Hey there ladies and gentlemen, dear painters!

i want to show you an other comission work. It is a strongly converted Chaos Lord.

I hope you like him!

Hey there ladies and gentlemen, dear painters!

Today i want to show you a comission work. This time it is a Tzeentch Chaos Lord from Warhammer Fantasy. Strong comic style was requested for this charakter model. It is for the gaming table.

I hope you like him :)

Hey there ladies and gentlemen, dear painters!

Today i want to present you my latest commission work. I painted these two Dark Elve Ladies for a friends gaming army. A comic-look with NMM and the color scheme was requested. While the sorceress was fun to paint, the Blade-Lady (sorry, forgot her name) was definitely not. This is due to the models appearance. She has (contrary to the awesome sorceress model) no nice designed face which i found a bit pity. But in the end i think it is a cool character model for the army. :) Regards, Solmar

Hey there ladies and gentlemen, dear painters!

Today i want to show you my little part of an awesome community project called 20 painters, 20 styles, one family. you can find the complete description HERE. In short: 20 painters give some color to a little goblin. Together they will stand on a display base and will be presented to the world on different contests (out of competition of course) and events such as workshops and so on. I had a short but great time painting this model. I did not convert him and painted him in a classic GW scheme but tried to give him a dark and menacing look.

I hope you like him and maybe you´ll see other goblins in the next weeks from other great painters! Regards, Solmar

Hey there ladies and gentlemen, dear Painters!

It has been a long time since i posted here and today i wanted to tell you why it was so quiet around here, in the forums and on sites like CMON or P&P.

First i have to say that i have LOADS of work... well at work ;) So on so many days in the past weeks i was very exhausted and had no motivation to paint or work on my projects.

Second thing is that i am really enjoying the latest patch of Mists of Pandaria together with my wife and a close friend. :) So got some distraction there also.

But now i will going on painting-wise, so what is coming next?

- A goblin painted for THIS awesome community project. Post will be coming soon!

- 4 Comission works for a good friend (2 Dark Elve Ladies, 1 Fantasy Chaos Tzeentch Lord and 1 Night Haunter) The Ladies are finished and also, post coming soon. Tzeentch Lord is on WIP

- After that i will reveal a really BIG project i am working on for the next months. And with big, i mean big!

So keep updated the next days!

Cheers, Solmar

Hey there ladies and gentlemen, dear painters!

Today i want to show you my version of the famous Painting Buddha Diorama. You geht the miniatures and the base over here.

The original story by the makers is a scene where two assassins are standing on a rooftop and identify their target. As this story is great, i wanted to change it drastically in look and context.

So in my version the world was taken over by nature in post-apocalyptic world. In this world it is the "Seekers" who strive through the old, gigantic town-ruins and search for technological artifacts. They are always two: one with insane pathfinder skills and the other a master of marksmanship to protect themselves against the dangerous environments they explore.

Notes on Brad: In my version, Brad is a bit arrogant due to his looks and skills with the weapon. He likes to search for old aristocratic-looking clothes beside their actual mission. His biggest pride is the jacket he found in a small cupboard, deep in the ruins, along with his ceremony staff.

Note on Janet: Janet is the mysterious part of our team. Much more pragmatic as her comrade, she is wearing clothes over her leather suit just to no longer being forced to break the men´s fingers for every offensive comment about her body.


I hope you like this piece. It was a lot of fun to paint!

If you like to vote:

Putty & Paint and CMON

Hey there ladies and gentlemen, dear painters!

Today i will again talk a bit about "them feelings", as i experienced my first "i give up" moment on a miniature. So what was going on?

I painted the priest from Raffaele Piccas range "Forged Monkey". The miniature itself ist really nice, sculpted very well and the cast was near perfect. So we see a good foundation for painting a good mini here, do we? My plan was to convert that little guy into a jedi knight, yeah! I wanted to settle up a story very close after a fight where the jedi just destroyed a droid, it crashed into the ground near him and there are 2 parts of the droid cut off by his light saber.

Painting wise i wanted to achieve high contrast through cold-warm colors (blue OSL by the light saber and brown colors on droid and robe). But the quality-goal was not to bee top notch as this was going to be a relaxing piece after GD competition.

So let´s first look at the pictures and then we will examine why this is bad and what happened.

