It all started with a mighty Bulldog, almost by chance.
Or better: without a proper business plan.
One of my life dreams is, indeed, to adopt a Bulldog. Unfortunately, in this world all the amazing things are quite expensive and, being Bulldogs probably the most amazing guys in this crazy planet, they are far too expensive for me.
There is also that issue about their life-expectations, but this is another story...
So, the idea to sculpt a Bulldog came to me following my dreams: "If I can't adopt a real one, I'll made a resin army of them!!".
I confess that I was a bit worried about how people would react to a Dwarf monsters-hunter accompanied by a Hunting Bulldog (oh, 'cmon! Don't blame me for a little advertisement...): in my for-18-years-Warhammer-influenced mind, everything should be angry, fearsome and possibly dark. So I feared that a monster-hunter Bulldog would have disappointed my beloved community (that, at least in that age, was about 20 people and my parents).
However, and in hindsight unavoidably, the first Hunting Bulldog was so welcome that we decided to sculpt two more Bulldog characters!
From that point, the Durgin Paint Zoo became gathered more and more animals: dark birds, funny birds, extinct (but tasty) birds, long ears dogs, long-muzzle dogs, bat-ears à la Parisienne dogs and even more!
Today we officially presented the new entry, our Pug:
this majestic creature has been made to enlarge our mastiff range (yes, it counts as a mastiff!), and it is probably the first step of a bigger project that I would like to carry out in the next future: a proper range of animals.
People love animals, it's a fact, and I confess that it's really funny (and inexpensive, I still have to recover my old, weak heart, after the 900€ invoice of the Iron Titan 3d print!) to create animal characters!
For this reason, I want to expand our collection adding more and more friends, and I'm not talking only about dogs, of course: I want to design a Owls set, a Bird of Prey set, a Tortoads set (turtles, tortoise, toads and frogs) and even more!
I saw that many modelers out there love to create amazing scene with animals, like my personal animal-guru, Josua Lai:
Talking with Josua, I discovered a side of this hobby that I've never thought about before: he said that these animal scenes help him to better share this hobby with his parents/friends/non-hobbyist people, and in fact it's true.
While non-hobbyist people would need to make practice, before being ready to metabolize that sci-fi full armored guy, colored with hellish heraldry and adorned with severed heads and skulls, everybody knows what a buffalo is.
Animal miniatures can work not only as great additions to your dioramas and characters (oh how I want to put my hands on that Dodo...), but also to make this hobby more "people-friendly".
It's a different approach to our hobby that I confess I'm really interested to dive in.
So, even if we have already started to work on our next main range (we will talk about it soon, don't worry), I assure you that in the next future our Durgin Paint Zoo will become more and more important in our plans.
After all: everyone loves animals!
..
PS: if you are wondering why I've never talked about cats, it's because they will be a fundamental part of our Orc range...
PPS: oops, too many spoilers!!