Raggy's Gaming Adventures

Welcome to another blog post! This time around I wanted to give you some of my thoughts on composing a great scene in miniature. A lot of this is influenced by the teachings of Seth Amsden ( CMoN page , Instagram ) who puts together some excellent compositions. Of course Oli ' Honorguard ' Späth and his class from a few weeks ago is another influence. What you'll notice in this post is that there is nothing in the way of mini pics in this post. I want to focus on the thought processes in this post and will look into following up with practical demonstrations in a future post. We'll look into a variety of things here, focused mostly on creating a realistic composition. The teachings here are applicable to everything from simple infantry bases up to competition dioramas. Although the example photos being used are of the beautiful Surrey countryside - the thing to focus on here is the thought processes and the ways of looking at both the world and your piece. Com...

There have been a few conversations with friends recently about how much I've improved over the last couple of years and what I've learnt and changed to improve and up my game. Of course being me, I figured this would make a great blog post! Sooo... what have I done that's helped me get better? Well there have been a whole bunch of things frankly - many of which I am still working on. For this post, I am going to cover the things that I've done, roughly in the order I'd recommend. Having said that - many of these will have a parallel component to them. Steady Hand Ok so this one is not entirely in an individual's control... and also probably not so relevant to a lot of the readers of this blog but it was my first real step up in quality and so I've chosen to include it. I started painting minis when I was very young (about 8/9 years old). Back then my ability to get a brush to do what I wanted it to was really not very good. I have painted off and...

It's always a good weekend when I spend it in a class learning new painting techniques. A couple of months ago it was CK Studios and stepping up my airbrushing game. This weekend just gone, it was basing with Oliver Späth of HonorGuard Painting . This is one of a series of UK classes being organized by Journeyman Miniatures . It's great that Journeyman have stepped up here; I feel like the UK has sat in the shadow of Europe and the US in terms of classes (and talent to be honest). Each of us got a plinth and a model for us to build our base around. This is the first time I've ever really incorporated a plinth into a model in this manner (stupid last minute decision for my last contest entry aside). I've mentioned on this blog in the past that I really prefer to have models that can be used on the gaming table at the end of the day so this class was really outside of my comfort zone. The Plinth came from Crazy Wenky and is excellent quality (and really affordab...