Please vote for my small business!

It's been one month since my last blog post, so here's one!

VOTE FOR MY SMALL BUSINESS... please??
A friend of mine who runs a small illustration business entered a give-away the other day. It's for Small UK Businesses, and there are 10 prizes of £1000 and 1 grand prize of £5000. The 10 x £1000 prizes are being given out throughout November and December, with the final 3 and the "grand prize" being given out on December 11th.

So, being a very small business which is very much in need of help, I decided to enter. So please could you vote for my business?

The link to vote is here (it's not spam...despite looking weird... but it is safe I promise): http://bit.ly/1hJSoKW

You don't have to sign up to anything, or provide any details or do anything. You just load the page, scroll (if you need to) and click the button which says "vote for us". It's that simple!

You can vote everyday if you want. You don't have to, but it would help increase the chances :)

Oh and I uploaded an unedited photo...urgghh, and I can't change it...so that kinda annoys me, but it's my own fault for not paying attention!

It should look like this:

I painted both of those... it's some of my best paint work :D

If I Win?
I've pretty much assumed I won't win the £5000 grand prize. I think I'm unlikely to win the £1000, but it's more likely than the £5000. If I won anything, it would help fund some more miniatures, and I may venture into the whole digital "sculpting" thing which many companies seem to be doing... even though they don't really need to as they have plenty of real sculpting talent anyway. I personally don't class it as "sculpting", but more as "computer design" as you are not physically sculpting any more, but yeah, maybe i'll be good at that since I am a computer geek lol

PDF Houses
If you haven't already seen, I've been working on some pdf houses. They are small, and mainly for scenery, but the roof can be taken off if you want for figures to be places inside. But it's not big enough to play games inside, it's purely for show and reference.

Here's a photo

Ok, that's all for now, cheers for reading. ...and please vote for meee :)

Painted Zombies and Armour

I finally finished painting the new costume zombies. I decided to base them on clear bases/counters as they interfere less with the scenery and overall look of the gaming table.

CLICK TO ZOOM

Click to ZOOOM

Speaking of counters/bases, I decided to buy in some transparent coloured counters/bases, as I thought they might be useful as either coloured bases, or markers/identifiers in games. They can easily be painted on, or scenery can be glued to them, so they can be customised to whatever you want.

Personal Armour!

I have been busy building my Mass Effect armour. The frame for the mannequin was built using plastic tubes, and then a stand for it to "stand up".

Below are two photos showing the progress! I have made the 2 bicep pieces, chest piece and the cod piece. and the second photo shows the detailed back piece with spine detail which was difficult to cut out.

Apart from that nothing much is happening. I haven't really done much business stuff this week as it's been fun making the armour...

Anyway, that is all for today I think,

Hope you enjoy!

New Zombies, Painted Zombies, Armour, and a Manikin.

Hi everyone,

I've been a bit quiet around here so here's a large-ish blog for you :)

Miniature Stuff
The "Costume" zombies are now available on the website!! Yay! I was excited when sculpting these as they were kind of fun. I'm currently in the process of painting some up for the website, and here is a WIP photo of what I have done today :)

I have also been painting up all of the WGF zombies over the past few weeks (I haven't touched them in about a week or so), which were also fun to make up. Below are images of the male horde and then the zombie vixens. The male horde come with tiny bases, so they have been based on 30mm to in-keep with our zombies.

A nice colourful bunch I think you would agree!

Personal Stuff:
I have been building some Mass Effect Armour for fun using a combination of EVA foam tiles and "funky foam" sheets.

I found some templates, so I resized them, and cut them out. I then carved out some areas and covered them over with bits of funky foam (dark black parts) to give more detail.



Once everything was cut out, I used a soldering iron to burn lines into the abs area and chest pieces (the dark lines).

I then used a heat gun (purchased for £15 from Tesco), to heat the foam. It becomes "soft", so I was then able to press it against my body until it cooled down a little. It cools after about a minute.









Finally... Kate (my wife) helped wrap me up in duct tape. That is me in the photo, but I covered my head up with that of Commander Shepard from the Mass Effect games...as my face looked weird. However, I chose an equally weird face to cover mine up with (it's been comically morphed...not by me..).

This isn't some weird fetish, I am making an Mannequin/Manikin of my body so I can easily fit the armour onto it.

It's a simple process:
You wear old clothes, you wrap yourself (or get someone else to wrap you up) in duct tape. That person then cuts your clothes off and you struggle/slide out of the "duct tape skin".

You can see in the image that we cut from the ankle to the knee. and from the wrist to the elbow. We also cut along the spine down to the "tail bone" area.


