Hello and welcome back dear jungle readers,

This is Hansrainer and I welcome you to the review of the third Volume in the Series "The Art of..." - by Dave Taylor Miniatures. This book is all about the Croatian artist Ana Polanšćak, a household name in the grim dark scene. In contrast to many other sucessful miniature artists, Ana has no professional background in the worlds of arts and crafts and is wholly self-educated in her impressive skill-set of illustration, painting, photography etc. Before she authored this book, she had already a prolific output in her blogging activities, that culminates in her current website and older entries can still be found on her now inactive blog.

Ana has what I would call a profoundly integrated approach to painting miniatures, crafting her art and illustrations, gaming and telling stories. This approach and her very unique style are what makes this book very special. Again, before I go into the nitty-gritty details of the review, I need to disclose, that the book was lent to me by my friend Maren, who herself enjoyed the book tremendously. 

The basics are completely in line with the other books of the series: Silver embossed writing on the matte hardcover, it is well bound with a thread binding and includes a cloth ribbon page marker. The pages are high quality paper and the print quality is excellent. As mentioned in the past, the layout could be a tad more adventurous and the slightly marbled and speckled page background can at times be a tad irritating.

As with previous books of the series, Volume 03 has a certain biographical touch, the author providing us with a good insight where she is coming from and where here interests and focus lies. The first section "where I come from and where I'm going" gives a brief overlook and mentions many points and steps that will be covered more in depth later in the book.

 "World building" is the title of the second section and takes up roughly a third of the book. Ana gives us a good insight into her work processes and the factors and motivators that drive her. It becomes absolutely clear that pretty much everything she creates is embedded in one of many rich and flavorful settings she has and keeps crafting as a major part of her work, sometimes collaborating with other artists following a similar approach. The second very interesting thing is her strong tie into narrative gaming - and the emphasis is on narrative here. She introduces us to a series of small projects and warbands, created to fit seamless into worlds, locations, and stories. The pictures that illustrate that part of her work make that particularly obvious: They are all about telling a story, conveying atnosphere, generating a feeling - nearly not at all about showing off the painterly prowess of her work. In fact, the painterly aspect seems very subdued and relegated to serving the narrative. Unfortunately that impedes the photos a bit - for my taste they tend to be quite dark and it's hard to make out much of the painted models, unless it serves a narrative purpose.

The third section, "Gardens of Hecate" introduces Ana's own world, where the work on several warbands and concepts lead to the creation of compelling fictional world. Atmospherically, I would compare her work to what we see in games like Diablo, but with a clear focus on the small world: counties instead of countries - the scale stays relatable. I have to admit, that at this point I realised that the book was not at all what I expected, but that I enjoyed it reading it, nonetheless. Ana does a great job laying out her creative and thought-processes, which approaches proved to be successful and which lead to problems in the settings consistency further down the road.

"Dark Age of Sigmar" is the fourth section of the book, where we see where her journey took Ana past the Gardens. Again we are introduced to new Warbands and Factions and several small settings she created. But here the focus lies more on how she created multiplayer narrative events in these settings, the challenges she encountered and the tools she used to overcome them.

The last ten pages are dedicated to Ana's journey into sculpting miniatures and unique pieces. Again its interesting to follow her, and her depictions of mummifyed saints and reliquiae are terrifying to behold (at least to me).

Conclusion

The Good: This book is special - it's weird in a good way. If you like grim dark fantasy art, strong concepts with a lot of follow through - this is the book for you. If you like narrative gaming, maybe even Inquisitor or similar games - this book is likely for you. Even though I am personally into neither, I did enjoy reading it. Its the kind of "hm, interesting" book that opens a new world for some. On top of that it contains a chunk of good starting points and pages where one could start to look if you want to got deeper down that well. 

The Bad: The image quality varies - quite a bit. I was really intrigued by the scenic and narrative pictures and everything thats "within the narrative" so to speak. I was, however, not so happy with the "this is just the model" photos. I found them all very dark on the brink of underexposure - and from a painterly view, I'd have enjoyed to see more. I'd particularly have loved a bit more detailed, high level resolution views of the heavily converted models.

The ugly personal view on the book: For me its a mixed bag - I actually almost always enjoy books that deviate from the step-by-step, "this is how my model evolved"-template many authors seem to follow. I am really happy for a book and a perspective that basically doesn't really care that much about how different models where done and even the "why" is only circumstancial. It was actually a good read. On the other hand - I usually expect some reuse value from a book like that (and that might be a misguided expectation) in the way that I see myself go back there for advice "how to" or inspiration or such. In this case this is not likely for me, because its honestly not my cup of tea. Overall the style is a bit too dark, to sullen and gloomy for me. But as the header says: That's personal taste. 

Overall, had I bought the book for the full cover price of ca. 32€ I would not regret it. If you're into that art-style, its amazing. If you're into narrative wargaming its a really good read too. If you enjoy reading the views and woes of other artists - this is another valuable perspective.

