Hey folks,
I hope you’re all keeping well and had a happy Halloween! I’m a day late with my post this week down to the bank holiday here yesterday, but I’ll be back to my regular schedule of Monday posts next week!
I’ve got a mini painting post for you this week, with my ‘red knight’. It’s another Scibor Miniatures sculpt. I really do love painting these minis as they all have an incredible amount of character, and they have just the right amount of fantasy for me, which I tend to prefer to keep at the lighter end of the scale.
Working out how to get the mini well positioned in the camera frame seemed to be my main challenge this week, but I think the photos have mainly ended up all right with a couple being thrown off by my bad light metering. I still need to work out how to better set up my lighting to get that nice smooth black background so many mini painters who photograph their minis seem to get!
So here he is!
I had two focus areas this week. The first was my continuing effort with non metallic metal (NMM) for which I used a new recipe. More on that later. Focus number 2 was painting red, a colour I’ve struggled to get a nice result with in the past.
Along with the blending aspects, working out where to place my highlights remains my biggest challenge in NMM. I’m posting these a couple of weeks behind my painting, and it’s something I’m continuing to work on, and hopefully improving on, even if only incrementally. On this mini, I really didn’t get it right anywhere, except for perhaps the helmet, and even then only in places! Even my application of light to basic shapes is wrong. I really don’t know what I was thinking…
I think my blending is showing signs of improvement on the sword blade, and I’m content with how it turned out. The photo is a bit overexposed hiding the shadows on the top of the blade. Really need to get to grips with my photography!
Here and on the next pic, you can see my effort with the red. Overall I’m happy with the result, as I can see where it needs improvement, and I now know how to do it. I think I could better this by pushing the shadows a touch more, and pushing the highlight by quite a bit. I really haven’t brought the highlights up enough.
I free-handed the fleur de lys, and again I think I’m seeing signs of improvement here also, although I did manage to get it a bit crooked. I blame the funny angle the shield is hanging at! The red blending needs a bit more time spent on it, but overall I think this is heading in the right direction.
I think the highlights on this side are a bit better in terms of placement and look like their coming from a more consistent light source, unlike the front!
My main guidance here – for colour recipe and blending approach only, the botched highlight placements are all my fault! – was this video from the entertaining Zumikito. If you’ve been following my mini painting journey, you might find it useful too! I certainly did! You can find it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOGlHTRySlU
Overall, I feel like I learned quite a lot from painting this mini. Over the course of this one and the next one to come, I really felt like some concepts were starting to make sense to me, so hopefully that will continue!
Next week I’ve some exciting news and updates, so be sure to check in for that. Until then, take care!