The best for last, in my opinion at least. I love the contrast of sculpts between the slim and chunky, but then the no-nonsense "I've got my helmet, and ready to go" versus "I can't travel without my snidey pet". The face on Helena was great fun to paint, really characterful.
The space version of Cut My Own Throat Dibbler, and his delicious tentacle-based treats. Good fun to paint a face in partial shadow. But underneath the Devo-esque glasses are painted, I promise.
For the Port Admin I nearly went for a lizard green, but thought it would be more fun to paint it human and expose the "ugly" nature of the character.
Trader Dronk's sculpt is a curious one. I looked at the official version and didn't like how the eyes had been painted on - so painted him with his eyes closed in a "I'm so pleased with this" expression, and like the result.
I may as well call the courier "Handsome" Jak, as when I saw the sculpt it demanded a metallic paintjob like the Borderlands character. One of the most fun sculpts I've painted in a while. Some WIP shots at the end, to highlight how small these models are and a close-up of the face - it's not pretty zoomed in, but gives an idea of the sculpt quality.
Whenever I paint skin, it tends to be caucasian tones. On this project I wanted to add a bit more variety, and that didn't just mean non-caucasian but also adding robots because we're in the future and there'll be robots right?
I wanted Ludo to feel lost and small. Putting them on a base alone didn't do that, so I dug out another piece of random scenery and stuck them behind it and added some anti-robot graffiti.
The socialites are painted in pastels, then I used the greys to create different effects - a more shiny metallic on him, and a softer fabric on her.
Let's start with the little guy, Karlston. He's very, very tiny. That's a 25mm base and he's dwarfed by it.
I thought it would be fun to throw a camo jacket on him, but make it look like he's lost and has been crying - looking around for his designated adult. There's track marks left in the dusty surface from him dragging the robot, so it's clearly heavier than it looks.
Meanwhile, at the fancier end of society someone has been able to afford a robot nanny to push their delightfully creepy baby around. I started painting her in metallics but realise that was a bit boring and gave her a swinging sixties shiny dress front to go with the fantastic hairdo. Perfectly normal, right?
As part of the Kickstarter, they threw in a number of smaller miniatures under the heading of "Familiars". But I liked the idea of them being more akin to scavengers in my little colony. While Ambulatory Fungoid and Horned Urz Cub are big enough to merit a base on their own, the others didn't and I wanted to create a little diorama for them.
So here's the Owl Shrews, Squippet, Homungulid, Testudo Bird and Feathered Hopper in a single scene. Should have taken more WIP shots, but there are a couple at the bottom of this post. It's an old resin barrel, a backpack of papers then I printed a load of fake posters, rolled them up and bundled them in a disorganised fashion.
Some of the WIP shots and a sense of scale for the bear against a Primaris Space Marine.
A single project through November - I finished off the Colony 87 third wave models from a Kickstarter project by Crooked Dice. Felt it was appropriate as I've just backed the fourth wave and wanted these out the backlog before the new ones arrive in January.
To complicate matters, I tried to paint everything using a Zorn palette - essentially black, white, red and yellow ochre. That's it. Nothing else. Mix your tones from there. YOu can see how a proper artist does it here (https://www.anderszorn.org/biography.html). My interpretation is just creating the tones and using those as colours for things, then a highlight and a shadow, nothing more complex.
I will post more close-up shots over the next week or two but here's the group shot.
