[SPEAKER_01]: brought to you by BedroomBattleField.com.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the table top miniature movie podcast.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're a fan of the old hammer aesthetic or folklore inspired features and worlds, then you probably love Oakbound Studio.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you don't already, then you're most definitely well by the end of this chat with founder and sculptor Jeff Solomon Sims.
[SPEAKER_01]: As is often the way in these chats, I kick things off by asking them about his hobby origin story.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well yeah, and so much as the modern day hoax right back to there.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think that's a good
[SPEAKER_00]: Like an awful lot of people, my first miniatures were here at Quest, the Box Tera Quest game and back in, I think I got mine as part of the relaunch in 1981, rather than the 1989, I've been trying to track down how old I was, and I was born in 84, so I think at five years might be a little bit young for the first release of the Hero Quest set by I think 91.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was seven so that's that seems more that seems more likely.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I remember very vividly that was a that was Christmas 1991 or just just after because my cousin had brought his hero quest set to my grandparents house where we were all spending Christmas together
[SPEAKER_00]: and so I spent all Christmas playing that with him and my parents.
[SPEAKER_00]: I remember it being boxing day so it may have been boxing day or about it just may just be a false memory but I remember them bringing a belated Christmas present which was my own hero quest box obviously they thought it was it was worth rushing out to buy something that was going to shut me up for a few weeks while they got busy on that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that was where I started.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I lived in a little village in the middle of the door, so there weren't, there weren't game stores anywhere near me, but the toy shop in the neighboring village had a very small selection of games workshop blisters.
[SPEAKER_00]: and probably no more than 20 odd different blisters to choose from in the shop.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I would go there with my pocket money once a month and find whatever the blister was that really appealed to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wasn't collecting an army.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wasn't really interested in putting together big forces.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was buying the odd figure to stick into my hero quest set based on what I liked the look of in the blister pack.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was always far more interested in converting and painting stuff than that and actually playing the games a lot of the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I didn't, I had a few friends in the village who played and we got V because back then the fourth edition box was out with the plastic high elves and goblins.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the toy shop had a number of the kind of quick start guides that were in that box set where is one goblin arch of versus an elf spear and then I think so you got to you learn how shooting works and how close combat works from one on one basis and we basically just bake or hammer using those rules so
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever figures we all had, they were either goblins or they were elves, profile wise, and we just use those and pushed.
[SPEAKER_00]: That doesn't also figures around the table for quite a long time.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was only really when the fifth edition box came out that we started actually learning what the rules were and playing, playing the game properly as it were with larger forces.
[SPEAKER_00]: But even then, I had a few trips to a bigger game's workshop in a city nearby, and they had the catalogs that you could get, and they ordered from, had all of the older ranges in, you could just, you could order any, any figures from their back catalog, and I remember pouring through this catalog and thinking, those figures are way cooler than what's out at the moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, why, why have they gone backwards?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why, why is there, why is their cartoon York on the shelves and not these kind of gribby things from the mid-80s?
[SPEAKER_00]: So even though I never played third edition when it first came out, second edition when it first came out, wasn't collecting the figures when they were actually on the shelves.
[SPEAKER_00]: The older kind of aesthetic of those things always had a bit more of an appeal to me than than the kind of middle hammer
[SPEAKER_00]: And then of course, I got into other things, so I was doing a lot of work with some local theatres, got into set design and pro-making and went to university to study stage management, but really kind of concentrating on pro-making and set building, set construction, and went into work into that field for a good few years, and kind of forgot about
[SPEAKER_00]: miniatures.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was still a big fan of folklore, things, and sort of big fan of history, and fantasy, and I'd go to real happiness and that kind of thing, but I wasn't doing an awful lot of gaming.
[SPEAKER_00]: or buying figures or collecting what I was doing in terms of sort of sculpting fantasy stuff was big scale stuff I was doing, you know, masks and pieces and crops for your theatres and TV companies and things.
[SPEAKER_00]: So doing sort of true scale sculpture that it's indeed is.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I moved to Bristol in, uh, what, 20, 2010 somewhere around there.
[SPEAKER_00]: and God became good friends with a couple of guys that lived near me and they were into miniature gaming and I sort of remembered that it existed by that point I got rid of all of my figures by a handful.
