Rainbow Sculptor

Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it, it was great to have everyone there to chat with!

Oh cool, thanks for posting, I was really glad to get the chance to do this one. It's been sitting in my queue of things I wanted to do for far too long. She came out even better than I intended I think, gotta love it when those happy accidents happen.

The Dawnseekers are so cool, really enjoying that set

Preview of Shimmerscale (still a WIP) 😜

Hmmm....that would be fun to do.

In case anyone wanted a closer look at the fairy dragons they previewed on Twitch

I believe you need to teach 4 classes in order to receive those benefits. At least that is what it has been in previous years. That said, they don't generally approve new teachers to teach that many the first year.

These are so fun! Really love the Aztec influences and it would be hard to decide which of the two weapons you sculpted I like more. Great work so far, looking forward to seeing how they progress!

Hey! Happy Birthday 🤗

I think I commented on this elsewhere but it deserves the love. This is such a cool take on her! I love the story and the shading/blending, and probably most of all the hair color!

Super cool idea, and I'm sure very difficult to implement. Well done, this is a beautiful piece!

Just for funsies I wanted to post this here. Alice and I have a history, as you can see in this thread, which makes this that much more special to me. I finally revisited Alice and the Wonderland crew after many years away. I wanted to see what my current skillset could do with the initial concepts and how I could expand on the other characters with the design skills I've developed in that time. This is a re-sculpt of the initial Alice, minimal changes to the design, I had my daughter Juniper pose for it this time which just adds more of an attachment to it than I already had. Here's the render I did up for the release and the physical models of the set from our Phrozon Sonic Mini 4K! Here are the other two characters I created to go with Alice for the January release of my Tribes, the White Rabbit and the March Hare. I was also able to put together color guides based on how I poly-painted these while sculpting. I used the Reaper Power Palette to pick out the colors from an image of the poly painted version. I organized them by material. I'd love to hear your thoughts on if you would find guides like this useful and/or what changes you would like to see to make it a tool you would enjoy having. It was a bit of an emotional roller coaster, coming back to this model. That said, I'm very happy with how the new version came out and I think if I ever come back to this character it will need to be reimagined from a very different perspective. For now I'm really enjoying building out the remainder of the Wonderland crew and I'll be releasing at least one other set of characters for this theme at some point. I was inspired to sketch out a languid posh naga version of the Blue Caterpillar the other day that I'm really looking forward to sculpting!

Aww thank you ❤️

This month I felt particularly inspired by the Nutcracker characters and decided to do a whole themed set. I learned a lot about the original source material and had fun reimagining some of my favorite Reaper painters as Christmas characters. If you want to play the guessing game, go right ahead, I'll put my inspirations after the images Sugar Plum Fairy- Erin Hartwell Drosselmeyer- Aaron Lovejoy The Nutcracker- James Wappel The Rat King- Ian Markon

This sounds epic! I love a good holiday themed adventure!!!

I feel more scared of Monday the 13th

Thanks! I'm glad you like it. She did get a belly button! I actually really liked adding that little detail because I don't get to include them often haha The full figure is 34mm to the eyes, I didn't scale the bust to the eyes mostly because we went through so many iterations of the plinth part but in total from the bottom of the plinth to the tippy tops of her antennae is 95mm. I was aiming to have it roughly the same scale as the first bust I brought to ReaperCon. I believe our support guy is test printing that piece now so we'll see how it comes out! Until then here's an accurate scale comparison of the two:

