be our base tone for the black.


Final shadows with pure black. I'll add a bit of blue to certain areas, with the normal brush, so that I add depth to the black.


And now I'll take the masks off.


Leaving the airbrush apart, I'll give black to the parts that will be in that colour. In this step I even give lights and shadows to the blacks in the chest eagle, with the same colour scheme I used in the fist of the shield.




And that's it for today. Stay tuned!

WIP Artscale Imperial Fist part 2

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Painting with... Rémy Tremblay

Now that I'm back from my week vacation in NYC, and following our line of interviews to Slayersword winners of 2011, today I bring you the winner of the french Slayersword, the very well known Rémy Tremblay. Professional painter and sculptor, he currently works for a lot of miniature companies all over the world. He has an extraordinay portfolio and a lot of works done in his career. If you follow Volomir's Blog often (as you should) you fill find that he is practically always mentioned in my monthly section Do Not Miss. Let's talk a bit with him and see what he thinks about the miniature world.

    Volomir: Rémy, when would you say is the moment when you started to paint and sculpt miniatures seriously?

    Rémy: First of all I'm sorry about my poor english, I only hope that English speaking people won't lose their eyes. I began painting minis 9 years ago I think... In fact with the first release of the french magazine "Ravage" , maybe with white dwarf 89. For the sculpting process it began with my big diorama, "le serment du Graal", 2004.


    Volomir: Have you learnt to paint and sculpt all by yourself, have you attended courses, or do you have some sort of personal master?

    Rémy: I'm self taught boy, as we are when making silly plastic toy painting :D. I followed a 4 year course at the Beaux Arts in france in my little city. But nothing about miniatures all those years.


    Volomir: Your works are mainly fantasy themed, but we also see more historical works from you. Which do you prefer, historical or fantasy?

    Rémy: I prefer fresh stuff, fantasy of historical doesn't matter. These days I want to paint crappy board game figures and sculpt fantasy minis for wargaming. Precise painting is too much for me.


    Volomir: Which do you consider is your best work so far?

    Rémy: Latest job :). I don't know, I like to make the minis but when done they don't have any interest apart sharing it ith other people. But to answer your question I would say the Cuchulainn figure.


    Volomir: When did you decide to become a professional artist? Is miniature painting/sculpting your goal or do you want to shift to something else in the future?

    Rémy: A friend of mine recently say to me that I was speaking about that at the age of 12 when I was watching X-files and playing heroquest. After 2 year of wasting my time with biology study I decided to become professional, so I followed the artistic path, mainly to conform to my parents wishes about study :). I don't have any ambitious professional project now. I'm enjoying my job and I will pursue it until I will be bored by minis. I will probably make some toys or big scale sculpture, more artistic stuff, anything that will be fresh at that time.


    Volomir: Your diorama, Slayersword in France 2011, was an outstanding piece, something huge which required a lot of work and time put into it. How long did it take you to create something so big? Did you have all the diorama planned beforehand?

    Rémy: It took me 9 month to achieve this in my spare time. At the very beginning it was just about making a cool Skaven vehicle. I like to let my projects live their own life, being attentive to little detail and emphasis it is my way to go. Everything planned is everything frozen if you don't take care. So freestyle with an initial idea is cool, but risky, you can lose your goal or messing everything with volumes or painting.


    Volomir: People often prepare great works to compete for the Slayersword. They consider all the aspects, such as size of the entry, trend topics, or commercial decisions. Do you think there is a specific formula to enter competition to aim for the Slayersword?

    Rémy: As you may know I was seeking for the slayersword for many years. I think I don't understand anything about the golden demon competition. I followed my path, I finnaly got my chance to win the Sword. The only rules this year were "only GW minis".


    Volomir: Can you tell us something about your upcoming projects? Is there something as big as the diorama coming in the near future?

    Rémy: In the near future I will paint 40 or 50 boardgame minis to play. I don't want to do competition anymore, It's really a painful process to have deadline and motivation all along the way. There are so many ace painters and sculptors, they do very good stuff, I think I don't have anything to bring to mini's world for now. My ideas are for too complex or time consuming to even think to begin one. Maybe a big project will be born, only time will tell.


    Volomir: And finally, last but not least. I’m sure any painter new to the hobby is eager to hear some counsel from one of the best artists currently. Do you have anything to say to help someone who is starting now and would love to win a Slayersword someday?

    Rémy: If you want to win in competition you have to put a limit then outstep it, step by step. You couldn't be good in one week, it takes years of dedication to minis. The best way to have a strong style is to try anything new for you, painting faster for gaming, painting with NMN, TMP, mix of both, vivid color, monochromatic scheme, using pigments, airbush... Fill your toolbox with everything you can learn. Read books about modelling, painting, sculping, art, play video game, draw and dream... Be rude with yourself, we make crap all the time but from crap to crap some people could find those pretty cool :).


    You want to be good, you have to work, it's the only way to go.

    Thank you for reading ;)

Thank you very much Rémy! He left us a lot of interesting comments. Let's see what he is able to create in the future, and I wish him the best on his professional affairs. Meanwhile, you can follow Rémy on his blog:

Rémy Tremblay Art

Until our next meeting!

Friday, December 2, 2011

Back to the City

The next few days I'll be travelling to New York City again, so I'm afraid there will be no miniature activity until I return.


My life is been a bit crazy lately, I am changing jobs and travelling quite a lot. As I said, I'll be in NYC until December 12 and thanks to my new job, I'll also be travelling to NYC and San Francisco from December 31 to January 16. I guess I won't have much time to do some miniature painting work but I'll do my best.

Even so, I won't leave you without good stuff on the blog since I am still doing the 2011 Slayersword interviews, so stay tuned!