Issue 53 - April 2020
HEROIC SCALE Monthly Miniature Magazine
RON HAWKINS
The Reaper’s Minis Kickstarters and Conventions
DUNCAN RHODES Games Workshop and the Online Painting Academy
TOM MASON
Mini Sculpting Super Show
BRUVA ALFABUSA
If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device
Word Bearer
Letter from the Editor
Well met, painters, sculptors, players — miniature enthusiasts of all kinds! Like the rest of us here at Heroic Scale: Monthly Miniature Magazine, you may be taking this time in quarantine to catch up on a backlog box of unpainted minis, assemble that Kill Team you haven’t had time to before, or learn something new with an online class. It doesn’t have to be miniatures related, we won’t judge! If you can meet with others online, you may be using Roll20, or D&D Heroic Scale
Beyond’s new Discord bot to hold long-distance campaigns.
Some of you may have already been doing this, but to those of you who are exploring the technology for the first time, remember! Even if your DM can’t see the tabs you have open, he’ll know if you haven’t been paying attention! You may be providing the hot pockets and soda for yourself these coming months, but respect the work they put into the campaign whether it’s digital or analog! Like every other outlet under the sun
in these trying times, we want all of you beautiful people to stay safe. Wash all that paint off your hands, and wear two thin coats outside. If Nurgle hasn’t ended the world by then, we hope you look forward to beholding the art and artists we’ll be bringing to you in May. Cheers.
The Mini Maker Ron Hawkins
The art director of Reaper Miniatures on process, production, & Reapercon.
Two Thin Coats Duncan Rhodes
The Chaos God of paint talks about his time with Games Workshop, Warhammer TV, and his new series.
If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device Bruva Alfabusa
Bringing life to the world of Warhammer 40K with 2nd millennium tech.
Mini Sculpting Super Show Tom Mason Creator Corner
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Contents
The Mini Maker Interview by Will Friedle
Ron Hawkins of Reaper Miniatures on process, production, & Reapercon.
Reaper’s 25th Anniversary Tara the Silent, sculpted by Bobby Jackson, painted by Erin Hartwell
Heroic Scale
So, just to start, what exactly do you do for Reaper? I’m the art director, so I get to work with the sculptors and painters to design and create all the fun toys that we make.
That sounds like a great job! Now, how do you come up with your ideas?
Well, it’s kind of like throwing darts. You just sort of... you have an idea, you try it out, you see how it works. Obviously, we have a lot of requests from social media and our forums. People asking for dragon-people or cat-people, or whatever it may be.
Roleplayers are our biggest group of customers. We want to make sure they’ve got everything they need to cover all their bases, but even then it’s really tough.
There’s a little niche, a lane we like to stay in, but we like to push every now and then to see if we can do some new stuff.
Very quickly, just walk us through the process. From, “Here’s the idea we have” to “Here’s our final mini”. How do you get there?
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Couple different ways we could do it. If we decide, for example, we’re gonna do a bard.
At that point, we can go one of two directions. We can get a piece of concept art created, contact our concept artist, Izzy Talin Collier, and say “Izzy, we need a bard.” I give her my input, say, the bard needs a sword, a jaunty hat, whatever it may be. Then Izzy will design it, and once we have the art, we’ll send that to the sculptor, who will pretty much directly translate it from the art.
The other way we could go, I could just contact the sculptor directly without concept art and say “I need you to create a bard, make sure it has a jaunty hat and a sword and then just... hope for the best.
When somebody opens their package and they have their mini in front of them, how long did it take you guys — from deciding you wanted to create that bard to your customer getting the mini?
For the Bones line, it takes months. Several months. From the time that we create it and sculpt it — the molds are made in China and then shipped back over here. For metal minis, we ‘ve turned figures around in a couple weeks. The sculpture will come in, and we will press it (or print it if it’s a digital sculpt). We’ll make the molds here, and can have production ready in days.
