Never toss a dwarf: Getting started with Stone Haven dwarves

Here is something that came in the other day.  For those of you familiar with the very successful kickstarter program of Stone Haven Miniatures, you have already seen a lot of this neat artwork!

I was lucky to be approached to paint a set of these for their display.  I just got the figures the other day.

I was impressed by the quality of the casts.  The mould lines were very much under control, and as you can see from the images, there was an attempt made to keep as many of the figures as possible to one piece casts.  After dealing with so many crazy anomalies with various resin figures, it was nice to get back to some solid pewter!!

I think it is the unique nature of this set that made it such a huge hit.  Yes, many of the usual dwarf archetypes are featured, but I enjoyed the ones that you just never see!

The female characters are very interesting, and I liked the sculpts.  It is not easy to make a female dwarf, for obvious reasons.  They did a nice job here.  I think they will be lots of fun to paint, and you will see all that play out here on the blog!

I don't have the kickstarter site up right now, but I believe they had some interesting extras, such as T-shirts and dice.  Great care was taken in producing the minis and the cards, so this project was very worthy of it's wide appeal!

I am going to be creating unique, character themed bases for each figure, but for those of you who will see these in your mailbox, don't feel like you need to do that.  :-)

OK!  Now I need to go and shoot pictures of the finished Raging Heroes Vestal!!

Stay tuned...

Hot stuff: A lava test for Raging Heroes

Hey, it is finally time to put some paint on the Raging Heroes Vestals!  I love these minis.  That is why we have chosen them for several of our 'How to' painting DVD's.  They will be used for most of our fleshtone demos, but in this case, I thought I would try out a new technique for painting lava.

I wanted a nice cool color for the rocks, but not too blueish, so my lighter greys were mixed in with a Vallejo highlight green from Panzer Aces.

More lights on the rock part of the base...

Once those lights were finished, it was time to get down to the lava!  I used a dark reddish brown close to the rocks and on the bottom edge of the base.  I am trying to set up the very bright Flourescent paints from Vallejo here...

The Fluo yellow was mixed in with a yellow white to start , and then was gradually covered with the fluo orange.  These paints are very transparent, so you can paint transparently without even thinning the paints!

You can already see how luminous this is getting!

I continue to paint more of the orange over my lighter color.  I even mix in a bit or red with it.

Now it is time to go back over my lightest colors before I put on the darks.  I mixed some bright yellow with the Fluo yellow and picked out my lightest areas.

Once that was complete, I took the reddish brown and began making dark spots in the lava flow

Eventually that color was mixed with black to create the darkest areas.  You can see that during these last few steps, I had also been picking out the areas on the figure where I wanted to reflect the lava.

Stay tuned for the flesh tone part of this piece!  Both the lava demo and fleshtones will be very important DVD titles when we do the Kickstarter!

A ride fit for a King

OK, lots of stuff going on, so I have the rest of the saved images of the Warsphinx!

This one gives a nice view of the skull from the lower level of the tomb complex display board.

This one really shows the King!

Wider view of the King and his buddies. Plus, these side views show the color transitions of the various areas on the sphinx much better.

Left side.  More greens, with a few gold-ish accents (remember, the tainting of the Pharaoh and his legions caused the golds to turn to quicksilver!).

These next few pictures show a design that you see on the Colossus, Heirotitan, and the Tomb itself.

Another side view that shows the emphasis on lavenders and blues...

Stay tuned for something interesting tomorrow... another painting DVD test!