Esoteric spring cleaning

I couldn’t get myself to finish the diorama yet. This whole isolation drives me nuts, I have my kids and the wife in the room I do my hobby pretty much for the whole time and only manage to squeeze some work in the late evenings.

Under the circumstances I decided to jump a bit and do next thing on my list. That happens to be oil painting. I watched some tutorials, best of them turned out to be those two:

I prepared a bit of a setup, however didn’t invest in fancy paints or fast drying medium. Instead I used a set of cheap Chinese paints I bought ages ago and used for washes (I swear I paid less than 5 EURO for them). I also own significant number of synthetic brushes, although, now I see advantage of short bristled brush.

The process of painting spans across two days, so lighting varies widely on bellow photos.

As per the first tutorial, I started with basecoat of acrylics. Just rough and ready single colour coats over zenithal primer.

Then I applied liberal coat of matt varnish and dried the mini properly. Side note, as you can see I went for a random bones barbarian. The mini is bad, you’ll see bellow that his face is simply a blob without any details.

Then I started with the most obvious – NMM. I never understood the idea properly, but to be honest blending acrylics on such mall areas was a much bigger issue. So I started with very simple sketch of diagonal white and neighbouring blue-black… and blended them in under 4 minutes on both sides of the sword! I don’t think I’ve ever made such a clean blend in my life before! And 4 minutes is faster than airbrush if you consider changes of colour.

Anyway I went further and did his skin. This is where my lack of colour theory and understanding of pigments shows (together with somewhat strange choice of colours in my paints set). I can’t push contrast on the skin higher without him looking not really alive. Also, his face or lack thereof…

After problems with skin tones the rest went smoothly. This is where I’m now:

I left the mini in a display cabinet to dry properly before I varnish it and apply blacklining and some washes (oil washes of course).

I’ll report back on that if anyone’s interested.

What I learned so far:

1. I love oil paints!
2. There is no such thing as an error in oil painting, you can always get back and repair whatever went wrong. A clean brush with a drop of white spirit acts as an eraser!
3. You really need to watch to not touch the mini, any contact with whatever before the paint is dry will destroy the paintjob – painting handle would be very useful, much more than in acrylics painting,
4. I need to learn whole lot more about colours.