Day 2 started out pretty well – I caught the right bus, I knew where I was going, I found a McDicks to get a McGriddle at (praise the evil genius who invented the McGriddle!), I ate breakfast with a fellow painter who was pretty awesome and then we walked to the shop to get our paint on!

We waited for a bit. 9am rolls around, which is when the event starts and we think “Oh well, the keyholder just slept in a bit, no big deal.” Everyone is pretty cool. Another 15…then another…then it’s 50 minutes later and we’re trying to figure out how to get ahold of the guy so we can get into the shop!

The fellow is found and is properly apologetic and we get excited to finally get our thing going. And then…we find…that the door lock has been glued shut. As in, the key hole has been filled with glue. The kind of glue that fills a hole really good, and then sticks really good. Curses, frustration…and resignation. It’s going to be a while to get a locksmith over to fix it…so a bunch of us head to the toy shop across the way (convenient, really).

If you ever get a chance to go into Toy Traders in Langley (God help you if you need to be in Langley…) I highly recommend it. Fantastic toy shop! Board games, barbie dolls, massive sections of comics and collectible action figures and LEGO and Brio and building blocks and if you look up, the owners of the store clearly have a hard-on for Star Wars. Awesome shop.

At about 11am we get into the store and get going. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover and not a lot of time to cover it in. We order pizza in, and we ended up skipping the last section of the class. Sadness. 🙁

Composition

This was a relatively short section, and I think we only touched the tip of it really. He talked about making sure to create a “V” or “^” with the outline of your model and/or diorama. Create diagonal lines to draw the eye around. If you add brick-work to your model, ensure that it runs diagonal, because this helps to give the sense that there is “more outside the base” that you don’t see. Only take as much space as you need for a diorama – empty space is wasted. There is almost certainly an entire other class on composition. During this talk he showed us a lot of different canvas painting that showed off the compositions he was talking about.

Skin

As a technique, the skin is almost identical to the pants. Choose a highlight colour, choose a shadow colour. Start at 2/3rds of the way from the top of the sphere (ogre muslces are full of spheres!) and shade down. Start at 1/3rd of the way from the top and highlight up. However, in this case because you have the crevasses of the muscles, we had to paint our deepest shadow down first, which is our target colour for the shadow. For this, I found the shading a lot easier than the highlights, whereas for the pants I found the opposite. I was wondering if the bright colour was harder to shade, where the dark colour was harder to highlight. That makes some sense.

Face

The face got interesting, although we used the same colours as for the skin. You should highlight the face more than the skin because you want the face to stand out and look the best. He showed us some more canvas paintings to emphasize his point.

On the face you want to shade:

• Under the chin.
• Under the lower lip.
• Under the nose.
• Above the eyebrows, coming down to form a V between the eyes, above the nose.
• Temples
• Back of the cheeks, in front of the ears.
• Side of the nose, and coming down.

You want to highlight:

• Top of the chin.
• Top of the nose.
• Top of the nostrils.
• Mid-forehead.
• Ears
• The bone under the eye, and moving backwards.
• Cheek

Eyes

Eyes were simple in idea, but difficult in execution. Fill the eye socket with black. Paint the raised area with eye. Put a dot of black in the middle. It’s that dot that’s hard, since your paint dries on your paint brush as you bring it to the model. This is why we don’t use a single hair brush (or similarly small), since you’d never get the paint on the model. This section was done quickly and I couldn’t get the dot right.

Metals

“Non-metallic metal is crap!” That’s a quote. There wasn’t an explanation as to why it was crap, and I forgot to ask. NMM is black-to-white, with gray in between, no exceptions.

With metallics the point is a sharp contrast. Shade with heavily watered down black, and layer in on successively to create a gradient effect. Highlight, in the case of Boltgun Metal, with Mithril Silver, again heavily watered down to layer. When highlighting and shading a flat surface with edges you want to paint a shade, and then on the other side of the edge you want a highlight. This is better explained with a drawing. Imagine a sword blade with two sides, a back side and a sharp edge at the front. If you shade the bottom of one of the sides, you would highlight the back immediately near that side, then shade the other side. At the top of the blade, you highlight the top of the side, then shade the back side at the top, then highlight the top of the other side. The idea is to create contrast by matching a shade to a highlight.

When done this, take a shade that you’ve used somewhere else on your model. Heavily water it down and put 1-2 layers of it in the middle, between the Boltgun Metal and the layered black. As a silver metal, the blade is desaturated – bright gray, middle gray and black. Blending with a previously used shadow colour, very subtly, serves to tie the blade back to the model.

 

Lastly

That’s about it. I got lost in Surrey after that, which was a little frightening, but at least I was pretty sure the bus I was on would take me to a skytrain station eventually. Even if it did go through all of Surrey to get there.

Next week is Masterclass 2, and we’ll do dealing with weathering and airbrushing and vehicles and stuff. Going to be good!

Later!