The Boelg - Alambic Miniatures

The Boelg was something i had in mind since quite a long time. I always wanted to put him in a post-apo scene, like if he was a lonely survivor riding his mutant dog. It's also a miniature we didnt see a lot of versions yet. I like that!

The cast was... horrible! Quite a lot of bubbles, gaps between parts and so on. So first i spent a lot of time fixing it, and also to resculpt some parts. For his weapon i wanted a bow, but not an usual one, a compound bow. So i took some old clock parts, plastic card and it was done (strings will be made after painting with hair stolen from my wife). I also added some leather belts, armor plates, a hunting knife, resculpted a bit the bags on the dog and some other little details like the arrows.

The build of the base is quite simple, it's a sheet of cork on big bricks to give some elevation to the scene. The street lamp is made of an old brush, plastic card and putty. Well, to make it short here are some pics! If you have questions, just ask :) .

On the painting side you can read a tutorial about the dog's skin inside the WIP Magazine 02, downloadable at this link . For the rider and as usual i primed it  black and white and then used the airbrush just to give a basic color. After that it's only brush work with the colors you can see on the pic of my palette (before it gets messy) and some more i forgot about :p. As always i paint with highly thinned paint to achieve a smooth finish that is very important when you paint human skin.

A lot of steps & hours later, here's the finished project :

 I hope you like it and feel free to ask if you have questions!

Cheers!

Midnight Walk - Zombie girl from Knight Models

Hi chocolate eaters,

I love doing miniatures exchanges with friends, and for the last one i had to paint another skeleton or something close like a zombie or... to make it short, something that normally shouldnt live :) . I searched and found this superb & pretty girl from Knight Models in 54mm, it would be perfect for the theme.

After a little talk with Matthieu and some laughs about the "night mode", that was the thing! I wanted her to be walking in the tall grasses at midnight. Like the one you wouldnt be happy to meet during your footing in the countryside...

Let's kill the thing, i have no WIP pictures! Haha! Sometimes you're just painting and you forget everything. But i still can talk a little about the process and the colors used. Better than nothing i guess. So for a night mode i obviously used blues and blacks, no surprise. Also purples and reds to give some more chromatic variation and tiny touches of warm browns (close to orange) to play with the blues. Finally very subtle green nuances were added, to play with the reds and also to give some more saturation.

About the technique, first i used the airbrush to give some colors and the general lighting. I wanted a strong light on the upper body, to simulate a strong and shiny moon. Then the real work came with the brush. I always rework everything with it, i simply never understood how to have a good finish with an airbrush. I started with the face, as it's the focal point and the funniest part to do on this model. It also gave a guideline for the rest, that was just about clothes. I mostly paint with very thinned paint, almost water, applied in many layers. Finally i added some blood, mixing Tamiya X-27 Clear Red with black and blue. As you can notice i didnt splash blood everywhere as it's usually done on this kind of subject. I simply dont like when blood hides too much the previous work. It also would scare my young kids :) .

Here's a short list of the colors i used, mixed in different proportions:

White (MC), Space Wolves Grey (GW), Scab Red (GW), Violet Red (MC), Lime Green (MC), Blood Red (GW), Dark Sea Blue (MC), awk Turquoise (GW), Black (MC), Smoke (MC), Bestial Brown (GW), Scorched Brown (GW), Burnt Umber (MC), Camo Green (GW), X-27 Red (Tamiya).

I may also write a tutorial about tall grass and how to paint it, if someone is interested.

Thats all ladies, meuuuh!

Welcome!

Welcome on this new blog, Cows & Chocolate!

First of all, who are we? We are two miniatures painters from Switzerland, Matthieu Rouèche (Blabla) and Martin Goumaz (Dre4mit). We met for the first time at the World Expo 2011 in Montreux. Since then we became friends and we share some painting sessions together, when our works and our families leave us some freetime. That means not very often, sadly. If you want to know more, jump to the "About us" section.

Why a new blog? We are both quite busy between work, family and other hobbies. We both had a personal blog before, but not enough time to keep it updated frequently. Considering this fact, we simply thought: "Hey, if we post on the same blog maybe it will be updated more often!". We just hope the future will give us right... :D

Why this name? Choosing a name for a blog isn't a very easy thing... As we're both swiss, we wanted to have something that reflects our country. After several months of intense brainstorming (lol), we stopped on "Cows and Chocolate". Simply because in Switzerland... we have a lot of cows and we produce good chocolate! You wouldn't have guessed it, right? Our wives told us this name was crappy, but we keeped it anyways! 

What will you find here? Hmmm tough question, when we know it's a blog about miniatures... Maybe some articles about paintjobs, WIP's, events reports... Let's be crazy, maybe even tutorials! And if we totally lose our minds, maybe some stuff that isn't directly miniatures related! Who knows...

What now? Meuuuuh!

Bismuth, the coal miner - Blacksmith Miniatures

Hi all,

I would like to show you my last paint job done for the Blacksmith Miniatures range. This one is a 40mm dwarfish minor sculpted by Valentin Zak. The sculpt is very high quality, without useless details, a funny dwarf's face and some well seen's volumes and textures ... a miniature made ​​for a good time with my brush.

This miniature was a little bit special for me…announced as a 40mm's figure, I realized that it was approximately 40mm of height but also 40mm of wide…one truth cube of resin. The face to him only made approximately the size of a small bust for the 1/12th and it is not to displease myself…

And for the scale...next to an historical 54mm miniature...

I hope you’ll enjoy it…cheers!

-Matthieu-