Groundhog Day

This weekend I picked a miniature from the Dark Sword Stephanie Pui-Mun Law Masterworks series. I had a hard time choosing– there are so many beautiful miniatures! I narrowed it down to two and let the Twittersphere decide:

The result was unanimous! Before I started with Euterpe, I looked up the sketch that inspired the mini. Stephanie's sketch shows a woman sitting atop a seashell-like rock playing a flute while an image of the cosmos rotates overhead. In Greek mythology, Euterpe is one of the nine Muses, goddesses of music, song and dance. I love the romantic idea of using a moon and water theme to inspire my color palette– I'll choose muted greens, blues, and purples in this miniature with a few pops of vibrant color accents to add interest. With Stephanie's image references and the Dark Sword Marike Reimer DVD playing in the background, I started cleaning up the miniature. I took my time to file away mould lines and decided I'd attach her arms last in order to paint her face to the level of detail I want. However, once I primed her, I noticed she has very detailed eyes sculpted in– a testament to the high skill of the sculptor no doubt, but something that I find challenging to paint. One of her eyes bit more recessed than the other, and I find that lower eyelids, however well-sculpted, have the tendency to make female miniatures look older. One of my painter friends mentioned that he sometimes cuts away that part of the sculpt in order to "open up the eyes more". I really hate to change a sculpt in any way– it's like adding salt to your dish at a fancy restaurant without even tasting it first. A silly analogy perhaps, but unless I set out to intentionally modify a sculpt, I try to keep it as consistent with the original cast as possible. However, that lovely sentiment flew out the window this Saturday. 

I usually start painting the skin while lining and blocking out adjacent shapes like her dress. I wanted to paint her with a fair porcelain-like skin tone. Things were going fairly well until I started on the eyes. I find that painting eyes on fair skin is difficult. Standard liners are too dark so I used the darkest shadow of her skin tone along with a warm off-white for her sclera. I wanted her to have rich, deep blue eyes and all I could think when I looked at her was, "Great, now she looks like Elijah Wood". No offense to Mr. Wood, but having this beautiful miniature remind me of Frodo Baggins was just no good. After 4 hours of layering skin tones and struggling with the eyes, I put her in the "Dunk Tank" to strip away the paint and primer. 

Before Eyes

During Eyes

After Eyes

I decided to start over– a la "Groundhog Day" the movie with Bill Murray where he's stuck doing the same thing every day until he gets it right. Yep, that was me! However, this time I decided to give it a different spin. I begrudgingly (and carefully) cut away the lower eyelids with an X-acto knife and brought out the Reaper Brush-On Primers in black and white. Then I mixed them in different amounts on my wet palette and applied them in thin layers as a basic value study. The darkest parts would be black and the parts that receive the most light would be much lighter. This took me around 15 minutes to apply, since I didn't want to apply too many layers and add unecessary texture to the miniature. Overall, I think she turned out great! I'm going to take my time on this second try and I may rethink some aspects of my color scheme. While I think fair skin is beautiful, I like painting dynamic eyes even more– I may give her more of a darker complexion, one of my personal favorites! I believe if you're going to paint a miniature you like, paint her in a way that you love. After all, if she's a Greek muse, she may as well have a beautiful Mediterranean olive skin tone to match! 

Gold Non Metallic Metal

My Restart Day was a success– I painted for about 8 total hours this weekend! I made some great progress in prepping some new miniatures as well as tackling one of the biggest challenges that's plagued me for awhile: Gold Non-Metallic Metal (aka "NMM"). I've been experimenting with both True Metallic Metals in bronze & silver (Ursula and Lord Ironraven respectively). However, I've been dabbling very little with Non-Metallic Metals (in fact, my only real NMM attempt has been Gus's monochrome chains) so this weekend I attempted to paint a rich gold on the Janna the Wanderer Reaper Miniature. 

