The Le: Sounds like you're pretty busy with work, which is always a good thing. But what do you do in your downtime?

James: Yeah you have to keep busy being a professional sculptor, the pay isn't that good :). What little down time I get I usually spend with my family. I have two boys ages 4 and 8 so they keep me pretty busy. I help coach their Hockey teams during the winter so that takes up a lot of time. I like to play video games and wargame when I get the chance (which is very rarely).

The Le: When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? I don't know many kids that say to themselves, "Gosh, I want to be a sculptor when I grow up!"

James: I wanted to be a hockey player, who had super powers, played in a rock band, and could fly a helicopter, oh and I also had a talent for art. Still working on that. I may try doing drug testing to get super powers.

The Le: How exactly did you get into the sculpting field? Did you go to school for it?

James: Well to make a long story short my Dad founded the miniatures company RAFM in 1977 so I grew up around miniatures. I painted my first figure when I was about 5 and my summer job was casting in his factory. I used to spy on the sculptors he had working for him and eventually I started sculting my own figures. I went to conventions with him and got to meet professional sculptors and they taught me some stuff. After a few years of doing it as a hobby I started to get freelance jobs here and there. At that point I went to the Wizkids Cincinatti studio and asked them if they were looking for sculptors. That was around the time when they were first starting, they had bought the Ral Partha sculpting studio and they were working on Infinity Challenge at the time. They hired me on to work in the Cincinnatti studio and that's when my skills really increased. I worked there for a year and then decided to return home to Canada and ever since then have been sculpting professionally as a freelancer for many different companies including Wizkids.

You can't really learn this type of sculpting at school, although a background in art will give you many fundamental skills that will help. There are many sources of information on miniature sculpting now on the web and sculptors often do workshops at gencon and Reapercon but when I started it was a very closed profession, you kind of had to learn what you could from trail and error and word of mouth. I was very fortunate to be able to get a staff job and work algongside other sculptors, I am very grateful to the guys that I worked with in Cincinatti, they taught me a lot.

The Le: So what's the status of RAFM these days?

James: Rafm is still around. They do a lot of contract casting these days like most of the other old miniature companies out there. They also have their own modern Horror miniatures game called USX that they produce miniatures for, its sort of like Horrorclix without the clix.