I hope the review could interest you in the book or resolve some questions - I'll be back with volume 4 in a few weeks!

Cheers,

Hansrainer

Hello dear jungle readers,

 

The second volume is at the same time the first that follows the by now customary format of the series: A monograph by a single artist - in this case Christof Keil, a miniature artist and blacksmith from Germany.

To be fair and as mentioned in the last article, the journey to review all of the "The Art of …"-Books started somewhere in early 2023, but then life happened. To be honest, Christof's book was the first of the whole series I saw and when I took a first look at it, I was not terribly impressed. While I am a huge fan of John Blanche and his Artwork, I cannot say the same for the style of dark and grimy miniature painting he inspired with the "blanchitsu"-Movement back in the day. This first impression wasn't helped by the fact, that the act of assembling and building models before painting (and in this vein kit bashing) is something that I loathe. So, from here on out, please take everything I am writing with a grain of salt...

BUT - in the end, you shall not judge a book by its cover and a monograph about the work of an artist not by just cursory leafing through the pages and looking whether you like the shiny pictures. And so, after quite a hiatus, I eventually sat down on a quiet afternoon to read the book. And what can I say - I read the 110 pages in one sitting.

Christof's work in this book is mostly in the realm of smaller miniatures (28-32 mm), more specifically it mostly focuses on Games Workshop - but given the huge impact those worlds had on many, if not most of the painters in the current hobby community, that's not necessarily a bad thing. And in fact, I would actually recommend it for most hobbyists interested in modding and building hero scale miniatures in that scale range.

The content

The book features roughly 110 amply illustrated pages, the quality (and size!) of the photos is mostly good to very good. Its printed on a high quality glossy paper, thread bound and with a good solid hardcover with some silver embossed titling - the production value is pretty high.

Beginning with a foreword by Tommy Soule and a short introduction, The Art of Christof Keil starts off with some clarifications of terminology and the basics of Kit bashing - including tools and a number of examples. 

 

 

The first section - aptly titled "Kit bashing" consists of a number of short articles on individual projects of varying sizes, focusing on the concepts, ideas and the workflow behind the projects. It culminates in a slightly longer tutorial, in which the conversion process is shown in a lot more detail and step by step. For me as somewhat of a GW-Fan, most of the kits and parts mentioned in passing are familiar. However, that might not be the case for a more general audience - I would have preferred  a more detailed labelling of the pictures, maybe even with arrows for specific parts and how they looked before and after integration into the kit bash. I think its a missed opportunity - and if Christof does another book in the future, I would find that really helpful. All in all, the part was good though and it even got me thinking of a few simple conversions for future projects in the small scale.

 

 

The next section is on the Black Phallanx, essentially a love child where Christof really starts to put together a coherent, strongly individualized force with its own lore and background. And while a hardcore puritan GW-Fan might find the deviation from standard design patterns disturbing, I was really impressed what he designed and put together: Especially his HALO-strike team and the second big suit were really awe inspiring.

 

 

The third section deals with his foray into larger scale models, especially Busts and here I liked especially his elaborations on how he learned to sculpt, first in Busts and how that change of medium again helped him to improve to become more free on his smaller scale conversions.

 

 

Chapter 4 - Adeptus Astartes - is all about space marines, space marine conversions and his well known black templar diorama, inspired by the cover art of the 3rd Edition Box Set of Warhammer 40k. Again, he lets us participate in the thoughts and considerations as well as the limitations of the medium that informed and shaped the creation of this piece as well as a small number of other Astartes works.

 

 

The final chapter - Food for Thought goes into the depths of thoughts and ideas that had and have an impact on Christof's work. To be frank, these kind of introspective insights are usually what makes it worth spending the time and read a book by an artist. And he does not disappoint here.

 

Conclusion and judgement :)

The Good: All in all, the book provides some satisfying insights into the processes and considerations at the foundation of this artists works. Its not just that, it has its tutorial aspects, the pictures of Christof's work over the last few years and some solid ideas how to tackle certain aspects from a craftsmanship- or sometimes organisational perspective.

The Bad: My main criticism is at times the implicitness with which the author assumes a quite high level of familiarity with the world of Warhammer 40k and also recent and older kits. Here it would have been really helpful to be even more explicit in the selection and preparation of parts for the kit bash - although admittedly that might have been nigh impossible given the fluid nature of his process.

 

 

The ugly personal view: To me personally, it seems that the author got better and better in finding his voice as the book goes on. Chapter 1 can be a bit lengthy and somewhat repetitive but it definitely picks up from here. 

For me, this book is a clear recommendation if you are interested in:

• Christof Keil
• kit bashing tabletop models
• in well converted Grim-Dark model
• artists' work and thought processes
• blanchitsu

 

Its not so much a recommendation if you are looking for:

• loads of information on painting
• painting instructions

I hope this review was informative and helpful - looking forward to reading Volume 03 - the Art of … Ana Polanscak.

Yours,

Hansrainer