Kess’ Arts & Missives

I post mostly Northstar related minis and my own kitbashed/sculpted creations, but I also make Warhammer and Halo stuff for my hobbying as well.

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Finally decided to make an introduction post to pin to my blog!

Hello, I’m Kess. I’ve been making miniatures since just before the first lockdown in the UK. My very first miniature was a Space Marine kitbashed with Tau pieces from a Kill Team box split between me and my friend—and almost every single miniature ever since has been modified, ‘bashed, scratch built, or even sculpted!

I loooooove making my own minis, or having a go at recreating artworks or characters from shows/video games that have no official miniatures that exist but I so so so want to have a little thing physically to show my love of them. I sparingly use 3d prints, because I have so much bloody plastic I might as well try and make it myself!

I use to post across all sorts of social medias, but in recent years I’ve deleted or abandoned all but my Tumblr, the people I follow here really inspire me and sometimes I even directly make minis tagged to certain artists. Tumblr is also a lot less stressful, as I don’t really care about “growing” as a “cReAtoR”, I just want a nice place to host all my minis.

I do have long gaps inbetween my posts, as probably 90% of these minis have never left my shelf once completed (which is a shame! They are meant to be toys that are played with after all)—so I pretty much go project to project that I find interesting in the moment, and sometimes periods where I can’t think of anything todo at all—so if you do follow me expect to forget my existence occasionally lol

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When the shrine to heroes past are left unattended, sometimes they might just get up and find some new followers for sustenance.

This BadSquiddo mini was originally going to be another hologram type robot, but a friend suggested I turn it into some kind of horrible meat abomination lol—with the mini being a statue that represents the beast—and that was way way way cooler I immediately got some stuff together for it in March! Been ill for a while, so I’ve not had the time to really relax and work on minis, I have some awesome completed minis already, I just need to actually get around to painting them now.

Got no clue what I’d ever use it for, could pass as some sort of 40k warp abomination but I like to think it’s some alien hermitcrab, so it’s just a nice display piece for now.

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Got some cool minis in the works, bit off more than I can chew with some of these projects lol. Cya in an eternity, excited to eventually complete them.

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100 posts!

Been really enjoying my Tumblr experience since I got here last year, and has really helped my hobbying. Got a lot more on the way!

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Whooooops!!!!

Going through my old posts, totally realised I never actually showed off the pics for that guy on the bottom right lol. He was pretty cool too, was very Half Life 2 inspired

Bit scuffed in the painting stage, but I really like how weirdly I painted that flamethrower, and the white wasn’t perfect but came out looking super satisfying atleast

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Spartan Daisy’s service record is tolerable, but her rebellious nature has remained even after recapture. Be cautious when in the field, especially the behaviour for ONI personnel.

After discovering one of the Flashpoint minis has a CQC head, I knew I had to recreate one of my favourite Spartans in Halo, from Halo Legends. I was SO glad she got to have a brief appearance in Silent Storm. Really happy with the tiny little teddy bear, that’s as small as I could make it at this scale.

Will be back to some cool robots I’m currently kitbashing up, hoping todo some more Frostgrave stuff soon.

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About 2 years ago, I painted up a Halo Ring for a diorama using some Halo Warfleet ships, it never came to fruition though. But I am proud of this ring itself.

This is what became of those ships lol

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I also have have Halo ship minis, from Fleet Battles

Despite the second, which is no longer current, they're actually on the top shelf, with MC and Locke swapped around, and my Halo games up there too, on the second shelf I've got two Sarah Palmers

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A more up to date pic

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Oh thank goodness, I was autistically furious the Chief and Locke were the wrong way. Here’s my Halo shelf

I use to have tons of Halo fan art I made, but I don’t have an up to date pic on it, I had made a lot more and adorned my wall with Halo posters and all sorts of lore bits I’ve collected over the years (like Dr Halsey’s map of Reach or GEN2 Mjolnir diagrams)

Unfortunately all the art I made is currently sat in a box, havn’t got the wall space for the sheer amount of it anymore.

I also for a time spent a huge amount of time collecting online Halo lore, from all of the audio snippets for ilovebees.com or the Eleven Hour in-universe emails, all sorts. The only stuff I don’t have on it is the second Story Shard and the Winter Contingency short story.

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Took that long to finally have a space for my Halo stuff

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The creaking is all that can heard from the Wooden Men, your terrified breaths are all it needs to lumber to your hiding spot.

Dumb little mini I made entirely because I found a fucking sick bucket piece in the Wargames Atlantic Villager kit.

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Found a cool video on my phone from August that I totally forgot to put on here, I have since gotten 1 more Frostgrave wizard since then, but I don’t think there’s enough space for him lol—but here’s a nice clip of all of the my Frostgrave Masters (and I had no space at all to show off their Apprentices).

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Kids these days only care about they teleholo-phonepadds and the newest auto-generated vidscreened megablockbusters, this particular Techno-Solo-Merc was delighted when his favourite granddaughter picked up hexadecimalised witchcraft.

I LOVE THESE! I think some of my favourite minis. Effective kitbashes, and certainly a better paintjob than I’ve been doing recently. Put a lot of effort into em, I particularly like the granddaughter’s teeny tiny little Tamagotchi on her belt, was her very first digital familiar :3

I’ve been wanting to make some cyberpunk looking wizards for a few years now, and the Automaton Stargrave kit finally got me to use up my best kitbashing pieces for it. I originally invisioned these as Chronomancers for Frostgrave, thrown back and forth through time where they’ve slowly collected strange technology, but honestly I really like the idea of this crazed old man living in Night City who thinks he’s an actual wizard (like the technomages in Babylon 5) mayyyybe being a bad influence lol

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It's apparently been 3 years since I started this blog, cewl.

