Hey folks,
I hope you’re all keeping well. It’s another installment of my mini painting adventures this week, and I’ve got a fantasy model from Scibor miniatures on the painting table. They’re made from resin rather than the plastic and metal I’m used to, so need slightly different handling and a little more care(I managed to break the sword in cleanup!). They’re really beautiful sculpts, with lots of detail and character. I’ve a few more from this maker in my drawer, and am really looking forward to painting them too.
I’m still chasing my goals of getting the hang of non-metallic metal (NMM) painting, and improving my blending, along with a little bit of (albeit simple) freehand work.
Let’s get to the photos, and I’ll talk a bit about what I think worked and what didn’t as we go along!
I used a new NMM recipe here, with a lot more blue hues in it. One thing I wanted to focus on here was pushing the contrasts, which this recipe definitely allowed for. I’m quite happy with the result in that regard, and it certainly photograph’s a lot better than my previous efforts.
I got a bit of a Peter O’Toole vibe from the model’s face, so went with blond hair. It looks decent in the photo, I think, but I’m not happy with that brown to straw colour range, and need to play around with my colour choices for blond(e) hair in the future. After my paint job, he admittedly looks far less like Peter O’Toole…
I freehanded the heraldry, a mix of a couple of designs I pulled out of a heraldry book, and quite like the end result. I always like to keep my fantasy as close to reality as I can, so chose something pretty conventional.
The big thing you’ll be able to see on this model is that I had a bit of a varnish disaster. I used a rattle can of matte varnish, and it did every single one of the things that can go wrong with it. I’ve got orange peel, clouding, and a non-matte finish. I’ve had pretty good luck with rattle cans in the past, so I’m not sure if it was too humid out, inadequately shaken, too old, too cold, sprayed too thick, or something else entirely, but it went so wrong it inspired me to shell out for an airbrush, something I’ve been circling for a very long time, but more on that in a later post!
Perhaps not the best choice of colour for his trousers. It’s meant to be canvas…
I tried a new approach to blending with this model—laying down the highlight and shadow, some transition layers, then glazing between to smooth them out—and quite like it, but will need a lot more practice before I get this one down.
In addition to the NMM, I tried a bit of secondary reflection with the yellow on his surcoat and the armour on his legs. Not sure if it’s worked, but that’s probably through too heavy handed an application, so I might try it again in the future with a more subtle approach.
Lessons learned on this one, and thoughts for the next one:
- Yellow is one of those colours that needs careful handling. I need to spend some time working on it to come up with a good approach to using it effectively.
- I’d like to try a less blue hued NMM recipe next time, although I think the tonal range here is pretty good, particularly for photographing.
- I need to keep working on my blending. I like this method, but it’s time consuming to get smooth transitions, and occasionally just glazing either the darkest shade or highest highlight over those two colours worked as well at blending the two together as areas I spent hours on with intermediate shades. I’ve seen some other approaches I want to try, but will likely come back to his one eventually as it contains a lot of techniques that are useful elsewhere.
- I need to spend more time considering where highlights fall on the model, and how light interacts with shapes (is it a cylinder, is it a sphere??) and reflective surfaces.
- Lastly, I’m happy that I’ve got my camera settings fairly well dialled in now!
As always, any tips or constructive critiques are most welcome! See you all next week!