3 new winners, 1 new WORKSHOP GIVEAWAY!

Good morning everyone! 

Today we will make it short and sweet. If everything goes as planned (Murphy, anyone?) we should finish refilming our material for our Season 1 DVD today. Then starting tomorrow the cutting and editing marathon will resume one more time - keep your fingers crossed ;) 

Giveaway winners

This morning I drew the winners of the three running giveaways. As always, I used Random.org to find the winners.

Matt Cexwish was a lucky winner, too!

Winner of the limited Dark Angel Codex (limited to 2000) is: ARBAL! Congratulations, man! :) 

Winner of the limited XXX Dwarf Diorama is MORI-KUN! Get your brush ready!

And now for the 'Grand Prize' - The Workshop in Berlin with Jeremie Bonamant Teboul. The winner here is someone that some of you may know as a painter: SkelettetS, buy a ticket to Berlin for you have won! If you ever meet SkelettetS, rub him for good luck. He is a two-time winner here on masterminis.net now! 

As usual, please send me an email to this address with your address (Arbal, Mori-kun) or to contact me for helping you with your workshop here (SkelettetS). 

Boooooh! I want to win, too!

Out of the 80 or so people who took part in these giveaways, of course, only three could win. 

But fret not! We have yet another awesome giveaway for you guys!

So, you already know from the title of this posts that its going to be another WORKSHOP Giveaway. But how could we possible follow up a giveaway with Crystal Brush Winner 2013 JBT? How does a workshop with UK SLAYER SWORD WINNER Karol Rudyk sound? Good? Allright! Let's do it! 

Karol's awesome UK 2012 Slayer Sword Entry

You have to be available during June 07-09. You need to get to Berlin by your own means - we can help you find affordable accommodation starting from a cheap youth hostel all the way to the presidential sweet at the Athlon :D

All you need to enter in this giveaway is to comment below with the Tag [KR] (so I know that, if the tag is missing, its just a normal comment). 

Hm.... what should you write other than "Me! Me! Pick me!" :D... How about this: What is your favorite miniature genre and why? (Steampunk, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Historic, ...). Yeah, that sounds good :D BTW: I have it on good authority that there is still ONE workshop spot available at Battlefield. 

We will draw the winner on Monday, 6th of May.

Good Luck everyone!

And don't forget to Share & Enjoy masterminis.net with your friends. 

Win Workshop with Crystal Brush 2013 Winner Jeremie Bonamant Teboul!

And the winner is....

Jeremie Bonamant Teboul!

Well, the title of this post is kinda 'over the top', as we announced the JBT workshop giveaway in Berlin before we knew he would win the Crystal Brush 2013 in Chicago. 

Nevertheless, I am happy to announce that one of my personal favorite during the voting session has won this years 10,000$ grand prize at the Crystal Brush.

With this piece we can truly say that 'Jeremie is back!' after his 2 year cycling trip through Africa. This is truly his style that we all know him for. 

What makes me even happier is the fact that our personal hero Enrique "Emuse" Vezasco Sanchez took home the second place in the event. 

His entry was actually my personal favorite for the title this year, but comming in 2nd is not bad either. 

If you are a follower of this blog you know that we helped Emuse to go to the crystal brush by supporting his rather unique indiegogo campaign for funding his trip. That's what I call 'return on investment' - go go Enrique! *does the 'la ola'*. 

I still have a workshop with Enrique pending. Now I just need to learn spanish in order to understand how he works his magic :D :D

Mola, mola!

Third place goes to Raffaele Picca from the Massive Voodoo Crew with his scratchbuild 'Zombie Giant' diorama. The hours he must have invested in this... incredible!

Here is the CMON site with the Crystal Brush Winners in all the categories. All pictures (c) by Crystal Brush/CMON. 

A lot of people raised concerns that the competition at the Crystal Brush this year was 'not the strongest' to say it mildly. Yes, there were a lot of entries that would not have a chance of winning this event - but then again I think that, if you look at it with an Olympic spirit, being part of any event matters. The top entries were all worthy of winning this year's event and with this, I think that Roman Lappat, this year's head judge, still had his work cut out for him. I think he and the online voting community did an excellent job!