[SPEAKER_00]: So everything was gone starting from scratch again, but
[SPEAKER_00]: we picked up between us the six that are not the sixth edition, the eighth edition, what I'm a fancy box at the island, blood and split the figures, and started playing again, and at that point eBay, I guess, was fairly young, it had been around for five or six years, and you could still, because there wasn't much, there wasn't much of a, um,
[SPEAKER_00]: market so the old metal figures in those days you could still pick them up reasonably inexpensively so I started building my collection again with the with the models that I'd seen largely in those older catalogs so going back to the 80s figures that I would have definitely got my hands on have they been in games workshop at the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so my collection is now far bigger than it was when I was a kid, but I've been able to pick up quite a lot of the things that I would have wanted to back then.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the old hammer scene started getting going and say around 2010, 2012.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I met some good people online, the bring out your leg, the annual old hammer gathering started going.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it started going up to that, playing more, playing more of the older rules set.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's kind of my history in the in the hot.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's really been pretty much exclusively.
[SPEAKER_00]: Warhammer as a fantasy war game.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm and other games watch all games.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have space hole and space crusade and here are questions and vast here at Quest.
[SPEAKER_00]: I kind of dipped my toe into military modeling a little bit while I was at school, like I had some historic 54 millimeters and was painting those.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had a couple of books by phenomenal painted by it.
[SPEAKER_00]: the name of Bill Horan, who was an American, I believe, an Napoleonic large scale painter.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I learned a lot of painting technique and sculpting from his books because it was a very different style to the style, but was around in white dwarf at the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I never really took to the historical scene that the fantasy staff was always really wanted to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: And not even
[SPEAKER_00]: the 40K that kind of sci-fi stuff that held a bit of an appeal for a while because I had some friends when third edition 40K came out who were who were playing bats and I didn't really know anyone who was playing fantasy at the time so I played some of that but really read the fantasy side of things is what grabs my attention rather than any of the other genres.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's definitely, you know, there's a lot of parallels here with my own kind of story and been pretty much the same age and having hero quest is that forced kind of touchpoint.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I agree like, let's, by myself, let's first kind of look at a set of the old manager was, was the combat card.
[SPEAKER_01]: So those minatures were very much the old 80s minatures, but in the first stuff I got, which I still like was the battle master's plastics and the fourth edition plastics and so on.
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, I do like them as well, but there was some about that 80s look that it was just a bit more unique and everything was in the video and at just a kid I could see why that really drives a lot of folk.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, absolutely, there's less, I don't want to say that things became formulaic because that's perhaps a little bit incorrect, but there definitely became a particular aesthetic that they were going for, whereas back in the earlier days, I guess you've got such a wide array of artists,
[SPEAKER_00]: and they're employing people who are sculptors, but who are coming from very different backgrounds.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they each got their own style.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the ranges have a lot more diversity to them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they do, by the time you've reached the kind of mid-'90s, and the law has been codified a bit more.
[SPEAKER_00]: The influences on the ranges have been a bit more sort of settings than so.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything starts to look more homogenous, I guess, and not quite so crazy and weird.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's going to be mentioned that the combat cards because actually that's that's probably true.
[SPEAKER_00]: I probably did have a set of those combat cards maybe even before I got my hero quest set.
[SPEAKER_00]: Certainly around the same time, I think I remember them being a gift from my great aunt, but I spent with spent ages on holiday looking at the, I have the goblin-oid stackups.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first one I got and I spent ages on holiday looking at those image, trying to work out if they were
[SPEAKER_00]: if they were actual niches that had been painted, or if they were paintings on the cards themselves, you know, if it was 2D artwork, and might my own brain couldn't quite get his head round what I was looking at.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm one of my favourite projects when I got back into into the game scene, was being able to pick up all of the auction in that combat card's deck and paint those kind of in the style of trying to do an homage to each figure in that that's how I've now got.
[SPEAKER_00]: framed on the wall of my studio, a complete set of the combat cards, miniatures painted in kind of as best I can do, the equivalent tones.
[SPEAKER_00]: It took a long time, I think it took me about three years to collect all of the figures, and most of that is because there are two or three models in there that are essay conversions, but they're actually pretty much scratch builds.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it took me a long time to get my sculpting confidence up to the point where I could even attempt
[SPEAKER_00]: And then it took me another three years to get around to actually starting painting on the Dickens.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was nervous.
[SPEAKER_00]: And my painting skills weren't up to doing justice to the cards.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they probably still asked to be fair.
[SPEAKER_00]: Fraser Gray's really crisp in animal blending on those models.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just absolutely phenomenal.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I'm happy to have a kind of standing collection in my studio.
