adepticon

My last class of Thursday was the Sculpting class with Jose Orteza.

This class started poorly. I think a few of the guys in the middle row had to much to drink at their events, and they weren’t focused all that well. Jose was either tired or not as organized, and it felt like he was trying to organize his stuff while these guys were joking around, and the class started a bit late. I was sitting around at 10pm for a class that’s going until midnight, and I wanted to get on with it. We ended up going a half hour overtime, which wasn’t great.

After a bit, Jose started. The class started with a number of great basic things (this is Intro to Sculpting), and…a bunch of places to buy specific tools. “You can buy the wax 5 at X”, “this Royal Sovereign set of tools can be found at Dick Blicks”. I don’t even know why I need all these tools, let alone care where I would buy them from. This took up even more time, and I started to wonder if the class was worthwhile at all.

Thankfully, it got good after this for a bit.

Increasingly, I’m finding I have ideas for models I want but I can’t find. I want to work on solo models and make them really nice instead of big units. Malifaux is good for this since everything is solo, but my heart still lies in Lizards even if I’m not overly happy playing Warhammer. I’ve seen what dear Patrick can do with putty, and I’m jealous. I’m jealous because he’s spent years sculpting little things, so that he can sculpt bigger things. I’ve got an idea, but no method of actioning that idea.

Here’s a few tips I left with:

• He recommended starting with 50/50 yellow/blue extender/hardener, although some items (cloaks, away from the body) need more hardener to survive.
• Fingerprints are very bad!
• Pushing “overworks” the GS. (I still have no idea what “overworking” is).
• Polymeric Systems sells tubes of GS (this was the one “buy this here” piece of advice that I thought was immediately useful).
• Any moisture between the GS and the surface will prevent it from sticking.
• If you’re gap filling, fill to 90% and then dry and finish later.
• Waiting 10 minutes after mixing the GS together is the optimal time for working with it. 90 minutes later it was still malleable, but harder.
• You can scrape with a hobby knife against the GS to remove any “doughiness” – I think it’s that rounding that you sometimes see.
• To cut, you have to chop like a paper cutter. Dragging your knife will pull the GS.
• Almost anything big needs an armature to provide shape and structure.
• You can use a small mirror to sculpt on, and then transfer your creation to it’s final place.

He provided a lengthy document that contained steps to create a variety of different things like hair, scales, jewelry, purity seals, etc. We spent the middle part of the class working on making a purity seal, a length of chain and a feather on the mirror. This was really good!

The last part of the class he rushed through a bunch of ideas on how to make a cloak, a kilt, a banner but he really sped through it and I didn’t retain anything.

I feel like sculpting is the sort of thing where he can show you how to sculpt a feather, and a chain and a purity seal, and then you know how to sculpt a feather and a chain and a purity seal, but you don’t know how to sculpt much else. So I didn’t really learn what I necessarily wanted to learn, but I did gain enough confidence to think I should try. I’m still afraid of trying (and failing), but that’s better than not even thinking I should try.

I took 3 classes Thursday night. I’m glad I did them early, because last year I did them on Saturday and was to exhausted to learn anything! I recommend anyone to take a class like this – a 2 hour thing at a convention, or a full weekend with a dedicated teacher – you will learn something. Even if you know everything you could possibly know, you still get the chance to sit down and talk with a master of the art. It’s well worth it.

My first class was True Metallics with Dave Pauwels. Dave was an excellent teacher, and had a lot of great examples to show us and was very personable.

I learned a few things which I’ll share with you:

• A wash is a mixture that is designed to fall into crevasses.
• A glaze is a mixture that is not for this purpose.
• The difference between these two is less than you’d think…mainly in their usage, rather than their mixture.
• You can add a drop of white glue to help break up the pigments.
• You should be highlighting your metallics the same way you highlight your regular colours.
• You should be shading your metallics.
• Be sure to let each layer dry first.
• He sometimes puts 20 layers of washes on his metals!
• He went over some chipping techniques I had learned previously — use foam to stipple on the chip colour, then shade and highlight your chips. 
• Sometimes you may want to dull coat your models just to make the “shine level” the same across the model.
• Shadows are more interesting if you start with blue.

Except for the white glue, all of this was something I was working on with my Rail Golem already. That’s not bad though – it confirms that I’m doing the right thing!

Freehand

This was a good class to take from Chris Borer of Full Borer Miniatures. He was also really friendly, supportive and helpful!

I tried some freehand on my Herald of Nurgle a few months ago and wasn’t as happy with the results. I didn’t learn a lot of technique, but I did learn a few important things, starting with…

Patience, bitches.

That’s the biggest problem of it all. I lack patience when painting. I want it now, damn it. Doing this in a classroom atmosphere really helped – you have no where else to go, nothing else to do, so sitting and painting the red straight grey line over a red cloak for a half hour is something I can do easily. Doing it at home is much harder.

I learned a bunch of other useful things as well.

1. Highlight up, but not to the top. Then do the freehand, then finish your highlighting.  You can much more easily fix your mistakes by painting over with the base colour.
2. Avoid really contrasting colours, otherwise #1 above will be harder.
3. Use a reference. For my Herald, I drew out the design. For others, find a photo online.
4. Make sure your reference is the right size. If it’s huge, and you have a small space you may not know that it won’t fit!
5. It’s ok to mess up or waver your line a bit – you can go over it with the base colour to fit it.
6. Focus on one side of a thin line first – you can fix the other side.
7. For more complex designs, you can draw more than is required and then use the base colour to fill places in. His example was a complex celtic knot thing.
8. Paint thinner, as it’s easier to fix mistakes.
9. If you’re writing text, write it down on paper first in the right size and then divide it into sections. Plan those sections on the model and then paint in.
10. Brown/grey looks better for text than black.