Death is only the beginning... - Imhotep "The Mummy" 1999 Welcome back, gentles all, to The Art of Caesura! Last week we looked at the last batch of skeletons from the Conan board game, and this week we're back with undead of a dryer variety. The bonus box from the kickstarter came with five each of two different sculpts of mummies for our friendly neighborhood barbarian to hack through, today we'll look at half of them. As with all of the minis in this box that I've talked about so far, I really love the "classic" style of these mummies. Don't get me wrong, I am wowed by the technical wizardry of a lot of the stuff coming out of the likes of Games Workshop and Wyrd these days, but there is something very satisfying in these grounded, archetypal sculpts. These mummies lent themselves perfectly to the quick and dirty style I used for their skeleton brethren.  I started by painting them all Ushabti Bone, I then in...

Death is nothing to us,  since when we are,  death has not come,  and when death has come,  we are not. - Epicurus G'day and welcome your Friday fill of The Art of Caesura! Firstly, a thanks to those who messaged me with words of support following last week's post. It's always nice to hear from you guys! Today marks the launch of the next few weeks' content: Conan the Barbarian! Or more specifically more minis from the Conan board game by Monolith Games.  Around Christmas-time I was painting these guys like mad! First with the skeletons , then the tentacles , then (to mark the blog's one year birthday) the mighty Kraken  (technically the demon, Thaug). Well now we're back to the skellies (sword and board this time) and again they invoked: I batch painted them much like before but this time I added an extra lick of highlight (and then proceeded to go back and do the same to the old ones so that they wouldn't feel left out). M...

Hey friends, welcome to a bit of a different post this week on The Art of Caesura! When I first set out to start this blog, one of the fundamental purposes was to encourage me (by holding me accountable to you) to re-engage in a lot of my hobbies that had fallen by the wayside. Before the blog I would paint maybe 10 minis per year - last year I painted over 60! Woooohooo, it worked! J ust as hobbies are a distraction from our other daily occupations, and just as a caesura is a break in a line of poetry or music, I have mostly tried to keep myself out of this blog. My purpose is not to have a lifestyle blog, and I want my art / hobbies / beer that I'm posting about to speak for themselves.  But for today that's all going to change... Long and Medium-term readers might be aware that I have had a smorgasbord of exciting and life-changing events occur over the past month or so, so today I'd like to give you a little peek behind the curtain. "New" Car: ...

And he that killeth a beast, he shall restore it; and he that killeth a man  shall be put  to death ~ Leviticus 24:21 Happy Friday here on The Art of Caesura! Welcome to another Malifaux themed week, our last for a little while. It's a bit of a special one today, the boss of the box: Leveticus! Before I started painting this miniature I was already getting excited about it. I knew I was going to have fun splattering his lab coat with blood, gore and other unidentifiable smudges. This was indeed fun, and was achieved by flicking Blood for the Blood God and Seraphim Sepia from the bristles of a stippling brush close to the finished model. It's always a tense moment, because you have the finished model before you looking quite clean and neat and you don't know where exactly the drops are going to fly. I once had a little drop of Blood for the Blood God zoom into the eye of a model which I had painstakingly painted an iris and pupil!  ...

The Illuminated are those who manifest Brilliance in their bodies; twisting themselves into inhuman monsters. ~ Wyrd Hey chums, welcome back to The Art of Caesura! This week we have the second of Jakob Lynch's drug-wracked Illuminated. The first Illuminated I painted was quite some time ago. I tried to keep some of the colour cues the same between them (normal skin tone, white shirt and then creepy alien extremities that darken to glossy blackness).  It's fun to compare my painting from one year ago (of the other Illuminated ) to this guy who's hot off the press. While there's some, but not a massive difference in skill level, something I definitely have noticed by painting a different model every week for the past year an a half is the speed and consistency with which I can get the same results that used to take me much longer. I totally recognize that to really ramp up my skill at painting I would have to devote more time to experimenting w...

A creation of steam and sinew that is at once living and dead, Abominations can be created by almost any bits of metal and machinery and flesh that a skilled necromancer may have lying around. Wyrd Welcome to another abomination on The Art of Caesura! This week's model completes our quartet of horror, it's the final abomination of Leveticus.  Another tiny, highly detailed mini from Wyrd. As I've said before, they really knock it out of the ballpark with some of their miniatures. I must say, I found this abomination especially horrifying (and that's coming off the back of a guy with his rib-cage splayed open!) I think it's the way that when you look at it carefully, it's actually a snake-shaped robot (with a glowing red lens in it's head) wearing the remains of a human head with jawbones still attached! Delightful. I pulled in some colours from the previous abominations to tie them together: I painted the tips of all of their...