2016 Adepticon Seminars

The seminar topics for the Adepticon 2016 have been chosen and I wanted to share with you the news that I'll be teaching two session on 'Painting Realistic Faces.'  The sessions will be Friday, April 1st, 10 pm - midnight and Saturday, April 2nd, 5 pm - 7 pm.  For anyone not familiar with Adepticon, it's held on March 31 to April 3rd at the Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center (Chicago, IL).  It's a large gaming tournament and also includes the Crystal Brush painting competition which draws entries from all over the world.  There are a wide range of painting seminars taught by some amazing artists including classes from Ben Komets, Angel Giraldez, and Kirill Kanaev (plus many more).  It's definitely worth attending if you can make it.

You can see a preview of all the seminar topics and instructors here: http://www.adepticon.org/?page_id=9973

The link has been changing as they make updates, so if it doesn't work you can find the list in the main menu on the Adepticon homepage http://www.adepticon.org/.  Please note that registration opens up on November 23rd at 8 pm CST.  Many of the classes will fill up quickly, so if you know you're going register early!

As I said, I'll be teaching a class on painting faces.  If you're reading this blog I'm sure you're familiar with my work, but here are a few examples anyway...

The above examples are a bust (150-200mm) and two 90mm figures.  The class will be focusing on 54mm heads (though the technique is the same as what I used above) as that size will work better for the amount of time we have to work.  It will be a hands on course and I will supply heads for everyone to work on during the class.  Earlier this month we had a workshop day at SCAHMS where I did sort of a dry run for the Adepticon seminar.  Here's the example head I painted during the workshop.  I think I probably spent 45 minutes to an hour on it, so quite a bit faster than I normally work.  Obviously given more time I'd develop some of the finer details more, but it still worked well to get across the major concepts about highlight/shadow placement and color (or color variation).

I haven't decided which head set I'll be using for the seminar, but most likely it will be something like this.  I feel the 54mm heads (1/35 scale) are close enough to 28/32mm that they'll work for people who focus on gaming miniatures but large enough to where we can really get into the detail work.  I'm tempted to find some 75mm scale heads as then we can do even more detail work... but I worry that will alienate some of the gaming crowd.  I'm certainly open to thoughts and suggestions.  I want to make the class as helpful to everyone as I can.