Welcome my second CMON favorites post, which features some more recent submissions.

Marneus Calgar by Brokenblade - Fantastic painting technique, and I simply love the overall style. It's full of contrast and bright colors, while still keeping it smooth.
Dalamyr by Avelorn - The work on the face of this mini is simply striking. The base is simple but good enough to set the scene. Work on the cloak and pants could have been a bit smoother IMO.
Space Marine Predator by paulvalenx - The complexity of this diorama alone deservers a 10, but on top of that it's awesomely painted as well.
Aurlok Totem Warrior by olliekickflip - Nice alternative paint scheme and very smooth work, with a lot of attention to details.
The Masque of Slaanesh by olliekickflip - Painted using a limited palette and lots of freehand.

You'll have to see this to believe it :)

Work is continued on the warband. The only things that need to be done are the metallics the bases and some details.

As a miniature enthusiast you most likely know CoolMiniOrNot.com. I don't attach much value to the scores given there but it's still the number one place to find the best miniatures on the web.

From time to time I will make a post where I link to some of my favorite submissions on CMON. I won't directly link to the images, because I hate when that happens to my stuff to, so I will post the CMON links here.

To start off, there are some entries that caught my attention the past few months:

• Mae'viir, Dark Elf Sorceress by automaton - Overall perfect, but the face really strikes me.
• Temple of Time by Theomar Pius - Brilliant piece of scenery, the church itself has been carved out of pink foam entirely.
• Space Marines Terminator Captain by Artur - An awesome idea very well executed.
• Amathor by Arjay - I really love this type of simple paintjobs which are full of character.
• Ready or not, here I come by SweetButEvil - This is what diorama making is all about: stuff it full of details that need to be discovered by the viewer.
• Where's the ladder? by akaranset - Great idea and very well executed.
• Gollum by Cruasan - Show this to your friends to explain our hobby :)
• Death Guard Dreadnought of Nurgle by Ana - Looking very, erm... Nurgle!
• Abism Haal by Rosman - I'm usually not a fan of miniatures with lights incorporated, but I really like this one.

Since the release of the 5th edition rulebook of Warhammer 40.000 became imminent, my best friend and I decided to pick the game back up. We used to play (well, at least a few games :) it a few years ago, but the lack of decent scenery and a good army building strategy made us abandon 40k pretty quickly. I painted a small army of Black Templars and some Tau back then, but sold them on eBay.

So now I'm back at it and choose Space Marines again: Ultramarines this time. I'm not really painting up bulk amounts of soldiers, just small batches to fill up the time between commissions and when I don't feel like painting showcase quality stuff. Another advantage is I get some more practice on terrain building. We're building quite a large table, with ruins, craters, etc. Probably more on this in the next few months when it's worth showing off here.

When I started reading this tutorial on painting Helle Möller by Thomas David I thought this was just another ordinary step-by-step guide. But when I scrolled down I noticed the special type of basecoat Thomas used... He started out with a black primer, and then used his airbrush to spray on a layer of dark gray, then two layers of khaki and finally a layer of khaki mixed with white. He held his airbrush above the model, pointing down to achieve a natural looking shade on the model.
So far so good... I've seen numerous people doing this with black and white primer. But I was really amazed how easy it was to paint the skin: Thomas used several glazes of skin color, followed by one was of ink. And check out the final result of the skin on this picture.

Pretty amazing huh?

For those of you who don't know: the game Alkemy is produced by a French company called Kraken Editions. It's a fairly new game, right now there are four starter sets available (one for each race in the game) and the third expansion wave has just been released. The company is made up out of a number of very talented French people, including some ex-Rackham employees. I've seen the official studio miniatures last year at Painting Crusade V in Brussels and I was very impressed with the overal quality of the product.

I never painted these figures before, but recently a customer asked me to paint the Jade Triad start box. The studio paintjob looks like this (click to enlarge):



I was asked to paint the warband in a similar fashion to the studio paintjob, but to mix in some jade color where appropriate. In my opinion the 'official' color scheme looked a bit to monotonous with all the beige, light brown and skin tones. So I decided to break everything up by painting the cloth around their waists in jade.

Here's what I have done so far (click to enlarge):



I just started working on the dark brown areas, the beige and jade, together is basically done, together with the skintones. You might notice the monkey-like figure on the far right: this model wasn't included in the starter set, but it was some kind of limited edition figure which the customer also wanted to have painted.

I'm not a real fan of the figures themselves, but I love painting them. The only point of critique towards Kraken Editions is the type of resin they used for the figures. This is so soft that blades and poles easily bend when touched, not really acceptable for gaming figures in my opinion. There were also quite a lot of mold lines in difficult places.