[SPEAKER_01]: it was such a sort of when you think back to that era with such a breadcrum trail for us all because you know, I remember like getting the combat cards on holiday and Cornwall as would have been like 92 maybe 91 and you're just like you say you don't really it's not like you put out your phone and you know what are these
[SPEAKER_01]: All you had was the cards, and you didn't really know where to come from, but early, and then you've got the hero quest advert on the TV, and then in the Argos catalog, you've got battle masters and stuff, so it's all these things, and you don't really know if they're all connected, but, you know, you just keep seeing these things, and eventually, of course, I think we all at some point go at hand, so one of these, we leaflets, it was in one of the boxes, you know, and you want more stuff, and then,
[SPEAKER_01]: The rest is history, I suppose.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a, it's a, it's a really tangible thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I guess that's, that's part of why I really like
[SPEAKER_00]: tracking down the kind of mysteries behind some of these figures.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the interviews that film deck ministers have been doing with various people in the games workshop staff through the years and the books like talking miniatures and dicemen, they all kind of illuminate a little bit of this past.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's as you say, it's the age before the internet.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you couldn't just go and
[SPEAKER_00]: and people's memories are not all quite the same and they'll be that's kind of tantalizing picture that you've got to work out what that figure in the background is and who painted it and what ranged did it come from and there's go digging through catalogs to try and find it's the kind of almost that.
[SPEAKER_00]: that mystery appeal, that sense of you're getting a very partial view of something, and you want to know more about it, that makes it a very intriguing thing to look into.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was an appeal at the time as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's figures that I remember turning up in white dwarf.
[SPEAKER_00]: that I could not, I couldn't put my finger on because they were from much earlier ranges, they were just kind of hiding in the background of photographs and you look and go, what's that net commands?
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's a weird, I like that model, but I'm not going to find it in a game's workshop story, it's not in the catalog, what is it?
[SPEAKER_00]: And then with the rise of the internet and the lost minis wiki and things, and you can start to kind of piece together where you've seen stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, it's a real kind of voyage of discovery finding out all these little...
[SPEAKER_00]: little things that are really completely inconsequential, but they're very encroaching and you can really lose yourself in a project trying to pan, pin down that exact thing and who painted it and where is it now?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's one of the wondrous things going up to war games foundry in New York and looking in the cabinets there that they've got so many of these old figures from the pages of white dwarf and
[SPEAKER_00]: they're in brilliant condition, they're really, really well preserved, really well looked after.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the paint jobs on them are insane.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you look at these things in person,
[SPEAKER_00]: the colours just they're so radiant and I was listening to an interview with Mike and they're talking about the kind of every metal painting style of the 90s and how they realise that you had to really accentuate the contrast on things and you had to go really much, much brighter.
[SPEAKER_00]: then you would if you were just painting for yourself for the table top because the photography wasn't up to picking up that kind of nuance in color.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you lost an awful lot of the detail and the color that was on those minutes just by the fact that they were photographed and then put in magazine print.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you see those figures in real life, however good you think they are painted
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, I totally agree in that cabin I've been lucky enough to spend a bit of time in front of myself, and you just your spots on new, don't you?
[SPEAKER_01]: There's been a few times as well, like I've been eating through an old rule book, or, you know, just recently got the 40k saying the edition book, which I've been eating through, and I was looking at a couple of the photos, and I was like, have seen that, have seen that in the cabinets, it's there.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, yeah, it's like,
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure glad that it's the answers that have that stuff as well, like such a, such a fetton, a custodian ship over, I guess, isn't it?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and clearly are still very attached to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It means it means an awful lot to them as a as a collection.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there are a few things that
[SPEAKER_00]: in more hell of a world, or at least they were the last time I was there.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I don't if you remember, you talked about the little folded up leaflets that were in the battle masters in Heracles boxes.
[SPEAKER_00]: I remember on there there was a space marine librarian and an apothecary with a banner and I think it was a chapter as well, which with those were the first space Marines that I'd seen other than the space crusade.
[SPEAKER_00]: figures.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they are something that really sticks in my head as being like the the iconic space warriors of that era.
[SPEAKER_00]: And those last time I was in Warhammer World, those were in Warhammer World.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there are sort of splitter and places to be right.
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of that stuff is in is in the cabinets of boundary.
