It has been far too long since I had a collection of Dark Sword miniatures to paint. I remember how much I enjoyed the crisp details and fine castings.
While I was at GenCon this year, I was able to secure a large amount of amazing miniatures to work with. Since Dark Sword has always tied in their miniatures in a story based way to paintings by Larry Elmore and others, they lend themselves to very dramatic renderings.
Here's a few examples.
I was happy to get my hands on a few of the Game of Thrones series. The Knight figure will be part of my Bretonnian army.
There was shelf after shelf of amazing figures, all of which cried out for painting!
Each one has very nice action to the poses. It will be a lot of fun just coming up with bases for them.
The faces also have a lot of detail. Each one has it's own personality.
In some ways, it will be very nostalgic to get back into these...
I had a number of discussions about "painterly" miniatures with some fellow artists over the weekend. This refers to the look and feel of the miniatures... instead of a mechanical feel as you see in lots of stuff these days, there is a flow to these, and their composition, which I can see lending itself to the kind of directional strokes that I employ with my bigger brushes.
Some of you are familiar with my attitude towards painting for contests.
That is, I don't do it! :-) There are a variety of reasons for that. Normally, any figures that I paint for myself are part of my armies. This is what I prefer. I would rather dump figures from my armies into any random painting contest that comes along.
However, the rules of so many contest these days are like GenCon regarding figures that have either won previous awards or being published.
This year, when I went through all of my army boxes, I was hard pressed to find anything that was legal. Technically everything in those boxes has won an award, since I have gotten multiple Best Painted armies with them.
It made me very bummed to take one miniature and one unit after another and set it aside.
Out of frustration, I just gave up. I made up my mind that I would attempt to generate a set of figures that would not be used for my armies, nor be miniatures used on a company website (like all the Dark Sword and CoolMini figures I have done over the years).
The new resin dragon kit from Dark Sword is one such item. I intend for it to be my Large Fantasy Monster or Diorama entry for Crystal Brush next year.
The plan is to reprise this piece which I painted years ago. It is the old metal Dragon from Dark Sword. It will be quite the challenge to make it all work out, but I think it will be a lot of fun!
Here's a link to the original:
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