(I wrote this post a month ago, but it kept being pushed back for AdeptiCon coverage. I think I’ll take a day break here, to make sure he gets some love. :))
And this guy finishes my glazing thoughts for now. The white shown in the photos is just white primer. I took the Guilliman Blue and watered it down, and painted it very carefully again into the undersides and pits of the cloak. After I’d painted his paints and quiver, I did the same thing with the blue on them as well. At one point this model looked so strange – white and stark blue with very warm beige clothing, accessories and the trim on his cloak. I toned it down quite a bit by drybrushing white on the cloak, and using the blue glaze to bring those warm colours back down in temperature similar to the cloak.
Lastly, as you can see, my first attempts at using the Secret Weapon Crushed Glass bundle. This is very neat stuff! I did it in two layers, not because I had to, but because I underestimated what it would look like after the first layer. That layer looked very weak, more like slush everywhere. I went back again and used less of the Realistic Water in the mix (watch the video on how to use it) and it came out much more snow-like.
(Just slotting this post in early because I need to send photos of this model to a few places this week!)
There isn’t an actual model for The Firestarter, but I got the idea of using these Hell Dorado Efrit Warriors from the Wyrd forums, and I do love the model! The funny thing is that most people refer to The Firestarter as “he”, but mine is very clearly a “she”!
She started with Sunburst yellow all over. Building on my playing with glazes from last time, I took Bloodletter and mixed it with the Sunburst to create a hybrid glaze/paint mix. I added more Bloodletter, getting more orange with each layer. I think I did 10 or so layers, before I got impatient and went straight to Bloodletter and put a bit of it at the tips of everything.
I painted her body in Shadow Grey, being careful to create area where the fire was still showing through. I mixed 2:1:1 Soft Body Black, Guilliman Blue glaze and water and then painted the undersides, exactly the same as how I did the Rail Golem. Then I did 3:1 Shadow grey and Sunburst yellow, adding more Sunburst to highlight up. This had a similar effect as painting the Lamenters Yellow over the grey – such that the tip of her head and some of her edges look like they’ve been OSL’d
She has some raised up areas on her legs and back, and I mixed Shadow Grey and Skull White to edge highlight those parts.
I think the hybrid mix of paint and glaze worked out well, as the glaze has the property of spreading out nicely and it tints the paint that I’m using. I’m not convinced this is better than just using paint+paint+water, but I felt like it was easier to control where my paint went, which is a critical improvement!
I wanted to paint my skull cannon, but I wanted to try a new metallic technique. I didn’t want to try that on the skull cannon, so I worked on this golem that I’d had no intention of adding to my Malifaux crew until a few weeks ago. >.>
Skin
He started Mithril Silver. I read an article talking about how to make metallic red, and they suggested Ogryn Flesh+Baal Red 1:1 – that made it looks like slightly red silver, and not good at all. So I did another layer of Baal Red. Which was still absolutely no good. Heavy Body Black to darken it. Then…Lamenter’s Yellow. This was still bad, because now I had a bright gold colour on him. I did the Baal Red again, which finally made the skin look roughly where it is in the photos.
I let it sit for a day or two, before deciding to travel down a road I’d been trying to get to, but hadn’t had the courage yet – highlight and shading with glazes of a colour entirely different from the base. Mr. Wappel talks about this regularly, but I’ve never done it. If you look at some of his models, he has purple and green and yellow and so forth all on the same patch of Nurgling skin. It doesn’t look patchy, it looks like mottled skin. I was studying a painting of trees in one of the local Vancity branches and remembered that a technique used to shade forests is to use purple. Using dark green to shade a green forest is visually uninteresting – at the end, you just had a big patch of different levels of green. But if you use yellows and purples, you can highlight and shade and create visual interest.
So I took Guilliman Blue, watered it down a bit and applied a few layers to the undersides of the Rail Golem skin. I did the same kind of layers as I would if I were painting using opaque pigments – paint a little less on each layer. I painted into the creases in between muscles and in the arm pit, and on any surface that was on the bottom of the model. Then I took Lamenter’s Yellow and some water and painted a bit on the top of the surface. This made the top a little more of that golden colour I didn’t want, but since I only used a little bit, it was more of a highlight than actually changing the colour of the model.
