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Know No Pear wrote: Hello! Have you taken any training in art or design? Your work is stunning!
Thanks for the positive feedback mate!
I'm the guy who answers emails in the uk, and blogs for the team. I wish I could paint that well!
However, the owner Nuke did not do art at University, some of the studio team did. We have people from all sorts of backgrounds here!
However during training and staff meeting, Nuke does teach about non-model related art theories, and styles: color theories, subtly, color meanings and connotations, etc, etc. We at nuke arts feel it really helps with the hobby, and are always looking for more and more to learn
In the upcoming weeks we have a pretty special project coming up on here: my own personal Pre Heresy Emperor's Children army. The Nuke team will take it from a pretty broken up, uninspiring paint job to a fully painted Nuke master piece! I will update with WIPS, this will hopefully show one of the services we offer at Nuke painting which is stripping (of paint) in order to turn an army into one clients are happy with!
If any body comes down to the Penkridge Wargames Show they will be able to see the army in the flesh (resin?), as well as some rather nice infinity, and level samples. Perhaps a Daemon Prince or two for sale. And I will be able to give out quotes and answer queries! It's free entry so I definitely recommend it, even if just to come keep the Nuke Arts Stand from looking lonely
Again I'd like to remind people of the animosity events I linked previously, as this is another chance to see Nuke Art's work in the flesh, as well as playing some awesome narrative 40k.
Also check out: http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/483676.page This in my opinion is one of the greatest ideas for a 40k event out there, have some fun and help out charity! Nuke Arts will be painting up an awesome Typhus for the gaming/auction as well, profits going to charity!
Finally any queries, hit me up at Ukrep@nukearts.co.uk
Know No Pear wrote: Hello! Have you taken any training in art or design? Your work is stunning!
Thanks for the positive feedback mate!
I'm the guy who answers emails in the uk, and blogs for the team. I wish I could paint that well!
However, the owner Nuke did not do art at University, some of the studio team did. We have people from all sorts of backgrounds here!
However during training and staff meeting, Nuke does teach about non-model related art theories, and styles: color theories, subtly, color meanings and connotations, etc, etc. We at nuke arts feel it really helps with the hobby, and are always looking for more and more to learn
In the upcoming weeks we have a pretty special project coming up on here: my own personal Pre Heresy Emperor's Children army. The Nuke team will take it from a pretty broken up, uninspiring paint job to a fully painted Nuke master piece! I will update with WIPS, this will hopefully show one of the services we offer at Nuke painting which is stripping (of paint) in order to turn an army into one clients are happy with!
If any body comes down to the Penkridge Wargames Show they will be able to see the army in the flesh (resin?), as well as some rather nice infinity, and level samples. Perhaps a Daemon Prince or two for sale. And I will be able to give out quotes and answer queries! It's free entry so I definitely recommend it, even if just to come keep the Nuke Arts Stand from looking lonely
Again I'd like to remind people of the animosity events I linked previously, as this is another chance to see Nuke Art's work in the flesh, as well as playing some awesome narrative 40k.
Also check out: http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/483676.page This in my opinion is one of the greatest ideas for a 40k event out there, have some fun and help out charity! Nuke Arts will be painting up an awesome Typhus for the gaming/auction as well, profits going to charity!
Finally any queries, hit me up at Ukrep@nukearts.co.uk
Peace out guys!
Ah, the work done is so professional, it's really inspiring. Looking at all the minis make me wanna paint so much more! If I ever need a centrepiece for a display I'll be sure to hit you guys up!
Ah, the work done is so professional, it's really inspiring. Looking at all the minis make me wanna paint so much more! If I ever need a centrepiece for a display I'll be sure to hit you guys up!
Thank you! It's feedback like this that inspires us to continue painting!
The head honchos work bench!
busy busy busy! Which is how we like it!
We had a few requests on facebook for a photography tutorial, we wanted to make it as accessible as possible for people. So we used the humble smart phone. We like to pose WIPs taken from Nukes iphone to the facebook, on here and directly to the client so they are always up to date with what's going on! We use a multitulde of media to do this: live, facebook chat, email, whats app? what ever the client wants!
Anyways on to the article, from the keyboard of Nuke:
NUKE PAINTING TIP: Photograph your miniatures with a phone camera (for hobbyists)
Smartphones today come with pretty good built-in camera. I use an iphone to take snapshots of my WIP Because
- tons of photo cropping / text adding and color balancing apps available
- instantly uploaded, no need to hassle with an SD card or transferring the photos to your conputer first
- at 3mega pixel (iphone 3Gs) you can get a decent photo especially when viewed on facebook
Yes yes, the resolution isnt everything, but im just showing it here. By all means, we own a Canon D50 at the studio and its what we use to film / photograph our completed work.
Yes, the quality of the photos arent amazing and you probably wont want to use it to present your 'finishes / official' work. But if your not a pro-painter and not sure what camera to buy.... IMHO get a smartphone!
