We have moved!

Hello all!

I thought I had better let you know that the blog has moved from Blogger onto a shiney new Wordpress platform! So, if you thought there hadn't been much going on, that'll be why...! Sorry!

There's a new tutorial, showing all the stages of how I tackled one of my commissions for Ax Faction

http://jollybodgers.com/tutorials/gilded-saint-tutorial/

and a review of some new paints I have been trying

http://jollybodgers.com/first-thoughts-scale-75-paints/

I hope you like the new blog!

Another bust in progress - Uncle John by Infamy Miniatures

I have been working on a little something alongside all of my recent commissions. A 1/10 Steampunk bust by Infamy Miniatures... This is 'Uncle John' the leader of 'Uncle John's Animal Circus'

"There are few things more terrifying than the opening of London Zoo's gates. The beasts roam free with Uncle John at the head of the procession rounding up a crowd to witness his fabulous animal circus. None of the men, women and children who are captured and dragged screaming into the zoo are ever seen again."

He is a fabulous digital sculpt which is actually just part of a full figure being released by Infamy at some point in 30mm. Quite disturbingly, it has Uncle John performing some kind of surgery on one of his bionic chimps...!

This bust is a beautiful cast too... but enough of me frothing, let me show you some piccies.

 Look at the cute monkey's face... I used a photo of the monkey from Prates of the Caribbean for reference

And one with his other friend, the Macaw

A Step-by step for Ax Faction

These things always start with a bit of a challenge… this particular bit of fun came from Paul over at Ax Faction and a request for a painted version of the Gilded Saint (the first miniature Ax Faction released).

“It’ll be interesting to see how you do the tattoos” said Paul…

“No problem” says I…

Bugger is she a small miniature! What have I got myself in to…?

This is going to be a tricky project, but in an interesting, ‘flying by the seat of my pants’, way. We then got talking about doing some kind of step-by-step/paint-along, so here we are! Ax Faction are going to release the first stage on their Facebook page this weekend..! So if you want to see how I paint the flesh tones on my barbarians, check it out over the weekend. I will be about to answer questions there too. Ax Faction are also doing a raffle where you can win your very own Dragon Hunter to paint along yourself.

But first things first, the model. This is the artwork for the Gilded Saint which I will be using as a template for my paintjob. Interesting tattoos, and a really tiny miniature… *gulp*

The first thing I did was have a practise run, and I just happened to have a barbarian which had stalled and needed stripping (I wasn’t happy with the way I had painted his face) on my workbench (sorry Hasslefree!), so I thought I’d give it a go and tattoo his back with the rather detailed cross on the chest of the Gilded Saint.

This was my first attempt…

Not too bad, but still too large. I am going to have to get my lines finer before getting to that stage on the girlie.

For some more fine-line practise, you may have seen the bust I did. He is a caricatured Russian prison inmate by Forged Monkey, and was a prime canvas for all sorts of fine-line tattoo-work. I was rather happy with the results:

I hope to see you over on Ax Faction's Facebook page over the weekend!

Ax Faction's Druid's Daughter

Another month and another commission for the guys at Ax Faction, the Druid's Daughter. This model is unlike anything I've seen before - a pin-up girl riding a ma-hoo-ssive hare! So I was really happy to get to paint her for them.

Colour choice was a fun one for this girlie - the only area defined by the brief was that the hare should look like a mountain hare in summer. So that meant I could have a good play with colour. I wanted to give her green and black striped trousers, so that gave me a colour reference point, and to contrast with that I went for a red saddle cloth, and her ginger hair pushed me in the direction of blue for an accent colour. Now, in terms of colour theory, this isn't particularly advanced - I picked opposing colours on a traditional colour wheel, but in terms of me painting saturated colours, I always find myself heading towards a muted desaturated pallet. So this was a bit of a challenge...

My photos appear to have taken a step backwards this time... but now that she is with Ax Faction, they are likely to be the best I can get...

She is up on Putty and Paint: http://www.puttyandpaint.com/projects/4771 and should be up on CMoN soon.

He's still got it...

I joined Cool Mini or Not back in the annals of time (2002 to be precise), and back then for me it was a real eye opener into the wider hobby outside of the Games Workshop universe which many of us cut our teeth on. So, I've been a member for a very long time, (not to mention met my better half) and through all that time, the one constant is that the top scores have got progressively more difficult to obtain.

I last had a new miniature in my CMoN top 5 (the number of minis that go to make up your personal rank) back in 2011 (Wolf, my mini which won be Best at Show for Salute), but the others are all 2005-6... a VERY long time ago...!

But today, I noticed a very welcome sight... the Crazy Ivan bust I painted suddenly jumped in the number of votes it received... why? It had made its way onto the top miniatures of the last 7 days! woop woop!

Not only that, but with a score of 9.4 (long may that continue) it inserts itself onto my personal top 5!

So that brings me up to

I've still got it!