A Blog of Blog-Thrones

This post looks long but it's mostly pictures demonstrating the works of the painter I'm talking about and linking to. Just skim through until you see pics you like and click associated links if you don't feel like reading anything. 

Time for another post! I haven't died fair maidens and/or greasy cheeto breathers. I've been monumentally busy recently. Thankfully my schedule has been ironed out a bit now that I've settled into the new university year, and I've had time to do some painting and modelling. Which is lucky, because I have sod all money and a massive pile of miniatures and paints. Before I start doing photos of what's on my table/floor/bed/in my bath in various stages of paintedness I have slowly been putting together another post to cover for my own crappy update schedule.

It is... a blog post of blogs! An inability to update on a regular basis seems to be a painter thing - there are lots of excellent, prolific painters out there who also can't update more than once a month. Makes me feel a bit better about my own update schedule, but then annoyed me because I wanted to know what these cool cats are up to and how they do their stuff.

So what I have done is collected together lots of the blogs of established painters and modellers and collected them here to allow people to peruse them at will. I did a lot of digging about. Hopefully some of these are new to you.

Sproket

I'll start with my current favourite painter, Sproket. He's got a really clean, but fantastical painting style. Featured are a couple of images from his current works in progress.

This amazing piece is the base for a diorama he is looking to enter into a golden demon competition. It is Dark Eldar themed and going to be a mount for some of these guys;

I really like Sprokets semi-pastel palette, and the way his transitions are so smooth over very small areas. There's something very different about his style. He has both a WIP thread on CMON;

http://www.coolminiornot.com/forums/showthread.php?47321-Sproket-s-Dark-Eldar-diorama

where he posts pictures and answers questions, and gives details about his process and steps, and a blog where he gives more pictures and details as to what he's planning/thinking and how he's achieving things, as well as his little experiments in making snow bases and cobwebs, etc. He explains how long things have taken him to paint and at one point uses his beard to paint something...

http://sproketsmallworld.blogspot.com/

It was from this I learnt that I paint alot better, and am alot happier painting, on a very smooth, heavy basecoat. His step by step pictures look amazing even with the minimum amount of detailing because of his dedication to having a solid foundation to paint up from.

I think this guy is seriously one of the best  painters going, certainly my favourite. This is what he decided to paint as a 'break' from his golden demon entry;

 

Bohun

Next in the line up is Bohun. This guy is known by pretty much everyone: he has done a couple of tutorials for Miniature Mentor that were both excellent, and consistently puts out 9+ work on CMON. He has a really bold, unique style. His strongest, most defining characteristic seems to be his ability to paint amazing contrast into his models. He uses a combination of warm and cool with highlights and shadows and produces some of the most amazing non-metallic metal I've seen.

One of his very famous versions of the nurgle dreadnought. He made the cobwebs using cotton buds - a similar technique to how Sproket did it on his egyptian type diorama above. Bohun's blog also contains WIP's, tutorials and little how to's. I have his tutorials from miniature mentor and I did learn alot from watching his him. 

The battle damage on his models is fantastic as well. He doesn't post very often on any forums but he does have a website he maintains fairly regularly that has a good collection of WIP shots and very well presented tutorials.

http://bohunarts.yum.pl/

Trull

Trull's website features alot of WIPs and Tutorials on how to build scenery, bases and buildings. I use a lot of superlatives when I write: I'll take a break on this one and let the photos do the superlativ...ing.

The blog is available in a number of different languages: English isn't his native but it's all still readable with just a few wierd mistranslations here and there. The WIP documentation is quite thorough and very interesting.

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Ffantastische-welten.blogspot.co.uk%2F&langpair=auto|en&hl=en

Ana

I have featured some of Ana's work on here before. The main thing that has always struck me about her miniatures is the freehand work.

I find her approach very different as well: the above free hand is all drawn in black and white as you can obviously see. In the end the model ends up looking like this;

I can't think of anyone else I have ever seen do freehand this way. I've only ever seen people basecoat then detail over the top, not use a monochrome base with transparent colours over the top.

Her blog isn't updated very frequently but there is a backlog of posts to go through including many WIP shots of some very sophisticated painting and many discussions of varying topics.

http://paintingmum.blogspot.co.uk/

Arsies

A rather unfortunate name for the english speaking - this blog is presented in French and English. There are a number of interesting articles on this including the using WIP and tutorials. 

  
The author also displays some of his work that has been used as the boxart for miniatures, and talks about that kindof stuff. 

Can you tell I'm flagging while I write this? I had a long list of blogs in front of me but as I went through them to check I wanted to put them up here I discovered that not many were as interesting or useful as first thought.   Here's a few more with pics for you guys to check out;

http://volomir.blogspot.co.uk/

 And last but not least are some goon blogs! They deserve more of a write up but now I'm tired and watching James Bond having his manly bits be whipped by Le Chiffre. It's fairly distracting.

http://hammertime40k.wordpress.com/

http://www.richyp.com/

http://sigismunds.blogspot.co.uk/