So now we talk about what i don´t like on him:

The OSL effect is pretty much a mess, it is chalky, it is not smooth it just does not look right. On the ground, i like it. On the robe.. well no! But the main point i dont like here is the face. Holy cow i had a huge struggle with the face, i made it 3 times and it still sucks!

Don´t get me wrong i KNOW how to fix these things! Soft blendings out, making things smoother, building up highlights in the face. But i just could not do it.

So let´s look at possible reasons:

- The mini and me were not good friends!
So what does this mean? For me it starts with the "purchase-reason". At all of my minis i have the feeling that i have to get my fingers on it BADLY! Like i really want to have it. With this mini it was different. I was at a workshop, the mini was there, the price was low. Easy buy. But no mini i would have purchased in normal circumstances (not downrating the mini here, it is still great!). So we might have a first motivational flaw here. Then a problem occured most of you might know. The mini looks great but you have less joy while painting because because you don´t get familiar with the sculpt. You can not do anything against it.

- The quality goal was not top-notch.
I realized this on tabletop projects. If i want to do a mini "quick ´n dirty", it just looks like shit. It is not easy for me to pace my work up and maintain quality. And that is what you see here. The mini is probably 8 hours of painting and it looks crap. The lesson i learn from this: in future i stick to my way of putting everything i can into my actual project (wich also is the reason for improvement on every new mini).

- I have "more exciting" projects on the horizon i really want to start with. Maybe this was also a demotivating factor.

So finally i said to myself: Okay, stop here. Head on to the next project and give this miniature the status of being the first one i gave up upon. This jedi now stands in my cabinet, telling me that i am still a young padawan and have much to lear about painting and about myself. :)

Cheers to you guys!

Hey there ladies and gentlemen, dear painters!
Today i want to show you my finished Imperial Fist Standard Bearer.

I entered him slightly unfinished in the German GD 2013 and he got me a finalist Medal. After GD i finished it completely and worked out some minor mistakes.

Now i am absolutely satisfied with him. I hope you like it!

Here you can vote, if you like:

Link Putty&Paint

Link CMON

And here the Pics:

Hey there ladies and gentlemen, dear painters!

Today i want to tell you a bit about my experience of the GD 2013 in Cologne, Germany. It was my first GD ever and i will reflect the feelings i had after the event. I will not cover up the Event itself with pictures etc. because you will get a really detailed article here:

Masterminis.net

and also probably a report here:

Massive Voodoo

So let´s see how the GD turned out for me. The title says "after "losing"". I put "losing" in quotation marks with a good reason!

So at the event, i entered five entries. Nurgle Dreadnought in 40k Vehicle, Black Knights in Fantasy Unit, Demonette in open, Theoden in Lord of the Rings and finally my Imperial Fist Standard Bearer (pics will follow this week) in 40k Single.

All five got a finalist medal (wow those are stylish!). But none of them placed on the trophies. In that moment i was quite happy with my result, 5 Medals in this hard competition ist HUGE! Everything was fine with my fellings. Till the 3,5 hours ride by train back home. That was the time, the bad feelings kicked in.

After an event like this you always have a devil and an angel on each of your shoulders, constantly whispering and tearing your mood into all possible directions.

This is what the devil said while driving home:

- "Losing" sucks badly!! (Quotation marks again, yu see?)
- What more must i do to place on the demons?
- Are these competitions a thing i really want to do?
- Why am i stressing me with competitions?

This is what the angel said:

- I got stunning reactions on my works while the competition and the evening before. Also from absolutely reknown painters!
- I like the challenge in competitions.
- I am a rather new painter, painting for 3 years now. Time will come, where will I be in 3 more years of improving?
- I get motivation to more dedicate to projects and will get rid of "rushing" mistakes.
- 5 FINALISTS! YEAH!

I like them :)

 So finally my mood is getting up again and i really pull much much motivation out of this "loss". I met awesome people from all over the world, i got insane feedback, and i had a lot of fun! In future i will dedicate more, diving deeper into my project´s themes, concentrate more to not rush, and simply continuing to do that things i think i can never do.

So this is it with all those quotation marks. I did not lose! I won in so much aspects. I learned many things about myself, i met great people and i gained much motivation to proceed and work harder. And attack with nice projects next year (if there still is a GD).


