I've been rolling around ideas for pain counters for the coven for some time. One of the things I love most about the Haemonculus covens is the way that they seem to twist and sculpt bone and spines. I started thinking about how this sculpting must be driven by pain, so what better way to represent pain counters than with a victim who is being sculpted into some kind of grisly trophy by the pain that a squad is collecting?
Hideous? Certainly! And, for that reason, perfect for the Coven >:)
While in London earlier this week, we stopped by the Victoria & Albert Museum near Knightsbridge in London. I'd never been on my previous trips to London, and I'd really been missing out. If anyone is located anywhere near London, I'd recommend heading down soon to check out the very inspiring Power of Making exhibit (pictured above) that is on for a limited time.
It's a random collection of fantastic creations by modern artists (from miniature sculptures carved into the lead of pencils to giant, wooden exosuits designed so Steven Hawking could fight crime), and though the exhibition is small, it has an inspiring focus on the act/process of creation, rather than on the finished products themselves. I spent like 40 minutes in the small gallery and came out with a burning urge to MAKE SOMETHING.
While at the V&A, I also stumbled across some mind-numbingly intricate Japanese carvings that I thought bore sharing with folks who appreciate tiny little things. Here's hoping they can provide someone with some inspiration!
This year I wound up in the UK, within striking distance of Games Day UK, and Games Workshop saw fit to hold the event on my birthday no less! Here's my impressions an photos, only a month late.
The event was a zoo. We had to fight our ways into the Golden Demon cabinets, and once we'd fought our way through those, I wound up feeling a little lost.
Well, it's been a BLOODY long time since I posted anything here, and my only explanation/excuse for it was moving between three countries in under a two month span (Japan -> Canada -> England). Now that I've finally settled here in the UK for the next couple of months, I've been using my free time to get back to work on the Coven.
And I jumped right in with one of my whackier ideas: creating a Haemonculus Coven Raider by crossing it with a Talos. I came up with two separate concepts, and I feel like this is the more normal of the two (I can't wait to get to the second concept as it's a little more grizzly). Here's another time lapse video showing some of my progress on the raider:
Though my first concept for the Coven raider was a Talos fused to the front of a Raider, as if it were driving it or towing it, I wanted to give the thing a slightly different profile than just a Raider+Talos.
I should definitely start with an apology to anyone who has taken the time to check this blog since June. As I wrapped up my teaching job in Japan and prepared to move back to Canada in August, then onto the UK in September, my model-related projects kind of fell by the wayside, and so did this blog. That being said, I'm now firmly set up here in the UK, I've dusted off the models and made myself a "Man Cave," so it's about bloody time I started cranking out some more content for the old bloggerino. Here's hoping there are still some folks around who'd like to read it ;)
So, though I have been away, I haven't been idle. My creation tends to follow tracks, and as I wrapped up my sojurn in Japan, cameras broke and new ones were bought and, eventually, photography moved to the forefront as modelling was placed on the back burner.
So, though this might not be, strictly speaking, of interest to the modelling/40k crowd, I've filled my summer with stuff like this:
...and this:
...and, as I made some of my first forays into videography/editing, they yielded stuff like this:
...and one of the things I'm probably most proud of ever having created:
And that all has little and less to do with modelling and sculpting, but I dream of a time when I will be able to just sit around and make stuff all day long. When that happens, I hope that this can be the place where those creative forays come to rest.
Enough of that for now, though.
The blog will be back to models by Friday. Promise :)
The concept series is my schizophrenic attempt to shine light on the art that inspires me. I always do some of my best work when working from concept sketches. I find the hard lines and white space conducive to creation as they give you just enough definition to get you going, while still leaving space to do your own thing. Here's hoping you find these sketches as helpful and inspiring as I do.
Though I'll be showing off some Tyranid sketches by Tom Box (aka: Bocks on the Warpshadow boards), I feel a bit wrong calling this lone, meagre post "The Art of Tom Box." You see, I actually know Tom marginally better than some of the other members on the forums, and, were it not for an unexpected attack of MySpineIsTryingToMurderMe-itis (it's a technical term: look it up), I actually would have met the guy back at Games Day Toronto 2009, when Moloch and Hydra came out for the event/the Tryan board. And, from what I've come to know about Tom, I can tell you that if we were to try and encapsulate his Art into one post, we would be needing a far bigger...well--for lack of a less corny word--box.
Okay, so maybe that 3D bit's a lie, but it is the case that I felt bad for not updating the Grotesque project on Friday, as I had been doing for the last two weeks, so I decided to use a new toy that just came in the mail to create a time-lapse-style video of me at work. It's the first time I've ever done anything like this, and the angle is a bit pants, but I thought folks might find it fun.
Featuring the sounds of fine, fine Canadian group MSTRKRFT. If you like the music, look them up. You won't regret it. Back to the video, though: I think that, should I do this again, I'll probably learn a lot from this initial outing.
So anyway, yeah: I got some more work done on the Grotesques this week, but not as much as I was hoping. Lesson? Don't predict that a week is going to be great for working until after it already has been!
Here are some pictures of the team in their current state:
This guy just doesn't let up. In the last week Jutami has returned with a whole pile of Tyranid sketches. As I'd featured his work just last week, I thought I should just continue on with a good thing.
If you're interested, Jutami has started a concept/art thread on Warpshadow, which he may start updating regularly. Here are a selection of my favourites from his thread. As I amended to last week's post, the best way to get in contact with Jutami is through his Deviant Art account.
This past week has been a pretty busy one (weekends included), so I've made only modest progress on roughing out the poses and starting the most rudimentary of repositionings on the first unit of Dark Eldar Grotesques from the Paulson Bio Terror models. Though they're not much more to look at, the work has given me a really strong idea for the role of each member of the unit.
Though there hasn't been that much progress, I think that repositioning the various Grotesques is essential as the fact that they all came from the same model will really start to show if I left the Bio Terrors as is.
The concept series is my schizophrenic attempt to shine light on the art that inspires me. I always do some of my best work when working from concept sketches. I find the hard lines and white space conducive to creation as they give you just enough definition to get you going, while still leaving space to do your own thing. Here's hoping you find these sketches as helpful and inspiring as I do.
The next installment in the Concept Series comes from another fairly recent addition to the Warpshadow forums: Jutami. He gained people's attention with his big beastie conversions--particularly his very heavily armoured Swarmlord. He also caused a fair few eyes to bug out when he revealed his clean, masterfully-applied, nearly luminous paint scheme. And, most recently, he rose to the task when forum admin Hive Node asked for artist on the board to contribute their pen-and-pencil renderings of Tyranids for the inspiration of other bugs on the board.
