With the end of March, voting has been closed for the first season of the Data-Sphere Painting Campaign (DSPC)!

We had a fantastic showing with 13 entrants, some with multiple entries!

Lots of international participation and plenty of talent was shown during the first season, but there can only be a handful of winners. So for this month, I am proud to present the winners of the Spring ’15 DSPC!

1st Place: LeoPelo

So, this entry comes up as first. It’s not hard to see why it’s so well liked. Entries were voted on publically, but here are a few reasons I find this entry to be grand:

• Red is a difficult color to paint for a number of reasons. Despite these reasons, the highlighting, shading, and vibrancy of the red stands out as being very well done.
• The basing is very evocative and makes great use of the Celestial Guard’s post. A well painted miniature deserves a well made base to serve as the backdrop and the Celestial Guard certainly did not end up wanting.
• The Hacking device is superbly detailed with different colored icons, an intricate surface, and attention to detail.
• The freehand “heaven” hanzi on the left pocket and the Yu Jing faction symbol on the backpack are, while small, very characterful.

2nd Place: Julipet

In a very close second, we have Julipet’s intricate Daturazi. Again, fantastic! Let me point out a few things that stood out to me:

• It’s part of a diorama! With a nicely crafted display, the Daturazi’s movement and emotion is well captured.
• Shading. While subtle, the armor has many shades of green that don’t immediately pop out, but slowly lull the viewer towards them. To contrast this, the skin and sword are very well highlighted with good vibrancy coming from the bright orange pants.
• Those small details really give the model life. This is where the diorama really bumped up the Daturazi. Subtle things like the pipe dripping some fluid, the broken fence, the very well crafted foliage, and the scratches on the bracers give more life to the model that it already had.

3rd Place: Crushar, SaturatedFat, and Surprize

This was a bit of a shock for me, as I never expected a tie. All three models were done well and used some great techniques to bring out the most of the model.

• Crushar’s excellent shading of the beige and painting of the face (those eyes!) is very characterful and realistic.
• SaturatedFat made great use of blues and the highlighting and blending done on the whole Fusilier is something to aspire to.
• Surprize keeps it simple by using airbrushing techniques to achieve smooth transitions and excellent shading on the armor of his Morat Vanguard while also falling back to more traditional brush techniques for edge highlights and weathering.

And those are you winners for the Spring ’15 season!
All top placers will be receiving patches to signify their achievements and LeoPelo will also be receiving some Vallejo paints as a bit of an extra reward.

 

Interested in participating in the next season? Join us in the Miniatures Forum of Data-Sphere! Next season’s, starting March 31st, theme will be:

Heavy Infantry