So lets all have more love, more fun and more happy painting!

Hey there ladies and gentlemen, dear painters.

Finally i want to show you a quick pic of my Standard bearer´s Banner front side.

It is nearly finished, just need to do some minor color tweaks. The motive symbolizes the gate of the emperor´s throne room.

A socket-label telling "Builders of gate and throne" will say what the 2 banner sides are meaning. I like the result. What do you think?

Hey there ladies and gentlemen, dear painters!

Second post today (out of 3). Here i want to tell you about the Painting Buddha DVD Set in the supporter version.

So let´s hop right in!

First you have this huge, nicely designed and high quality box!

When you pull of the heavy-paper-super-glossy-sexy sleeve, you get this awesome magnetized content box:


So what is in there? At first, a thank you Card and two booklets about "Who we are and how to be a better painter" and secondly about "preparing our resin miniatures". Definetly very useful for starters.!


Then of course the 6-DVD set. No need to say how awesome this is. (Review of the DVDs and Miniatures when i have wathed it!)


Nice buttons. I love buttons!


The Steelbox containing the minis.


And of course the minis and base themselves. Really great cast and quality! Expect a more detailed review in future!



Now get your chance and order your supporter´s box here: http://www.paintingbuddha.com/ and be sure to join the revolution here: http://masterminis.blogspot.de/

Hey there ladies and gentlemen, dear painters!

Today i want to talk about my impressions of the beginner´s painting class by Roman "Jarhead" Lappat. But i will not tell you the whole time-table stuff and what we did in detail. I will tell you about what you learn and what this workshop does with yourself.

An other review with timing and many pictures can be found here:

Review by Baphomet (Peter)

So at first, let me tell this was a beginner´s painting class and some of you might know i am not a beginner. :) Roman jokingly said he does not believe that he can teach me new things. Holy cow, how he could!

1. What i learned for my painting:

First i learned a more comfortable way of painting bases and bring them to life and link them to the miniatures to tell a story. I will definetly integrate the new workflow to my everyday base painting stuff.

And second i learned much about pushing details and contrasts further and getting a feeling of "when is the mini finished"? There is always room of improvement on little details. :)

2. What beginners learn:

In this workshop a beginner learns the most important aspect of the hobby: fun! Painting is fun and colors are your friends, you don´t have to be afraid to do something wrong. Grab a mini, grab some paint and off you go!

For all who are still asking themselves if they should participate in a beginner´s class: DO IT!

3. What everybody learns:

In the beginning of my painting "career" i concentrated much about color receipts when i was painting stuff. For example, when i wanted to paint wood, i watched at minis with good painted wood. But instead you should look into nature, open your eyes. What does wood looks like in reality? And then you can try to bring this look to your mini yourself.

Nature is your greatest teacher. Everything is out there, all these inspirations. Just open your eyes and you will see awesome stuff!


Let me tell you how much i enjoyed this weekend with all the mini painting, discussing, learning, eating and of cours coming together. If you are not painting.. definately give it a try and show it to jour friends, maybe let them join the hobby too!

Regards, Solmar

Hey there ladies and gentlemen, dear painters!

Today i want to show you my Demonette of Slaanesh i painted at Jarhead´s Beginners Painting Class. (Review will follow!) As i am not a beginner anymore, i could play around with it. I really like the result and want to thank Roman and Peter (Baphomet) for their tips about increasing my miniatures quality.

 Here you can vote:

Putty&Paint and CMON

I hope you like it!

Hey there ladies and gentlemen, dear painters!

Today i want to show you my 95% finished backside of the bannner! I like how it turned out, it shall symbolize the backside of the Emperor´s Throne. Built with the help of the Imperial Fists and Rogal Dorn.

I hope you like it. It looks amazing on the miniature, i can tell. :) You´ll see, when it is finished.

Hey there ladies and gentlemen, dear painters!

Today i want to bring you an interview with 2 guys you all may know, Roman "Jarhead" Lappat and Raffaele "Picster" Picca. I don´t think i have to introduce them as they are the kind of VIPs of the Miniature World.

So let´s hop right into the interview with a mixture of serious and... well funny questions.

First introduce yourself. You only have ten words each for this task. Apart from that, no rules here.

Roman:
Roman, thirty years old, happy painter, wild, calm, epic, boring.