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Astonishment: I appear to have been miniaturised into a significantly smaller form, quite perplexing.

Reassurance: Nevertheless, Master, even a Jawa can take down a Bantha—you’d not not be concerned with the *little* details.

I’ve had this mini laying around for aaages, since I started on those porcelain mechanicus boyos, I had two a friend printed me and I ripped apart the other for a 4-armed robot, but I’ve always loved KOTOR and thought it would be awesome to have the other painted up as is so I am have a little mini of HK-47

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Some plunder Felstad for it’s lost treasures, other see the value in it’s ancient and SHREDDABLE architecture.

This is a silly one, but I saw a meme of a skating wizard and thought; that would be a pretty sick wizard and had to make some mini versions of them. The painting could’ve been a whole lot better, but I’m gonna be honest I had no real plans for it and really only focused on the kitbashing.

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the Whizzing Wizzes own these Northern Streets. So unless you’re here to trick and split golems and crypts, then go back to outside the blizzard veil where you belong, nerds.

A relatively simple kitbash compared to what I’ve been doing lately, but a fun one for me to try and get back into the swing of things again. Even back then I wanted todo some extra ones for those original skater wizards, been thinking about it on and off since I made those and to make something funny again—I would gush about these, but I just made some EVEN COOLER wizards I need to paint up now :3 cya soon.

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This year’s Art Vs Artist.

Regrettably I haven’t done many individual mini projects this year, mostly batches of really complicated kitbashes that were really time consuming—but I do think I’ve made some of my best work this year, and like to think it shows atleast fortunately.

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After the UNSC barely survived the Covenant War and the value of Onyx’s Engineers were made apparent, the retrievable of lost and scattered Huragok was of the utmost priority for Humanity.

As soon as the ODST expansion for Flashpoint was announced I knew I needed them immediately, got the Buck and Dare models as a pre-order bonus so I modified some of the pre-made models into the Alpha Nine team from Halo 3 ODST themselves. A year or so ago I also sculpted an Engineer, and wanted to make some new ones—this time, one based on the cut Halo CE Engineers which were fully modelled, textured and animated in the game but were cut last minute along with Blind Wolves and Thornbeasts, and then a Reach Engineer with their cool armour that doesn’t come along with the as-nasty implication’s as the Brute’s modified armour for them in ODST.

The terrain in this box was cool enough to get some more interesting glamour shots too, the Flashpoint proper box has just generic scifi stuff so this was an instant upgrade

This particular Engineer is probably the coolest mini I’ve made and painted, and I’m really happy with how I’ve painted these ODSTs (using mostly metallics instead of blacks, an odd experiment but I think it came out great).

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The Collector's automata from across the Imperium. Their shells are useless once their Abominable Intellences have been cleansed--someone's gotta keep their husks so they don't fall into the wrong hands, might as well be someone who appreciates them.

Been slowly working on and off with these lot for months now, been in a real slump with my mini work, until some key pieces of inspiration struck which made me instantly want to have them in miniature form--and looking around broken minis and key bits I've been hanging onto for a while, got into the groove from there with others--I'm both happy and displeased with these lot, I think the kitbashing on all of them is excellent, and the painting is actually okay for such a long break, other than the little holo-table bot I do think the rest look a little generic however, tried to spice it up with those circular patterns which is alright I guess.

The (totally not a Tech Heretic) Collector. That little top piece I've had for almost 5 years, been trying to find a use for it forever.

my fucking sick Flamethrower-wielding Ballerina. She has little wheels for feets!!

Then for the rest, I've been wanting to tackle a 40k version of Marathon's S'pht for a while now, last year I made a Compiler and I absolutely loved it, wanted an excuse to have one in an Inquisitor game

And I saw this AMAZING blog, @cardo-de-comer with both 2d and 3d artwork, and such striking colours. I try to make colourful miniatures, but these just looked gorgeous. I knew I was gonna have a little hologram out of that upside Tau drone piece, originally was just gonna be a flat piece of transparent plastic that I'd do a diagram on, but seeing their work I knew I just had to have someone on it.

At such a small scale, those tiny little roughly 1mm dots is the best I can do to attempt at recreating that amazing texturing work.

For the bot that was shown off last on my blog, I was playing this amazing demo for an indie game called Hypogea, the robot in that was super distinctive to me, and I knew I had to recreate it.

Certainly my biggest post on here, and despite the complexity of these minis they were actually made pretty quick, just not been feeling that great, and took FOREVER to paint. I've got some more Frostgrave Wizard ideas, and I recently got myself the new ODST minis that came out, got some fun sculpting ideas for them. Hope to get back into the flow of things.

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I am still around, just took a long break. Got a million projects in the works.

Working on more robots :)

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The streets have never run with so much CYMK before.

These minis have actually been collecting dust for almost a month, finally got around to using them for testing them with Rogue Hobbie’s signature range. Absolutely fantastic paints and I really enjoyed making some super bright minis again which I immensely enjoy. I’ll probably just use these lot for generic Cyberpunk 2020 characters to populate the world.

While most of them are kitbashes with stargrave , the one is pink is only a slightly modified pewter mini from Northstarfigs

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Recently been playing Cyberpunk RED and I got a cool visor to both play my character based on my FAVOURITE cyberpunk miniature I’ve made—and to satiate my Trekkie need to see how La Forge sees.