chaos and noise

I've been painting up character miniatures for the players in our wednesday night game, but bishi_wannabe (as the GM) has missed out so far... Fortunately, I drew his name for the Kris Kringle present - and so I decided to paint up Reaper's Necromancer as the Demon Queen. She's a recurring villain in the game, and one I'm sure we'll cross paths with again in the future.

The photo (and miniature!) are very overexposed - I think all the cleavage blinded my poor camera...




I experimented a bit with colours on this one, while still trying to use red and green. It's a Christmas figure after all :)

Flesh: All the skin colours have a bit of emerald green mixed into them, which gives much more natural shadows. Any warm green should do the trick, deepening the pink flesh tones without darkening them. There's a thin glaze of purple as well, which cools the colours down a little.

Red robes: shaded with Coal Black (a dark turquoise). I usually use black (which makes a murky shade) or brown (which never really works at all...).

Green imp: shaded with the same red/turquoise mix used on the robes. Red and green make good shading tones for each other, being strong contrasts.

The armour and sword were a happy accident, basecoated with a light grey I'd been using on another model. They have one umber wash, and some thinned white paint for a highlight. The end result isn't quite as chalky as the photos make it look (particularly the back view), and I think it turned out okay.

miss_rynn's Christmas Special went well last night. I'm still so full of food that I can hardly move.

It's been a while since I posted any pictures. Among (many) other things, I've been working on some Ulthwe-craftworld Eldar, in the same colours as this. I posted these ones off to their owner yesterday - one character and three vehicles. The pictures are a bit overexposed (washing out the colours a little), but at least I managed to get things in focus this time. One day I'll finally manage to get the depth of field and exposure right in the same shot...

I like using the Ulthwe palette of blacks, reds and bone-white. I've run out of black paint again though - there's a surprising amount of surface area on these things...

Autarch:


Fire Prism #1


Fire Prism #2


Wave Serpent:


( Some more angles after the cut... )

Back to painting posts again... I've finished two lots of work over the last week, ending in a fairly busy weekend.

This is a Falcon grav-tank in Ulthwe Craftworld colours, and my first real attempt at painting black armour - something I've never really liked, as it always ends up looking too grey... I've used some of the P3 colours (Thamar Black and Greatcoat Grey) and kept the highlights to small areas like the edges of armour plates. It seems to have worked - next month I'll be painting a few more units for the owner of the Falcon, including some jetbikes.



I really need to figure out how to get the whole model in focus :) (Pic taken using macro mode, F/22 and a 1/2 second exposure - I can't increase the aperture setting any further, so I'm at a loose end as to what I should try next time...)

Now that the weather is a bit cooler, I can paint without having everything evaporate straight off the palette...

This one's a Vanguard light warjack, for Warmachine. Modified a little (I build a new spear, added the ternion brand on the shield, and turned the head around), and painted up in Fiona the Black's personal colours - black and purple, with the symbols of the Dark Twin. Lots of fun to paint - I'd forgotten how much I like detailing these things, and adding colour (rust, patina, etc) to the metallic parts. Hopefully I'll get a lot more painting done over the next few weeks.



Two more pictures behind the cut: ( Read more... )

Lest I forget what I'm working on, here's this year's Uberlist - a list of all the painting that I've started (italics), finished (strikeout) or simply added to the to-do list (regular font).

If you're interested in seeing what's on my painting desk at the moment, you can find the list ( behind the cut )

I finally finished a few more of the models on my desk - wulfen, pirates, and some 40k chaos figures. After a marathon photo-taking session (still not 100% happy with the shots, but at least I'm getting a bit more light in the pictures) I've ended up with some more pictures to add to the website. umbra_mentis - remind me to actually give your camera back again when I see you next... otherwise I might never remember to.

These are some of Leigh's pirates, for Warmachine. Dwarves with peg legs, quatermasters with monkeys, cooks who double as surgeons, and a troll bosun who ties dynamite to his harpoons. Good fun to paint, as every figure is very different to the others around it...



Bigger pictures ( under the cut )

Lately, I've been making a conscious effort to push myself a bit harder when painting. I hadn't really made any improvements in about a year, though not for lack of trying. A plateau is a good thing to aim for from the ground, but it's a little boring if you can't get off it.

Well, that's not strictly true. My hands hadn't made many improvements, but my eyes had... At the Gencon painter's panel discussion, Amy mentioned that your hands and eyes tend to leapfrog each other. I'm getting a lot more critical of figure painting, as I have a better understanding of what to look for - Geologists and microscopists will be familiar with that learning period of "getting your eye in," where you learn to recognise important details. The problem with painting is that recognising a technique, and being able to replicate it, are two very different problems...

It can become a bit demoralising, too. If your eyes are ahead of your hands, you percieve your work as going backwards - at least, until you look at an older model. Sometimes you lose the motivation to paint for a while, which only worsens the problem as lack of practice won't help your technique. Eventually, though, the cycle turns around and your painting starts improving at a faster rate.

