'Editors Choice' on Putty and Paint!

Now, I'm not one to blow my own trumpet, but the Orc bust is doing me proud - he has been picked by the bosses on Putty and Paint to be one of their 'Editors Choice' minis and shown on their homepage! (woohoo!) The extra visibility seems to be helping the number of votes he's had too, as in just 4 days, he already has more votes than any of my other entries on the site. You can take a look and see how he is doing here: http://www.puttyandpaint.com/projects/1666

He is also doing quite well over on Cool Mini or Not - the best I've done for quite some time, and is currently in my top 5 of all time. Hopefully he will stay there as I am really very pleased with the way he has turned out. Any of you crazy voting types can do that here: http://www.coolminiornot.com/329241 (6 more votes until the magic 50!)

For those of you who want to see the pics here, rather than on P&P or CMoN, here they are:

Enjoy!

Orc bust back on the workbench

In my usual hap-hazard way of working on what really grabs me, I spent a good bit of Thursday working on 'Einstein' the Figone Orc bust from back in February, and have actually got some half-decent photos of him! And what a photogenic lad he is too...!

Slowly but surely

After a brief aside whilst I painted a commission piece (images to come once I have permission to post details), I am back on the huge samurai! *gulp!*

His head is complete bar the pattern on the white fold-backs, and both arms are almost there too. My mission for this week is to get to a point where his arms, legs and head* are attached and all that is left are the details such as the separate silk knots and lanyards, his swords and his quiver. As soon as I get to that point I will make sure to post pics!

*The head depends on how easy it will be to add the armour plates to his upper arms after it is glued in place

Here is a very poor, but closer shot of the chest piece with the very beginnings of the freehand design which will eventually cover all of the white armour plates.

Enjoy!

And now for something completely different...

A 120mm Twelfth Century Samurai by Pegaso...!

I have had this model on my pile of unpainted toy soldiers for a very long time. I am pretty sure I bought him way back in 2002/3 so 10 years ago... A model this large can be quite a daunting task and I have already started painting him once and given up. But now he is firmly on my mind, I am painting him as a present for my dad.

When I first started painting him I was pretty much copying the cover photo, and failing miserable. He is wearing bright pink/orange and I really struggled with the colour. Once I stripped him I decided to try a different approach. Toosh has painted a few large scale Samurai many moons ago and has an Osprey book (or 2) detailing the arms and armour of Samurai from the 10th to the 16th Century. This model fits into that date range nicely and I flicked through the book in eager anticipation. Lo and behold, I found a pic which had obviously been used by the cover artist for Pegaso - orange and purple, fitting the exact time frame of the kit. But I had already decided to avoid that colour scheme so I started looking at other Samurai on the page.

There were some nice dark green colour schemes, but the artwork which really stood out for me was on the opposing page - an interesting mustard and duck-egg with orange silk braidwork and a really bold black and white silk cover to the do-maru (breastplate). The period is a little out, but I think I will get away with it as there are a LOT of similarities between the two.

I have spent most of my time so far studying the patterns and painting the head of the model. Getting this right is very important to me. Here are a couple of photos with his head shot against the reference page showing how I want the whole piece to look.

Talk about a challenge - lots of big firsts here... first historical piece, first large scale full figure, first samurai... Wish me luck!

On the workbench - Figone Orc Bust

Whats next on the table?

An orc bust by French company Figone - he has been thoroughly enjoyable to paint so far, and I have some ideas for the rest of him to try and get some different textures on there. Thick, worn leather apron and a white pin striped shirt.

Not very Orc-like? It'll fit a lot more when I have attached his brass and steel goggles. I wanted to take the sci-fi orc and make him a little more steampunky. I have attached these two pics... the first one is much sharper (from my actual camera) but the second one is definitely a better colour match - its all a lot richer.