It was a few months ago, probably at Astronomi-con, that Mr. Dyer mentioned organizing painting classes in Vancouver. I said yes, please, that sounds great! I have been looking forward to these classes for months now. My painting style has grown, I think dramatically, in the last year or two and the chance to take a class to try to solidify some new skills wasn’t one I was going to pass up. The downside – this is the busiest February I’ve ever had, I’m moving, I’ve had a few weekends packed up, and now I have two complete weekends filled with painting classes. I don’t regret it…but the timing is poor. 🙂

The teacher for the weekend is Mathieu Fontaine (Blog) – a winner of multiple Golden Demon awards (that’s good), a phenomenal painter, and a general bastard (in a good way). It turns out that he’s also a phenomenal teacher – able to explain difficult concepts while jet lagged, with a friendly and patient attitude. I would recommend him.

I took some notes while we went, and I took some photos. I painted for about 20 hours, and I didn’t finish the model. (No one did – that wasn’t the point). I learned some lessons about photography while I was at it. 😛 Hit the jump to read my (cleaned up) notes, and see some photos!

Priming

The model of the we worked on this weekend was a basic Ogre Kingdoms model. Chosen because it has large open areas to practice a variety of different shading, highlighting, and blending techniques.

We started with white primer. Black primer is the regular standard of wargamers, largely because if you screw up and fail to paint an armpit it’s black, so it’s “shaded”. White primer is less forgiving in that manner, but the colours turn out brighter and more saturated. We used short bursts, passing the spray can over the model with a wave of our arm to prevent the primer building up. Similarly, we sprayed at a 45 degree angle from the bottom and from the top so that the mid-section was only sprayed once – my usual method of spraying head-on at the model would have paint potentially built up in the middle. Lastly, this is a much lighter coat than I would usually apply. You could still see the plastic through the primer! Previously I’ve sprayed a model such that it’s shiny, and I thought that was good coverage. It turns out that this just makes the paint harder to stick to the model – watered down paints hold onto the primer much better with a light coat.

Base Coat

Think of a colour spectrum, with your deepest shadows on one end and your brightest highlights on the other. Your base coat should be a colour roughly 2/3rds away from the shadow. You want to apply 4-5 coats of watered down paint, and don’t let it settle in the cracks. Use the edge of your paintbrush, the same way you would butter toast, and pull the pigment around where you want it. I choose a base coat of Rucksack Tan, a P3 biege colour. I also had to apply 8-9 coats for a base coat, so that it would cover the model properly. You can see the progress in the next few photos!

Lighting

Zenith lighting is…lighting from the zenith. Dur. The sun is at the highest point in the sky, so the highlight comes from directly above the model. A good way to simulate this is to take a photo of the model with a light above it, and then put that on your computer screen as a guide.

When painting, think of spheres. We talked about spheres a lot. 🙂 Everything is a sphere. If you imagine a sphere with light above it, it has it’s lightest point at the top. From there it gets darker until it rounds the corner and then gets darker. We’re painting this every time.

Blending

When choosing a colour to blend as a shadow, you don’t want to pick black. Black will desaturate your colour, leaving it looking flat. You want to pick another colour to mix with. In my case I choose Cryx Bane Base, a dark green P3 colour. I thought it might look good with the tan…I probably should have chosen a red colour instead. 🙂 He recommends blue as a good shadow colour because in general, a blue object is perceived by the eye as further away (when compared to other colours). Use a lot more water than you do with your base coat. Start your shadows from about 2/3rds of the way from the top of the sphere and slowly pull the pigment down. Use the edge of your brush again. When highlighting, start from the top 1/3rd of the sphere and pull the pigment up. When you screw up, use your base colour, watered down, and pull it down from the highlight and up from the shadow. This is important because when you use these watered down paints, there is more pigment where your paintbrush just was, compared to where you pull it from. So you create a gradient effect just by pulling the pigment around.

One downside to my chosen colours, is that the pants just looked dirty when I finished my shadows. I fixed it quite a bit by reapplying my base colour where the shadows looked patchy and pulling the pigment up. When I finished, my shadows looked pretty decent. We passed around our models after we’d finished the shadows, and I saw a couple really well done shading jobs – blue pants shaded with a deep, beautiful blue.

 Skin

The day ends, almost 12 hours later, with us starting skin. We applied a base coat to the skin of the model and then choose a shadow colour, as we did with the pants. In this case, we used the shadow colour to outline the recesses of the muscles. We would use this, in the morning, to use the same shading technique to shade 2/3rds of each sphere down to the recessed line. Then we would, again, highlight from the 2/3rd line up. I choose Iridian Flesh, a dark flesh colour, so that my model didn’t end up a mass of beige. I’m glad I did – I saw good painters shade the lighter flesh tone and not do well with it.

Lastly

In the evening we had a few hours of colour theory and composition. I won’t get into either here (colour theory because it can be Googled pretty easily, composition…maybe I’ll write down my notes in the Day 2 post), but I did learn two fascinating facts. Apparently yellow is really expensive to make. Most companies get around this by selling it for 4-5 times the price of other pigments, and most fine art students are told it’s part of the business. GW sells their paint for a static cost, and choose instead to drastically reduce the amount of pigment in the yellow paint, rather than have mom say “This stuff is so expensive!” (they say this already) “Why is the yellow so much more expensive! I’m not buying this stuff!”.  Also, red, in general, is a difficult colour to cover with. Not just in model painting, but in general. Both colours, if you need to do large areas, should be airbrushed, or done by starting with a darker version of the colour and working up to the primary.

There’s another day coming, but it had a lot less stuff in it, for a few reasons (starting with the fact that it was scheduled for 4 hours less time…). I was thinking that I think I knew a lot of this stuff already in theory, but that I had never actually applied it to a model, or learned the practically of doing it. A large part of this day was having someone say “no, more water” “apply more highlight here” “that colour is to dark” – the important details of the techniques.

Later!