From this very day on I am now a freelance sculptor.
Hooray!
If someone would have predicted that two years ago I would have had a good laugh and surely not believed it.
But that is life: It always holds many surprises and now I am really looking forward to this endeavour and chapter in my life.
I would be happy to let those who are interested partake in this enterprise and so I will show in this blog what is happening on my workbench whenever I find the time to do so.
At the moment I am working on a commission for a polish company, of course I can not show any pictures of that.
Nevertheless I would like to share some impressiones of my collected works I have done so far beginning with my very first scratch build miniature.
Of course it could not be anything other than a dwarf:
As a matter of course there is also a story behind this miniature.
Being introduced to the tabletop hobby by a friend way back in 1992 I soon started to be an ardent collector of everything dwarven. Painting my miniatures came to me naturally as I did historical modelling before I got into tabletop, so painting was not new to me.
Eventually I learned that with painting miniatures on a semi proffesional level I could combine hobby with making money. Must have been in 1999 when I answered a job offer from Hobby Products for painting their miniatures as a freelance painter.
Hobby Products had an own game in 15mm scale called Demonworld and as far as I know they also produced the miniatures for Armallion, the DSA tabletop game.
Necessary painting skills back then were not the same as today (and payment wasn't either) but it was still great fun. So I went to introduce myself to said company to show them my painted minis and thus became acquainted with none other than Werner Klocke. In that time Klocke was employed by Hobby Products as sculptor and had to judge my painting skills.
I got the job and did a bunch of painting jobs for the Demonworld line.
That is how I got introduced into the tabletop scene where I also got to know Stefan Niehues, back then the other Hobby Products sculptor and in later times my "sculpting mentor", so to say.
To cut a long story short, Werner Klocke sold me a roll of Greenstuff for 30 Deutsche Mark (the miser...) and that was the very beginning of my sculpting career.
At first I did just minor conversions but in the end I did my first miniature from scratch, the dwarf you can see above. That must have been in 2001. The dwarf was meant to bolster a regiment of spear-carrying clandwarves (dwarves were allowed to take spears back then, 4th Warhammer edition, I think...) so of course I also painted it. Yep, that means the original green...
I soon did a second dwarf and before I painted that one too, Stefan Niehues introduced me to Thomas Palm, head and owner of Assassin Miniatures. He was very interested in my second dwarf so in the end I sold him the sculpt and got my second sculpt released - what a career... :-)
When I told him that I had done another dwarf but had it painted he really wanted to tweak my ears and assigned me to get rid of the paint so we could release that dwarf too.
No sooner said than done, in the end even my first sculpt got released by Assassin Miniatures, which for me then was very exhilarating.
Hah, now I got carried away spilling the beans about some very old inside story. Hope it wasn't too boring. :-) Anyway, that is how I came to do my first sculpt and even got it released.
More rantings of times bygone soon to come...^^
Cheers,
Gregor
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