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!