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If you go out in the woods today... An 8112 PLOG


Mirage8112

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3 hours ago, Chillpill said:

 Keep coming back to this in admiration and despair. Admiration because these look amazing... despair because I will never reach this level of painting!

Awww. Thanks man! That actually means a lot. I'm having tough time staying motivated these days. It helps to have a little encouragement. 
 

3 hours ago, Chillpill said:

How long have you been painting miniatures for?

 
I got into painting miniatures around 2008 or so. So nearly 10 years I suppose. Originally it was my wife who encouraged me to get into the hobby, as a way stop playing World of Warcraft. One obsession just snowballed right into another lol. 

But truthfully, I've been painting much longer than that. My miniature painting style is heavily influenced by my background as an oil painter. I started with learning watercolors in my mid 20's; circa 2001 or so. From there I learned to draw a bit, then got some oil painting instruction. I worked as a teacher, teaching drawing to children and adults until 2010, when I left California. 

Most of my non-tiny soldier work is small scale hyperrealism, mostly a genre called Tromp L'oeil (French for "Fool the eye"). Here's a recent example:


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In painting like this, everything is painted. From the cloth to background. I have a lot of people try to pick the tape off my paintings:

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Most of the work is small. The chess painting is 8" x 10". The charlie brown painting is even smaller: 4" x 6". But they do occasionally get bigger. 14" x 16":

 

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or 14" square:

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I don't have nearly the time i used to after my daughter was born, but I'm starting to get back into it. Generally speaking, it's a lot harder than painting miniatures and very slow going which is why I've backed off doing "serious work". 

Aside from my background as an oil painter, you'd be surprised how little of it translates. Learning to paint miniatures with very thin layers of acrylic paint is worlds away from oil painting. That being said, there are two pieces of information I've learned as an oil painter that have been invaluable to me as a miniature painter.

1. How good is your brush control? 

Far and away this is the biggest thing. Painting is drawing with paint. Your ability to make the tip of the brush do what you want it to do makes all the difference in the world. Do this as an experiment; how small can you write your name with a brush? 

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Practice that. It teaches brush control like you wouldn't believe. 

2. Clean simple painting beats messy complicated painting any day of the week. 

The cleaner and more even your basecoats the better things turn out. My Sylvaneth scheme is actually really simple to paint, but it's effect all depends on how smooth the fades are. some of my Tzeentch stuff is done with an airbrush, but most of it is by hand, and I could certainly do it all by hand if I wanted to. But it's nearly impossible to paint a clean fade if the undercoat is patchy or if the paint has too much texture. 

I've taught people to learn to draw from the ground up, paint too; I'm sure you're no different. I'll be happy to give you feedback on your work (if you want). I strongly believe that I do can be learned, especially with a little bit of training and a desire to do great work. Sometimes all you need is that last little push to get over the hill. 




 

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Thank you so much for your feedback! I will tag you in my plog on here! I am completely new to this. Back in school my painting skills were always very "meh" ... they did not get better haha.

I am not very good at drawing at all and doing it with a brush makes it even harder of course. My brush control is poor I think so thanks for that tip I will try that!

 

 

 

Thank you for taking the time to explain your background more as well really appreciate it... no wonder your work looks so amazing! That Sylvaneth army....seriously sooooo gooood!!

 

Sent from my SM-G955F using Tapatalk

 

 

 

 

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  • 5 weeks later...

Hey Party People!

Slowly but surely I'm working my way through the backlog of gray plastic that seems to perpetually sit on my shelf. Im making good progress. I took a bit of a break for the second half of August, while I was waiting for the GHB2017 to drop. It's little bit difficult to choose what weapon option to build, trying to decide if it's worth magnetizing or what variation of a kit I want to use without knowing what the points values stack up to. For example, my intended Disciples of Tzeentch list went up almost 400 points over 2k, so I've had to make some cuts. 

