Making Conan

Nimesh Niyomal is a Sri Lankan graphics designer we’re friends with. However, Nimesh has a problem. He’d rather make Conans than do graphics design. So, he did:

We then printed him up. This, like any 3d printing, was harder than it looked by we got it sorted.

Painting Conan

We wanted to do more advanced painting than we normally would. More blending, feathering, and layering. We got some 75mm scale figures and practiced:

We were happy with the results, but it was crazy time-consuming. The solution, we knew, would be to bite the bullet and learn oil painting. A lot of advanced acrylic painting is about trying to replicate what oil paints are designed to do; rich blends, layers, and transparencies.

So, we turned to Marco Frisoni; a Youtuber who has done a great deal to popularize the use of oils in miniature painting:

Some fancy oil paints later, we were off to the races.

Here’s a small oven we made to bake the oil. Oil paints don’t dry as such; they cure. For faster curing you need a bit of heat:

After a bit of practice, everything fell into place! We ended up with a mixed media approach. Large areas that needed lots of blending we did with oils. Other areas where that was less important, we did in acrylic. Different tools for different tasks.

Here’s a Conan getting his basing touched up. Next to him is a $2 dinosaur we used for oil painting practice:

Why is he so big?

This was a pleasant accident. Originally he was 75mm scale, but there was a miscommunication and he ended up bigger. We decided to stay with the bigger look.

Conan the Completed

Here are some shots:

If you would like your own Conan, we have five for sale. This isn’t a false scarcity trick; we didn’t want to do more than five because unallocated painting bandwidth is best put to working on commissions.

If you buy a Conan, in addition to having a better-painted collectible than Sideshow Collectibles or Hasbro Pulse can do, you help fund these little learning experiments of ours. The more we learn, the better our work becomes.