Cavemen & Romans

BLIND BEGGAR GAMES CAVEMEN 

The beauty of aiming at smaller comissions these days is that i get these tiny gems that come across the desk once in a while. Sometimes its a vintage model, sometimes its a unique brand. Today i put the finishing touches on the base coats for these fantastic cartoon cavemen from Blind Beggar games.

kickstarter link:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/blind-beggar/palaeo-diet-the-tribe/description

They're very fun to paint and i honestly had no idea what i was getting myself in for.
As a big fan of Wallace and Gromit (and all ardman animations) i personally derive a sense of familiarity from them in realtion to that style.
My client (John, a lovely man i met a few years ago in person at a convention who has a jovial disposition and a kindly demeanour and with whom i've had a long running and trusting relationship) wanted them as they are on the kickstarter page, but i cleaned up the style a little making the eyes a bit mroe cartoony and a bit less...creepy?
Once the paint has cured on these models i will get them inked and then get all those lovely cartoony details back up to level with some highlights. i'm thinking a home made black wash for these so that the minor detailing in the low quality sculpting can pop a bit more and all the furry textures come out also providing a little automatic black lining which would suit this gawdy type of miniature. 

"Early Man" the Ardman animation from which i get my inspiriation for this job. 

Test model (for color scheme.)

GANGS OF ROME 

My second lot from this same client this week is a Gangs of rome order. This lot will receive a much more naturalistic and realistic paint job with softer and smoother highlights that the cartoony Cavemen.
I personally have some negative thoughts on the gangs of rome pricing model (how it's ridiculous) that i won't share in detail as this blog is about art and the process and not my thoughts on capitolism, however i am glad none the less to get a chance to paint some romans and more specifically civillians as i am not a fan of rank and file roman soliders (work wise) as they can be a pain! (anything uniform can be a pain for quick work, but bright red armor is a buggar to get right en masse). Painting all of these nice warm cloth colors should be a pleasure. I recently read an article about how ancient rome was not white at all but rather an extremely mixed race place. I may ask my client if he fancies a mix of skin tones. 
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 As with all of my orders the romans have a dedicated tray in the workshop that helps me to keep organised. I have stuck them on pennies but my client and i are still communicating about the best approach for basing. I have now received the mdf bases that are required for the game in the post but there is one or two missing and i think maybe the suppliers didn't send them to my client. I am sure we will hash this out soon. In the meantime i attempted to remove a fighter from his tab base with a small saw that my flat mate has. It was a success and he came off smoothly at the bottom of his feet. So i mixed up some miliput and i made a test base in "cobble" finish.

I haven't sculpted in a long time, so that was a very satisfying process. 

I can't wait for it to cure so i can drill his feet and get him onto it, and get a test model painted for this lot. I could of course paint a test model as they are but i don't want to get around to removing their tab bases and then ruin any paint jobs (you have to hold them pretty toughly to saw off the bases). So for now i shall progress on this order again soon once we have ironed out the kinks.