Now, for those who already own one, heres what you can do to improve your smartphone miniature photography. This is pretty similar to conventional photography, so i will put it in a layman's term and just point out exactly what to do
1. Light: make sure you have enough light. I use 1-2 warm daylight with high wattage output.
2. Shadow diffusion: With light comes shadow. Strong lightsource means more detail on your minis will show, but also strong shadow (and extreme brightness)
You can soften this by building your own soft box. Its easy - get a large empty box, cut holes on the top and the sides and tape some handtowels on them = done. If you wanna see a tutorial for this let me know - i used a homemade softbox even when i started painting as a job.
3. Focus - now, most smartphone comes with the autofocus (and auto balance) feature. For iphones you just tap on the screen - do make sure your miniature is in focus before taking the shot. You can adjust the distance between your phone / mini to get more detail. The closet, the harder to focus. So i place my phone around 6-7 inches away at least, and zoom in. This way, i can even get tiny details like eyes / facial expression with my meager iphone 3gs 3megapixel cam
4. Background. In most my progress pictures, you will see that theres a fuzzy grey background (sometimes discolored), thats the filter of my spray booth.
Anything uniform will work. I prefer grey. White bg will trick your smartphone into thinking that your mini is too dark, so the autobalance feature will bring down the brighness, resulting in a darker photo. Black bg will do the opposite.
You can easily download background pics from the net and print them out. Or use your shirt, or your girlfriend's velvet dress if you are feeling posh. As long as you keep your bakground uniform, and along the mid-tone, your smartphone mini photography result will be enhanced!
5. Photo editing on your smartphone. Now, after youve taken a few best shots. Its time to adjust the balance. I use pic stitcher app to arrange my pics when i want to feature more than one pics in a frame. And Line camera to adjust contrast and add txt.
6 Presentation - this is important. Remember, if your like me amd still using a 2009 era smartphone, well, you gotta remember the fact that the resolution wont be that crisp. So you gotta choose the part you want to present and present them in more than 1 picture, because people arent gonna notice all the details if you dont provide close up shots, especially with 3megapixels no.
So you can zoom in, crop and select the part you wanna show (my fav is the face) and upload that individually. Or you can create a few separate zoom-in pics and stitch them all up with pic-stitcher or any framing app.
This way you dont rely on your audience to zoom in an look at those pixelated details... You blow them up as big as possible and take it to them.
Hope this helps, and as always, you have my thank and respect for reading through this wall of text!!
Cheers Nuke
Be sure to check out our facebook for more tips, and nuke thoughts! There's a few up about washes, subtle paint schemes, nmm, feathering, more to come!
This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 2012/11/08 20:01:26
Slaanesh Champion looks awesome. I've always loved that style of helmet too, it used to be difficult to get hold of but I think the new plastic slannesh fantasy battle kits have a few variants...
Don't forget chaps, Nukearts are providing an awesome first prize for the our painting competitiion, and stuff for 2nd and 3rd placed entries too, at Animosity. To enter the Nukearts Painting Competition simply go to our Campaign Weekend thread and get your ticket to attend...
geordie09 wrote: Slaanesh Champion looks awesome. I've always loved that style of helmet too, it used to be difficult to get hold of but I think the new plastic slannesh fantasy battle kits have a few variants...
Don't forget chaps, Nukearts are providing an awesome first prize for the our painting competitiion, and stuff for 2nd and 3rd placed entries too, at Animosity. To enter the Nukearts Painting Competition simply go to our Campaign Weekend thread and get your ticket to attend...
I've always had a soft spot for that helmet too! Probably because the first few White Dwarfs I got had Paul Sawyer building up a heavily Slaanesh influenced force. If you don't mind going outside GW there's a few variants available from other sources too! (I wanted to do a cult of slaanesh army back in storm of chaos.)
Continuing with the chaos theme, I'll be uploading some recent Chaos Daemon Princes tomorrow! I definately recomend you guys check out Geordies event, we are looking forward to supporting it and rest assured the mini will be all sorts of Nuke-Awesome!
They're all so lovely! Are the daemon princes painted by a different painter than most of the smaller minis? They seem to be of a different yet still astonishing style.
I really love the OSL!
Know No Pear wrote:They're all so lovely! Are the daemon princes painted by a different painter than most of the smaller minis? They seem to be of a different yet still astonishing style. I really love the OSL!
Just got word back from Nuke. 3 Staff worked on this: Nuke Assembled, Another basecoated, a third airbrushed and did about 70% of the work, Nuke returned and did detailing and a few touch ups here and there. He likes to add a personal touch to every project in this way, and having more than one staff on each piece ensures demanding and high, but consistent quality control!
geordie09 wrote:I wonder if anybody would complain if I entered the competition too?
Haha! Personally I think it would be a bad example if you didn't!