For metal minis, we’ve turned figures around in a couple of weeks.” The Mini Maker
Do you guys ever go to an artist and have them paint it so you can see it exactly the way you want it to be done? Or are you done once you come up with the plastic mini? We do get things painted, for example, I have a piece here (see previous). This is one of our anniversary models, Tara the Silent, and the one we have in our office was painted by Rhonda Bender. She took this and ran with it. Pieces like this we’ll use for marketing, box art, catalogues, advertisements, and then they’ll go to our gallery where people can take tours and check out the collection.
So, we are working on the Pathfinder Red Dragon (see right), which has been a ton of fun and hopefully I won’t screw it up too badly. Now, it came in multiple parts when we got it, had to be assembled, so my question for you: At what size mini do you decide it needs to be broken into parts? And then, how do you decide where to break it up? Well, the Pathfinder Red Dragon was based on the Pathfinder Core Rulebook illustration by Wayne Renolds. We knew it’s a dynamic piece, and it wouldn’t do it justice to make the dragon a flat figure. Taking the dragon, we know that we can’t have the arm in the way, the head with all those spikes, you have to take these things apart to be able to make a mold. Imagine if you have a toy soldier, and you squish it between two slices of bread. When you tear the bread apart, if any is stuck to the model, that’s Heroic Scale
called an undercut. That would destroy the mold, so you have to build in a way that undercuts don’t happen.
That bizarre analogy actually explained everything perfectly. Is there anything else that you guys are working on? Coming up with? About to roll out that you can tell us about? That’s not too top-secret. The readers at home won’t be able to see it, but what I have here is the Roc for our Bones IV project, a digital print, actually. We had parts of this printed and shown at our Kickstarter campaign party, just not assembled. Now that we have this put together, we’re kind of tickled with it. If you wanted to paint it, all the raised feathers? You could drybrush the heck out of this thing.
Well, thank you so much for helping us out, A) here at Heroic Scale. You have given us so much stuff; we love your products and use them all the time. Absolutely incredible stuff. We hope maybe you can get out here to Los Angeles some time! Maybe we can get to you guys in Texas, since you just told us about the Hall of Fame there, which we definitely want to check out. And we have Reapercon, we’d love to have you guys and all your readers down for that.
I’m sure we’ll be doing a lot of stuff with you in the future, because it’s been incredible. Ron Hawkins, thank you.
Right: The Pathfinder Red Dragon mini as painted by MGM Painting.
The figure is about 4” tall, with a wingspan of 6”.
The Mini Maker
TWO THIN COATS
Talking Shop with
Duncan Rhodes Interview by David Nordquist
First off, it’s been a long time since I’ve painted anything consistently, and the last time I’ve painted a miniature was…
Are you saying you play your games but don’t paint the models?
Well, you said it, and I didn’t disagree. What would you recommend to a person who has a desire to paint, but who doesn’t currently — not because they don’t want to, but because of time? I know that sounds like the language of excuses but we don’t speak that language. (laughs) Well, pick an army that you can drybrush really fast. Necrons: spray ‘em silver, drybrush, there you go.
What if I was a Chaos player, and not daemons, ‘cause that’s not the same thing.
Okay, well, if you’re a Chaos player then you’ve kind of shot yourself in the foot a little bit, I’m afraid. (laughs) It’s fine, it’s fine. It’s all up to the color scheme you pick. Do Iron Warriors; you’ll fly through them.
Duncan, you’re a good person, and I can see why they chose you to do the job you do. Heroic Scale
I’m very lucky to do the job I do. I certainly didn’t go into the studio with any of this in mind. I was really just in the right place at the right time. My schedule was free, and we wanted to experiment with doing a painting video tutorial that went into the “how to paint your miniatures” book, so I ended up doing it and it just sort of naturally evolved from there. I got along very well with the guy who was directing it, Roger Yates, who is still my director now, and we were just a team that worked really well. So it was very natural.
So, how long have you been painting?
I have been painting since I was eleven, so that’s… 21 years, now?
