Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Zombicide A-Bomb and Fem A-Bomb

I've noticed my blogs been getting a lot of hits from Zombicide fans over in France so, "Bonjour!" from the US, hopefully these latest sculpts will be well received.
I finished the first A-Bomb in late November last year and it was based off of the cover for the new Rue Morgue expansion, I ended up changing the hand position to make it more, "groping" and since his left arm was not detailed in the concept art I decided to exercise some artistic licencing with it. To me asymmetrical elements always add a wrongness and alien aspect to a design so I made sure that if one arm was bloated with tumors then the other was emaciated and spindly hopefully adding to the look of unstable genetics the infected seem to be suffering from.




I had some down time in early December while doing some new pieces for the Wrath of Kings line and really wanted to do another A-Bomb but this time make it female, so when I could, I worked on this figure. I attempted to emulate Edouard's character design while adding some of my own without making it look out of place. Originally I wanted her to be in a wedding dress, a kind of bridezilla joke but the train and ruffles of the dress would have ended up being too complex for the molding process. I have to do my best to ensure the sculpts for Zombicide are one piece with no assembly required for the players and an overly complex dress would have added too much depth (front to back) for the figure so at the last second I decided to abandon that. Other then that I got to do all that I wanted to on the figure; I flip-flopped the arm styles from the first A-Bomb so it didn't just look like a copy and I added more bizarre spines and spikes along with a pulpy, corpulent hump on her back... Oh yeah, and breasts. With armor. 
I didn't tell the gang at Guillotine Games what I did and just secreted it in with the next figure shipment as a surprise Christmas present. I suggested they could use it as a stretch goal for the next Kickstarter campaign, which they did.





Until everybody gets their orders for the latest Zombicide expansions in hand here are some shots of the "Greens," (but in my case "blues") for both the primary A-Bomb and stretch goal Fem A-Bomb.

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

R.I.P Giger

Hans Ruedi Giger died today from injuries sustained from a fall in his museum in Zurich, Switzerland. We have lost an artist with amazing vision and the world is poorer for it. He was 74.


Saturday, March 1, 2014

Zombicide Bust












Here's something you probably won't get to see in person, a 1/6th scale bust I did for no real good reason other then just because I wanted to. Remember a few posts ago how I mentioned that one of the Zombicide figures got lost in the mail? Well, this guy was in the box too. My guess is right now he is in a landfill, ashes in an incinerator or sitting on a disgruntled postal workers shelf staring at him accusatorily.
Based loosely off of Edouard Guiton's art work and style and sculpted in Super Sculpy this guy took me about a day and a half to complete. And in hindsight I wish I had taken better pictures since as far as I know this is all that remains of him.

Friday, February 28, 2014

Zombicide Berserker







Here are some pics of the Zombicide Berserker, also part of the Prison Outbreak expansion... Grrrrr.

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Cabrakan. Cabrakan. Let me love you Cabrakan.





This guy was a toughy, and not because I had Chaka-Khan's song "I Feel For You" stuck in my head for weeks. The difficulty lay in the concept art... There wasn't any. Only the finished art which is great for portraying ambiance for the faction but not the best for figuring out how everything is supposed to work together. Attempting to convert a 2D piece of art like this into 3D and you end up with a lot of objects occupying the same space that shouldn't. On top of all that he's not a conventional mecha design. No obvious joints or hinges so it was difficult to create limbs that looked like they could work with nothing but angles.
The stipulations I was given was that; 1: he needed to fit on an 80mm base, 2: there had been a skull already sculpted and cast in clear resin that was going to be included with the kit, (three crystal skulls for the chest) and the model had to have slots for them. And 3: try to make the figure look as close to the art as possible.
There is a lot going on in that picture, so an attempt to extrapolate size assuming the skulls were 28mm human scale was the first order of business and everything was made from that presumption. I made him bigger then normal because he's supposed to be a walking monument and I wanted to make sure that was conveyed when placed on the board. Lots and lots of planes and angles, more then any other inorganic I've ever worked on and each had to be shaped and cut before the next one was added on top of it. I even had Derek Osborne stop by to give some help with deciphering some of the art, for example, I had no idea what was going on with his arms. To me the artwork made it look like his forearms just sprouted blades. Derek asked, "Where's his hands?" and I replied, "...Hands?" Yeah, lots of fun.
Anyway, hope I didn't disappoint any Dark Age players out there.

Pictures provided with permission by Cool Mini or Not.

Sunday, September 29, 2013

A gorilla? In South America?

Reminds me of the Monty Python: Meaning of Life quote, "A tiger? In Africa?" I'm sure there is a clever explanation for it but I don't know exactly what it is. 
Here is the Helldorado figure for Quetzalcoatl, I really need to figure out how to take better pictures. I think the big problem I had on the pose was his right arm isn't driving down as much as in the concept art. That was becase the right tusk and all the fethers of his gauntlet were getting in the way of each other so I had to widen the distance between the two. That and fethers... I don't think I've ever had to sculpt that before. Geah!
Sculpted from Fimo, greenstuff, Magic Sculpt with some resin casting.









Art provided by Cipher Studios

Sunday, September 15, 2013

Wrath of Kings: The Children

I'm guessing these guys are soldiers for the Warchild figure but I could be wrong. I was given one piece of art and asked to do three different poses from it and here they are. Fimo, magic sculpt and aluminum tubes.











Pictures provided by CMoN, figure painting by James Wappel and art by Edouard Guiton