More Trolls
Okay guys.... I am not the best painter or modeler in the world, I have a go, slap some paint on, etc etc. However Nuke Arts is redoing one of my armies to make them into a force to be proud of, this I feel is something we need to highlight and showcase on here! If you have any old forces you want a repaint given to, hit me up at: ukrep@nukearts.co.uk
So the humble begins of of the rebirth of my poor broken, mispainted marines:
A complete strip of 2500 points, gaps filled on my vehicles, bases removed for nicer bases to come, left shoulder pads removed to be replaced with forgeworld ones!
I will search through the Nuke archives for an example of when we did this before, for a used Eldar army a client purchased off Ebay Stay tuned!
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2012/11/14 21:21:42
An example of a largely second hand army, that was largely warped, and thickly covered with paint that the Nuke Studio restored and worked upon!
Nuke Tip European Flesh from Nuke himself
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Nuke Painting Tip: Euro-style flesh, and implication on a higher gaming standard miniature.
Ok - this is completely my own interpretation and generalization of the European style of painting NOT caucasian flesh tone - the terminology "euro-flesh" derived from my own observation.
From my experience, it seems that there are more single/display standard minis from Europe (Poland / Italy / France / Spain) whereas we see a lot more army commissions coming out from US / UK. So of course when I look for inspiration, I often look at European artists' works (GD entries, EuroMili entries). This article is about how to implement the style, simplify it, and apply to your higher gaming standard miniatures (non-competition entry minis)
Of course you may argue that there's plenty of god-like painters outside of Europe, and you are right, there's plenty indeed!
Euro Flesh: My own definition
- Full dynamic of tones: shadow, mid tone, highlight and extreme highlight.
- Color nuance: with purple / yellow and sometimes green/blue, even for human flesh.
- Blending: this depends on the artist, often we can see that the colors aren't seamlessly blended on purpose, which gives a distinctive style.
- Eyes: not just a black dot on white... usually composed of more than two colors, with shinning highlight in the middle.
- Very minimal use of black and white
Application (how I do it)
The flesh on the sample picture took me about... 15-20 minutes to paint, using successive layering technique, with the aid of glaze medium to help 'feather' the edges. I used Creative Arts size 1 for the body / face / eyes / hair.
Colors I used, from dark to light:
- Panzer Ace Shadow Flesh (or GW Dark Flesh)
- Vallejo Model Color Purple
- GW Bugman's Glow
- GW Cadian Flesh tone
- Panzer Ace Highlight Flesh
- White
Why not using all GW, or all Vallejo?
Because Panzer Ace medium flesh is too orangey for me, and GW Bugman's glow and Cadian flesh tone are what we use for other standards too (so we remain the overall consistency amongst our standards)
Steps:
1. Preferably prime with white. Not that this matters... usually the model will be airbrushed for other colors (so sometimes we start off with a green face.
2. Light layer of Bugman's Glow - 70% coverage, not too thick.
3. Shading with diluted Dark Flesh + purple around the shaded areas like the side of the pelvis / navel / under the cheekbones and eyes. Repeat until you get the shading depth you desire.
4. Highlight with Cadian flesh tone + Bugman glow + glaze medium. Any wet pallet users can jump for joy here! (not me though) - repeat this 2-3 times on the raised areas, and adding more Cadian Flesh tone in the mix after each layer... like this
Cadian Flesh Tone = CFT
Bugman's Glow = BG
Glaze Medium = GM Flesh Highlight = FH
White = W
5. Adding additional shading, if needed.
Using super thinly diluted dark flesh + purple, I drop a tiny drop of the mixture around the side of the nose, mouth, belly botton, and glaze the side of the pelvis area again lightly.
6. Repeat the layer 6, with Flesh highlight + white + Glaze Medium... what I did was dotting this on as extreme highlight to imitate the reflection on shiny surfaces like the upper part of the lips, the tip of the nose, and tiny dabs around the stomach.
Done!
I hope this is helpful! If you're reading this part it means you've conquered yet another wall of text, so well done!
After so many requests - here is one way I add blood / gore to a miniature. I wouldn't call this a 'recipe' because once you have acquired the ingredient, it's done.
First you gotta run to the closest hobby store and get this:
- Tamiya X-27 Clear Red (クリヤーレッド)
Really simple... X-27 is a clear gloss enamel based paint, dries clear and glossy. It could be diluted with enamel thinner (although I don't use it) or turpentine. Not that it needs diluting anyway.
The paint has almost no opacity, meaning whatever it covers will be visible through the layer of thick red goo... that's when the fun start!
Application(s)
Oh there are so many ways to apply blood! Use your imagination and unleash your wildest gore-dream. Here's what I use to apply X-27 on my minis
1. SLASH!!!! *splatter splatter splatter*
Load a brush full of X-27 and simply use your mouth to blow really hard
2. *drip* *drip*
Use a toothpick or a small brush and apply directly on the floor
3. *ARGGHHHH MY ARMMM* - *Smearing blood everywhere*
Big, bristly brush or a Q-tip .... smear it on whatever you want
OK - I will continue with more gory applications in the next episode: Water-based blood.
Have fun, and if you find this useful, please like, comment, and share it!