Thanks to Althai for the hint on highlighting, that really helped with this last round of detail work!
All I did at this point was bring down the black so it wasn’t highlighted on the lower areas and then I did a quick splat of ‘oil’ on the gun hose near the pack end. Then the glowy bits and visor.
I’m close to calling it done, I’ve been on it for six weeks now 🙂 I know it’s not perfect, but then I never expected it to be. Second mini in 14 years!
Black parts highlighted, getting straight lines was a total pita…definitely going to be an area I focus on. Tightening up my lines and smaller crisp highlight edges along long surfaces. Also struggled a ton with the circular thingies, same as I did on the arm. Small details certainly a weak point!
You can also see some of the new shading for the orange.
Pretty much the gun tip, eyes and visor left. And a bit of touching up, but I’m not going to go nuts on that. Possibly going back to weather stuff to bring it in line with the armor/gun.
Welp, I made a decision on the flesh tones for the Ogre boss man…and I am waiting on the paint to arrive. So, back to the Drone!
Working on the armor. Re-base coated the armor for the third time, finally got happy with a mid-tone of the previous two attempts, but now the paint is thicker than a tenement kitchen wall. Ah, well.
Applied battle damage/scuffing with a nubbly brush using black/brown paint applied pretty thick. Turned out pretty awesome once I got the hang of it. Needs to be pretty thick to give the right look, and there’s a bit of an art to applying it, though it was quite forgiving about mistakes while still looking quite convincing. So far so good.
Then I went to rust stains/general muck. My initial mix was too red brown and by the time I caught it, it was a bit late. Also, and probably the biggest issue, it was way too thick. Should’ve been down near a wash rather than a layer. I salvaged a couple areas by remixing with a lighter brown (beasty brown), going over a few spots, and then deepening things with some black and a few dabs of the initial redbrown/black mix. I think if the paint had been thinner, I would’ve been right in the neighborhood. As it is, I’m not real happy with it…but again, trying to remember it’s a learning project and my first try 🙂
Now for the images!
Oh, and I had also hit the orange jumpsuit with some deeper shadows when I first started today.
Going to participate in a little group paint project over on the Reaper forums. In anticipation of the utter landslide of Bones minis next March, some of us are going to group WIP an existing Bones model.
So far I’ve just primed him with Army Painter white primer and run a black/brown wash over him to bring out the details.
No deadline for this one. Deadline for the Firebrand is Oct. 15th, so there’s a slight priority on that one. Should be fun to see how different people tackle the Ogre.
Played around with my camera’s settings and figured out how to set the white balance. Should at least improve color reproduction somewhat, as I don’t have to run white balance in GIMP which is only as good as the white in the photo (or grey, as it were).
Also tried pulling back the lights a bit and adding a couple more layers of tissue paper as a diffuser to reduce the hotspot reflections. At this point, short of hitting it with a matte varnish before photos, I think I’ve got it more or less dialed in. We’ll see when I finish this guy and hit it with the varnish. Here’s the sample shot:
Got the pants, boots and warm greys done. Left to go: armor plates, black metal and straps, glowy bits. The pants and boots don’t have a huge amount of contrast but I like the way they came out enough that I’m moving on.
When I got to the armor plates, the original grey (VGC 48 Sombre Grey) was way to purple/lilac, so I decided to paint over it with VGC 47 Wolf Grey…which is almost white and really blows the contrast. It also went on really poorly, might be a bad bottle as I couldn’t really get it very workable and even very thin it’s pretty blotchy/globby. So I’ll be going back to bring it down a bit, then get on with weathering it ala Ali’s WIP.
Still tweaking the lightbox setup, balanced out the bulbs with a couple Reveals. Still hotspots like mad, so I’ll add some more diffuser sheets and see how it goes.
I know, I know, I need more pics. My tv and pc are down (tv being the pc monitor), so I’ll be painting a lot this weekend. The fiancee has a flash card slot in her laptop, I’ll use that to upload something. For nows, another quick update:
I’m calling the warm greys on the Drone done and moving on to the cool greys (the armor plates mostly). I’m ok with the way the warm greys came out, it’s faaaar from perfect, but I can see a lot of progress and where I’ll be going with the techniques, so mission accomplished there. Still experimenting a bit with paint consistency but what I’m using now is sooo much thinner and flows much nicer. So it’s mostly working on brush control to actually get the paint where I want it; that and seeing where the paint actually needs to go! Good stuff, though, considering it’s technically my first painted mini with no drybrush/wash (I did cheat with washes twice for little spots).
The bolts on his arms were a stone cold bitch and the main thing I dislike on the mini, but I’m not going to spend hours getting them right 🙂
Worked more shade and the highlights into the orange. Starting to get a feel for paint consistency, had a real nice pool of paint going for each and played around with it just having fun trying to paint. Never realized how little I actually painted before, with washes and drybrushing hiding the almost complete lack of technique.
Then I moved to the warm greys, and as I have a small wet palette, I tried to save some space by removing the previous warm grey base tone and putting in a new pool to work from. Went great at first, and to my amazement, I was starting to pull off Ali’s 2-brush method with this much more diluted paint (they had told me to thicken the paint if it dried to quickly). There was one blend I was actually happy with! Of course, I then slopped on it when shading something else. Dammit. 😀 Then it got ugly, because I hadn’t been thinking about the fact that the old paint had dried enough to lay a layer of acrylic down that stopped the wet palette action and the paint got thick, my painting got messier, and I’ll have to rework most of the greys because of it.
I’m not going to spend forever reworking problem areas, as it’s really my first shot at fully painting a mini. But these greys, yeah I can do better! The oranges aren’t great but I’m pretty happy with where they are for where I am as a painter. I can see some progress and that’s really the whole idea with this project.
Looks abysmal in photo, so I’m using them as a guide for the next session and don’t really feel like posting them 🙂
With the company of my 7000 song-laden iPod on shuffle, I knocked out the rest of the base coating! Yay. The armor plating turned out a bit more intense then I intended, so I’ll be going back to fix that up when I get to painting it up properly. Otherwise, I think it’s a decent start.
I tried using the Winsor & Newton Series 7 #1 for some detail and I think I’m a #2 guy. The only thing I prefer the #1 for was reducing the body width to get into a couple tight spaces where the #2 might touch the sides, Operation-like (bzzt!).
I also signed on to do a group WIP over on the Reaper forums, so I want to get this out soonish. Also, the informal competition at SMV forum ends at some point! The Reaper project will be on the new Bones material, so it should be a good introduction to the material the mini landslide will be made of!
Welp, WP decided to eat my previous post so this will be a bit more terse.
I’m going to deviate from Ali McVey’s WIP because I am too sloppy a painter to finish outer coats without base coating under them. Took me about two hours just to get the orange and black down and the touch-ups still aren’t complete.
Going to finish base coats today and hopefully get to some shading tonight or tomorrow.
No photo box, bleh quality!