Since painting the Gencon bodger models, I've finally started to move on from where I've spent the last year. It's a nice feeling, finally getting some traction. It plays merry hell with any attempt to keep the new models consistent in quality with what I painted six months ago, but I like being able to finish each piece and know that I learned something from it.

The problem now is that I'm sitting at an "in-betweenie" point. Wargamers paint models to get them on the table for a game. Showcase painters work on single models, often for competitions. Wargaming painters marvel at the flawless techniques of the showcase models, while showcase painters wonder how the hell wargamers paint models so damn fast. Whichever group you currently sit in, feedback is an important mechanism for getting better at what you do.

Which is the tricky part. Posting work on most wargaming forums these days rarely gets comments beyond "that's cool," which (while a confidence boost) don't give me much to work on. Posting on painting forums rarely gets any feedback at all, as I'm light years away from the quality of work being diplayed there. I'd like to shorten that gap, as I'd love to paint like this. Right now, I'm not exactly sure how to go about doing that, though.

There's a lot happening at the moment. I'm trying to update some old InDesign files, ready to put together a new edition of two VCE study guides. Unfortunately, I don't have the half of the original fonts, and most of the images are embedded from old MS Word documents. The fonts could use a bit of standardisation anyway, but the images are a problem. Hopefully, I'll either get hold of originals to scan, or I'll find a printing company that will accept the files on faith - there's no way of checking embedded image quality before printing the file.

There's a third book in the works, although it's previously been made using Quark. I think it will be easiest to rebuild it from scratch, for the revised edition. It's an economics guide with a fairly complex layout, so it may still cause some headaches over the next few weeks.

In between long stints at the computer, the uberlist marches relentlessly onwards. I'm working on four different painting commissions at the moment, with about twenty pieces in the current wave, and thirty three after that. I've finally realised that the "paint everything all at once" approach doesn't work on this kind of scale, so I'm trying to minimise the amount of work on my desk. In theory, the best approach seems to be keeping a single day's work on the desk, and finishing it before starting anything new... only time will tell whether I manage to keep to that rule.

In the background, I'm still slowly building up stock for the Purple Mantis store. I have a Paypal Business account set up, so the next things on the list are a SSL certificate and configuring the Zencart storefront. First priority is finishing the design and painting work, though, so I have enough money to get the online store started.

Luckily, I like being busy...

Painting contests are a good way of building up a folio, and they also serve as good publicity. I think I've only ever entered three, but that's about to change... almost all of my current commissions are going into competitions over the next few months. Between the Warmachine/Hordes Australian Nationals in June, a Privateer Press online contest in July, GenCon in August, and the Australian Golden Demon competition in October, I should be quite busy...

Today, I've been playing with metallics. Specifically, trying to paint plain old boring silver... in a way that's reflecting the aurora borealis. It's an interesting challenge. I've taken the sheen off the silver with some matte medium, and started building up thin glazes of colour to tint it - blues, browns, greens and purples. Once the last glaze dries I'll start building up the silver highlights again, and then I'll get to work on the rest of the model.

Over the weekend I tried (again) to learn how to use Illustrator. I don't know why, but I've never had much luck with the program - even with plenty of exposure to InDesign and Photoshop, Illustrator just doesn't seem very intuitive at all. After some spectacular failures involving attempts to trace over pencil linework, I gave up and experimented with using basic shapes to make a map. This time, things started to work out... successfully translating a sketch of Meredius into the beginnings of a detailed map. By detailed, of course, I mean that I've added about 700+ buildings to the city so far, and probably have another 400 to go. Obsessive? Me? ;) Meredius is the setting for a masquerade freeform that aeliel and I will be running at Arcanacon next year - a miniature Venice, built in the centre of an ocean. Should be fun :)

I'm becoming more aware of time, these days. Specifically, how much time it takes to do specific things during the day - I know that lately I've been undercosting the time involved in painting, but I hadn't realised just how badly until I bought a little electronic timer to stick on my desk. I paint pretty quickly, but I forgot to factor in just how much I slow down when I'm bored...

There's been another heated debate on the Privateer Press forums about how much figure painters should reasonably charge for their work, with some fairly extreme views on both sides. While I'm happy to ignore the "I need cash now so I'll work for 50c an hour" arguments, and the "I couldn't possibly sell work for less than $150 a model" counters, someone mentioned charging extra when repetitive bulk work was required. I think it's a good idea - there is nothing more boring than doing the same task over and over again, and boredom slows you down. Slowing down pushes back other jobs in the queue, which pushes back getting paid for the work, which means you eat instant noodles for another week.

I happen to like instant noodles, but I do appreciate getting paid as well :)


In other news, I won the Cryx faction medal in Saturday's Warmachine/Hordes tournament. I think that makes five medals from the last four events... lots of shiny things :) The Liber Animus tournament is on next weekend, and after that it's high time I started getting ready for the National Open at GenCon.

Enough typing... back to the painting desk.