THE
WARP STORM

Scibor Miniatures has kindly provided a range of sculpting tutorials for years, and one non-metallic metal painting tutorial.

They are gems shared freely to the community. Visit his website in the link above for more. Here is an image salvage compilation of the tutorials, for backup and spread:

"in 10 minutes" - I beg to differ! although that's clearly where practise comes in! Simple enough tutorials though, mohawks might be useful for you @James?

The gold tutorial is really effective though, and I'm not a big fan of NMM!

Yeah i can definitely see some use for my space wolves!!! Id also like to try the nmm stuff more. Really cool that scibor have shared all this.

Yep, Scibor is the man in this regard. Really inspiring stuff! His tutorials made me try out my own.

Haha, you can get down to 10 minutes with practice! First times will take a lot more time, and there is nothing wrong with that. Don't measure it in minutes, is my advice.

I once sculpted a quick face in 5 minutes or less at a tournament a couple of years ago, when there were 8 minutes left of lunch. You eventually get a lot faster with practice. In fact, after a certain point of training, a lot of mastering sculpting is not necessarily primarily about becoming better at pulling off more and more advanced stuff, but of speeding up processes you've already learned and doing complicated things in fewer steps quicker (in terms of sculpting, let dry, sculpt more, let dry, sculpt more, let dry).

It's a lot of fun. Tedious, of course, but fun.

Do you have any recommendations for starting points? I've literally never sculpted a thing (at least, not successfully) but I feel like at some point I really ought to change that!

Sure thing! What kind of armies and models do you have? It's always best to attack lesser rabble models first instead of finer miniatures which you'd prefer to sculpt something on later on when you've honed skills.

Goblins are perfect candidates for sculpting, but similar rabble exist in many armies. Old 2nd edition monopose statue Space Marines, Ork boyz, Cadian footsloggers and so on can all be prime test subjects.

Sculpting a little fur pelt on a shoulder, hip or suchlike would be a good start, but not fur which actually hangs out in free air. That's more complicated, and best to wait with it. There are various fur tutorials out there that should show up on a quick Google search (I try to cover empty niches to help expand the repertoire, instead of treading already trod paths).

Sculpting some buboes and misformed bloated stomachs and intestines on Nurgle models (zombies, plaguebearers, or marines?) would also be a decent starting point. It hardly matters if it gets messed up, since it's Nurgle anyway.

Sculpting some hair on some rabble model could be another starting point. Not the best, but worth a shot. Look at photos and give it a go.

Maille/chainmail is another good starting point. The method is simple but tedious. Good tutorials exist out there.

Purity seals are yet another good starting point. They'll get better in time, but the first attempts will probably be good enough to fit in with later tries with a lick of paint. Purity seals are rather bland, with enough details to give give a little challenge.

I'll try to think of other starting points. There are bound to be lots out there, so I look forward to hear what kind of models you have ready for some converting.

Cheers!

The current focus is Orks, with Guard in the near future and Marines a little further out.
Gretchin in particular are going to end up being an issue for me. They're brilliant, but there's so few of them. The standard box contains just 10 with little 'standard' variation, and while there are others dotted about (or OOP on eBay) there's still a finite number of basic grots.

I'm sure I'll be able to find something to work with though, and I would imagine that the more you know you're capable of doing the more you want to do!