Big Changes at Our Sculpting Studio!

As everything continues to grow and accelerate here with the company nearly doubling year over year since our first releases way back in 2019, we've been hyper focused on working to improve every part of the business. 

Although many of our sets can be kitbashed with each other, we have never settled on a standard, "official" house style for our miniatures. This is now changing.

28mm is a tough nut to crack in some ways because it has very specific proportions and style choices needed at scale to A. “pop” on the tabletop and B. take paint well. Something that looks great as a render or blown up 3x can look like garbage at scale. Many designers are too focused on adding a bunch of detail that because they are looking at it blown up on a computer screen can seem great, but the final 28mm reality is a muddy mess of hard-to-paint excess "stuff". 

Bryan Ansell back in the early days of Citadel/Foundry - where modern 28mm began.

What we are striving to achieve is a look that goes back to some of the early days of 28mm miniature design with the sculptors who were at Wargames Foundry and Citadel in the late 90s/early 2000s. People like the Perry Brothers, Mark Copplestone, Steve Saleh, Mike Sims, and Mike Owen at Foundry and Jes Goodwin, Aly Morrison, Brian Nelson, Michael Anderson, and (again) the Perry Brothers at GW.

These sculptors had an innate understanding of what looks right in a sculpture on the tabletop. 

Rob's first Wargames Atlantic set - 7 years ago!

Lucky for us our own Rob Macfarlane started at GW back in 2011 and added to his own self-taught style learning from many of those great sculptors.

Late last year, Rob created a series of dollies to have standards for our sculptors to match his size and proportion, now we want to push the envelope on our house style to match how Rob designs in that classic 28mm style. 

To that end, Rob has been promoted to our first Art Director and has already hit the ground running with the sculpting studio team. Rob, along with his own continuing sculpting projects, will be critiquing the team's work and stepping in to train on specific techniques to help elevate everyone's art.

Rob and Andy Hobday at the Wargames Atlantic UK office - probably listening to Tony talk nonsense.

As part of the new process we are also implementing a new system of file and part checks that adds 3D printing stages for every set (including all the digital ones) Whereas we have relied on renders and reviewing STL files in the past, now there will be multiple stages of 3D printing to see parts at scale and check for depth of cuts, height of relief, size of details, making sure there aren't too many fiddly details, etc - things that can only really be determined by seeing the parts at their final scale. 

How the sausage gets made

Thieu Duong (one of our first sculptors responsible for many of our plastic sets) has been building and managing the sculpting studio team and will continue to do so to help reinforce Rob's tutelage. And Max McDougall will continue to project manage the majority of the work including the creation of sculpting briefs for the team. 

You will start to see Rob's influence reach into every one of our products going forward. Please join us in congratulating Rob on his new role!