I had this idea to create both a full body miniature and a bust utilizing the same sculpt. I haven’t attempted a project like this before but I knew several things that would need to be considered and learned several more along the way. I’m writing this to share the things I learned and hopefully give you some things to consider for your next project. The sculpt I wanted to create was a Christmas version of my company’s mascot character, Lunette. She’s a moth and caretaker of a magical library where she guides curious readers through the various fantasies and adventures behind each cover in her collection. For this version of Lunette the idea was that she snuck into The Night Before Christmas, stole an elf’s clothes, and started tampering with Santa’s naughty list. Here was the initial concept art: I liked a lot about the early sketch but moving to the sculpt phase highlighted a lot of areas that weren’t working. The clothes weren’t feeling stolen, or particularly elf like without color. Instead it was looking more like a cave woman or fairy. Going back to my original idea I brainstormed some ways I could rethink the costuming to better convey the story. I pulled up lots of references for different Christmas elves and made notes about the elements I liked or thought would work well. I ended up with this: I liked how the awkward lengths of the sleeves and pant legs were reading more like these clothes didn’t belong to her and the Santa style belt seemed like a strong Christmas element. I was feeling pretty good about this direction and ran it by a few trusted friends. They thought it was looking more like a pirate than an elf. I could see what they meant and went back to my references to see what else I could use to really convey the Christmas vibe. One of the things I noticed was the triangle edges on a lot of the collars, cuffs, skirts and such. I really liked the long tailed vests and thought adding some lace would bring in that homey/authentic quality. Thinking more about how to push the idea of the clothes being too small for her. This was finally working. The triangle edges for the cuffs and pointed shoes were looking very elf-like, the unbelted shirt allowed me to push the tightness of the buttons and awkward length of the vest further. I split the pants along the seams a bit and we were ready to move on to polishing. A common misconception is that the sculptor can simply chop off the head or top third of the figure, stick it on a box or cylinder, and call it a day. The truth is that a lot of things that need to be exaggerated to look right at 34mm would look terrible at 75mm. The hands are a good example of this. At full figure scale the hands and pen needed to be very oversized and bulky to not only be understood and paintable at scale but also to minimize weak areas like thin wrists and tiny pen nibs. Here’s a closer look at the level of exaggeration needed at the 34mm scale. In the mini version you can see they are very oversized and chunky. My main unit of measurement here is ensuring the pen is at least 1mm thick and then adjusting the hand around that marker. Less than 1mm will create very very thin and breakable areas. When sculpting for casting you cannot break the 1mm rule, honestly it's a good rule of thumb even for printing to ensure durability. Though modern printers are certainly capable of rendering smaller detail, the first time you accidentally knock it off your table you'll be breaking out the super glue. I want the things I make to last and prefer a chunkier style anyway so I do my best to ensure that thinner areas are at least 1mm thick. The button detailing on the vest is also simplified compared to what will be needed in the bust. Though no one will likely ever notice, every wrinkle in this fabric was redone by hand on the bust to accommodate the larger scale and greater level of detail. Bust Mini Now we've finished up the full figure! I started thinking about plinth designs and collecting some reference images. I don’t have a lot of experience creating plinths and it’s a task that still intimidates me a bit. I do love having the space and freedom to really play with shapes and patterns and add to the story of the character through the basing design. Since the theme of my release on MMF this month is going to be The Nutcracker I’ve been looking at quite a few nutcrackers and getting really inspired by some of the more elaborate versions of them. The next step is deciding where to have the figure end. The only hard and fast rule on this topic is to never “cut” a figure at a joint. Instead of cropping the body at the shoulder, consider cropping it along the center of the forearm or between the shoulder and neck instead. You are more likely to convey that this is part of a larger image/scene and less likely to communicate that your character has suffered some terrible trauma. With all that in mind I ended up with this. I knew she needed to keep both her arms in order to retain the story component. Which didn’t leave a lot of areas to cut it. I really loved all the designs on the plinth and how it felt like the imagery supported and expanded on the story of the figure. Adding in Santa and his reindeer to the plinth also inspired me to put Santa’s wax seal on the bottom of the naughty list. I experimented with adding this element to the full figured version but it just wasn’t legible at scale and seemed to be more confusing than helpful. I shrunk the hands and pen like I planned to do, detailed out the lace patterning in the sleeves that were too small to do before, and retouched all over the figure to ensure things looked good at the larger scale. There was a lot about this that I felt was working but it still felt a bit awkward. My husband pointed out that she looked like she was coming out of a birthday cake haha He was right, the silhouette was not benefiting the figure and the awkward placement of the junction between the figure and the plinth was distracting from the overall flow of the piece. I tried angling the top rim to give a more dynamic slice but that didn't fix the issue. After some more brainstorming we decided to crop her a little higher and make the plinth overall more bell shaped. I loved this idea as it had a nostalgic Christmas feel to it and made a much more pleasant overall silhouette. Here are the final pieces. I hope this was a fun look into the making-of process and that you like our Christmas Lunette pieces as much as I loved creating them! Happy Holidays from our family to yours ❤️

It's not a cat face but it is a face. I believe it is Izzy's variation on the Green man as that seemed to be a repeating motif throughout these figures. Here's a closer look at it, hope that helps 🙂

The beading definitely reads as intended, the feet hair and the color scheme are just awesome!

Really beautiful work! I love the lighter color hair, the color choice compliments the dress very well. You did a great job of making the boars look menacing despite my failed attempt to turn down the cute! haha You did such a great job on this set, even down to the beautiful basing details. Excellent work!