 Nevertheless, after I sat down and worked everything else out, I was able to open another box and get building/painting. It's taken me about 2 weeks to power through the next unit. Skyfires!

I started with the disks. Originally I had planned on making the disks metallic, but when I put the finished test disk next to the rest of the army it just kinda fell flat. So, I did the brave thing, and when through and repainted the damn thing details and all:

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You can see here that I'm starting on the blue base coat. I decided that the since this is such a colorful army (which is huge deviation from how I normally paint) I might as well just go for the goal, and do the disks with the same color progression I did with the Tzaangors armor:

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Overall, I think it's much better. Here's the completed/painted assembly of the second disk:

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And finally all three skyfires painted/assembled:

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As I said in a previous post, each type of Tzaangor will have different type of plumage/ skin color depending on their rank/unit type. Red/orange plumage with black skin for foot Tzaangors. Green plumage and black skin for skyfyres. White skin with Green plumage for the Shaman (that will follow the skyfyres around). I haven't entirely decided on what plumage the enlightened will have. I've determined from previous color combinations that yellow won't work (doesn't work well with the blue and conflicts with the gold). and I don't have any easy recipe for bright purple (being one of the most difficult colors to paint with any intensity). Pink is already the color for my OSL, and blue won't work because it will get lost in the armor. I suspect I'll try to come up with something workable for purple, but I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to do it. Anybody know of a good supplier of florescent purple?

Finally, a full army shot of the Tzneetch Arcanite models I've completed so far.

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I have some chaos warriors to paint in this scheme, as well as a box of enlightened, 3 more Skyfires and a Shaman. That combined with what I have from my old warriors of chaos army should bring me right around 2k points. This army is my "fun" army and isn't really designed to be at the height of competitiveness. For that, I have my uber-tuned Sylvaneth army. 

With the changes to the GHB, my Sylvaneth army is definitely headed in the Dreadwood direction. That means I need a bunch more spites, dryads, and some more Scythe hunters. I could probably get away with using my scratch-boult treelord from 2013, but eventually I'll replace him with something painted to match everything else. 

Updates soon! (as soon as I can crack open those boxes and add to the force) 

Happy painting.

-F
   

 

Edited by Mirage8112
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fantastic painting - almost needless to say.

for my own taste, initially felt the colour palette's were a bit ott, but have started to see that, with the Sylvaneth for example, you really are achieving a very 'otherworldly' look that's probably more in keeping with the bonkers AOS planes fluff than most manage.

but ... wish you'd stop saying things like: 'This is a tabletop army, so I'm not doing anything super fancy. Just trying to paint as cleanly as possible ...'  ;-)

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Dude, incredible stuff! I'm a full-time concept artist, and I can't paint miniatures half as well as you.  O_O 

I also painted my Sylvaneth with the inverted light to dark for a more thorny look, though less smoothly and nicely. My colors are a lot less striking as well. Can't wait to see more, your plog will be a huge source of inspiration going forward! :D

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  • 4 weeks later...

I've been oil painting now from somewhere around 15 years (give or take).

I suppose I've been painting longer than that, but I'm counting that 15 years from the time I first received any substantial instruction on technique and application of paint. Prior to that, I picked up most of my technique on drawing and painting from books and articles. I read pretty voraciously, and having step by step guides on how artists made painting was pretty instrumental on getting me on my way to being a competent painter. Nowadays, some 15 years on, I mostly don't need the step-by-step pictures anymore. I can read a finished painting like a book. I tell almost at a glance what colors are used, how the paint was applied, what mediums were mixed in and have a reasonable guess at how much prep work was done before the artist actually began painting. I can also tell (in most cases) if the artist was left or right handed. 

I've been painting miniatures now for nearly 10 years and it's more or less the same. I look at a mini and I can tell, pretty closely how the artist got to the end point. Because of this, I often forget to post the step-by-step progress photos because I don't have quite as much need for them. But at the same time, I also hope that this PLOG might be useful to somebody who might not have quite as much painting experience. As fun as it is marvel at a well painted miniature, and as much as it might stroke my ego being told how good they look. That's all just for my vanity, and doesn't really help anybody else. 

