Miniatures From The Art of Ian Miller

It’s been a while and I’ve been distracted with other things. But I have done a little work so I thought I’d share what I’ve done so far after some very gentle persuasion from Gerry on the uHH – https://youtu.be/M1vmrtaRR5c

The idea was to use thinned Contrast paints to try to get some of the mono-colour style from Ian Millar’s art. I don’t consider this following miniatures finished, but I have black rimmed the bases for a better presentation.

This is the most complete mini I’ve done so far and I’m mostly happy with it. The dogs could probably do with a slight orange highlight and maybe a few bits and bobs could do with some more work.

The Fishgog guy is definitely the most complete here, whereas his friend really needs more work. Who said trying to minic Ian’s style was easy?

The following are the least finished and need more work, particularly the guy in white.

So that’s all I’ve done so far. The vast majority of the models are unassembled and still in their bags. To some extent I got a little stuck and just put the whole thing to one side at the start of the year while I worked other things.
Digging these miniatures out and writing this blog entry has gave me the urge to at least get the rest of the models assembled and give them some basic colours. I really love these models and with the detailing on them even a basic paint job shows off the details marvellously.

I just need to finish my current other project first but hopefully it won’t be as long a wait until the next post here.

Rather than work on everything at once I thought I’d start on a handful of single piece models first. That way I’m more free to experiment on the simple models before I move onto the more complex models which will involve pinning and lots more glue.

So after cleanup and mixing the glue for the base I primed the miniatures white.

As it was far too cold to prime with a spray can outside I used two coats of Vallejo brush on primer.

I then covered everything with undiluted Nuln oil to get the pre-shading.

I then drybrushed everything with white to bring the models back and add contrast.

Thats the models prepared. I plan on using contrast paint, well thinned, and mostly as inks rather than for their contrasty powers to lay on translucent colour to try to reference Ian Miller’s style in his drawings.

I want to paint all of the miniatures as a matching set so that means a similar base.

Looking through some of Ian Millar’s art I quite like this idea from the graphic novel The City written by James Herbert.

I’d heard and seen a technique of mixing pva glue and super glue on a base to get weird organic results so I tried that on a spare empty base then, using diluted contrast paints I came up with this test base.

I was quite happy with this so I pressed on and added the glue mix to the first section of miniatures I was to work on.

Earlier this year I backed the Osmoticmeld Kickstarter – https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1520354196/osmoticmeld/description and my miniatures were delivered in November.

Below are a few of the miniatures out of their bags.

This Spindle Dragon is going to take some assembling, but I’m really happy they’ve included a steal rod in the mould for it to stand on.

The miniatures are roughly 28mm so they fit with most other miniatures I paint.