Are you asking me or telling me?
Oh, I don’t know. It feels like a long time. It’s hard to remember a time when I wasn’t painting.
So pretty much, you’re always painting, painting in your sleep. How many models would you say you’ve painted, if you had to guess? I would say… there’s definitely more than 20. I think it’s in the thousands?
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Below: A converted Vampire Lord figure from Games Workshop’s Warhamer Fantasy - Age of Sigmar
I like to think of him as a
roaming warrior hunting for the ultimate challenge.” Duncan
Well, it’s gotta be in the thousands, because mine is between five hundred and a thousand, and I haven’t painted a lot. Seriously, I painted a hundred cultists in one sitting. It was like eight hours. That’s incredible. That’s something to be proud of. That’s the kind of thing my friend Chris Peach would do; he’s all about the speed painting. I wish I knew, I don’t know how many Space Marines I’ve painted, and even then how many Ultramarines.
That’s probably between five hundred and a thousand for you. Probably even two thousand, three thousand. It might have been a whole chapter.
What amazes me about that is that you might not even be kidding. You actually might be serious and telling the truth to me right now.
Heroic Scale
I really don’t know! I’ve painted a lot of Space Marines. When you paint them in the studio, they’re not “yours,” so you don’t get attached to them — once you’re done, you’re done and you’re onto the next thing. You kind of forget how many you’ve done.
There wasn’t actually a definitive number there, so if I were to say you would get a quid (£1, or ~$1.25 at the time of writing) for every model you’ve painted, how many models do you think you’ve painted? Enough to send me on holiday somewhere very nice, for a very long time.
So, what do you like painting the best?
I really like painting Nurgle’s stuff, ‘cause it’s really easy to do the effects that you see, all the horrible guts and innards. One of my favorite videos that we’ve done was painting Orghotts Daemonspew, the Maggot Lord. On the painting videos, what I find most fulfilling is if we do something
really complicated, but make it look really easy, and that model’s got loads of that kind of thing done on it, especially on the maggots themselves.
You said “make it look easy”; is it actually easy?
Yeah! It genuinely is. Once you understand how many thin layers to apply and how to thin your paint. It all pieces together rather easily, so a lot of the content that I think is useful out of our videos is that you literally see that. That gives it an advantage over a photograph, in which you don’t see that kind of thing. We’re always trying to make it achievable, looking for those easy techniques to allow people to get the results that they want. Painting something that you’re really proud of shouldn’t just be something a small group can do; everyone should be able to do this stuff, if they want it.
Okay, what’s your favorite army? For 40k.
I would say, the Imperial Knights, but I also really like
Duncan’s warband of Stormcast Eternals from Warhammer Fantasy Age of Sigmar
the Death Watch. There’s a lot of different bits in each that I like — I like the style and story of the Imperial Knights, but rather than the Knights themselves I prefer them with their supporting infantry, to get that whole culture and appearance on the tabletop.
Is it also because the Knight is one big model and it’s “easier” to paint?
Oh, no, no! I think it’s amazing that it’s easy to paint, and I think that’s an example of a kit that’s been really beautifully designed to make it easy for the painter. You can keep all the armor separate, spray the scouts in silver, do your washes, drybrushes, stick the armor on, and finish in whatever color scheme you want. It’s a much, much easier model to paint than it looks, but I also just think they look great. I really like them and think they’re cool; big giant robots. I’ve known about Knights in the storyline for years and years; to see them developed was really exciting, and I love their heraldic designs.
I don’t disagree. Next Star Wars’ Imperial Stormtroopers from Star Wars Legion, by Fantasy Flight Games
question: that was your favorite army to paint, what’s your favorite army to play? Imperial Knights because you get to stamp all over things. I also really like playing with the Astra Militarum, because I love that the average Guardsman is a bit rubbish, but they have the potential to do something amazing. So when one of them shoots that Melta gun that blows up Mortarion, that’s amazing and hilarious. I find them really fun to play because of that.