So, I am currently in the process of painting another 16 dryads and I'm taking step step photos of each stage. I'll be posting them in a day or two as soon as I have everything squared away. In the meantime I've prepared a post on... uh.. preparing... basing materials for the 30 dryads, Drycha and TLA that I'll be basing as soon as all the dryads are finished. 

Happy painting!

-F

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Salutations! 

So, I've had a lot of comments on my basing scheme for my Sylvaneth Army on Facebook, Instagram and this PLOG as well. The process for actually doing the basing is simple and straightforward forward, but acquiring and preparing the materials can be a little bit tricky. The leaves in this picture: 

IMG_1144.JPG.a488d52123ec3ebe72f6dfb9d3eddccd.JPG.c73e43d388d519d19033c0fa64fab1d4.JPG

Are actually separators from the seed pods of birch tree. A number of years ago, you could buy these from Secret weapon miniatures and a few other outlets, but for whatever reason they are no longer sold anywhere. It's actually rather fortunate that I had one of these tress in my yard as a kid, so I recognized what they were the moment I saw them and knew I have several in the neighborhood close to my house. Why spend $15 on something you can make yourself? 

The answer? because it's a huge colossal pain in the ass. 

So, over much trial and error (mostly error) I've come up with a reasonably not terribly difficult way to get the materials for free. The whole process takes about 30 minutes and depending how much starting material you have can yield a large amount of quality basing materials. And it's free! 

Firstly, you'll need to find a tree like this:

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This is a Birch tree. They are thin-trunked with white bark and black markings, heavily leafed, and tend to yield seeds most of the year (except for winter) now is actually an excellent time to collect seeds since the pods will start drying out now, meaning you can skip the drying step. Collect as many as you can, preferably a gallon, since in the cleaning stage you'll lose approximately 3/4 of the volume. The seeds of the tree look like this:

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You can see that this pod is still green, but is already starting to crumble. The dryer the pod, the more brown it becomes. Birch seed pods are made up of 3 parts, the stem (obvs.) the separators and the seeds. It's actually the separators we're after and they look like this:

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Like tiny little Maple leaves. 

The main problem is that the seed pods are almost all seeds. Nearly 3/4 so. I sued to separate them out by hand (kill me now) because I didn't really have any other option. Over time, I noticed that if I breathed too heavily on them, the seeds would go flying but the spacers stayed put (relatively). This gave me an idea; I could sue the seeds natural tendency to catch the wind and fly away to separate the seeds from the spacers. 

Firstly, you will need a box, roughly 9" x 14" and about 2" deep. I believe I used the lid from the citadel woods box since I happened to have a crapton hanging around not doing anything. So, first, you just crumble seeds between your fingers until you have about 1 1/2-2 cups, and then dump them into the lid like so:

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Then you'll need to set up a wind source (unless your lung power is super awesome) to blow a continuous stream of air over the top of the box. You could use a box or rotary fan, I ended up using a shop-vac with the intake-outflow hose reversed to turn it into a giant leaf blower. You need to be careful that the airflow isn't too high, or you'll fine that you've just blown everything all to hell and need to go collect more seeds. I've found for my particular shop vac, I needed a distance of something like 15 feet:

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I also needed to put a rock into the box to keep the box from blowing away or flipping over, because if it does? You'll need to go get more seeds.

When you turn the air on, the pressure creates a sort of drag wind that actually blows the seeds back toward the leading edge of the box. when they move, the lighter seeds catch the wind and fly out of the box, and the seed spacers stay in the box. He's a video demonstrating what it should look like. the wind is blowing from the top of the frame toward the bottom. You can see the spacers moving in opposite direction:
 


 
After a few turns of the box, the seeds should be mostly separated leaving behind only the spacers. You will lose a few spacers in the process but only a very few. I should also mention that you'll have seeds all over the floor behind the box, so be prepared for a little clean up. 