[SPEAKER_00]: And every time, because every time I go up, I'm working on some slightly different projects, I clock different figures in the cabinet there.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't know that they have that great to turn over.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's probably the same figures in each time.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just that I'm looking for slightly different things.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I noticed that they're in there.
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, it's a wonderful collection.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you gave us a really good background about, you know, your hobby going through childhood and coming back in, and the kind of origins of all time, but how do you then transition and actually create and stuff?
[SPEAKER_00]: uh well that that was kind of something that just happened so I I think I mentioned when I got into the old hammer scene I wanted to create a familiar army and that ties in with here a quest obviously because they were the they were the big green skin monster in the here a quest set but also with this kind of sense of mystery you know that there were a race that they
[SPEAKER_00]: devised in order to attempt to do their own warhammer world specific creature, kind of, at the time, Rune Quest had the brew, which, that kind of beast men, as they became in Warhammer, and Brian Ansel decided that the warhammer world needed its own creature as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I forget who it was and that's really terrible because that is such a
[SPEAKER_00]: that they as a racer such a key thing to my coming back into the scene.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think it might have been Graham Davis was tasked with creating the law for these creatures.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he basically took, I thought it'd have been a lot doing video, but I've got it behind me on the shelf here.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's um there was a book of Irish folk tales which were written by Michael Davis.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think Michael Scott.
[SPEAKER_00]: Michael's what?
[SPEAKER_00]: Michael Scott, and the cover was illustrated by Alan Lee, who was one of my favorite artists because of his work with Lord of the Rings, and more specifically for me his work with Brian Fraud on the Fairies book that was one of the books that I came to again and again as a child that was one of one of my favorites.
[SPEAKER_00]: And on the back of this cover, Alan Lee's painted a familiar from the Irish myths and vays feature in the first chapter of this book.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he's painted this this creature and it's kind of got a long green snout in a single eye and it's carrying an axe.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you've seen the
[SPEAKER_00]: limited edition for me, the 28-millimeter one, not the, there'll be 54 or bigger creature models.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is very much taken one for one from that illustration by Adam Lee.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you've kind of got this merging of it's a hero quest monster that's influenced by an army painting who's one of my favorite artists.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's rooted in the Florian's of Irish folklore and Irish folklore or something that I'm big keen on.
[SPEAKER_00]: So just the whole thing kind of came together and this is the type of creature that I want to have as my army.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they completely fail.
[SPEAKER_00]: They completely flopped as a commercial entity.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's been attributed largely to some slightly new dubious lore that was written regarding the reproductive habits of the creature, which we don't need to go into a lot has been said about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not sure that the failure of them as a species was entirely due to that, I think there would probably be the specificity of the design of them made the not very popular, the fact that, at least the myth goes that Nick Bibi and
[SPEAKER_00]: whoever was writing the rules for them, kind of got the wrong end of the stick.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the rules were written for 28 millimeters scale figures, but Nick produced them as oversized figures.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there was a bit of a mismatch there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Actually, I don't think that's necessarily true because the the statlines
[SPEAKER_00]: are actually quite good.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think they work quite well for an oversized creature, but I can see that if you are wanting a unit of 10 of them and they're all oversized and then you're going to try and do an army full of oversized units is going to get very expensive very quickly and they're a pain to rank up because they've got those separate great big tails that stick out beyond the basis.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they're not they're very awkward figures to rank up.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, they were, they were not popular.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they were not many of them produced.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when I decided that I wanted to do an army of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first thing that I started doing was collecting the old plastic lizard men from the fifth edition box set.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I had some kicking around anyway, and then resculpting them carving the scales off sculpting new heads for them to make, to make film warriors
[SPEAKER_00]: and out of that I started sculpting full figures and posted some pictures up on the old hammer for him and a couple of people said are you going to get this cast up quite like some so I decided to look into it and found I was living in Bristol and there was a company in Birmingham called Griffin Moulds.
[SPEAKER_00]: who did molding and casting metal figures and it wasn't that expensive to get a mold made.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I ran some stuff up to them and they put it in a mold and spans and metal cast for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I gave them a kind of cost price or slightly above cost price to people on the forum.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they're seem to be some demand for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I just started doing a few things.
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought, just for fun, I can sculpt the figures that I want in my collection.
[SPEAKER_00]: and then I can get them cast up and few people were by them and that will pace with the molds and I'll have metal miniatures that I want in my collection and I'll have enjoyed sculpting them and having the challenge of making something that's moldable, castable.
[SPEAKER_00]: And things really kind of snowballed a bit from there.