Pipes
The pipes were similarly done. I think I used Boltgun Metal so I could start darker. I mixed Guilliman Blue and Bloodletter to create a purple glaze and applied in layers, along with straight Bloodletter to create the worn and used look that his pipes have.
This all inspired me to do a multi-post series on different ways to use these 2 colours, as well as Bloodletter. I haven’t even pulled the green, Waywatcher Green, out of my box. >.> You’ll get the next few articles shortly, but this may be interrupted by a GottaCon report, since I’m leaving for the Island in less than an hour!
I evened out that stark highlight I had in the mid-section. Watered some codex grey and fixed that up. Patience, and solid brushwork were needed – you have to push the pigment where you want it to be while it floats in the water.
Lamenters Yellow continues to be a great colour for me. I put it over the red to make an orangey-fiery thing. Some of the scales (left of the first photo) they are really dark and not fiery at all. Added some watered Mephiston, some watered Ushapti Bone, more Lamenters, and lastly really watered down some chaos black and painted that in between the scales. That’ll give them more “pop”! 🙂
I think the moment I started to feel better about the model was after I painted the bone. I had started to do the glazing thing again, and it wasn’t working and was creating another horrible patchy mess when I decided to screw it. Layered highlighting had gotten me this far in life, and I wasn’t going to put it down yet. Moments after I started, I felt some of the tension leave my shoulders. When I was done, the model had the sort of characteristic brightness that I like in my models. It was that simple – a few simple spot colours cleaned up and instantly it looked much better.
A bit of work here and there on the ropes, some more cleaning up and that’s where I got to tonight.
Only two more things need doing here — the metal bits, and for me to accept that it’s a good paint job. I could feel something resembling obsessive perfectionism sneaking in today while I worked the skin back and forth trying to reduce the chalkiness. Perfect is the enemy of done, and of good enough.
After that, I glue this sucker to his base. Pretty excited about that!
This one is actual glazing. The light is Fortress Grey, the dark is Codex Grey mixed with P3 Umbral Umber and some Chaos Black. (All mixed with the matte medium and lots of water). The Umbral brings some warmer (“red”) tones in certain places while the rest of the skin is very cool (“blue”), which gives some tonal variation in the skin.
After the fiasco the other day, I found some foam and blue-tac and now I don’t handle my model anymore.
I don’t like the belly section on this side. It’s too stark, but every time I try to fix it I end up to stark in the other direction. I think I need to take a mid-tone and even out the muscle shading a bit.
But you can see that the horrible chaos of the last post has been fixed. There is still some mottling in places, but this is good since it’s a dinosaur skin. Painting on the layers of light and dark has given a certain amount of order to the chaos, so it no longer looks like the dogs breakfast.
The other thing I’m trying, is a bit of OSL, (Mr. Wappel) which is why there is some orange and yellow on the underside of the model. Can’t say I’m succeeding, but it should be good enough when I’m done.
That’s the biggest part of the model done, and because it’s a simple model there is really only 4 more colours to paint – gold, the scales, the ropes and the bone. I think I’m going to try to finish this part this weekend and glue it to the base so I can stop calling it my Stealth Suit Stegadon…
Like most hobby desks, mine is in serious need of cleaning.
I’ve only ever used a wet palette at painting classes. It seemed like something people did when they were taking a class. The other day I was in Michaels and picked up some parchment paper (baking section) and made it happen.You need:
A plastic lid, or styrofoam plate.
A piece of paper towel and get it moist (but not soaked).
Parchment paper and place it on top of the moist towel.
I’ve had that dark grey, and the lighter grey next to it, wet all night long. I’ve been painting for 2 hours, judging by the episode of Chumphammer I’m listening to. The big bonus of this is that I can go back and forth with my colours. If the dark got too dark, do a layer of the light, and vice versa. And this is how you do glazing! I’ve been doing it with a dry palette for a few years, and mixing new paints/water when I needed them, but this…this is way better. Highly recommended.