After that's finished, uou can see the reduction in size; with the pile going from this:

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To this:

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Now that the seeds are mostly separated, you'll need to sift them in order to separate the seeds that have lost their "wings" (they are black spots in the periphery of the pile). To do this I just use a common flour sifter (one of the cheap metal ones with a crank handle). After a few cranks, this is what falls out:

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Seeds, wings, small stems and few twigs. At this point, the separation is complete and for every 2 cups of raw material you started with, you'll yield approximately 1/2 a cup of seeds. It might not sound like much, but a little will go a long way; 1/2 a cup of seeds will probably cover all 30 dryads, the Treelord Ancient, Drycha and a Wyldwood. 

At this point I'll usually take 3 tablespoons or so and color them to use as accent leaves. I'll cover doing that and actually basing with them as soon as the dryads are finished. Maybe in a week or so. 

I hope everyone finds this helpful. Happy painting.. er... basing! 

-F

Edited by Mirage8112
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I know, I know. No posts for weeks and weeks and an AVALANCHE OF POSTS. Suck it up buttercup. I got pictures to show. xD 

So, in line with my post the other day, I'm showing a full stage-by-stage progression to show how these dryads are painted; complete with colors, brush sizes and alternate application techniques.  I've been told that my "style" of painting is unique, but I'm not entirely sure what that means. I do tend to do quite a bit of wet blending, only because it's predominately how you use oil paint. I also rarely thin my paints (only when doing fine highlighting or transitional layers)  I've experimented a bit with layering and edge highlighting upon occasion, but I'm still getting used to it. 

So here you are. Enjoy!

Step 1: The Dryads arms/head are glued to the body, but the rear headpiece and back branch is not. it makes it a little easier to get in an get the leaves and fine highlights, but you could very well skip that step and glue everything together. The entire model is them primed grey, and then basecoated in Rakarth Flesh with an airbrush*. 

 

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Step 2: Drayd bark is then applied via the airbrush to the hands, feet, and branch tips. Have the back pieces removable helps with this as it's nearly impossible to hit just the tips on the face without hitting the backpiece with the airbrush. 

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Step 3: the entire model is washed with a heavy application of Carroburg Crimson and allowed to dry. 

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Step 4: Rakarth Flesh is again applied with the airbrush, leaving only a small reddish transition section between the Dryad bark and Rakarth

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Step 5: Then, a second highlight of Flayed one flesh is applied with the airbrush, only hitting the face and chest area. 

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Step 6: The airbrush section is finished, and now we switch to a Medium Artificer brush (Unless noted from this point on all the work is done with Artificer). The tabard is painted with Bugman's Glow, and the very very tips of all the Branches, fingers and feet are painted with Abbadon Black 

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Step 7: The tabard is highlighted with Pink Horror from the bottom up, and at waist level from the top down:

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Step 8: The tabard is again washed with Carroburg Crimson, as are eye sockets and mouth (carefully, with a small artificer)

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Step 9: The tabard receives final highlight of Emperor's Children 
 

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Step 10: The eyes are carefully painted with Gauss Blaster green using a Small Artificer Brush 

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Step 11. At this point, the steps might be a little hard to see, but if you look closely, I've begun highlighting the body, arms and face and back headpiece with a 50/50 mix of Rakarth Flesh and Palid Wtych Flesh. The back head piece also get a very very small amount of Carroburg Crimson washing into the recesses to help separate the branches. After this, the back headpiece is glued in place. 
 

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Step 12: A final application of pure Palid Wytch flesh goes on the eyebrows, cheekbones, shoulders, the raised areas on the chest and knees, and on the back branch. After, the back branch is glued in place. 

