Hi all! As we're approaching the weekend, I thought it might be nice to share a mini project for you - painting challenge to help keep you busy. Brief: Paint a model with realistic battle scars and wear. This will enhance your skills in weathering and creating narrative details. Difficulty: ⭐⭐⭐☆ ☆ (Medium) Challenges: Precision and keeping your hand steady when painting the highlights on your scratches. Being consistent with your highlight placement - irregular placement will make your battle damage look off. Tips: - Use a brush with a good fine tip - it doesn't have to be a tiny brush, but one with longer bristles will help you with keeping a straight thin line  - Be super light with your touch and use only the very tip of the brush to get the thinnest lines - As Bob Ross used to say "2 hairs and some air"! - Use a model that doesn't have sculpted battle damage so you can see the effect at it's best.  Done right you won't notice that the damage effect is painted on a smooth undamaged surface. - If you're going to be glazing shadows and highlights onto your model, you can do them after you've painted the battle damage onto the base colours and it will soften the effect of the damage a bit and make it blend with the model better.  you can then do a second pass of damage to create some more extreme contrasting elements.  Step-by-Step: 1. Paint the model: It sounds over-simplistic, but first you need to paint the model to a finished level with your choice of colours.  Include shadows and highlights.   2. Damage Areas: Using a fine brush, paint small lines and chips in a dark colour to represent scratches and dents.  I recommend Vallejo armour brown, or a similar dark brown colour.  you could use a darker shade of the base colour if you prefer, but a dark brown is usually a good bet. 3. Highlight Damage: Add lighter colours to the edges of the dark lines to create depth. This should be a lighter version of whatever colour you have used for the base colour of the item to be damaged  Avoid pure white or your highlights will be too stark.   4. (OPTIONAL) Rust and Wear: Apply brown and orange washes to metal areas to simulate rust. 5. Finishing Touches: Drybrush, stipple or dot metallic colours lightly over the edges to create a worn effect. This is more useful if you're painting something that is supposed to look like painted metal, so it'll look like the paint has chipped off and broken away.

When I first started my miniature range, I made a set of 4 multi part heroes - a wizard, barbarian, fighter and rogue. Each of them had 3 heads, 3 left arms and 3 right arms. When I came to get them produced, the manufacturing costs were prohibitive because it was based on individual components and mould cavities so I had to pare it back. I changed to making dynamic posed hero miniatures without the options, that were cast in resin. But these frequently required parts to be removed and keyed to facilitate the moulding process. When I later started selling the STL files, I sold the files cut up like I was using for my resin masters, 3D printing customers were baffled by this and couldn't get their heads around multi part models to the point where many didn't even know what glue to use to fix the bits together. So I went back to doing single piece miniatures and they went down quite well. Later on I found those 4 original minis and decided to release them. They instantly became best sellers and I never once got a complaint about them. So Multi Part models tend to go down better with customers if they have options. Now some time later I started releasing Level Up Heroes - one body for a Noob, another for a Veteran of the same class, and then finally the Epic version - see the pics for some examples). Each one had a ball socket for the head and at the wrists. I had a whole library of heads and weapon options that were all interchangeable. Each month, I made a male and female of each class along with a bunch of new accessories. These sold well, but were a drain on me trying to design this progressive upgrade and make them all cross compatible. So each month, my output was just these 6 bodies and the various new heads and weapons etc that I was making. (On a tangent, I will probably be returning to these soon to expand the range). In the same 1 month window, I also made the entire contents of the first image by making myself a modular collection of different leg poses, torso poses, heads, weapons etc, and essentially kitbashing the whole lot. I subsequently spent a few months expanding this group into a full army and released it all as a Kickstarter project that made me over £30k.

How often do you see companies offering the same miniature in 32mm, 40mm, 50mm, 75mm and 150mm scales? Its become a lot more common since the advent of 3D printing, and in fact before consumer 3D printing this phenomenon was actually unheard of! The fact is that you cannot produce the same model in multiple scales by simply changing the size that it prints at, because scale is sculpted into the model. So what do I mean when I say "Scale"? With table top miniatures we're typically dealing in a set range of relative scales - this is not to be confused with modelling scales that are more precise and use a scale ratio such as 1:72 or 1:56. In wargaming miniatures, we typically deal in 6mm, 10mm, 15mm, 20mm, 25mm, 28mm, Heroic 28mm, 32mm, 54mm and 75mm. This is measured with the model in a T pose from the bottom of the foot to the eyeline of a standard human character. That's not to say that you can't have characters smaller or larger than that, but the level of detail on them should be relative and look consistent across a range. The image below shows our Captain Zed's Mercenary Company set - the characters are all individualised and have their own personalities and a variety of different body types and height differences, yet the scale is clearly uniform and they obviously belong in the same set. 54mm scale and up tend to be reserved for display pieces, whilst historical gaming is usually between 15mm-28mm. Games-Workshop pioneered the Heroic 28mm scale with miniatures that were 28mm scale in size but have comic book style exaggerations in the limb, head, hand and head sizes - rescale a heroic 28mm scale miniature to actual human size and it looks insane, but it reads great on the table and paints well so it became popular. In recent years we've seen a bit of a popularity shift more towards 32mm scale as a gaming standard because you can still get good detail but without having to comically exaggerate the features of the model. They also provide a nicer painting experience whilst not looking entirely out of place with 28mm miniatures. Everything we produce is by default sculpted at 32mm scale, with just a few exceptions with some of our display pieces. We can rescale them to 28mm for you by request without any significant losses as its not a huge leap, but trying to reduce them far beyond that is a big ask.

We've had a flurry of new members recently who I suspect have joined as a result of buying in to the sculpting course. I'd like to say a thank you to everyone for your support and thank you all for finding your way here. I want this to be an engaging community where we can all share work, talk about projects and help each other to develop skills and understanding of the various aspects surrounding the hobby and the miniatures industry as a whole. In the meantime though, please head over to the pinned post 📌and introduce yourself so we can all get to know each other and get started on this journey together! Oh, one last thing - I'd love to know what content you're hoping to find here and if there are any burning questions that you need answering (no, not that question...that one's for your doctor! 🔥😅) . Comment below and help me to tailor the content here to your wants and needs!

Hi, thanks for coming! I'm just starting up my Skool community so I'm going to be inviting people in and trying to build this community up. If you've arrive here and are wondering why there's not much going on, this is why. I'm working on my first proper zbrush sculpting course right now (check it out here https://dankelly1.gumroad.com/l/uxser) and it will launch on the 15th September 2025 and I'd love for this community to be a hub for like minded people who want to learn about the full ecosystem of miniatures. Whether you're doing this for relaxation and mindfulness or you want to turn miniature sculpting into a career and free yourself from the shackles of your 9-5 job, I'll be here to help you every step of the way! Please post an introduction and let us know who you are, what you do for a living, what level your miniature experience is at, and what skills you're looking to develop. Oh, and where you are in the world - it would be great to organise some in-person meetups if we start getting groups of people with common geography! Everyone is in the same boat so don't be shy! Oh, and if you had to pick one and banish one - Lord of the Rings or Starwars?! 😉