What is Dark Heartwood?
We make miniatures and art pieces with a focus on creature design.
Dark Heartwood was founded by Tom Rush with his love of miniatures and monsters.
Dark Heartwood handles almost all of it’s production in house (with the exception of art printing or guest artists!). All of the Design, illustration, writing, digital sculpting, traditional art, 3D printing, moulding, casting, painting, packing and posting is handled by Tom and Emily.
When we can, we like to bring other creative people on board. We always make an effort to obviously credit the people behind the art. AI ‘art’ sucks and so do companies that push anonymity on their art teams. People make and do cool things.
We always aim to grow but not at the expense of anyone we work with!
Who’s on the Team?
Tom Rush
Having jumped around various model making and SFX jobs Tom gathered the skillset to handle the design and production needed to create a miniatures company.
As a big fan of monsters and a collector of useless toys and miniatures from the 90s Tom is primarily a sculptor and designer first - but handles most* of the production and illustration too.
*There are plenty of other creatives who get involved too!
Emily Manning
With a similar background in SFX and model making, Emily is part of the production behind Dark Heartwood as well.
A lover of Folklore, old books and classic metal miniatures She focuses on hand sculpting with a few creepy faces currently in the store.
Word is she has recently started sculpting some miniatures… so keep em’ peeled!
The Theme of the Miniatures
When we have enough of a selection of miniatures under our belt we will shift focus on designing a game. But first we are setting the tone.
And that tone? Well, we try to find that sweet spot where the Dark humour lives. We have a little monthly newsletter that is almost entirely news from our fictional town. Which you can find here.
Dark Heartwood is a place where vegetables are likely to attack farmers but also desperately starving giants will practice cannibalism… It’s all being written as we design and make it; world building in action.
There will be more to come in the years ahead - scenarios, games, more miniatures.
Other creatives we’ve worked with!
Rob Luckins
When we need to get the big guns out for photography we turn to Rob. You can tell when he’s photographed miniatures for us as the photos just look so damn good. So far he’s worked on the Pumpkin host and grave horde photos - pictured here.
He’s also a Toy designer and print maker too - so if you are into Dark Heartwood, you’ll probably be into his stuff too - go check him out!
Jamie Maw
We recently needed a background painted up for some future photoshoots so we turned to Jamie to fix something up for us. It turned out great! in fact you can see that image swirling around at the bottom of the page.
Jamie has a bunch of cool environment work on his Artstation, so definitely go and check him out.
(image screen grabbed from Artstation with permission from Jamie)