At first, I re-watched the NMM chapter Darksword's "Masterworks Miniatures Painting with Jessica Rich". I love Jessica's painting style and I've had the pleasure of meeting her in person and taking two of her classes at ReaperCon. She's an incredibly talented painter, a wonderful teacher, and a very nice person. While I don't own any of her go-to paint colors for gold (Terra Nova Tundra, anyone?), I attempted to find something similar. However, my color theory could use some work! At first, I made the mistake of thinking "Gold = Yellow". Well, yes and no. I chose a bright punch-you-in-the-face-yellow that didn't mix well with any of the browns that I used to darken it. I thought, "It's too yellow. It needs to be warmer and more orange" so I added a rusty brown. Nope, even worse. Now the metal just looked like an unnatural burnt orange. Finally I scrapped that idea, took a break, and went back to the drawing board. I looked up a few examples of gold and decided I wanted something with a green/brown tinge to it rather than something with a yellow/red rust color. After that, I landed on the right combination– just a small touch of yellow along with a yellowy-brown and an off-white for the highlights. I'm not saying it's the perfect combination, but it worked well enough for me for this first gold NMM attempt. I'll be sure to experiment with other colors– including the combination Jessica suggests for the rich, warm gold color she paints so well! Here was my original inspiration: 

Jason Chan has created some truly beautiful art for Magic The Gathering. I love this image of the Deathpact Angel– it's a wonderful example of a muted gold. While I chose to bump up the gold on my miniature with a bit more yellow, this image helped me identify where the light would fall on a metal bodice. I'd love to paint one of the Darksword winged miniatures I have in this muted gold paired with dark grey/purple wings. Without further ado, here's some Work-In-Progress pictures of Janna and my first attempt at gold non-metallic metals:

BASE COATS + SKIN + LINING

GOLD NMM: Work In pRogress

Right now, she's basically only skin color, outlines, and gold NMM. There's plenty of work left to do on her, but she's off to a great start! 

Ursula · More True Metallic Metals (Part 2)

This is a continued experiment with gold True Metallic Metals. I haven't used a lot of the metallic paints before and I haven't practiced any TMM techniques since painting Lord Ironraven. In this experiment, I wanted a bronze, greenish-effect on the battle axe of Reaper Miniature "Ursula". I also wanted to paint some fun, bolder colors on her hair and bodice. I haven't painted orange hair before, and it was an interesting contrast to dull down the metallic paint and build up bright colors elsewhere on the miniature at the same time. 

For the metals, I painted a base coat 50/50 mix of Privateer Press P3's "Blighted Gold" & "Rhulic Gold". Then I added multiple, thin layers of Reaper "Green Shadow" to give a green tint to the metallic base color. I then highlighted and edged in Rhulic gold, though it doesn't read very well in these photos (a definite downside to TMM). Natural light definitely helped in these photos, and I'll soon decide if I want to paint a few touch-ups that will look better on camera and then take final pictures. For the rest of the colors, I used a wide range of Reaper paints:

  • Hair: Rust Brown, Marigold Yellow, Pure White
  • Bodice, Gloves, and Belt Sash: Surf Aqua, Blue Liner & Leather White 
  • Fur: Leather White, Brown Liner
  • Scale Cape (I call it her "Acorn Cape"): Olive Skin Shadow, Brown Liner, Leather White
  • Axe Handle: Olive Skin Shadow, Brown Liner
  • Eye Patch: Olive Skin Shadow, Leather White, Brown Liner

I decided not to line the TMM metal edges in an off-white and paint "hot spots" in a pure white, a common practice in NMM-- I'm not convinced I should mix the techniques. I think that matte white paint may stand out too much from the metallic paints and distract from the intended effect. Otherwise, I'm pleased with Ursula as a TMM practice miniature. She's one of the minis that's been sitting on my shelf for a long, long time after years of being intimidated by both TMM & NMM techniques. I improve only by experimenting with these different techniques, and I always learn something new each time I try-- some lessons learned from mistakes, others are happy accidents that I try to recreate on future miniatures.