The other new thing on my desk is a dedicated clean water bottle. For years I’ve been using water out of my cleaning pot to water down my paints. The other day, I noticed that my grey was red. >.< You’d think I would notice that sooner (there’s a good story from my GW days, working with Owen, here), but my eyes have a very hard time discerning the difference between similar shades. (And don’t even get me started on navy blue/purple). Clean water bottle, also a total win.
I like having a back-log of posts lined up, and I don’t want to post spam, so we’ll get into the actual end result of the glazing…tomorrow.
Glaze is in quotes because this isn’t glazing…well, maybe it is, but it’s not what people usually mean when they say glaze. I’m feeling like this is really part of the base coat of the model. I’ve painted some bright colours on, and now I’m darkening them a bit.
I took 1:1 Chaos Black and Matte Medium, added a boat-load of water, and wazzed that all over the entire damn model.
Still watching (listening to…) The Voice. Doesn’t make for good painting, even if it’s an easy job.
It actually looks much much worse than the photo makes it seem. The paint has dried in a patchy, horrible way. If you click on the photo and open a bigger version, you can see what I mean on the back leg.
There are a few spots where, while I was painting after working out last time, the paint isn’t adhering to the model. Oils from your fingers slide onto the model, and because our paint is acrylic/water based, it does what oil and water do and doesn’t stick. One spot was so bad I asked my club mates for advice and it was recommended that I sand it down. I did and that fixed the problem, but there’s a few more smaller ones to fix.
Right now, I’m a few posts behind. This is good because I can say that despite how embarrassed I am to post a photo of this model, it’s turning out ok tonight (which will be posted…in the near future. :))
Glazing was a good class. I didn’t learn a whole lot, for reasons we’ll get into, but I left feeling energized, which was a feat considering the absolute exhaustion I went into the class with!
I can’t remember or Google the teacher’s name, but he was originally a student of Mathieu Fontaine, whom I’ve written about before. “Glazing”, it turns out, is a technique I’ve learned already. Start with a mid-tone and apply successive layers of darker mixes to the shaded portion of an area, layers of lighter mixes to the highlighted area. Nothing new there.
What was new, was that I’d played with a bunch of this stuff and looked into different ways of applying the methods Mathieu taught. So I asked a bunch of questions. I asked about how James Wappel does his stuff, I asked about using the artists matte medium as a pigment thinner and generally just had the confidence to have a conversation about this stuff.
The downside…they have no idea how Wappel does what he does, and they recommend against the matte medium.
One thing I really did re-learn, is that I really should figure out how to include a wet palette into my painting workflow. I learned it with Fontaine, but neglected it, and it’s really kind of useful to do. >.<
I think it was mostly invigorating because I felt like I was a part of the conversation. Like I could paint something, and potentially be able to speak knowledgeably about how and why I did what I did. Like I could put something together that would look decent in that competition shelving out front.
I’m still going to use the medium, because I’ve loved what I’ve done with it so far. 😛
Edit: I believe that the teacher was Alex Akers. He runs Battleroad Games and his (defunct) hobby blog is at http://akersminis.blogspot.ca/.
I decided to finish the Kroxigor first, since he was a big, centerpiece model.
I wanted him to look similar to the Krox in my Fantasy army, but I failed at that. Those Krox don’t have any yellow on their scales, and most of their back is grey as opposed to the all red that I have going on here. He still looks pretty badass, but he isn’t the same.
After the Mephiston Red base and the “wash” that I did from the last post, I used some GW Lamenters Yellow glaze to see what it did. Woooah boy, did that make things yellow! You can see it in these photos, there is yellow on the edges and in the cracks. Then I took a Matte Medium+Bleached Bone+water combo and gently did all of the edges of his scales. The end result is this sort of yellow, sort of pale off-white, really red, thing. I like it, but I think it’s much to much red.
Working on the rest of the team next, who are also much to red. Worse, the skinks even have red helmets right now…need to figure out what I’m doing with the “team uniform”. 🙂