In closing, I would like to congratulate all participants for taking place in this years big-money event. 

AND I would like to remind you that you can WIN a workshop with this year's Crystal Brush winner Jeremie Bonamant Teboul, here in Berlin, for FREE. As in: Does not cost you a penny to attend. Yeah, cool, huh? (Read this blog entry and leave a comment to participate). The winners will be drawn tomorrow evening. Stay tuned for MORE FREE WORKSHOP giveaways. That's right! MORE. FREE. 

Have a great beginning of the week!

Zaphod

Crystal Brush, Games Days, Giveaways!

Hey guys and gals! 

Just a quick friendly sunny Sunday afternoon reminder to all of you miniature lovers out there: 

Chrystal Brush Voting Online

The Crystal Brush Voting is now online. You can vote on your favorite entries and decide who goes home with $10,000 US (minus taxes, mwahaha). 

The quality of entries 'varies' to say the least - just makes it easier to call the winners, I guess. The voting process goes like this: You log in to CMON, start with the first image. Then you give it between 1-10 stars (10 being the best obviously). After you do so, you will be prompted to vote the next miniature. There are not THAT many minis to go through, so voting won't take too long. Prepare to see the light - and some shadows...

I would be interested what you have to say about the miniatures: Did you go through the whole voting process? How did you feel about some of the entries? 

Please leave your comments below!

Games Day Germany, US - Ticket Attack launched

We were able to secure tickets for the US and German Games Day yesterday morning.

According to sources at GW, the ticket sales are proceeding 'normal', that means as fast / slow as last year. This means that tickets should be available for a few weeks before they run out. Many people are scared away by the new prices of the tickets [50€] and the fact that neither GD Mini nor GD T-Shirt are included this year. 

If you have missed that whole discussion, you might want to catch up here: 

Part I - Part II - Part III - Part IV

Tickets are available in GW Stores and through their webshops at www.games-workshop.com.

We bought a hand full of extra tickets in case some of our international friends could not secure theirs in time. 

Just as a fun fact for the US tickets. If the 50$ entry fee does not scare you away, the 41$ (!!!) S&H on sending a slip of cardboard to Germany might. Seriously, da fuq?

Giveaways drawn tomorrow

Don't forget, that tomorrow, Monday the 22nd, we will draw the winners of the 

- limited Dark Angel Codex (limited to 2000)
- limited XXX Dwarf diorama (30 yrs GW, limited)
- AAAAAND: A free Workshop with French legend Jeremie Bonamant Teboul. 

Also: There will be more giveaways soon, so if you have not already done so, this might be a good time to sign up and follow this blog ;) 

Happy Sunday everyone! :) 

GW News - first pics of full new GW WHFB ELF range

This just in - new WHFB ELF range
(leaked from the Chinese source 'Bai Du')

So here is the full range of the new elves. Loads of bling-bling, loads of gems, somewhat weird flying chicken and a sky-coach... Wonder if that qualifies for the mile-high-club...

Bai du (百度) is a company in the Xiangdi District of Beijing. Baidu is the largest Chinese language search engine. Google with funny characters, so to speak. How they get to 'leak' these pictures can only be explained with the large number of toy making companies in the Shenzhen region where companies like Hasbro and apparently GW have stuff made.

Not sure what BAI DU means in Chinese, the Japanese translation would be something like '100 times'. 

I'll post these without further comments - but I am interested to hear (see) your comments in the... well... COMMENTS below :D

(source: Bottega Moderna)

Crystal Brush Weekend

Morning, y'all! 

Two more days and a few hours until Adepticon and the Crystal Brush painting competition. 

The Crystal Brush is next to the Spring Angel the painting event with the highest prize money. 10,000$ will be handed to the lucky winner of the event. 

Last year's deserved winner was Jose Palomares with his mind-blowing scratch build 'Gea', followed by works of Diego Esteban and Sebastian Archer. 

This year, we helped talented Spanish painter Emuse to be able to go to the Crystal Brush. He had started quite a unique indiegogo campaign that ultimately allowed him to go to Chicago to enter his art in the competition. 