This is a really beautiful piece and so many great photo ops! Excellent work

This is SO cool!! This is the kind of stuff I love seeing. Truly unique and creative work ❤️

Limited Color Palettes Limited color palettes are one of my favorite color schemes to use. It’s super easy for beginners to get beautiful pieces with a harmonious aesthetic but even if you’re really experienced as an artist it’s a way to take the stress out of mixing a whole bunch of colors. I figured this would be a fun thing to discuss as we're going in to the holiday season, time for painting minis gets tight, and this is a great way to still work on your painting and minis without wasting a bunch of time stressing about color schemes. How-To: Pick two colors (complementary colors work great but it can be any two colors) plus black and white. That’s it! You’re done with the super stressful color picking portion of mini painting! Wasn’t that easy? How do you make a whole piece out of just two colors? Here’s my formula for getting a great range of hues to use throughout your piece. Note: you will get better results if you pick a warm color and a cool color but I’ll talk about those a bit later. In this example we started with blue and orange. These are complimentary hues, meaning they fall directly opposite each other on the color wheel. The left column has a mix of 70% blue with 30% orange. The top one is mixed with white, the center is a straight 50/50 mix, and the bottom square is our main hue mixed with black. In the center column there’s a 50/50 mix of the blue and orange. The straight mixture is in the center square, that mixture adds white for the top square, and with black for the bottom. In the right column you flip the percentages to favoring the orange. So 70% orange with 30% blue. Tinted on top (adding white), shaded on bottom (adding black), and a straight mix in the center. Now to talk about warm and cool colors. This can be a bit tricky because usually people just assume that if it’s red it’s warm and if it’s blue it’s cool. That’s simply not true! Each hue has it’s own spectrum ranging from warm to cool. The very center of that spectrum represents the True Hue or the most pure version of that hue. The best way to illustrate this is to show you the spectrum of a hue and compare the extremes. Here we're looking at Green. All of the colors within that arc are considered Green but on the cooler side we see a more turquoise or blue-green color whereas on the warm side we're shifting into that kermit-like yellow-green. This shift happens in every hue. It seems to be easier to explain these secondary colors but what about red and blue? They are all warm or all cool right? no. They too have a spectrum. The warmer side of red is more orange, the cooler side shifts towards purple and gives us a magenta. The warm side of blue is in that violet/magenta side, the cool side gets closer to green and gives us turquoise. It's a little easier to see on a color wheel but can be more difficult when you're staring at two paint bottles and trying to figure out which one is warm or cool. As a color leans more to one side of it's spectrum than the other we call that it's bias. Here's another side by side comparison of our primary colors in the warm and cool versions side by side for comparison. Knowing what the bias is for the color we're using allows us to predict better how it will mix with other colors. Mixing the reddish blue with the bluish red creates a vibrant magenta color. They are both biased towards each other and will therefore maintain much of their saturation when mixed. Using that same cool red with a warm red, as in the example on the right, will give us more of a brownish maroon color. As a side note for color mixing: directly mixing the true version of complimentary hues (hues on opposite side of the color wheel from each other) results in gray. The colors neutralize each other and we're left with a mid tone of blah. Though it is difficult to find a genuinely TRUE version of a hue so you'll usually create a chromatic gray or slightly colored gray. That's okay, and can be a really fun thing to play with. Keep it in mind though when picking out those Reds and Greens for Christmas minis! Red and Green are complimentary hues so when they are mixed 50/50 they will give you gray. Now that we have a little bit better understanding of the characteristics of the specific colors we're choosing and a simple and fun way to start playing with those hues, let's not let ourselves get paralyzed by the mountain of choices we have in Reaper paint we all have in our studios!

I think there are colors that are easier to paint, blue/purple/green come to mind in most circumstances. The warmer side of the spectrum tends to give people difficulties. Yellow paint is notoriously thin because there are no substances to create yellow pigment from that are both vividly pigmented AND opaque. Therefore we end up having to do lots of layers, utilize underpainting, and tweak a lot more than other more naturally vibrant paints. Value tends to have a lot to do with it in my experience. Painting lighter values tends to be more challenging then mid or darker values. Red I find pretty easy as it covers well, takes to white/black well, and can be mixed pretty effectively with other colors in a predictable way. I'm sure there's a lot of variation between what type of paint your using, what medium your working in overall, and as you pointed out skill level and preference. That's my two cents on it anyway lol