Now I have to build a "skeleton" so that it can "stand up". Once that's done I can pack it full of stuff (newspaper, old clothes, whatever you want), until it is all "tough". I will make a blog of the next steps :P

Once this is done I can continue with the rest of the armour.

Alrighty then, that's all for now!

Cheers for reading as always :)

10% OFF Most Accessories

I have decided to give a 10% discount (through email order, not through the website) on most of the accessories I stock.

When you hover over "Accessories" on the menu, you will see sub sections called "Scenery", "Sculpting" and "Other". I have decided to give a 10% discount on everything under those 3 sections (apart from putty).

September 30th is the last day of the deal. You MUST email me with your order and I will send you a payment request, as it is not available through the website. Any website orders will NOT get the discount.

POSTAGE still applies to all orders.

Here's a little photo:

Click to ZOOOOOMMM

Cheers guys, spread the news with anyone you might think will be interested :)

Painting, Zombies/T-shirt, and Zulu Wars

 Hi Guys, I thought I would do a mini blog of something I haven't shown anywhere else.

Apart from sculpting the latest batch of zombies, I have been busy painting up the Wargames Factory Vixens and Male horde. In the photos below you can see the progress so far.

Hopefully they won't take too long to paint up since my dad and I plan to test out the rules he wrote, so we need tons of zombies!!

In the top photo, to the left of the photo, there is a female zombie about to "high five" a male zombie...










Apart from the zombies, I also have to paint up the survivors and the Dreamforge guys. I might leave the Dreamforge guys for a Christmas thing if I get bored lol







Zombie Range
I should have my new zombie range sorted this week, so off to the casters by the weekend. Hopefully they will be back in my hands around mid to late September, so in time for some Halloween gaming!!

ZULU Wars
If any of you guys are interested (or know of anyone who might be) I also decided to get in the Zulu wars range from WGF too. I have to order a certain amount of items each time I "re-order", so sometimes it's easier to buy a whole new range to make up the numbers. I do love the Zulu Wars though, so it worked out well, but that will be the last of the WGF stuff, as I don't want it taking over the website... like it's starting too!

Finally, someone mentioned T-shirts on Facebook today, which made be do this (Ignore the dotted line):

Kinda thought the zombie bust would make a cool zombie t shirt. I may be alone in that thought though!! haha Maybe I might do it... I dunno lol With a bit of photoshop i think it could work...

Anyway.. that's about it really, not much else going on. I've been a bit down today, staring at my bro's photo or into "space" for ages and not really getting much done :( ...Hopefully I'll "bounce back" tomorrow :)

Survivors, Zombies and "not" Doctor Who

I thought I would start by letting everyone know that the WGF Female Survivors are on their way to us, so if you would like to pre order them please send me an email to carl@grekwoodminiatures.co.uk or grekwoodminis@btinternet.com and I will reserve a pack for you. They will cost £15.50 so quite cheap!

For those of you who recognise these, these are from Crooked Dice, but we now stock those on our website too.

For those who didn't see this on my Facebook page, here are some WIP shots of my new zombie range which I should be sending to the caster this month.

They will be on sale sometime next month. Once again, 16 zombies, 8 females and 8 males.

Finally, here's some WIP painting I've been doing. Actually my dad started the "men" but I have taken over them now as he's busy with his work/etc

I've started painting the women up, and added some base tones to the men too.

The idea is we have some rules which my dad wrote for a zombie game. They are basic and are meant as a fast play rule set which is easy to understand and learn. So we need loads of zombies to use in our game!

Righty oh then...no much else to report really! Oh dont forget, if you are on Facebook join our apge and be in for a chance of winning some stuff :)

Cheers as always!

FREE Give-away!! Must like Facebook Page!

I know everyone here who has Facebook probably already "likes" my Grekwood Miniatures page, but I thought it would be worth posting here just in case someone didn't, or you think someone might be interested in this mini give-away.

Basically I have a couple of items, which I thought would be nice to give to a random person who has "liked" the Facebook page.

The winner can choose any of the 3 items A, B or C.

A - The Tenderiser, A 46mm miniature

B - Bexi Warrior Princess

C - 3 of the Zombie Nurses (not 4 like on the website)

Ends August 31st 2013

Please feel free to go to the Facebook page and SHARE this image to get more people involved! Or spread it in any way you can think of.

Cheers to everyone who has done it so far :)

Oh finally: Female Survivors from WGF - I WILL be stocking these later this month, so please check us out if you are in Europe since you won't have to pay heavy postage (like you would buying straight from WGF).

Cheers!