Hey, my name is Nickey and I'm a digital sculptor currently working freelance and on my personal brand of minis under the name "Nickey's Hatchery". In the past, I've worked on a variety of stuff from movies (The Expendables 3) to games and various 3D Printing projects. My current focus is on collectibles, figures and miniatures of high quality, unique design and hopefully interesting lore.

So how does it all start? Well, most of my personal work revolves around the World of Qa'Gir. My own little fantasy land where I have the freedom to create anything I want. Inspiration can come from anywhere. Recently, I've been having a blast with patrons on Discord talking about all kinds of creatures ranging from scary and intimidating to silly and funny (Hamster Horde). I like saying that nothing is out of the question and give freedom to anyone to express their own ideas. Who knows, maybe one of them could become a part of Qa'Gir!

Let's use the Ratmen I sculpted this month as an example - the Flesh Forgers. The first thing was figuring out what kind of Ratmen would be interesting to do. The name Flesh Forgers came up in conversation and sounded intriguing. So, what are they? How do the forge their flesh? Magic? Technology? Biology? In the end, merging metal and flesh sounded like a fitting image for Rats. Next up - what's the lore? Well, in Qa'Gir there's a race called Grizz. Those are all kinds of rodent-like beings (the Hamster Horde is also one of them) and the Ratmen was one of its sub-species. Flesh Forgers are one such clan of Ratmen. I'll stop here but if you want to read more about them, here's the Qa'Gir World Anvil page (https://www.worldanvil.com/w/qa-gir-nickey-s-hatchery). It's public so anyone can see the stuff I write. I'm in no way a professional writer but I love doing it and hope that one day I might be better. Plus, I think that having lore to connect to miniatures makes for more exciting minis and could even spur ideas for adventures in your RPG game of choice!

Now that we have a bit of lore and some idea of what they should look like, we go into the designing and sculpting stage. Since this is my own personal endeavor, I've not yet found a concept artist to work with me so the designs tend to take me a bit more time to do. This is when I fire up ZBrush and get crackin' on the minis. I usually start with the bigger guys - in this case the King of the Flesh Forgers - Sparktail Fuzzybutt (named by a patron, don't judge me; told him I'd use any name he gives me... he didn't fail to take advantage of that). Sparktail is the embodiment of the Flesh Forgers ideal of biological enhancement. He's a mutated Ratman capable of producing a mutational serum from the bile-filled blisters on his back. I went through a bunch of iterations for him - taller, shorter, thinner, fatter and finally stopped at what he currently is - deformed, mutated, yelling and not a little bit crazy. The whole process of designing for me is a lot of trial and error. You have an idea, sculpt it, decide it doesn't look better, hit Undo a bunch of times or start over, and repeat that until a miniature you're happy with stands before you. And throughout this whole process - browsing the Internet for reference images whether from real life rats or concept art.

Once he was ready, I decided he was more the "political leader" of the Flesh Forgers. Didn't look much like a guy who leads them into battle. Which is where the Warlord of the Flesh Forgers came into play. Now that guy was definitely fun to sculpt. Big, muscular, toothy, angry and overall a terror to behold. As a comparison for size - while the minions are at around 32-34mm, the Warlord stands at a towering 110mm to the tip of his tail-spikes. He was meant to be the peak of Flesh Forger mutation, a relentless hurricane of vicious destruction.

Now that the mood was set with a crazy King and savage Warlord, they need minions. Well, since the King loves stapling metal armor pieces and weapons to his minions they quickly became a grotesque merging of metal and flesh. Swords for arms, metal pieces hammered a-la-Wolverine between fingers, armor plates embedded directly into their muscles. With this theme opening the door for many future variations. Body parts can be replaced, new weapons can be merged with their flesh, many more mutations and other ridiculous enhancements. Driven insane by their King and just as cruel as their Warlord. All they crave is war and they need nothing more.

And that's how it goes. A new race joins the World of Qa'Gir! All that's left is making some test prints in resin (I print on a Phrozen Shuffle myself) and then hoping someone else will also enjoy learning about them!

The first of hopefully many more blog posts in the series of "Hatching Creatures". I hope you liked reading about the Flesh Forgers and I can't wait to share more in the future. My personal releases are still just a part-time job with commissions taking up at least half of my time every month but hopefully someday in the future I'd be able to give Qa'Gir the attention it deserves.

If you want to help with that, I'll allow myself to link my Patreon where you can support these efforts, get some minis or talk lore with me if you follow the Discord link (no need to be a patron to join). These guys will, of course, also be available on my MyMiniFactory profile. I also run some private streams on Discord that will turn into Twitch streaming soon once I've set up the Nickey’s Hatchery Twitch channel.

Special thanks to the MMF Staff for encouraging me to create these blog posts talking about Qa'Gir and digitally sculpting miniatures!