2018 Summer Charity Raffle
Summer 2018 Charity Army
I wanted to try something a bit different for our fifth charity army. After a few years of commission painting and modeling, I have tried to make sure that the breaks in regular commission work to do the charity projects are also a chance to refresh my palette. With commissions, your ultimate objective is to meet the expectations of the client, whereas the charity projects are all about finding the balance between self expression and "What is going to raise a lot of money?"
I first encountered Creature Caster and their models last year for a very large Tzeentch themed 40k army, and they were immediately responsive to a CC centered charity raffle and even donated some models to the cause.
In the past few months I have had a shift towards very muted palettes that are more reminiscent of oil painting scenes that have indeed been the focus of my own study. On the table top, models have a tendency to encompass a very extreme range of dynamics to make them pop. For these models and my last Kingdom Death commission, I took a more muted approach that lets the skin tones do most of the expression. Not everything has been pushed to the extreme, and if anything its caused me to have to learn how to photograph miniatures a bit differently, its difficult to get all of the nuances without the model appearing flat.
This project also took longer than I planned. Just like last year, I enjoyed a pretty terrific bike wreck on the road that sent me to the ER and quite a bit of whiplash. Taking a little bit of time off didnt seem to help, I later learned that it was a part of thoracic outlet syndrome: essentially, my right hand and arm would swell quite painfully after a small amount of use, particularly in the thumb. It caused quite a bit of slowdown and discontentment on my end. On one hand, I take time off from income generating commission work to do these charity projects, and I do that happily, but with the bike injury it became a much longer project that both delayed the charity as well as delayed my return to regular work on client's projects (who thankfully are very patient and understanding of the circumstances).
A surprise meeting with an SUV slightly delayed this project.
Im very happy with the outcome though, I hope these models raise as much as possible for Doctors Without Borders.
So why arent they based? I fully intended on basing these models, I even bought and paid for them. However, I realized in time that basing them on 40k models would exude them from play in other game systems, and since they arent necessarily 40k/AoS models that this would prove an overall disservice to them. They can always be based, and if a winning donor asked Im sure Id happily base them on an appropriate base for gameplay. But as they are, they are all about the model themselves and Im quite happy and impressed with Creature Caster's production.
Until next time,
-Zach