[SPEAKER_00]: I
[SPEAKER_00]: So I had started working on a rule set that was one of my favorite rule sets when I was younger, was the was necramander, but I never actually had the necramander set because it was too expensive.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have the Trinity Baffle Ground set, which I don't know if you remember, it was a white wolf.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of white wolves only forays into miniature production with niches by Bob and Ace Smith, and that had to kind of...
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a good game that I've recently re-acquired, I don't say recently, like five years ago, re-acquired another copy of it to actually play, but so I love the neck commander, and I got back into neck commander when I got back into gaming in the 2010s, and it kind of bugged me a little bit that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Although Necromander plays out in a very rich environment, you've got lots of terrain and opportunities from moving up and down buildings and interacting with stuff, it's a very combat focused game.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of shooting hand-to-hand combat and not much else.
[SPEAKER_00]: Occasionally, you're asked to pick stuff up as part of an objective, but that's really as far as it goes.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was writing a ruleset.
[SPEAKER_00]: that would enable you to play similar, similar games, but have a lot more interaction with the environments and with other models in a non-combat basis.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the same time I had just done a little kickstarter for a bunch of Celtic folklore miniatures.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I was going round with you game shows with those.
[SPEAKER_00]: And people were asking me, oh, what rules that are these for?
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, I have a rules set.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just sculpted some figures that I quite liked.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they just buy them and use them forever, you're using them for.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I got talking with a guy who was producing a Celtic folklore role playing game.
[SPEAKER_00]: and he'd written the rules for it, but he was a bit stuck on kind of some background for it, so I ended up doing a bunch of writing Celtic folklore background, or Celtic folklore influence background, and that project really kind of fell apart.
[SPEAKER_00]: They did nothing, nothing came of it, but I then had this.
[SPEAKER_00]: set a background that I was quite happy with and a set of rules for a more sci-fi-based game that I was quite happy with and so myself and a couple of friends started putting the two together and modifying it and changing it into this kind of Celtic folklore miniatures game.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's where that's where the woods came from initially.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a kind of marrying of a figure range that I wanted to make and a world that I was creating for somebody else.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then they came together and that was,
[SPEAKER_00]: 2016, the first rule book came out.
[SPEAKER_00]: So 10 years ago, 2019 after a lot of playing at the first one, I came out with a revised edition, and then a lot more, a lot more playing since, um,
[SPEAKER_00]: We've got the new edition, which is the Shivoshield, the wood skirmish game is coming out next weekend.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's been a bit of a journey for the last 10 years from just throwing stuff together, but it's still a hobby for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not by any chance.
[SPEAKER_00]: My main job.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm still just making the figures that interest me writing background that's based on stuff that interests me.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, it is very much a personal project, and if other people like it and get exciting about it, then that's great.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm very happy to share their excitement.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not like I've sort of set out to think, what's going to sell?
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm still just doing the stuff that interests me, and if it sells in enough quantity for me to do the next thing bigger and better and brighter,
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it sounds like you're in a really good place while and it's fascinating to hear kind of how it all came about, how things aligned for it and you know, if we think about the sculpting for a second, we'll firstly like amasumen.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, by talking to you and also looking at the managers that you make that you've got that heavy inspiration from the old tamarida and then also, you know, it doesn't seem like the sort of thing that just anyone could touch them hand to what was there a certain.
[SPEAKER_01]: Was there maybe parts of your job, your design job that helped you pack up those skills quicker or, you know, what do you think on that front.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, very, very definitely.
[SPEAKER_00]: sculpting a creature at one to one size from sculpting it at 28mm.
[SPEAKER_00]: I remember going into a game's workshop back in the late 90s and mentioning to one of the guys behind the tail, how incredible it was that anyone could sculpt anything back small.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I remember very clearly his response was well, they can't.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody sculpts anything that size, everyone sculpts everything at three times the size and they shrink it down.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because, oh, okay, oh, that's interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if he hadn't said that, because that wasn't true.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what he was thinking about was the plastic, to which at that time, were sculpted three up.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then a panter graph was used to reduce the size to make the injection molds that the plastics were injected into.
[SPEAKER_00]: But all of the metal figures were sculpted the right size.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were sculpted.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a little bit of shrinkage in the molds, but certainly not three times.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if he hadn't said that, if he'd been slightly better informed about the company that he was working for, I could have started sculpting a lot earlier and I'd probably be a lot better now.