Raffa:
Raffa, painter, impulsive, loose, concentrated, distracted, planning, perfectionist, dreaming, music.

Tell us what is driving you in this hobby. Maybe explain your "happy painting" spirit.

Roman:
I started with gaming like most of us did. It took me three years to switch from painting mainly gaming figures to display pieces. My hobby is my job now. I recognized many things while painting that made me feel bad, for example thinking too much about prizes, ratings and oppinions of others.
I learned in my life to throw away those things that harm my healthy soul. I just don't care  anymore and just enjoy painting. That is what happy painting is about to me.

Raffa:
My drive is to develop myself. Exploring new things is what keeps me going on and standing on the same spot and using the same skill-set can bore me very fast. I strife to be a swiss army knife of creative skills... and miniature painting offers a lot of them.

Raffas "Visions of Hatred"

We often heard about "Kong Fu". What is ist and where can we buy it? ;)

Roman:
Kong Fu are the thoughts of my soul. You can not buy it, just speak your own.

Raffa:
I guess everyone has his own "Kong Fu". In fact I only know one person calling it like that, it's what keeps us going, what makes us mad, fills us with joy and pain. Success in a very personal way. For one "Kong Fu" is having fun, for another it is having a good time with friends and for some it is to have success on competitions. Just my very personal opinion of it.

Romans "Mephisto"

After an fantastic Artbok, ever thought about making a DVD?

Roman:
Yes.

Raffa:
I don't want to tell to much... long story short: yes. But definately not a typical one


Try to convince a non painter to start the hobby in ONE sentence!

Roman:
If you need some rest from daily life madness, take a brush and run away into the lands of fairy tales and monster hunts.

Raffa:
Phew... that's a hard one as I think everyone should decide for him/her self if painting figures is the right hobby. I know miniature painting can be very frustrating sometimes, especially if you are not very patient. I give it a shot "If you are looking for a hobby to express your most personal thoughts and dreams in a three dimensional, touchable and interesting medium, go for miniature painting!"


We all know, Roman is the Batman of the miniature world. But what hero/villain would Raffa impoersonate?

Roman:
Batman's twin.

Raffa:
Ha, good one In fact we often joke about it. Roman says I'm Robin, but come on, who wants to be a sidekick? In my opinion? Iron Man! They are very similar, both have no super powers but are still awesome. But while Batman hides in his Batcave hanging out with Alfred wearing a gimp mask, Tony Stark is having a great time partying all the time and getting all the hot girls.


Is there a "thing" you absolutely HATE to paint on a miniature (im my case it is fur)?

Roman:
Always depends on the sculpting work, if fur is sculpted well you can find a lot of joy in painting it. No there is none, always depends on my mood and the figure I am painting.

Raffa:
It depends, sometimes it's all the little, unnecessary details that some miniatures are covered with. But one thing I "hate" to paint are shoes.


Roman, name your 3 favourite works made by Raffa. If there is time, tell us why.

Untold Honour, because of the lovely detail everywhere.
Medusa bust, because of this crazy colour concept.
Touch of death, because ... just because.

Untold Honor

Medusa

Touch of Death

Raffa, name your 3 favourite works made by Roman. If there is... aahh dude, just tell us why!

I have more than 3 favourites... but I just pick 3 random ones:
For sure the Rhino King. I just love the ambience of the piece, the tattoo designs and the funny little fella handing him the fruit. Another one would be Cmd. Shepard. The light situation and style of painting is really good, the colors are well chosen and the battle damage is perfect. And the last one I am allowed to pick is the Hombre Toro... too. much. power. Really great color variations in the skin and great expression.

Rhino King

Commander Shepard

Hombre Toro

And last but not least: What is it with the Apes?

Roman:
Apes? What Apes? Just kidding, the apes in the jungle are real life friends and most of the time act like a bunch of wild apes.

Raffa:
UH UH AHHHHH!!!!! Hard to explain... it just happened!



Thank you very much for answering these questions. To you me dear painters: I hope you liked the interview and guess what? These two guys are for hire, so if you want to have your mini painted to a masterpeace, don´t hesitate to contact them. And watch out their ebay auctions too! :)

You find all this and more on Massive Voodoo!

Hey there ladies and gentlemen, dear painters!


