Space marines, concept art, display bases! BTS #75 (Patreon)

Hoooooty hooooooooooo! What up mini family?! As I'm sure you're all aware, I finished up painting the Hawk Lord Primaris Space Marine last week with a fun little display base that I was pretty proud of. It made sense to me thematically and wasn't hard to execute. 

Not gonna lie, after finishing this model I took a little break. I spent over 50hrs in the first 3 days of the week painting and making the video so that I could hand it off to the sponsor with enough time to review. Since then, I've been working with Tatiana, my concept artist, to finish up that 3rd wood elf. We took it back to the drawing board and now I have something that I truly love. 

The posture, the blood licking, the hair over the fair, the expression, the bare chest, the gladiatorial armor style..I love it all. It screams "I'm a deranged fighter". Tatiana is finishing up this last one. In anticipation of this concept being done, I've been vetting another casting company to see what they can offer up when compared to Creature Caster, who've been really good to me. I sent them the 3D model of The Duchess and then made some improvements not only in the sculpt, but also the casting. 

So hopefully one obvious improvement is in mold lines. A service Level 52 Studios has is cleaning the parts post cast, and a cleaner cast overall. This quality of life improvement for the end user is something I really like. The service from Level 52 Studios costs more, but to me it's worth it. Something worth mentioning is that Level 52 has the advantage here, because CC didn't know there were going to get scrutinized against Level 52, and Level 52 did. Who knows what happens when you have to cast 300 of these. I brought these fears up to Level 52. Another slightly less obvious improvement is that the sword blade is now keyed into the basket of her weapon which means that there's less of a chance that it'll break in shipping because it's a separate piece. There were a few other QOL improvements on the sculpt.  

Another area of concern is sculpting. It's incredibly convenient to have the sculptor be working closely with your caster, like it worked for Creature Caster. So, I paid big bux to have Level 52 sculpt a concept from a video game for me personally that won't be sold. 

(this is a WIP sculpt) Meet Fayde; a character from the video game Heroes of Newerth, a game very near and dear to my heart. My hope is to make a video about the friendships I've cultivated remotely over this game, while painting it and using some clickbait shitty title like "I spent $XXXX on a SINGLE mini?!". It's always great when click bait, a subject I'm passionate about, and a pretty model line up. The person sculpting this is "dblueice" who has a lot of experience under his belt. I even contacted him early on in the development process of The Duchess to see if he'd sculpt her. This is one of the many sculptors that Level 52 has access to, so my fear of getting a quality sculpt has been assuaged for the most part.

But what about my hobby?! Well, I got started on a really fun diorama today. One that will feature a special little tubby astronaut. If you're not familiar, Roman Lappat has this joyful little community event going on right now using this character and I need in. Here's one of the many examples he's produced already. This is one of my favorites he's done.

So I started to build this garage that I imagine is used for a single stall car repair shop.

I want the astronaut lying on the top of the building in a lawn chair with a can of beer next to him. I want him to have written "send more beer" in red paint on the roof of this place, the story being that maybe he's an alien traveler and he come to earth to a more rural area that's been forgotten and he's just enjoying his time on earth for a bit and sending a funny message to his alien brothers up in the sky. That's all for now! 

Scott