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, there are definitely some techniques that marry over and some that don't.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when I'm sculpting a full size.
[SPEAKER_00]: are usually be working in shavans or months to clay or something like that, which is a wax-based modelling clay, so it doesn't set, but it hardens as it cools down, so you have to warm it up either with a rubbing in your hands or with a heat gun or something just to get it at the work
[SPEAKER_00]: and there are lots of things that you can do texturally with that smoothing it and things that you can't, you can't do the medium doesn't work in a smaller, in a smaller scale.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the 28mm stuff is a lot easier to handle and store and move around obviously so then.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd say it helps, so I think what really helps in terms of a design aesthetic is just
[SPEAKER_00]: having spent such a long time with the Brian Fraud books and with the Labyrinth and Dark Crystal as films.
[SPEAKER_00]: So my dream when I was a kid was to work for Hanson's Creature Shop, but that was what I really wanted to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: So all of that puppetry, all of that creature making.
[SPEAKER_00]: I really studied in massive detail and although the processes are very different from creating a gaming miniature to creating the full-sized puppet or animatronic aesthetically, there's no reason that you can't carry that aesthetic on them.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't see an awful lot of sculptors working
[SPEAKER_00]: that the Triedifying Miniatures have a bit of that look because they're based on Corbona artwork and Corbona has similar sort of Scandinavian troll influences to Brian Fraud.
[SPEAKER_00]: The work of Frank Bauer is an influence on him as it was on Brian.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's this kind of rich culture of trial art that's kind of getting a little bit out there, but it's still quite outside of the mainstream look of fancy miniatures.
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of fancy miniatures are quite generic, I guess you could you could mix and match different manufacturers very easily, whereas doing something that takes a very different point of origin gives you
[SPEAKER_00]: If I was working on a commercial basis, it would be a really stupid decision because you then can't use those figures very easily in other rules sets or alongside other ranges.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you're kind of doing yourselves out of customers then, but as it's still a hobby project for me, as it's still
[SPEAKER_00]: you know just sculpting the things that I want to see out there and and as long as it it covers its costs that's great and I'm delighted to see there are there are actually plenty of people out there who are also like that aesthetic but it's not it's not very compatible cost compatible with other things that are out there.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that, but it also really lends itself to the hand made side of things.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know the Trunfang Miniatures are digitally sculpted and they've done a good job of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the kind of slight you raw edge that you get from sculpting, I'm quite dig on lack of perfection.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe that's not something that, that as a sculptor, you should strive for.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think a lot of people strive to be, for things to be absolutely perfect and spot on.
[SPEAKER_00]: things in real life are on absolutely perfect all spot on and you sometimes some of those kind of quirks of character that you read into a figure are just the just inaccuracies and imperfections really.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you've got a completely symmetrical polished object, then it sits in that uncanny value way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Something reads it as not quite natural, it's two symmetrical, it's two smooth, it's two perfect, whereas if you're working by hand, nothing is ever going to be completely symmetrical.
[SPEAKER_00]: No matter how good you are, it's not going to be completely symmetrical.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're always going to get rough surfaces, you're going to get the odd fingerprint that you haven't buffed out in time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And all of these little things just add a little bit more texture, a little bit more character to the sculpt as it comes out.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so even though on a subconscious level, I think there is something that when the human eye looks at something that is immaculately proportioned.
[SPEAKER_00]: uh, perfectly smooth and designed with with optimal symmetry and it's really naturalistic.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's still something that the the brain goes.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's there's something not quite right there.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it kind of repels a little bit.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whereas if you if you've got a bit more of a kind of natural organic look to something then then the brain doesn't rebel in quite that way against it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, that's probably nonsense.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's probably just me justifying my love of older figures, but there are so many people say that these old figures have soul, which
[SPEAKER_00]: new digital sculpted plastic figures don't.
[SPEAKER_00]: Although I've seen some very good digital sculptors who are able to embrace that handmade look and have created some very good digital sculpts in the style of handmade sculptors, which is really refreshing to see.
[SPEAKER_00]: But so many people talk about miniatures having sold when that's clearly nonsense, they clearly don't have sold.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you mean that you're able to read expression and intent in that figure more than you are in something else?