Today i want to show you some WIP progress of my Standard Bearer. obviously here you see him without his standard and base. They will be painted seperately. The marine himself is near to finish, maybe some minor tweaks here or there. I enjoyed painting the freehands on cloak, knee, sword and shoulder pad. I´m getting into it. :) Also i painted him a blind eye due to his scar on the face.

I hope you like him so far.

Hey there ladies and gentlemen, dear painters!

Today i want to talk to you about a very interesting and fundamental topic in our beloved hobby: receiving feedback and dealing with it.

So i will explain this on an example of myself, regarding on my duel scenery. After posting the base on a forum i was asked to take a picture with the miniatures on it. So i made this quick one:

This was my setting for the duel and this was the feedback i got:

- the base is too big for the 2 small miniatures
- the base is too chaotic and the eye can´t rest on a specific region
- the scenery is actually no ambush (as this was my idea)
- composition and choice of miniatures was... well, poor

So this sounds really hard in the first moment and for a short time i was like: "wow, am i so wrong"?

But then i could overcome my feelings (with some help) and turn the first "da fuq" thought into constructive problem solving so this is what i made of this:

- i CLOSED this project for now, yes sometimes you are stuck and have to clear things out
- the base will maybe used for a much bigger Miniature, time will show
- i really like the standard bearer and i will do a single mini out of him (upcoming right now)
- i abandoned the chaos champ for now
- and i heavily thought about the term "ambush", its meanings and characteristics in order to get a really awesome project startet in the future!

 So what do we learn from this? Yes, some feedback can be very harsh in the first moment, but often it leads you to even more awesome stuff! And there are different sorts of feedback. It is always great if your stuff is liked by people, this is the fun part, the rewarding part. And the the is the (in my opinion more important part) constructive feedback where you need to overthink and do some things again, maybe even from scratch. THIS sort of feedback will make you a better painter AND you will learn a lot about yourself.

Roman aka Jarhead is calling this "Kong Fu". Now, i know why!

Regards, Solmar.

Hey there ladies and gentlemen, dear painters!

I started a really big project, this time a duel. I have finished building the base and the miniatures and test fitted everything. I won´t show you the test fitting, as this would take the whole surprise, don´t it? ;)

This will be the scenery: We have a brave Space Marine Hero-Standard-Bearer, standing on the edge of an destroyed war-environment, raising his chain-sword and giving his comrades (not seen in the scenery) hope to win this batte. BUT he does not see the wild Chaos Champion behind him, charging with his big axe and ready for the jump, possibly meaning a bloody ending to our hero`s speech!

This piece will be titled "Ambush"

So i build the base and primed it. Here you can see it primed:

I build this scenery over a core made of milliput, cork and aluminium foil. The debris are some parts of an GW building, scale model bricks, slate stone and other stone parts mixed and crushed with a hammer. I then used some sanding and struckture paste to do some oxidation and dust.

The next stage was to airbrush the overall scenery just to give myself an idea of lights and shadows. Very basic work:


I used greys, browns an sandy colors.

Next there was a lot of drybrushing, reshading with washes, some first details received colors. As this is a very dusty anvironment i only used really desaturated colors by mixing nearly every color with grey tones.

Here is a first color scetch:


And now we have it this stage, some more details, a source lighting of a chaos relic, a decapitated helmet of an other chaos marine, traces of war, little more saturation and contrast on some parts:


Sorry for the bad photos, they are taken with my iPhone. In future i will document my steps with my camera. So stay tuned for further updates. ;)

Regards, Solmar

Hey there ladies and gentlemen, dear painters!

I want to show you my Lord of the Rings Miniature Theoden by Games Workshop. I was lucky to get a white metal cast off ebay. :)

Painting was a lot of fun, also i wanted him as he looks in the movie, so colors wasn´t that hard. ;)

I gave him a burned environment on his base so that a) noting distracts from him and b) it gives a bit of desperation to the mini (and Theoden runs often into desperation as we know).

I hope you like him.

Here you can vote if you like:

CMON: Theoden on CMON
Putty and Paint: Theoden on P&P

Hey there ladies and gentlemen, dear painters!

Today you have the chance of winning a Happy Monk diorama painted by Ben Komets himself. Just be sure to hop over to Masterminis.net in order to get your chance, like i do with this post. :P