Hello all, thanks for sticking around! The last few months have been absolutely intense, and with still one Annie as the main staff, I’ve had a chunk of time off ill due to it all. Not the Community Miniatures Project’s fault, but running Bad Squiddo Games day to day is a huge thing. I’ve started working with more freelancers though to take some off my plate, which is working great, and one of the bonuses is we can make some progress with this.

One of the things that set me back and put me in a bit of a block was people seeing my rough concept art! Even though I keep saying that it doesn’t need to be refined, so long as the sculptor knows what is going on, showing just one made me feel super self conscious and stressed, as usually just the sculptor sees them, so it was weird with a big audience.

Artists

I’ve been chatting to several artists to get on board with this and make it a bit… fancier? Our main artist is Martin Whitmore and we love him very much, but he often gets busy on large projects either for us or other people, so it needed to be someone with a faster turnaround.

Derval Chambers

Welcome Derval to the gang! Everyone has to have a bit of a test to see if we can work together on both quality and accuracy, but also communication, especially when working with a concept piece. The test piece I chose was Aethelflaed, a miniature we already have.

I got him to draw her in a different pose to the mini, first as a rough sketch.

The style is perfect! I had him make a couple of changes, which was a good test for our communication as well – to switch the direction of her left hand, and remove the curls on her shoes. He had to fill in some blanks just having that photo to work with so this is all grand and he switched it straight up (you’ll see in the next image).

I’ll mostly be using him for these types of line art, but out of curiosity and for future projects, I asked Derval to colour her in, and the results are…wow!

This makes me very happy! It’s lovely to see minis in different poses, it really brings them to life. Talking of which….

We also got this sketch sheet of different expressions, which gives me SO MANY IDEAS! This was mostly just for fun, and it is so fun! Angry Aethel!

How does this fit in to The Community Miniatures Project?

It means I have someone else to help visualise the character. And something more coherent that you can look at before the mini is sculpted. So you can have an actual idea of what is coming which is much better than my scribbles and rambles.

The sculptor Alan is busy on WW2 Soviets for us at the moment and the next job after that is to tackle all the decided Community Minis so we can get caught up and back to a less manic pace. This means while he is mentally over at the Eastern Front, we can get a good crack on researching these ladies and getting the art together so he has something solid to work with as soon as he’s ready to. I gave Derval the heads up that it’ll probably end up being around one a month after the first load, and he is totally up for this and excited, which is super cool. It gives me a fresh wave of enthusiasm!

Sorry again that it’s taken a while to get this off the ground, but I totally feel it’s worth the wait, and is something that we’ll be doing a long time, once we’ve got the hang of it!

Thanks so much, and stay tuned!

Annnniiiiie