Maledrakh incorporates contrast paints

Still messing about with contrast paints, we come to the Nolzur’s Marvellous miniatures Spectator and Gazers.

The Spectator and Gazer are obviously variants of the classic Beholder…

but smaller…

A lot smaller.

I painted these with Contrasts: Terradon Turquoise and Volupus Pink. A single coat of contrast paint straight onto the nolzur light grey primer after cleaing off all those horrible mould lines and touching up with some light grey paint. I wetblended the eyestalks. The tongue is Magos Purple. The eyes are done with regular paint and gloss varnish. The tongue was also given a coat of gloss varnish.

Really simple. Really effective.

I put the Spectator on a 32mm 3D-printed base and the Gazers on 20mm bases.

What you lookin’ at?!?

These minis were completed July 10th 2020

Spectator and Gazers

Nolzur’s Marvelous Miniatures, Wave 9

WizKids

PVC boardgame plastic

32mm plus 20mm bases.

Getting on with the contrast paints, this one is a hybrid of sorts.

Nor’Okk the Ettin by Reaper Miniatures. One of the original Bones models from the very first kickstarter in 2012. This means that is is made of the soft, bendy white pvc they originally used. This is also a showcase of that the softer material can work well for larger models. Even though many of the smaller (human-sized) Bones can be pretty bad what with soft and shallow details, the occational missing nose and noodles-for-weapons.

To the painting:

For this model, I wanted to try a more hybrid approach combining contrast paints with regular paint to see if there would be a glaring difference.

I basecoated in black with a zenithal grey on top. The zenithal was slightly spotty or grainy, and this affected the result alot as the contrast paints are transparent.

This model was rather cave-man like, so I gave them the classic Fred Flintstone look with orange furs with black spots. The furs were done in regular paints, CItadel Doombull Brown, Vallejo 72.009Hot Orange, Scalecolor Mars Orange and Citadel Squig Orange, with a slight bit of Reaper Warrior Flesh and Reaper Bright Flesh mixed in for the highlights and inverse details. The spots in thinned Vallejo  70.862 Black Grey.

The wooden clubs were mainly done in contrasts: Gore Grunta Fur and Templar Black straight onto the zenithal. Spikes and details in regular paints.

The skin was also mainly contrast: Darkoath Flesh and Guilliman Flesh, then drybrushed ever so slightly with regular paints after a day or two.

Note: Contrast paint rubs off easily and any drybrushing must be done with a lot of care.

The fish were done in gunmetal and then a stripe of vallejo black green ink, followed by (when dry) some dark quickshade ink to bring out the details.

I did not pay enough attention to the belly, as the contrast pooled a bit. This left an unsightly dark stripe at the bottom edge. I drybrushed carefully with some Reaper Warrior Flesh, and again with this mixed slightly lighter a couple of times to smooth it out and partially cover it.  Turned out OK, even though the stripe can be seen if you look closely.

The rest of the details such as leg wrappings, chains, beard and faces are all done with regular paints.

This model should work well as a Berzerker in the Ogre army.

I used a 50mm round lipped base for this one.

Conclusion: Even though there is some shine in the contrast paints, most of the shine has been knocked back a notch or two by drybrushing with regular paint. A coat of varnish will also take care of that.

Apart from the shinyness, I think it worked rather well to combine the paints on this model. I am happy with the paint job, and happy to continue experimenting with different techniques to incorporate the contrast paints into my repertoire.

However; I experience alot mess with the paint pots, as the contrast paint dribbles down the sides of the pot when I take the lid off or on. Am I the only one or is this a common experience?  Am I a cynic for thinking this might be a feature of the pot design to sell more?

As a part of trying to incorporate contrast paints into my repertoire, I started by using contrasts mainly as another type of wash over zenithal grey on black undercoats. Which is good and well. However, I realised that I myself actally never have used them as advertised, globbed onto white or cream undercoats. Looking at pictures and videos of other people painting is fine, but really not a replacement for doing something yourself. After all, there is usually a great gap between theory and practice in most things.

So I broke open the drawer full of old Bones 1 pc-type minis. These are some of the very few minis I have that are undercoated all in white. I don’t even remember why. Maybe I was all out of  black primer spray or something. However, I was reminded why the old Bones 1 pc-type minis were consigned to the Drawers of Oblivion™ in the first place. Bendy. Soft. Shallow details. Faces without noses. Hands without fingers. Weapons made for poking around corners…

Them old Bones are a quite different beast than the newer Bones. Which are still not pefect, but certainly miles better than alot of the old stuff.

