Fey Project 3: Gaze into my eyes

The sheer number of awful eye cliches and puns available to title this post boggles the mind. Would "An eye for an eye" have been better? What about "The eyes have it?" I'll spare you the other options. Chances are that at least a couple have already popped into your head whether you like it or not.

This installment is about one of the most daunting parts of any miniature: the eyes. Since my woodland fey project is all about playing with advanced techniques and pushing myself, I decided it would be a good time to tackle some of the more complete eye painting methods out there.

Eye of the tiger, baby.

Metallic Paint Revisited

Some time ago, I wrote an article about my work with metallic paints, and how I went about shading them. Now that I am safely back from ReaperCon 2014, I thought an update might be in order.

Among the terrific classes I got to take at ReaperCon was a session on the use of metallic paints by Clever Crow Miniatures. While I am no place close to mastering the technique, I thought I'd share my thoughts on how I am trying to incorporate them into my own style. (For a complete rundown of this technique, please ask Clever Crow himself - he's full of helpful advice.)

Firestorm Armada Revisited

One of the very first things I posted here was my Dindrenzi Battleship WIP for Firestorm Armada. I was pretty happy with the result, and Spartan's later releases took away the laborious assembly issues, but I still had a problem: That paint scheme was designed with a great deal of hand highlighting and paneling, and it was simply too much work for a table-top fleet scheme.

This month, I set out to come up with a revised scheme that would provide a similar look, but also come together much faster, allowing me to bring a mighty armada to the table in (relatively) short order.

Wing It

Sometimes I paint with a planned formula, or a packaged set of matched paints. Other times, I just start mixing and blending until something good happens (or I give up and strip the paint off to start over.)

For the Ettin, I know I wanted a grey-brown base for the skin tone, but I didn't want things to look fully undead-grey, like they did with my Red Box Keeper mini, from last year. What you see above mixes some bronzed skin tones and browns into the highlights, but is, overwhelmingly, grey.

Darksword Hawkman Continued

I made lots of progress on the Hawkman WIP last week. I started painting in his sword. I painted the trim on his robe. I even started in on some experimental basing techniques - more on that below For now, here is his state, as of last week:

Read on for tinkering with base-painting

Sometimes Close is Good Enough

Well, the Sunday Battletech demo game has come and gone. I managed to get the Wraith fully painted for the event, but I wasn't quite done sealing and basing the figure. Even so, I showed up and played with it, and the game was fun, even if it wound up a bit one-sided after a few lucky hits early on.

I still need to hit the model with an extra layer off Dullcote, and lay down some Woodland Scenics "Realistic Water" along the stream in the middle of the base. Once that's done, I can declare victory and move on to the next thing.

The Best Laid Plans

Last time, I talked about the materials I used to base the fantasy character model I've been working on. This post covers the rest of the construction and preparation for the model.

I think I put in much more work than I had to to get his left hand to look the way I wanted it to. I should have kept looking through miniature's lines until I found a better suited source for a wizard's gauntleted hand. Still, I got there eventually.

Cork Board Basing

In my last installment, I described the parts selection, fabrication and early assembly on my brand new sword-mage build. The next step I tackled was basing.

 
Like a lot of character figures, this one features a built-in "Broccoli" base, stuck to the bottom of the figure. While I understand that this feature is handy for people who like to buy a figure and quickly get it onto the table with out needing a base to hold it up, it makes more creative basing significantly more work.

Things that Stick

I've done a number of assembly and conversion articles, but I haven't commented too much on the stuff that makes such things possible: glue. No miniatures enthusiast gets very far without picking up some handy adhesive that will bond tiny parts together. I thought it might be useful to post a brief survey of my favorite forms of stick-um.

In the course of my work, I have used many such glues, but there are a (relatively) small number that I return to again and again.

Learning from the Best

What do you see when you look at this picture?

Clearly, it's a painting, or at least part of one. What does it have to do with miniatures you ask? Read on to find out.

More Non-Metallic Metals, Plus a Bonus!

