Hey folks,
Happy New Year to you all! I hope everyone had a great Christmas and that 2023 has started off well for you! After a particularly hectic holiday period here at Hamilton Industries, I’m hoping to get back to normal service with my Monday blog posts.
I’m going to start back with some mini painting, as I managed to get a few done over Christmas so have a bit of a backlog to get through. I’ll have a more considered updates post for next week!
I wanted to try something very different with this model, while holding to my non metallic metal project. I saw a video on Youtube doing a bone armour that I thought looked pretty cool and decided to give it a go. He’s another model from Scibor miniatures, and once again a real joy to paint.
I think the face on this guy is one of the best I’ve done so far. I experimented with washes to give him some stubble effect, and also to give a bit more colour variation to his skin tone. I find my skin tones are always very flat, so that’s something I want to work on going forward.
I made a bit of a mess of the reflected highlight on the lower part of the cuirass here, but I’m only noticing it now from the photo! This is a good shot of the face. Sadly I didn’t write down my method, so can’t remember what I got right. From now on I’m keeping a notebook to record what I did for each mini!
The eagle on the shield is a freehand based on one in a heraldry book I have. The ones with lots of images of contemporary representations of arms are great as they tend to be quite simple and are easier to reproduce. I’m hoping I’ll improve with practice, but I’ve always been hopeless at drawing, so I’m not getting my hopes up too high! Also went with a worn leather for the scabbard. Along with the NMM fittings, I’m quite happy with how this turned out.
I could probably have gone further with the cloak highlights. I was trying to stick to the 80% rule for black (80% of it needs to be black for the whole area to read as black), but I still think I could have pushed further within that 20%. Quite happy with the NMM on the sword blade, but I think it’s a bit better on the other side.
A quick shot from this front angle. Not happy with the wood grain on the shield, so need to find a better method of doing that. I’ve also used global highlighting for the hair, and want to improve on that with a more directional effect in future.
All in all I’m happy with this guy. I think I’ve made improvement on the areas I’ve been working on, and can see plenty of ways to build on that more. That’s all for this week, so until next week, take care!