Pinselwut, miniature painting by Solmar

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

Hey there ladies and gentlemen, dear painters!

This time i want to show you a fun project i made in order to relax from the hard work of making the Black Knights. Also, this is my first bust! I saw him at the Duke of Bavaria and had to paint him! :)

Here you can vote:

CMON
Putty and Paint

I hope you like him!

Cheers, Solmar

Hey there ladies and gentlemen, dear painters!

I want to show you my unit of Black Knights. It was a fun and challenging experience to paint a unit at a really high standard. Texture, freehands, conversions, little sculpting work on 5 models take their time.  :) I am really happy with the result.

Click to view full size!

Click to view full size!

 Here are further links, if you want to rate or comment:

CMON Unit: UNIT
CMON Details: DETAILS
Putty and Paint: P&P

Cheers, Solmar

Hey there ladies and gentlemen, dear painters!

Today i want to report of my weekend at the Duke of Bavaria. It was an awesome event! Meeting so much new and nice people, connecting, building new friendships. It was like a family-meeting!

For me it was the first time i ever got to a painter´s event and a competition. I participated with a display containing my Nurgle Cybot and my finished Black Knights (which i will take photos of today). This is what happened to me and i am amazed and euphoric when i write these lines:

I made an entry in the Fantasy Painting Standard category as i have never been on a contest and just wanted to look, where i stand level-wise. I have not expected to get anything there, just looking what happens. After some time i got feedback from many nice people, saying my work looks really good, it should have good chances in standard, i might even could have participated in the master category.

This was the first awesome moment for me. Then i was asked to meet the jury and they told me that my entry was standing out of standard category and i could choose between getting Gold in standard or moving my entry to the master´s category. I was like: DA FUQ? Okay then i was so overwhelmed that i agreed to move to the masters.

It would have been awesome if the story ends here with receiving nothing at all.. But (and this sounds so insane) i received a silver medal for my display in the master´s category! Insane! To get things clear: The medal is not that important for me. More important is the feedback i received, knowing that i make a good work and that all doubts i had while painting my Black Knights were unnecessary! Feeling so great.


In the end i am super-motivated to keep on the happy painting and i will hop right into the next project!

Here is a link with further photos of (some) minis on the Duke of Bavaria:

Duke of Bavaria 2013 Pictures

Cheers, Solmar