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not sure that's necessarily true because you can get very good expressions on digital sculpts by the nature of being able to zoom in and sculpt stuff at whatever size and then shrink it again.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I don't think that's quite what they mean, but I do think that there's some science to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, the older figures, the proportions aren't true by any stretch of the imagination.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's intentional, but it's not that the sculptors didn't know what proportion to human body was.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you shrink that figure down to 28 millimeters or 25 millimeters and your head is true proportion, your eye can't see it from where you're stood on the table top.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you can't read that expression.
[SPEAKER_00]: How no matter how good it is unless you're looking through a lens up close at it, you can't read it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's fine for a display piece.
[SPEAKER_00]: but you're going to think that a model whose head you can see and whose expression you can read from a distance is going to have stand out as having more character just by the nature of you can see what their intent is.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the odd proportions, the big hands and the big heads of 80s, 90s, miniatures is deliberate.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not restriction on the sculpting size.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not lack of knowledge of perception, of proportion on the part of the sculpted.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's an intentionality to make sure that you can see what's going on on that figure from a distance.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's a part of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So sure.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, it's all just almost analogs, isn't it?
[SPEAKER_01]: It's all just everything's both not the experience that we then have on the table, top everything from the way the minutures are made to the way the terrain has, and then of course it's the collaboration between us, the sculptor and the person who's bought the minuture and painted it themselves, they're bought and at the end and yeah, it gives you that's whole holistic experience, I guess, doesn't that?
[SPEAKER_01]: So,
[SPEAKER_00]: but truly interesting to King the Hidiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiotiot
[SPEAKER_00]: drawing on very different source material that are very different from your generic fantasy or as has become accepted or your generic fantasy elf that we now would see and we'd know immediately what that figure was.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're looking at something that's slightly different, you've got that error of mystery again, you've got that sense of I'm not, I'm not quite sure what this is.
[SPEAKER_00]: So my imagination can start filling in the background around here.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's this
[SPEAKER_00]: Although over the years, the world's world has fleshed out a bit, for sure, it's definitely grown.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's the background is definitely deepened because the long use it was something the more you work at it, the more feeds into it, the more realized it gets.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I don't ever want it to get to the point where I'm
[SPEAKER_00]: detailing every aspect of every element of this fantasy world, because I want there to be unknown, so I want there to be things that people are coming to in using their own imagination to fill in the gaps, because I think that's as much part of the hobby as the painting and the sculpting and the gaming is that kind of world creation element.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's one of the reasons that I picked the familiar as an early as a race to get back into, because they weren't fully developed.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was very little law on them.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's a lot of scope for you to take that army in a direction that you wanna take it in and you don't just have to.
[SPEAKER_00]: read lots of artly books and lore and work out what's actually going on with them.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can have fun and play around and make up your own stuff and I really want that to be still a part of whatever with people picking up oakbound stuff to play the games.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want at least 50% of the invention of that world to be in their own heads.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want to spell it out because you lose the opportunities to take stuff in directions that you want to take it in because you feel like you've got to conform to official law.
[SPEAKER_00]: And nothing's official, you know, it's just, it's your fantasy, how do you board into it?
[SPEAKER_00]: You do what you want with it by not fully realising everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's kind of giving that commission for people to fit in the blanks in their own ways and nothing is wrong, do what you like with it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So 10 years and what's kind of front and center for you just now in terms of anything you've just released or anything you're looking ahead to put now?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, just now, Shivishield is everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, well, in fact, I mean, that's not strictly true because it's it's been finished for about six weeks now that it went off to the printers and that's it lined one under the making of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And still casting for the next weekend and still packing boxes, it's a major relaunch of the range for me, so it's pretty, it's pretty all consuming.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm looking forward to freeing up some space in my studio, which is currently for the boxes and loose castings that need to be packed in that kind of thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So once the lead is out the way I'm looking forward to giving myself some norm oak bound hobby time as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've got a set of heroes for Dungeon Quest that I very keen to get painted up.
[SPEAKER_00]: They've been sat around for over a year now after I got really excited to the managed to collect them all.
[SPEAKER_00]: I haven't got rounds of painting them, but I have just booked a table for bring out your lead to run Dungeon Quest on Sunday there.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that means that I now have to paint them.
[SPEAKER_00]: So looking forward to getting those painted.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course I've got another few.
[SPEAKER_00]: minutes just to add to my space-hulk set that I'm kind of quite keen to get to as well, but at the moment everything is buried on the boxes.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Salute is my big focus, and the promotion of Shivish Yield, which is the latest iteration of the Wood's skirmish game that myself and my former housemate from when I lived in Bristol, Mr Roderick Hamilton.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've been working on that for the last two years refining that shaping that.
