Some of my work as a commission painter

"Hey!.. I paint little toy soldiers for a living and like to play with them sometimes!"
Sounds like a great pickup line doesn't it? Well.. imagine how hard was explaining to people what I do for a living..

This post will be a bit more about what exactly am I painting plus some pictures of my work and a bit of info on it. I don't do any more commissions but I do paint a lot for fun and am enjoying it a lot more. It is always more satisfying finishing a project for yourself rather than giving it away and you can put a lot more "love" into it this way I guess.
I used to do commissions for a year and a half - painting hobby models for different games or collections (Warhammer fantasy, Warhammer 40k, Dungeons and Dragons, Malifaux or other indie companies). Since I got into the hobby I've probably painted over 2500 models and am still enjoying it quite a lot. Every next project I got into is better than the next and it is quite cool to see that evolution. I always like to experiment with new techniques, looking into other peoples works and try out and interpret how they do things into my works, I just love the whole process.

Sadly The first 2-3 big commissions I did I never even thought of doing it as a full time job.. it was more like a job for friends that evolved into something else so I don't have any photos of them but I do have plenty others to show you now.

This is one of the first miniatures I have photos of. The name of the character is Orc Painboy from the Games Workshop Warhammer 40k Orcs army. It was a whole army of orcs I did paint and they are some of the most fun miniatures to pain with so much flavour and humour in the sculpts (maybe not this model in particular). The technique I used for it was something I did use quite a lot since it is time saving and has a really nice effect. I put 2 sprays black foundation and a second colour that would be a complimentary to the base one (in this case red is complimentary to the green skin), then put some value highlight colours (in this case yellow since it fits quite nice with the green and white for the top highlights) and finally I put a pretty thin coat of the base colour on top to achieve this effect.

This is everyone's favourite The Necrosphinx. This one was the first I did and then everyone wanted one.. I think I've painted 5 or 6 in total and did enjoy it every single time. Such a beautiful sculpt from the Games Workshops Warhammer Fantasy range (Sadly it is no longer available). The tricky part in this is all of them triangular shapes in red and turquoise, do you see them? Yeah about 600 of them on this model.. and I've painted them all 6 times.. I guess I must be quite patient.

This is Nagash! Even though the picture is quite bad and I don't really like my work on it as I am seeing it right now it still is something I did almost 2 years ago so I can forgive myself a bit. Anyways I did paint 3 of these guys in total and it is a pretty nice and quite big model. Again from the Games Workshop Warhammer fantasy (now Age of Sigmar) game - that is the leader of the undead. Every time I painted this model I did the spirits in different colour schemes but this one I like the best I think.

Drycha, the Briarmaven of Woe is a powerful spirit of Athel Loren. Another good and very old sculpt (this one is metal.. I hate metal minis but I did enjoy painting this one in particular) from the range of GW. This miniature I painted with the same technique i did the first one on the blog and it took me about 15-20 minutes (quite proud of what I achieved in such short time).

This is one of my latest works for a friend here in London. It is a Storm Cast Eternal from the starter set of Age of Sigmar and my friend lost the original head somewhere so asked me to switch it up. And these dudes in the lore fight evil and the forces of chaos, so I decided it would be a great idea to put a chaos warrior head on him.. Anyways I did this one in a day since my friend needed it done kind of ASAP, so I feel like I could've done a lot better. Still quite happy of how it turned. It is one of the first tries I had on a full non metallic metal armour on a model.

This model is one of the last I've done for myself. It is Azhag the Slaughterer from GW's Orcs and Goblins and it is a nice resin model with lots of details. Truly had a lot of fun painting it and i just took a picture of it without playing with light or anything because I wanted to upload a photo of something that I did in the last few months. I will most likely make a post with more and better photos from different angles later.

I feel like the post has become quite long so that will be it for now. I hope you like it and feel free to follow, upvote and comment. I will be doing more of these and some more in depth posts about the techniques and paints I use if there is any interest.. maybe some painting tutorials and what not.. We'll see and time will tell.