brassbaboon

Isn't that Miss Kitty from Gunsmoke? :)

Awesome paint job! I love the crystal ball in his hand... I dunno even how you pulled that effect off. I would probably have made the dragon whelp a bit darker and rugged looking so that it didn't look the same color as the robe, but that's being ultra picky.

Scale Nazi comments aside, I have to admit to a certain level of frustration that the RPG gaming hobby has been so insanely inconsistent in what one would think to be a fairly critical aspect of the game, which is the size of the models used to represent the world and the beings/things in that world. In the battle grid itself, one inch is supposed to represent five feet. That means 25.4mm should be five feet. So let's say you are naively ignorant of the miniature size inconsistencies (as I was) and you go to a lot of trouble to build out a large building (e.g. a tavern) "to scale" (as I did) and then after finishing your masterpiece, you put your official D&D Wizards of the Coast "medium sized" miniatures (in my case soldiers, an adventuring party and some self-created furniture) and you look at it and it dawns on you that "those bastards are over EIGHT FEET TALL! WTF?!" Yeah, I admit it, I was more than a little frustrated...

For sculpting feathers I might be very, very tempted to, well, (ahem...) just use actual feathers....

@Superhippieman, I needed a "road gang" crew of dwarves for my curernt campaign. I sculpted a group of five road workers using Sculpey polymer clay. I was reasonably happy with them and used them in a couple of sessions right before I went on a miniature collection expanding binge that saw me acquire or sculpt over 1,400 minis in a couple of months. Finally, almost by chance, I happened to see my road gang standing next to some commercially sculpted dwarves. They were significantly taller. But nobody ever noticed during play. Because my mini collection is made up of very old, old, recent, new, and self-sculpted critters, most of my miniature factions have significant variations in size. Some of my older orcs are no bigger than my more recent goblins, for example. My oldest humans could pass for "modern" gnomes easily. But nobody has ever complained. It all seems to work fine.

Hard, I don't believe it is illegal to make copies of a miniature so long as you own the original and don't sell or give away the copies. I think you would be on shaky legal ground making a miniature based on someone else's artwork and selling copies of them. For the purposes of learning how to sculpt I can't imagine that there would be any limit to what you could copy or use as inspiration for your work. As far as I know you only run into trouble if you try to market the results as your own work, or even if you tried to market the results as legitimate copies that you are reselling.

@hardDRollins - I've done quite a bit of sculpting, but I've taken a much more practical approach to the process. I did not expect to be able to sculpt Reaper level quality figures on my first try, so I set my expectations to be much more achievable while being much more practical and useful to my own needs. I decided that my initial goal would be to produce usable, recognizable miniatures for my own campaign. I needed a kobold army, so I got some sculpey clay and some acrylic paints and I spent an afternoon making a dozen or so kobold miniatures. I didn't even TRY to make them professional quality. Instead I focused on what miniatures I needed to create the kobold party the adventurers would encounter. So I ended up making some crossbow-wielding kobolds, some sword-wielding kobolds, a couple spear-wielding kobolds and finally a sorcerer kobold. I didn't even sculpt eyes on the faces, and made no effort whatsoever to sculpt fingers, toes, claws... I just made them as close to the right size as possible, with recognizable weapons and then painted them all the same colors. They were a huge hit. My gaming group LOVED them. One of my players begged me to make a otyugh for him. I needed some soldiers, villagers, and some dead bodies for the next session so I did pretty much the same thing. And again the play group loved them. Remember, these were very crude first efforts. On the villagers and soldiers I at least PAINTED some eyes on the faces, but made no effort to SCULPT them. Later in that campaign I needed a goblin lair set, so I did the same thing for goblins. However, by this time I had gained some confidence and decided to try to put some detail and personality in the sculpts. They took a lot longer, but they ended up looking more interesting and a couple of them (especially a pot-bellied goblin caster) actually came out pretty nice. And again the gaming group was suitably impressed, with the request for an otyugh restated. So I decided to actually attempt to "sculpt" an otyugh. And I did. The player who asked for that otyugh still has it (some five years later) in his collection and loves to spring it on his players. That was the first real "effort" I made to "sculpt" a miniature. Then I decided to sculpt my currently active player characters. That was fun too, and I still use those sculpts years later. All of this was still using sculpey clay. Sculpey is cheap, forgiving and you don't have to worry about it hardening before you are done. Of course it has loads of limitations as well, and I rarely use sculpey any more. I use a variety of epoxy putties for my sculpting now. Since then I've sculpted dozens of figures, some of which are just knock-offs needed for a campaign, others are efforts to be "professional quality." But in general I sculpt what I need. I still am a long way away from being able to produce pro level miniature sculpts, but what I have done with my sculpts has been to vastly increase the flexibility of my miniature collection, tailor my collection to exactly what I need (I sculpted a factions worth of Yuan-Ti over a weekend), and gain constant sincere positive feedback from my gaming group on my efforts, with frequent requests for me to sculpt or paint things for them. In the past six months I've spent a great deal of time "frankensteining" creatures, where I take existing cheap toy miniatures (horses, bugs, dinosaurs, lizards, spiders, etc) and have used epoxy putty to mix and match parts and sculpt a bit to create centaurs, were-beasts, pegasi, dragons, driders.... the sky is really the limit. Not sure if this helps. The main message is "start with something practical that you can use right now."

Nice, I have that mini and was wondering how best to paint it. You've given me some great ideas.

Very nice sheer effect. I like the baboon's little vase too. You could have made the baboon brass though... ;-)

The dagger might be an attempt to sculpt a stone dagger. Otherwise I agree it has an odd shape. On the legs... Check out the actual real-world legs on female gymnasts or swimmers. Chicks that do athletic stuff have actual athletic muscles. I'd prefer to see my dagger-wielding female rogue with legs and arms that imply she could actually do some damage with that blade...

Nice. Love the spiked chain. I would say "awesome work on the armor" but that would imply that the rest wasn't as good and it's all awesome. Very nice job.