[SPEAKER_00]: very, very pleased with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: As a rule set, we got a really nice write-up in more games and the straightest this month, which was which was lovely.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and it kind of feels like it's coming together.
[SPEAKER_00]: that the few things that have sat uneasily with me with that skirmish set.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the last five or six years, we've now managed to iron out.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm very happy with it with it as a product.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it hangs together really nicely and we've managed to do it as a two-player starter set as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: So
[SPEAKER_00]: for the first time because of the success of a couple of games that I released last year there have been some funds in the bank to invest in getting cardstock printed.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we've got nice set of tokens and counters and templates in the boxes.
[SPEAKER_00]: The spoke take measures in the box there's lots of dice you get two war bands worth of metal figures of course metal figures.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, it's a chunky old, it's a chunky old box, but a two player starter set is the absolute dream for a school company to be able to produce with, and in previous years we managed to release books because books are relatively easy, especially using print on demand sites, but being able to buy in bulk card stock in the quantities that you have to buy in order to get printing at a reasonable cost.
[SPEAKER_00]: is a real game changer.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, I think it's going to look very pretty.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a it's a really nice looking box.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm very happy with the game play.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm very happy with the
[SPEAKER_00]: way that we've restructured 10 years worth of miniature development, miniature ranged development so that it's all very cohesive now and the factions play together.
[SPEAKER_00]: Each one plays very uniquely, very individually, but they work together as a whole really nicely.
[SPEAKER_00]: They all fill different niches.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I'm really, really satisfied with how that's.
[SPEAKER_00]: with how that's come out.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we do have, we do have some follow-up to plan.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've got us a supplement plan, but maybe we'll come out in the autumn, but I think once this launch is done, I need to step away for a little bit, get my head clear.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do a few other projects and then I'll come back to it with some refreshed enthusiasm.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've got a date for our annual open air games day.
[SPEAKER_00]: We do a day in the woods in Gostyshire.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every summer, so that's going to be 4th July this year.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just a free day, rock up, bring your stuff, play some games, go home again.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's always really nice.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've got
[SPEAKER_01]: We're as the base piece for the less not to keep up with everything and just do the website itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I'd go to Oakbound.co.uk.
[SPEAKER_00]: At the moment, I'm rebuilding the website so that not everything is up there.
[SPEAKER_00]: The shop is currently dormant, but if you go to the news part of that website, you can sign up for the A-corn, which is our monthly easing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's essentially it's a mailing list, but I try and not be all spammy with the mailing list it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I try and have
[SPEAKER_00]: some decent hobby content in there.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this this month, the main content has been a look at other things that are happening at the so I've done a little guide of people who are releasing things that I think people who are interested in outbound stuff might also be interested in checking out at the show and some online links that if you're not going to the show you can check out
[SPEAKER_00]: I have were around for second edition would skirmish through the supplements but aren't in the core book for the new release.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we covered rules get you by rules to feel those war bands in the new set.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to have some scenarios for Deepwood Shadows, which is our role play setting the same world, our role play game.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those are becoming up quite shortly.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's the best place to find out what's fresh in new.
[SPEAKER_00]: On the website, you'll also find links.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've got a discord, if you just want to chat about stuff, we've got a Facebook group, we've got an Instagram and
[SPEAKER_00]: And we've got a YouTube channel in which is partly talking about Oakbound stuff we're doing series at the moment where we're digging into each faction one by one and talking about the influences on them, the way that they play some tactics for playing them, what you can take in your war bands and models that you might want to choose.
[SPEAKER_00]: but I also do a decades of dwarfs series so looking through old copies of white dwarves and comparing them 10 years apart or five years apart to see the kind of aesthetic differences and the style of the magazine how it's changed through the years.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we quite often find that 10 years apart or five years apart, you'll find the same subject cropping up.
[SPEAKER_00]: but looked at in quite a different way.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the contrast is often quite interesting seeing how the trends of the time and the intentions of the company have shifted slightly alongside the technology that's available to them and the way that the artwork style has changed to reflect our kind of cultural references on people at the time who the target audience is.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's an interesting comparison.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks very much for listening to this episode of the tabletop miniature hobby podcast.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you enjoy the show, then please do share it with someone else you think might enjoy it too.
[SPEAKER_01]: And be sure to check out our Discord community of like-minded hobbyists, which you could find a bedroom battlefield.com forward slash discord.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd be great to see you in there.