The Crystal Brush is not without criticism. Even though coolminiornot and the sponsors of the event throw a lot of money at the winners, the participation of absolute top painters has been somewhat sparse. The total amount of entries has also been very low - many privately organized shows here in Europe (both on- as well as offline events) have way more entries and  display an overall higher standard, some claim. The winning entries, of course, are absolutely stunning pieces of art - and definitely worthy of winning any event. 

The second criticism is the voting mode. Half the votes come from the judges at the event (this year Roman Lappat of the Massive Voodoo Crew will be the head judge, so I know that a fair result is literally guaranteed), but the other half come from the online community. And this is where the problem for many critics lies: Pictures of miniatures are not the same as seeing the miniature. Some  critics fear that artists that can 'activate' their fans have a better chance of winning. 

The charm of online voting, of course, is that many fans and people interested in miniature painting become part of the process, thus furthering the interest in miniature painting. 

Be that as it may, the Crystal Brush is one of THE big events of the miniature competition year. For all of you who would like to vote on the entries, the CB Gallery opens in a few days and you can vote on your favorites.

What are your views about the Crystal Brush 2013? We would love to hear your comments below :) 

I am personally looking forward to the amazing level of art that we are about to witness.

May the best mini win :) 

Zaphod

Games Day Ticket Attack Reminder

Greetings, my fantastic figuristas!

Ticket Attack Reminder

Just as a quick reminder if you should have missed the whole Games Day Discussion last week: 

This Saturday, April 20th, you will be able to order tickets for the German (August 11th, Cologne) and US Games (July 27th, Memphis) day. Tickets will be available both in stores as well as from GW's web shop. 

According to a GW HQ official, from past experience GW expects tickets to last 3-4 weeks before they run out. But we all know it's better to be safe than sorry, so I would urge you to buy your tickets in the first week or so. 

Since they have not been officially announced yet, I would be surprised if the tickets for Games Day Italy, Japan and UK would also become available on April 20th. Neither the UK, Italian nor Japanese site talk about the Games Days yet (Japan took their earlier info down again). 

...BUT, I guess it would not hurt to check these GW online stores on April 20th.
Again, better safe then sorry. 

Extra tickets

We here at masterminis.net will buy a few extra tickets for the German GD for those international painters of you out there who could not get a ticket in time or decides to come last minute. Since we can't afford to buy dozens of tickets, they will be somewhat limited, so please try to get your own tickets first ;) 

Giveaway reminder

Don't forget we have three giveaways going on at the moment. They will all be drawn on Monday, April 22nd.

- Jeremie Bonamant Teboul Workshop (Berlin, July 5th-7th, 2013)
- a LIMITED EDITION DARK ANGEL CODEX, limited to 2000 worldwide or
- a LIMITED EDITION XXX DWARF (30 year GD anniversary mini, rare) (both here)

Also, today the last prizes to a hand full of winners of our revolutionary giveaway were sent out - we needed some big boxes for the Space Hulks ;) Avicienna & quix42, I still need your addresses! Please check your email ;) 

The shipping price for postage was increased by the City of Berlin, just because I parked in what they claim to be a 'no-park-zone'. I am THE president for crying out loud. I claim galactic immunity! ^^ 

Games Day Germany IV - Limited Miniatures Update

Games Day Germany Rumors - Update IV

(GD Germany Updates: I - II - III)

Make sure you read up on our 210000 subscriber giveaway here! Win a workshop with French painting legend Jeremie Bonamant Teboul!

Here a quick little update about the Games Day Germany 2013

These are the confirmed 'english guests' of Games Day Germany

• Jervis Johnson (Game Designer) 
• Phil Kelly (Game Designer) 
• Jeremy Vetock (Game Designer) 
• Seb Perbet (Miniature Designer) 
• Dale Stringer (Miniature Designer) 
• Steve Bowerman (Army Painter) 
• Edgar Skomorowski (Warhammer Forge and Forgeworld) 
• Dominik Oedinger (Forge-World-Book Designer)

And apparently, these are the 40k and WH Forge World GD limited minis. I like! 

I also really dig the Army on Parade trophies... But I would not even get a single mini finished, so why bother with an Army display ^^