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sundancer 1 year, 11 months ago.
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Well, I did see it coming. I’m still fine, wife is a bit down but our daughter is full on sick with 38°C – 39°C and headaches.
Oh, hope everyone gets well soon. It seems like everyone is getting ill recently.
I actually did some hobby over the weekend and finished my two Oakbound Studio miniatures which I’ve added to my project – https://www.beastsofwar.com/project-entry/1790927/
I had quite a lot of fun adding extra foliage to this model below.
I now have a whole lot of miniatures to assemble as my Osmoticmeld Kickstarter pledge came in, miniatures inspired by Ian Millar’s art, and in the next few weeks another kickstarter pledge is due from Midlam Miniatures.
Only a couple of days til UGNI releases their Dark Elves. And, of course, I’ve still a couple of human players to finish off (and I need to base all eight or nine of them) and about four elves still half-painted, and four or five skaven still needed to complete my team of eight (I don’t play Blood Bowl any more, but Blitz Bowl and Sevens – and some other football game rules I’ve got here, they may be One Page Rules? – are great fun. And you need fewer players to play, so a team of eight is more than enough for me!)
So of course, with so many football teams still to finish, I spent this evening finishing up a couple more cyberpunk city dwellers….
I’m giving serious thought to mounting these on clear bases – I’m rubbish at basing. And I’m never happy with the results. So maybe clear disks are the way to go after all?
final details on these two finished (trouser and jacket cuffs, belt buckle etc). I’m calling them done.
And I’m pretty dead set on rebasing them onto clear bases unless someone can give me a good reason not to….
So in my pursuit of becoming a better (ok, let’s be honest, just a faster) painter, I took myself along to my FLGS. A guy called Adam was running a half-day course on miniature painting at the Dice Saloon in Brighton. While I’ve learned to stop hating my particular painting style, his example mini looked too intriguing – volumetric shading and correct placement of edge highlighting was something I was desperate to learn, but I also picked up a few really valuable tips along the way.
Firstly, the key to speed painting is to use a bigger brush!
While that might sound obvious, it needs a little more explaining – a while back, my favoured workhorse brush was around a size zero. Then I discovered that, by loading the brush fully with paint (instead of dabbing just the tip into it) I was getting better results with a larger brush (even on smaller areas). So I ramped it up and even now, I paint about 90% of my mini with a size 2 sable (for anyone interested, the green-handled Pro Arte watercolour sable brushes are fantastic).I thought this was a pretty big brush. So I was amazed when I was given this monster
Turn your monitor upside-down if you need to – make sure you read that right; it’s not a size six.
It’s a size nine brush!Which leads onto the other thing I learned today – the consistency of your paint is almost (if not more) important than the size of your brush. With a honking great big brush, with a nice point and paint at the correct consistency you can be far more precise and get a far better finish than painting with a smaller brush a thick, lumpy paint.
The easiest way to get correct paint consistency was surprisingly simple: always mix two colours. It was as easy as that. Even if the “second colour” is exactly the same as the first. It’s the act of moving a wet brush through the paint (to mix two colours together, for example) that not only creates the right consistency (for clarity, we were mixing paint on a wet palette) but also loads it fully into the bristles of the brush, meaning you don’t have to keep returning to the paint to load it up – it also means the paint flows easily and readily off the brush, onto the model (instead of scraping it off the brush onto the surfaces, like wiping dog mess off the side of your shoe!)
And after just two hours of painting here’s the result:
Other than the eyes and a bit of the edge highlighting, it was painted almost exclusively withe a number nine brush!
Now it’s not as precise as I’d normally paint (and I’d probably go back and tidy up a few of the edges). But on a normal day, I’d struggle to get a mini like this finished in more than twice this time. I’ll be honest, the black/grey isn’t anywhere near as good as I’d have liked – but the red (particularly the shading) is really quite impressive!And the other thing I learned today?
Push the contrast. However much you think you’ve gone as bright as you dare – go brighter.
Here’s my mini alongside a couple of other marines painted during the same session:
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t put white anywhere near a black object – even for specular highlights. Being seeing my model alongside others painted by the other guys in the same class, it’s clear that’s what I’m missing. You know how you make black look really super dark and shiny? By painting it white!
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