Painting and playing: what would you say are the percentages of painting vs playing that you do personally? I would say it’s about eightyfive to ninety percent painting for me, fifteen to ten percent playing. I mostly play with my friends on Sunday evenings, we’ve been doing a gaming group that’s been running for something like fifteen years now. The various Warhammers are a common thing we play, so that’s when I tend to play the most. It’s after work, and it’s on Warhammer Live as well, but that’s the most frequent gaming I get. For painting, I do that most
nights.
I can see that, that makes a lot of sense. I really do love painting.
Open narrative or match play, what’s your favorite? Narrative, I think, because for me what makes Warhammer so unique is its storyline. Going back to my Imperial Knights example, I like the narrative of it. I’m not picking these things for competitive reasons, or they’re just what I have. I have liked creating the stories behind it for the characters, the units. Like, the men-at-arms that are subservient to particular Knight house, or particular Knights. I like the organization, I like playing in the fantasy that the general, being the lead Knight, he’s the one who gets the honor of charging first.
I like playing with those kinds of constraints — it makes the game lots of fun for me and really brings it to life. I also like that it causes stories amongst my gaming group that we remember for years and years and years. That makes it more than just a game for me.
Games Workshop’s Imperial Knight Warglaive, painted in the colors of the knight House Griffith by Duncan Rhodes.
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They’re all designed to be easy for the painter, and you get to stamp all over things.”
So next, out of all the actors and personalities out there, which one do you get compared to the most?
Are there certain colors that you would consider “beginner colors” versus more advanced colors to work with?
People compare me a lot to Bob Ross. Talking about happy little Chaos Warriors, little accidents. I think it’s because we try to make a friendly, welcoming, atmosphere about it which is what you want. I want everyone to feel like they can take part. A large part of my job is getting that personality across, so Roger was certainly very keen on making sure that happened when we started doing this. It was quite wooden for a bit, but I hope people understand now that the personalities behind the camera — we love this stuff and we want people to be able to experience and enjoy it.
I would consider yellow and white armies to be tougher to do. It’s not universal; things like skeletons are white but they’re very easy to do. If you were trying to get a smooth white like on power armor, that’s a bit trickier. It’s not as tricky as it used to be, certainly, but that’s worth bearing in mind. It’s easier to paint an Ultramarine or a Blue Angel if Space Marines are your thing. Or a Dark Angel, indeed, rather than a White Scar or Imperial Fist, but it’s not impossible. What we try to cover in our daily videos is the technique, which is still the same kind of thing. It’s just that, on the brighter colors, mistakes show up a little bit more. It’s all about neatness.
If you were to give somebody, a first-time painter, first-time hobbyist advice for getting into painting, what would be something that you would say to them?
I would begin by painting the thing that you think looks really cool, that you like the most. Failing that, go for one of the starter sets, like Dark Imperium, for example. You want to use spray primer, ideally, for the smooth coat, and then develop an understanding about using a palette to control your paint, to thin it down of course, and to apply it smoothly and thinly like that. If you do it like that, you’ll get a better result in the end. That’s the key thing, an understanding of how to get paint up to the right consistency, and then how to apply it.
Is there something that is particularly difficult for you, in terms of painting?
Yeah, actually. Weirdly, I find painting black power armor very difficult, which is why I don’t have a massive Death Watch army. (laughs) It’s quite a bit. My favorite Space Marine chapters — I like Blood Angels, I really like Black Templars, and I like Death Watch the most. Two out of three are wearing black power armor, and I always know somebody else is collecting Blood Angels so I don’t want to do them at the same time. I am working on ways to make it easier while retaining the black, because the trouble is I tend to highlight it too much, it goes too gray. Once we’ve cracked it, I think you’ll probably see it on the Tip of the Day.
