Anzu's Chaos Dwarfs [2023-01-28]

Beautiful hat! And such finely detailed ornaments, especially the feathers - amazing! :exploding_head:

Do you use Procreate and Greenstuff for different kinds of sculpting techniques, or just to get some visual contrast while working? Iā€™ve read that they have different properties, but I havenā€™t compared them sufficiently to notice it much :blush:

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Splendid hat! And good listening material. :smile:

Just marvellous sculpting.

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Thanks :upside_down_face:

I do like Procreate a lot, especially since I only need water to wet my sculpting tools and itā€™s a lot easier to create flat surfaces. Due to its relative stiffness, itā€™s also great for adding small details and it also works nice for cloth. However, I find it sometimes a bit hard to use since the putty does not really want to adhere to itself when you mix in your hands. So there is a good chance of it flaking apart when I add small details on a previously hardened surface. Green stuff is more forgiving in that respect. Since I have to use vaseline here, I usually reserve it for the last details. Interestingly, I have the impression that, when dried, Procreate adheres better than green stuff.

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Man I never seen your thread before!! Those conversions are awesome!! Beautiful work done! :shock:

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Thank you, much appreciated! :upside_down_face:

Not much to report here: I did start with an axe-wielding arm, though. I have not attempted hands so far, so a bit of analysis paralysis on that front as I was worried that the wire might make sculpting fingers more difficult. I ended up drilling a tiny hole through the rod (with another piece of wire as none of my drill bits were small enough), that might do the job.

Otherwise, I am having fun with hobgoblins right now. I wish I could post more but that has to wait until the GH competition is over. :smile:

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Nice plasticard work! Thatā€™s a material that still daunts me. Looking forward to seeing where you go with this. Also, epsilon axe = best axe :anvil:

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Gracias! Really love your rendering of this axe on your Dendra panoply sculpt. To bad it did not survive! In fact, it got me thinking of using a few Minoan influences on my future sculpts as well. I mean these guys worshipped bulls like our evil stunties, what could be more appropriate?

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Absolutely! Iā€™d like to see what youā€™d do with some Aegean Bronze Age influence. Itā€™s an awesome and unique aesthetic that sees far too little use in fantasy (let me just drop this link to my topic-appropriate Vanguard warband :tongue:). Iā€™ll definitely revisit the Greek bronze age dwarf idea in future sculpts.

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No updates in a while. After the the last GH, I took a small break from sculpting, only to catch Covid last November. Nothing serious but that left me a bit too tired for a while for a demanding hobby after a day of work. Started doing some sculpting and painting last week again and it feels great :slight_smile:

I used 7th ed dwarf warrior arms as reference. In hindsight, this was a mistake since the arm turned out to be way too oversized for my chorfs. Genius me did the side-by-side comparison only after being done, not sure if it can be salvaged for the original purpose. Anyway, a useful lesson in anatomy for me. Back to the drawing board!

Other than this, a few more less successful attempts at sculpting hats. I find it surprisingly hard to get the basic shape right of anything that is not cylinder-like, any advice from the pros?

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The hand is unreal, the anatomy of the arm as well :boom:

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@Dedled Thanks, your recent sculpts have been hugely inspirational here! I saw that you have sculpted individual nails which looks so much better than the ā€˜sausage fingersā€™ you have on some of the official GW minis.

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Great work on that arm! Very natural muscles and fingers, Iā€™m sure this is one of the best sculpts of a hand gripping a weapon Iā€™ve seen. I have no idea how you genius anatomy sculptors pull off stuff like this! :hatoff:

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I am speechless,
Itā€™s amazing how many people here can model so well.

Greenstuff and I are on a war footing

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Thank you! :smiley:

@Antenor Iā€™ve used an anatomy book as reference here. Bought it for this exact reason some years ago (An Atlas of Anatomy for Artists by Fritz Schider in case you are interested ā€“ it has some really good illustrations; nowhere perfect but for the price (~12.60 Euros here on the German Amazon right now) pretty hard to beat.

@Bessron It really comes down to the tools. I do 90% of my work with a small silicon brush and only use metal tools for details. With metal tools you need to make sure that they are sufficiently lubricated (usually vaseline or water). You can create the illusion of complexity by using small repetitive patterns, some of them are surprisingly easy to pull off. A good example is the chaos dwarf beard, I really love doing those.

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In todayā€™s episode of Anzu Being a Moron you can see him putting a right hand onto a left-hand arm :man_facepalming: I nailed the scale this time, though.

On the bright side, every single of these setbacks pushes me closer to actually start ordering casting utensils to save some of my progress.

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Hey, thatā€™s my arm! :muscle: :wink:

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Long overdue and finally finished (the GS part at least): four converted hobgoblins. I started them for a GH competition last year. I originally did not plan to completely cover the original models (they started out as regular plastic hobgrots) but the bare legs looked weird, so I gave them trousers. Then someone pointed out that they just had four toesā€¦ argh. Shoes it is.


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:heart_eyes: so good dude, they look great

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These hobgrot conversions are marvellous!
Iā€™m especially loving the Scythian caps and the intricately detailed clubs youā€™ve given them, Iā€™m always interested in how people improve upon the basic (miserable) hobgrot models.
Your take on them is very unique!
And I agree with you about the four toes, but I wasnā€™t as clever as you and your idea to give them shoes.
Keep them coming, I want to see more!

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Thank you! :upside_down_face: I have to give credit to @Admiral though ā€“ the Persian theme is shamelessly stolen from his slave drivers while the clubs are inspired by archaeological findings from Mesopotamia.


Source: A MESOPOTAMIAN-ELAMITE BRONZE MACE HEAD

As I have now glorious 8 points worth of hobgoblins (Ravening Hordes), I need a different strategy for the next ones. My current plan and approach here is to sculpt the torso + legs from scratch and create white metal copies of it. For this purpose, I recently bought HTV silicone rubber from Poland along with everything else I need to cast my own models. Key here is to keep things as simple as possible such that I can get away with gravity casting.

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