AdeptiCon is just around the corner!

And for the first time ever, I'll be running two hobby seminars at the show : )

Getting everything together for the seminars has been... interesting. It has certainly been a lot more work than I first originally imagined, but I'm now ready to go. I'd like to thank Warlord Games for providing the Algoryn models (from their game Beyond the Gates of Antares) for the classes (below you can see 50 of the suckers waiting for priming).

As part of the seminars, all students will receive a bottle of my "Super Secret Metallic Wash". Here you can see my daughters mixing it all carefully on a recent snow day. My thanks here go to Robert Kingery for his supply of dropper bottles for the wash : )

Here are the examples I painted up for the presentation and handout. We'll be looking at Dark Iron, Polished Steel, Brassy Brass, and Shining Gold.

Once my presentation and handout were complete, I took a few moments to get some more metallics on my Mechanicum Vorax models. I just love the evil bug feel of these guys!

Perhaps I'll see you at the show : )

Cheers
Dave

Thanks for waiting, I hope you like your tanks : )

A little while back I posted about some Shermans I had converted for my friend (and blog-follower) Jake. Here's that post.

Well, with Jake visiting AdeptiCon next week to run a couple of seminars on digital sculpting, I thought I could save some money on shipping to Australia and please Jake at the same time. To that end I've been working to get this squadron of Pacific Theater tanks ready for the trip to Chicago.

I tried hard to match the conversions and paint job to those images sent by Jake, and I fully realize that they might not be 100% accurate, but I hope they're not too far off. As you can see, the tanks are beat to hell, with quite a lot of chipped paint and rusty areas. The salt air can really do a number on ferrous metals.

I named the lead tank Fireball, after a WW2 wargame called Fireball Forward.

And this tank was named Ducky. Jake is a University of Oregon alum, so I thought he'd get a kick out of that connection ; )

I hope you like them!

Cheers
Dave

And the final two Hell Dorado warbands.

I realized that I hadn't posted the final two Hell Dorado warbands that I painted last year for the hobby articles for Cipher Studios. Well, here they are. First (above) are the Immortals. This Chinese-inspired faction has been in Hell for quite some time, and the foot soldiers sport a few tainted/mutated body parts. Very fine and delicate miniatures, these ones.

The final war band I worked on was a little larger, primarily because it doesn't have a starter box, so I had to pick out the models based on what I liked - I liked a lot of them. These are the Mercenaries. I have enough of them to play a decent sized game of Hell Dorado, and I can also ally them with my Westerners (or any other faction, really).

The Officers here are Andre de Montbard and Marcus Leblanc. Both have a fantastic Templar look.

These are the Troops for the force: two Deserters on the left and two Templar Squires on the right.

And finally the Independents: Thirty Coins (the blind sniper), the Russian Trapper, and one of my favorite models in the range - Angelo Casaviecchi (a lemure trapper/trader).

Such wonderful character in all of these models, and a joy to paint.

I finally finished one!

It's still all noses to the grindstones here at Dave Taylor Miniatures, with lots of work for March in the queue. I'm quite happy about that : )

I did carve out some time, however, to finish up this guy, who has been sitting on my desk for a few weeks (thanks to a generous James). He's an early cast of the Quaker robot from the Infamy: Welcome to the Big Smoke game. You can check out my other posts about it here.

He's a nifty little, almost-hound-like cleaning robot with a big lightning gun on his back. Very cool. I went for a simple, Tesla-just-finished-building-this-prototype-in-his-workshop look, with dark cast iron, shinier steel, and some solid brass machined parts.

The base is from Secret Weapon Miniatures' Town Square range.

I hope you like it : )

And here's a size comparison with a FW Thallax.

Cheers

Dave

Guest Post - Damon Drescher - Seeking out a Crystal Brush

A big thank you to Damon Drescher for putting together the original guest post for my blog, and a bigger thank you to Figure Painter Magazine (FPM, for short) who will be adding an adapted version of the article to one of their upcoming issues. I'll be taking it down from here to ensure they have the deserved measure of exclusivity. As soon as the article is available there, I'll link to it from here. I'll also be keeping a couple of Damon's photos here ; )

Figure Painter Magazine is a great, and eminently affordable, resource for all painters!