Two Thin Coats
Heroic Scale
Text to Speech
EMPEROR
Bruva Alfabusa Brings the 42nd Millennium to Life
For our readers who might not be in the know, tell us about If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device. So, If the Emperor had a Text-to-Speech Device, which gets called “Text-to-Speech Emperor” or “TTSE” for short is based in the Warhammer 40k universe. The premise is, “after ten millennia on life support on the Golden Throne, what if 2nd millennium tech once more allowed him to command the Imperium?”
Now that Games Workshop is moving forward with the story in 40k, how has that affected your timeline in TTSE? Well you have to understand: we began this twisted fanfiction in the first place because the story hadn’t been moving. Aside from the video games, 40K lore had been more static than the God-Emperor’s skeleton at least since the 90s. So on the one hand the changing direction of the official material has forced us to change the script to intersect with those events. You’ll notice that in earlier episodes there was a running joke about dissing the Ultramarines (ultra-smurfs) and cutting Roboute Gulliman, their Primarch, off of life support.
As of Psychic Awakening, Gulliman is now a central figure in the new direction for 40k’s story, so we can’t kill him anymore and have had to drop that thread entirely.
New models have also expanded the lore of the ‘verse and the cast we can employ. For the longest time, we only had the vaguest ideas about the Adeptus Custodes, the only minis were from the 80s. In 2018 we suddenly had a whole army’s worth to choose from! And we grabbed as many as we could for Kitten and Magnus’ army-building exercise in episode twenty-seven. On the other hand, recent reveals have also made for glorious coincidences with the content we’ve created. In TTSE, Ephrael Stern is going to be relevant in episode twenty-nine and onward, which we’d planned for months. We teased in episode twenty-five that we were planning on playing her as a fight-obsessed Dragon Ball Z simile.
Evidently, Games Workshop had the same idea! Her new model was teased just a few days ago. The dynamic pose, the screaming, the flying hair? It is really uncanny how close it looks to what we had in mind for her.
Spoilers, much? Sometimes real life Text to Speech Emperor
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The jumping pose, the screaming face, the flying hair? It’s really uncanny how close she looks to what we had in mind.”
Above: Ephrael Stern’s new model, realeased by Games Workshop for the Psychic Awakening event. Right: Ephrael Stern as she appears in episode twenty-five of Text to Speech Emperor, demanding food from what she thinks are Eldar Harlequins.
Heroic Scale
gets written into the episodes. How often does that come up, and what’s your take on it? Well I am gonna start near the middle of the project and then talk about more recent stuff, keep the order of events right and the chroniclers at TvTropes happy.
that team. It got so bad that Earndil had to actually fire on his own commander to give me a fighting chance, and at the end of the episode we had to pull an Emperor-ex-Machina to even let the Inquisition survive.
What are your thoughts on sponsorships on Youtube?
ThunderPsyker, the voice actor for the Adeptus Custodes known as Little Kitten, and Dr White, who provides voices for a number of characters in the show; I thought they were kinda cute together, right? So I put together a quick short to mess with the two of them. I showed the script to a couple of the others, and it quickly mutated into Dr White’s character (Commander Shadowsun of the Tau) breaking up with Little Kitten and shattering his poor feline heart.
So I just got an offer to advertise RAID Shadow Legends for $10,100, which is an ungodly amount of money for a single 60 second ad. It is understandable why people take them on.
I am also gonna clarify: this isn’t what happened for the next BROTRIP episode. The final draft was finished August 18th, 2019, and had nothing to do with the Coronavirus epidemic.
However, it would also leave the series with a permanent scar cast in the form of a 2018 phone game. One that’d fester like fruit left in my kitchen. My patrons would suddenly be paying to be advertised at, and I’d contribute to something that annoys me as a consumer.
More recently, we have been letting memes and other current events slip into scripts. Magnus the Red’s plans revolve around “Making the Imperium Great Again”, stuff like that.
We’ve talked a lot about the story and characters, how often do you play the game itself, and what are your experiences with it?
Recently, I have been getting into the Necromunda gang war side-game. I play a Genestealer Cult, and one of my friends plays Redemptionists. My Acolyte Hybrid was turned into a pathetic, screaming paste faster than he could say “please stop bullying me.”