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Step 13: The hands are highlighted with a 50/50 mix of Dryad Bark and Bugman's Glow

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Step 13: the hands get a final highlight of Bugmans's, Dryad Bark, and Rakarthflesh (mixed together in equal amounts) 

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Step 14: The green and pink leaves are painted Skarsnik Green and Pink Horror respectively 

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Step 15: The pink leaves are edge highlighted with Emperors Children 

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Step 16: The pink leaves get a final highlight of Fulgrim Pink on the very end tips. 

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Step 17: The head tattoos get a fine application of Fulgrim Pink with a Small Artificer Brush. 

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Step 18: Using a small artificer Brush, florescent pink is carefully applied to the tattoo in a 50/50 ratio of paint to water. This can vary, depending on how strong I want that particular tattoo to read. Florescent green is also very carefully and very thinly applied to the eyes with a Small Artificer Brush (this paint is not thinned with water, just a small amount applied very carefully and spread till it is very thin). The body also get a few choice crevices washed with Carroburg Crimson thinned 50/50 with water.  

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And that's it! Only 18 steps! O.o

Alternations and addendums: 

Now, to be fair these steps could be greatly condensed. There are several places where I've chosen to add an additional mid-level highlight when it would be perfectly acceptable to just do a single. For example, the tabard has a highlight of pink horror before the wash it applied, but I could have just as easily painted the tabard, washed it, and then highlighted it with Emperors Children. The same goes with the intermediate 50/50 highlight of Rakarth and Wytch flesh before going with pure Wytch. I've also marked the first mention of doing by basecoat with an asterisk* because and airbrush is not totally necessary. It helps create clean easy fades, but it can be done just as easily with a 50/50 mix of Dryads bark and Lahamian Medium for step 2, and steps 4 & 5 can be replicated almost as well by drybrushing. 

While writing this, I got a bit into color theory and why I've chosen to build these scheme this way. Thinking better of it, I've deleted it and I'll post it separately later this week. 

Anyway, I hope somebody out there finds this useful. Good luck and Happy painting! 

-F



 

 

 

Edited by Mirage8112
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18 hours ago, Vaux said:

Very nice tutorial, but somehow the combination of the green and pink on the leafs makes it look like holiday lights you see on christmas xD

Lmao. It totally does. Especially when there's only one mini in the shot. When all the dryads are grouped up it mitigates that a bit thank goodness.  

Originally, I painted all the leaves pink, but it was too much. Generally I try to go with a ratio of 2 pinks for every 3 greens (give or take).

 

10 hours ago, Nico said:

Great stuff. For a minute I thought you were going to whip out the centrifuge.


I use the centrifuge on the Treelords. I just strap the mini down, turn on the spinner, pour the paint in and presto! xD 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Another big update! (Of course. At this point would you expect anything less?) 

The fairly unimpressive news is that I've now totally finished the unit of 30 dryads and am preparing them for basing:

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I will start basing them sometime either today to within the next day or two, and will give a write up on that process. I also finished a commission for a Malifaux miniature for a friend of mine, and if anybody is interested I can also include a walk through on the process I use to make snow bases:

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But today I have something I'm pretty damn excited about. 

Last weekend I picked up Shadespire, and I've got to say, INCREDIBLE game. I'm super amped on playing it and this last week, I cracked open the box and went to get started on the miniatures. However, upon testing my my paints for the airbrush I noticed my Vallejo model air metallic has small chucks of dried paint in them (an unfortunate side effect of leaving the caps off, of which I am notorious for). So, I popped down to my local Indy shop to pick up a few replacements. 

Unfortunately, they didn't have the colors I needed and instead they had a relatively new product from Vallejo called "metal color", seen here on the center/right:IMG_0184.JPG.57497e1d083dc5541d34473d704a4930.JPG 

Overall, on my test sprays, they didn't look that different. In order left to right are Gold, Dark Aluminum, White Aluminum and Aluminum:

IMG_0185.JPG.dea5e6f198da2a24109266343940dec9.JPG 

In retrospects, I should have bought a slightly darker mid-level metallic, as the White aluminum is very close to Aluminum. Maybe the White is slightly darker, but only slightly. They mix well together, and feather easily, so overall its not a huge problem. Just an extra step. In testing, they preformed about the same as the Model air. 