During my Fourth of July break I found the time to complete my NMM character experimentation. My photography is not as good as I'd like, but you should be able to get a pretty good notion of what she looks like:

The highlight placement is far from perfect, but I am pretty happy with how things turned out for my first real attempt at painting a model using NMM techniques. It is surprising how fast a few blended blue and white paints can start to look like a metallic object, even with inexpert handling.

Fun With No Metals

The past month has been really busy between work and other things. (Fun fact: I just bought my first brand new water heater!) Fortunately, things seem to be settling down, and I have had some time to get modelling. With my AWS-8T project in the can, so to speak, it is time to tackle something new!

Reaper Con! (Part 1)

I got back from Reaper Con 2012 late Sunday night. I think I've just about recovered, and I'm more or less back on my normal schedule. This first post will hopefully provide a taste of what went on at Reaper Con. I'll try to post some more, along with pictures of the game tables and painting contest entries soon.

This was my first trip to Reaper Con, and I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I've been to gaming conventions of all sizes in the past, but Reaper Con is, not surprisingly, much more heavily oriented towards the craft of miniatures painting and sculpting. Sure there is plenty of gaming, if you want it, but the main event is the massed gathering of a one to two hundred miniatures fans, hobbyists, and professionals.

When you drive up to Reaper's address, it's easy to miss the signs, but a keen eye will get you there. As you turn into the lot you can see that you are in the right place.

Experimentation

How do you come up with a good paint scheme? Sometimes you can pick a set of colors that work well together in the abstract, and fit them onto a miniature easily. Other times, you can decide to follow a pre-generated paint scheme from a canon game universe, or by borrowing from another painter's work. Once in a while, inspiration strikes and a great concept just pops into your head.

All of those are useful approaches, and I have certainly made use of all of them at one time or another. I have also blocked out some paint patterns on paper using colored pens, pencils, or even crayons. (Yes, I know that there are digital tools for doing this, but I haven't tried them at all.) Ultimately, no matter how many miniatures I paint, sometimes I just have to pull out a brush and try out a paint scheme with a real model and real paint to work out what I want.

Better Painting with Pen and Paper

This article is about a vital tool that can help anybody improve their miniature painting, but that I think gets too little attention in painting tutorials or blogs:

Can you really improve your results using a cheap notebook and a pen or pencil? Read on to find out.

Fun with Metals

I've noticed that my blog has a lot of grey, black and white from all the unpainted metal and plastic. It's high time I post a paint-oriented article to get a little color into the mix!

Metallic colors are tough to do right in miniature scale. This is true of both metallic paints and so-called non-metal metallics (NMM), achieved by shading regular paint colors to achieve a metallic-looking effect through shade and highlight. I have recently been trying to improve my skills with both styles. One such effort was to paint a set of Ironwind Metals Battlemechs using an all metallic paint scheme. In this case, I chose the House Laio's 4th Tau Ceti Rangers.

Armor Plating

I paint a lot of mechanized figures. Battlemechs, space craft, tanks, etc. It is common for all of them to be dominated by armor panels with finely engraved panel lines separating each plate, and it is the job of the miniature painter (small scale artiste?) to find a way to make that detail look it's very best.

I've seen a lot of advice and tutorials online about how people go about painting the armor plating details on small military figures, such as Battletech minis and the like. Most of what I see falls into one of two categories:

A. Paint the mini with your base coat and then apply a wash to darken the panel lines.
B. Paint the mini with your base coat and then use a fine brush or micron pen to ink in the panel lines directly.

The people giving this advice usually have dozens, if not hundreds of quality paint jobs to their names, so I know these techniques can produce wonderful results. Even so, I don't use either one, and it leaves me wondering: Am I the only one who uses a reversed technique?

Highlights

I had some extra white paint left in my airbrush after base coating a whole batch of Firestorm Armada flight bases. Rather than throw it all away, I decided to take a crack at "Zenithal Highlighting". I grabbed a black-primed Battletech miniature off the shelf and tossed into my spray booth to give it a shot.