That has actually been about right for my experience on the tabletop on the whole. There is a huge battle between the Inquisition and Daemons of Chaos in episode twenty-six part one, Hateful Feud at Khaine’s Gate. We based the script of that battle on a game I played against Earndil Slartibartfast. You can actually tell how bad I am by the mistakes the Inquisition made, since I was playing
I won’t though, because I feel it’d seriously mess with the series’ “immersion” if that makes sense? I don’t want to signal that I am somehow superior by rejecting this offer. A lot of my friends would’ve taken it in a heartbeat because it’d pay a years’ worth of rent. Hell, if I did take this offer, it would contribute massively to the series’ budget.
The massive privilege of being able to reject offers like these lies squarely with the fact my Patreon has been consistently able to fund both my existence and the channel. So, uh, yeah, thanks for giving me that privilege, every single person who’s been a patron of mine since 2014. Crowdfunding is nice.
When do you think we can expect the next episode? You know, I get that question all the time. I also know that I am terrible at scheduling, we even made fun of it in episode twenty-seven at the end, with the Emperor’s comments on “real world” time. I make no promises, except to say that we are definitely working on it.
Text to Speech Emperor
Creator Corner
TOM MASON
Mini Sculptor, Host of The Mini Sculpting Super Show, and Avid Minis Fan.
Heroic Scale
On Sketching About a month ago I decided to start drawing everyday. Only a small sketch in a sidebar or in my Sketch Wallet (seriously, get one of those if you love drawing). The main point was to get back into the doodle mindset where I could just draw with anytime that was available. I’m absolutely loving it! There are two main results I’ve noticed so far. First, a more consistent style begins to surface. Second, a confidence in putting pencil to paper and simply drawing. This has been an invaluable practice in helping me push past freezing up while sculpting. So while I do plan to write and post more about sculpting and miniature, for a while I’m going to be posting these daily-ish drawings as well. It will be a nice encouragement when I look back and see what can be done by doing just a little each day.
Painting Techniques
Bobby Jackson, a prolific sculptor at Reaper Miniatures, showed me a new dipping method for painting miniatures at ReaperCon. I completely forgot to take a photo of my first victims —I mean— experiments before the dip so I’ll snap a shot on the next round.
I’ll just need to make sure to pull a bit more dip off next time. The also need to sit for 24 hours before applying the dullcoat, which takes a bit of patience if you’ve been dying to paint them for a while already. If they turn out, I’ll have a great method to finally realize my dream of painting my two sets of Hero Quest!
Sculpting Digitally
With everyone getting their hands on 3D printers, demand for miniature designers to be able to use 3D modelling tools like ZBrush, Blender, and Maya has really gone up. I’ve been getting a handle on ZBrush, myself, and while it’s a versatile, intuitive tool there’s still moments here and there where I don’t know what the optimal solution to a problem is. It took me the longest time to figure out how to take advantage of boolean tools in the program. There are tools and functions where I think, “yes, this is just like how I would approach it if I was sculpting my clay”, and others where there’s no direct physical analogue.
I taught a handful of classes at last year’s Reapercon. The first was an intro to sculpting session, which was followed by one focusing on sculpting heads and faces, based on the resective Mini Sculpting Super Show episodes. It turns out that many people there had also been watching my videos on Youtube, and one of the students in the face sculpting class had also entered a piece into Reaper’s MSPO competition. His piece, a parking lot diorama covered in graffiti also featured a miniature figure — a biker-jacket clad character that he had only managed to put together because he found my videos.
The character’s face was completely obscured, behind sunglasses and a bandanna and it turns out he was in the face sculpting class in the first place because he had no idea where to start on it. The diorama itself was still strong enough to take silver, only barely missing gold. I’m looking forward to seeing what he brings next year.
Teaching at Reapercon 2019
I’m really happy with how my first experiments look so far.
Creator Corner
53 04 2020