“I started Hellscape 3 years ago. The original idea was to create four small vitrines. At that time, I was using DAZ 3D, but it was too limiting. For various reasons the project was canceled. Fast forward six months, I revisited the project, but this time using Zbrush. Iustinian and I recycled some characters of the 1.0 work, but basically we redid the whole thing. Then came the lockdown in Shanghai, which meant I had a lot of free time imprisoned at home, to look into production. I wanted to directly print the figures and avoid molds, and I eventually found a resin vendor on Alibaba and convinced my 3D printer to start printing with this new resin. Massive headache and many failures later, we were sure that it was possible. Then followed another long process of figuring out the digital file size and printing all the figures out, which lasted over 1 year. To cast all the figures, it was another 4 months, a lot of things had to be redone. There’s a lot of manual work in bronze casting. The next thing was painting all these figures. We invented techniques using car paint, which is not what is typically used for, for example, Warhammer figures. Airbrushing work like that involves painstakingly covering up different pieces of clothing, skin, hair with tape, segment by segment, for 70 small monsters. That took around six months. The whole thing is finished after two years of work and a lot of investment, I wanted to cry, in a way it is such an absurd and silly project. But I think that the piece has only gotten more meaningful in our contemporary moments, for better or worse. I am glad that I saw it through and that it exists.” — Nik Kosmas.

— Hellscape 2021-23 230x150x150cm, cast and painted bronze diorama (3d sculpting: Iustinian Funie; Additional 3d: Evgeny Dontcov; Project manager: Cao Xiaochuang; 3d printing: Jam Zhan; Casting resin: Liam; Foundry: Chen; Painting: Allen Flames; Logo: Don Gianni)