Riders of the Storm – Interview with Iain Lovecraft

Fey Building - Lost Dragons Kickstarter

Fey Building from Lost Dragons Kickstarter

Riders of the Storm has had a pretty spectacular reception in the community.  This Kickstarter features it all.  Awesome terrain, amazing miniatures, and DRAGONS!  

Iain got back to me on some questions I sent his way.  It’s been a pretty busy time for him, with this Kickstarter and other projects he has that we will be seeing coming up.

Find out more about Iain’s work, and pick up some of his previous models from his site, i-lovecraft.com

 

  • Tell us about the vision Riders of the Storm. November seems to be he month of the Dragon.  How did you come up with this idea?

    • Riders of the Storm - Bridgetown
      Riders of the Storm was an idea I had been wanting to develop for some time now and when I finished the All Roads Lead to Rome Kickstarter in July, I begun to draw up the campaign and start to get sketches and designs ready. I begun posting concept art and dragon models on my Facebook work blog announcing I was preparing a Kickstarter project on dragons and elves, and the response was just fantastic. I am happy to say that my idea back in July and my original design concepts inspired many and led to November being the month of the dragon. 🙂
       
      I wanted to make this campaign special, I did not just want to create a catalogue of beautiful models to sell. I wanted to create and infuse my models with an ongoing story. To this end I created a 3 minute video which told a story and situated the characters and dragons on a world of their own. The video was rendered and then hand drawn in post process, which meant going through a lot of frames and work. I was happy with the final result, although I know it is rough and could be improved, it did its job of telling the story I wanted and bringing all the art on the campaign together.
       
      Riders of the Storm - Dragons - InterviewThe idea behind ‘Riders’ was to bring back an ‘old school’ feel to fantasy, as I had experienced when I was younger in the 80´s or 90´s. The characters were loosely based on the ‘Michael Moorcock’ Eternal Champions novels and a lot of the literature and illustrations of that time. Certainly ‘Rodney Matthews’ illustrations where a great reference to me for this project, and I borrowed heavily from these concepts and ideas, whilst still coming through with my own style and original work. It is important to note that all artists borrow from each other, but you must have the decency either to admit your fault or take the concept so far as to really make it shine as something new. Plain plagiarism is abundant and ripe and should be frowned upon because it kills creativity in its tracks and leaves a bleak future ahead for creativity and cultural progress.

  • What printers do you use to print terrain?

    • Funnily enough, I now tend to use my ‘Ender3‘ a lot, preferring this to my other more expensive printers. It is simple to use and delivers excellent performance, I would certainly recommend it for all terrain builds and as far as miniatures go, if you are not using a resin printer, the Ender3 is probably your best shot at getting a great little mini going.

  • What software do you use for your modeling?

    • I mainly use Zbrush, for all virtual sculpting, but when it comes to modelling, there are many options on the market. As I own an Autodesk suite, I tend to use Autocad, Fusion/Inventor, Netfab and Meshmixer, but there are free counterparts you can use to all these programs. Blender at the moment is the best ‘Freeware’ you can get for modelling and sculpting. There is a marked difference between modelling and sculpting, they are akin to design and art respectively. Although design is an artform, the process and objectives of art, as in sculpting, are different. Design will bother more with clean images and instant communication of the form and idea, whilst art is only concerned with transmitting an emotion or expression through the form, regardless of all else.