Painting technique experimentation

The second one was a plastic veermyn, ultimately I’m still working towards getting smooth gradients when starting off with “shaded base coat” but I’m hopeful I’ll get it there since the amount of time taken off of individual models is pretty substantial. And honestly it’s a little more fun since you don’t have to be too overly fastidious until the end (okay to be fair most of me finds this fun, part of me is beside itself with frustration because you can’t just leave that mark there!).

The first step is the midtone/base layer. In the videos there’s a lot of back and forth with colours and plenty of mixing on the palette and the model itself. I did my best to loosen up a little more in this regard but it’s still definitely much more neat than in the tutorials. One advantage to this method is that supposedly you don’t need to remember formulas to maintain a coherent army if you’re doing a large project (and the video seems to show that matching does indeed work).

Next up establishing some lights. Going through these old images I’m getting the sense that I need to find a way to make the transitions here less stark while maintaining the speed. Oddly I wonder if covering up more of the model would help since the following step is shading and you can then bring it back down in layers.

Then the shading. Not much to say here, mainly inks thinned down with some glaze medium (in the case of vallejo) or glaze medium/water for army painter. Water in any substantial amount does not make for a happy vallejo ink 🙂

And then the longest step which is adding in details (red eyes and such) and using thin glazes to improve the transitions, shift colours as desired, increase shades or highlights and clean up parts of the model that are particularly messy. Again I think the highlighting step is where I need to focus (including on the dwarf I’m largely finished now).

And done. The base here was designed and 3d printed custom as well. I’m pretty happy with the print itself but not so much the paint scheme. It’s not super inspired but I was starting to drag my feet again on what is meant to be a fun learning exercise so I just threw some stuff together to try and keep myself moving.