So, I went through my usual process of priming the Model (in this case, Obryn from Shadespire). Since the Gold color is so light, I opted to shoot it through the airbrush as a zenith highlight, and use the regular Retributor gold as my base: 

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So far so good. 

However, when i actually started to paint it, it became apparent that this paint is a TOTALLY DIFFERENT anything I've ever used. Firstly, along with the paint I brought the primer that went with it. Vallejo Gloss black:

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Yep. That's dry. 24 hours in fact. It's very weird to paint on, and very much reminds me of the first time I went from painting on canvas to painting on hardboard or copper. The paint streaks like crazy. Normally this would be a real drawback, but after working with it a bit, I found that very very thin successive layers added this weird effect where the underlying paint showed through the top layers, allowing me to not only control the color, but reflectivity of the paint as well. So, it became clear after about 20 minutes that this new paint was a perfect for a demi-metal technique. Basically, where you mix non-metric paint with metallic paint to create a hybrid. 

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In the picture above, I've shaded the breastplate, the right shoulder pad, and done a little on the faceplate. 

It's a very strange way to paint, because I usually start with middle value and then work up the lights and down to the darks. However, in this case, the lights and light/middles are already established by the airbrush, so I have to shade through the middles down to the darks. It's super fun:

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The effect is crazy intense, and the pictures don't really do it justice. But it has the effect of losing truly like weathered gold armor. The Shoulderpads are Demi-metal as well, so they have this glittery-blue effect when the light hits them. The cloth and belt however are totally matt, and it created a really nice contrast between that you don't really get normally. I personally feel this is one of the aspects thats often missing from NMM (non-metallic metal), since the metallic aren't really metallic, they have the same finish as cloth/stone/or wood. This on the other hand, is basically NMM with True metallic paint (TMP). All the highlights are painted, as are the reflections and shows, they're just painted with varying degrees of metallic paint, so the shadows don't reflect any light at all, and the highlight reflect a lot of light. 

Obryn is mostly finished, but I haven't been able to get a good picture of him. The lights reflect so much light they mess wit the camera exposure and everything gets lost, so I'll wait to post a photo once I get him based and in a light box. More pictures to come.

Happy painting!

Edited by Mirage8112
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20 hours ago, Lysandestolpe said:

Beautiful work man! All of it looks solid as usual.

Whats your plan for the Stormcast? a small/large army?

At this point, I'm just doing the 3 models from Shadespire. The technique for getting the gold is fairly labor intensive and I'd probably shoot myself in the face if I had to paint an entire army to this standard. However, I'm not opposed to painting up a couple of characters or perhaps a small unit to ally with my Sylvaneth Army. I've been eyeing the Vanguard-Palladors and the Lord Aquilor for a while and since I'd only have to paint 4-7 models as opposed to 10, I might be tempted to pull the trigger on that. 

What I am strongly considering is doing a duel Diorama with Stormcast Character vs the Slaughterpriest I've painted to competetion standard. Originally, I was planning on just doing him as a single figure, but I think doing both as duel on a bridge with bloodletters crawling up from some lava and winged prosecutors swooping down would make a killer showpiece. 

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Nice to see somebody else using Metal Color - best acrylic metallic I've come across.  I tend to use the gold and silver for nearly all of my edge highlighting now.  Gunmetal is pretty decent when you're after a darker steel, I'd say a fraction darker than Leadbelcher, but more reflective.  They do pull through the undercoat finish too, so if you want it more matt, use a regular black undercoat and then through satin to gloss.  Biggest benefit I've found over Metal Air is that they clean out the airbrush a lot more easily :D

Out of curiosity, what colours are you using to shade the gold?

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