Sculpey time!  For the last several days, as I have been working on the miniature aspect of the videos, the basing part of it has proceeded as well.

There was a big day of baking sculpey, among other things.  Your hands get quite a workout converting 3 pounds of raw sculpey into various shapes for baking!

I needed thick pieces the most, but those take a little longer to make, since you can't just put them through the extruder.  You have to be much more careful about how you are rolling it out, since you can make it uneven very easily.

You can mitigate that by putting a few "spacers" for your roller, but that also limits the size of the piece you are making.

Time for the toaster oven to kick into action.  It was a bit warm that day, so I was glad to have a way to bake the clay without heating up the kitchen even more :-)

After a day of curing, the clay is put to use.  Lots of bases, for all sorts of videos.

Sci-fi bases, fantasy, marble, cobblestone, concrete and more!

Many more have been created since...

Someone just made a bloody mess...

Time for some more blood 'n gore!

This figure is the fantasy version of Gluttony from Raging Heroes.  Combining that with the new corpses from Secret Weapon was the final touch!

I noticed that when I mixed my 'regular' paints with the Secret Weapon washes, I got some nice colors.  Normally, mixing them with GW washes makes them much more dull.  In this case, I was mixing very light colors with the washes.

I mixed in the paints with washes like the Algae, Armor wash, and the Blue.

I also mixed them in with the Dried blood wash.  So, something new to put in the memory banks!!

And now for the figure:

This was very fun to paint!  I was very eager to see the figure and the base together...

There you have it!  A real Bloody Mess.  All set for the video.

Be sure to check out the Raging Heroes kickstarter!

Bloodbaths made easy... Secret Weapon bag 'o corpses

Here's a brand new product from Secret Weapon that came out just in the nick of time!

We unveil the Sack 'o corpses, which is chock full gory (but very handy!) pieces and parts.

They are just right for converting miniatures, or in my case, adding to bases!

Here you see some of them added to a Raging Heroes Gluttony figure, which I am using for the "Bloody Mess" painting video.

Oh yeah, and they are not to shabby for your Zombiecide hordes, either!!!

Here is the base for the Bloody Mess video.  Yes, it is quite a mess!

Severed heads are fun, but having a full range of chopped up and ripped up parts was fantastic.

Many thanks to Justin and the good folks at Secret Weapon for producing such a great product!  I will be posting images of a few miniatures decorated with the Sack 'o corpses bits tomorrow!

A quick edit here to acknowledge that the blog has surpassed 900,000 page views!!!  Many thanks to everyone who has taken the time to visit this Mansion of Mini painting Madness :-)

You might even say it glows...

Today we have the figures for the using fluorescent paints video.  I chose a few of the Reaper elementals, as they seemed to scream out for glowy paints!

This is will one of the rare "dual miniature" videos, since I wanted to show more of the range of fluorescent paints than just the oranges or just the blue/green.

I know that the ghost does not seem to glow quite as much next to the inferno, but it really does!

The ghost is actually part of the Bones line.

Ride 'em cowboy...

Time for the other horse!  Of course.

As I was looking through the giant horse reference book, I noticed that there is a very distinct mottling pattern that carried through from one breed to the next.  It was all quite similar, no matter how different the colors happened to be.

In some ways, it reminded me of the patterns I was painting on my Dark Eldar figures.  Almost reminiscent of scales, if you can believe it :-)

So, that completes the horses!  Moving on to those Reaper Elementals...

Just Horsin' around...

Ok!  Time to saddle up and get to those horsies!  Here we have the Appaloosa breed, one of the two featured in the videos.

Years ago, we discovered a giant 600+ page book covering every breed of horses imaginable.  It has been incredibly helpful!  I will be including all the information on that book in the video, in case any of you want to track that down.

I learned that there are 5 distinct varieties of Appaloosa.  This is one...

One of the reasons I chose this as a video topic is because of such variety, and the chance to do faces such as this.  I was not aware that showing the whites of the eyes was this rare among horses.

Now to the mini.  In this version, I did not use as many warm browns.  I will probably try to sneak more of that in next time :-)

I remember trying to paint something like this many years ago, and it took forever!  Not so this time around.

By the way, this is one of the Reaper Bone minis.  Granted, I had to do a lot of resculpting to change it from a unicorn to a regular horse!  Still, it was very fun, and nice to work with.

I was very glad that I chose to find or convert some kind of horse figure that had to bridle, saddle, etc., to get in the way of the fur!

The Amazon completed!

Here we go folks!

The Amazon leader from War Gods is now finished.  As I mentioned in the last post, this was a blast to paint.

Be sure to check out the War Gods of Olympus kickstarter so see many more incredible minis!

I had lots of fun painting the SE-NMM effects.  That is not always the case, especially on figures that do not have the precision is sculpting and casting.

I had some fun with the base as well.  If you check out the concept art in the PDF of the Amazons, I wanted to work that design in.