So I pulled one out more or less at random. I thought what I pulled was some sort of lady druid. Turned out she was a “Dark Elf Wizard”. Right right.
The stark white of the plastic and subsequent primer made the mini very difficult to read. Details? What details?

At any rate, it was the first to get the prescribed Contrast treatment. No thinning, no nonsense. One coat, straight onto white undercoat.

Which I rapidly found out was a bit of a utopian dream. Mr Shakyhands wanted it otherwise. I spent more time trying to correct overpaints than anything else. In the end (what, maybe all of 10 minutes) I gave up the fiddlywork and adopted a more laissez faire attitude to this.

I am thinking if I do any more of these, which I most likely will just to get the feel of the different paints, I will be going for speed and single coats for starters. Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead! Let ‘er rip! These minis would not get painted any other way, so whatevah!

I mean, it went so fast I don’t even remember quite which colours I used here. Was it gulliman or darkoath flesh? Was is snakebite or gore-grunta fur? Camo or militarum on the hair? I know it was Templar Black on the leggings, and Iyanden Yellow on the staff. The rest eludes me. This was a fast paint job.

I did some details with regular paint, such as the eyes , the knees and the knife. The rest is constrast on white.

I did however learn once and for all, that contrast is shiny. She looks positively wet in this picture. On the other hand, one of the problems I have earler had with this type of older Bones is that the detail is soft and shallow, and easily gets obscured by regular paint. Especially when using unthinned paint and several coats for coverage. The contrast does away with all that sort of thing as it is so thin, and actually brings out details I for one have not seen before. (Just like a wash, fancy that!)

So this mini looks perfectly fine considering the amount of effort that did not go into it. Also it shows that contrast paints can work on thinner, shallower minis than the GW chubbies they usually are shown on.

The Prophet of the New Path vs The Defender of the Old Faith. Who will win? Or will their lovemakingup beget a Genesis-like bastard with the power of the Word?

77121 Liela, Dark Elf Wizard

Bones 1 Core set, 2012, Dark Elf subset

Reaper Miniatures

Sculpted by Werner Klocke

Made in Bonesium PVC

30mm base.

available from reapermini.com both in Bones and in Metal. The metal one is way more detailed.

Crooked Claw miniatures was a Germany-based one man (and afaik run as a part-time, hobby-style evenings-and-weekend business) miniatures company that was all about oldhammer style goblins (and a few orcs) sculpted by Kev Adams the Goblinmaster. I do not really know the backstory, but I surmise that the person running the company commissioned minis from Kev Adams, had them produced and cast up, and then sold them off his website. There was also an indiegogo campaign at one point. I believe my Crooked Claw minis are from that campaign. I bought a batch of them second hand some years ago. Crooked Claw minis sold off all stock and closed down early 2016.

At any rate, the Goblinmaster makes lovely goblins in his signature style, and the Crooked Claw ones are immediately identifiable as Kev Adams sculpts. However, the troll is not. Both this troll and an armoured wolf are sculpted by Diego Serrate.

I like to think I am not an elitist. This is a well sculpted lovely, even brilliant troll. But still…. not by Kev Adams. Strange how brand names can alter one’s perception of a product, isn’t it?

The troll is cast in resin as opposed to the metal most other Crooked Claw minis were made of. I put in on a 40mm base.

Painting:

I am experimenting with incorporating contrast paints into my repertoire, and am trying out different things here and there. I find that only using contrast paints on stark whiteish undercoats tend to become a but muggy or rough, and are not really my thing. Also each contrast paint behaves differently, and I still have a lot to find out about them.

For this mini I used Militarum Green and Iyanden Yellow (with Gore-Grunta Fur on the club), over a zenithal grey on black for the base coats. Using a brush that was not overladen, both colours on right after the other, drawing off the excess to avoid pooling. This served mostly to tint the underlying zentithal more than use the Contrast paint’s inherent shading effect. I might have gotten similar results using regular thinned paint. However, I like the intensity of the contrast paints, and I don’t have to thin them, put them on my palette or anything. Straight outta the pot!

Once dry, I both drybrushed and layered highlights and smoothed out some of the edges with regular paint. Some extra shading with dark quickshade here and there. Working up some details like the boils, nose, ears and eyes all with regular paint.

Tufts and flockmix on the base and done in roughly an hour after the base contrast coats were dry.

Troll

Crooked Claw Miniatures, 2014

Sculpted by Diego Serrate

Made in resin

no longer available as far as I know.

This model was completed the 2nd of May 2020.