misterfinn

Thanks @Franchute and @mrcoblin - I agree that the coffin can use more contrast and the bottom needs to be darkened. Wouldn’t have put my finger on it without your comments :) Gonna be down to the wire this month - haven’t even primed the “miss” yet!

Some OSL WIP: The blobby bits around the elbow/forearm area are actually teal flames. They stick straight out from the coffin toward the viewer so they're difficult to capture in the photo. Any comments on the work so far? In particular, I'm looking for places where the illusion breaks down - is the light source itself bright enough, is the light dispersion too tight or too broad, is the color fade/opacity right or is the coloring too dramatic, does the shadowing look accurate...that kind of thing. Be as nit-picky as you want. :)

@mrcoblin Very solid work. Your highlighting and shading give a natural look to the models. It's not too contrasty, but still plenty defined on the tabletop. I like your color choices too. Basing looks fine to me. One suggestion, if I may: I think both models would benefit from more consistent darklining. You're getting there with the choker and shoulder straps on the first model and the boots & shoulder straps on the second model. I'd like to see that definition between skin and garment carry over to the armbands and other transition areas. @Phinn Good luck with your thesis! Is it for your master's or your doctorate?

@Strangely Brown I think your NMM is looking solid. Highlight and shadow placement looks right to me. Dial up the contrast a little bit and I think you’re good to go.

In my experience, highlight placement and brightness is similar to what you’d use for NMM. The brighter the highlights and sharper the transitions, the shinier it will appear. I’m intrigued by your idea of using contrasting colors for highlights. Are you going for an iridescent effect? Something otherworldly? Just experimenting? Tell us more :-)

Miss Terious (6ss), for realsies - nothing in progress to fall back on this month! Sculpted some flames coming out of the coffin and I think she will have glowy undead eyes so this’ll be an OSL-fest.

@RustAndTheCity This crew is epic. Basing, SFX, colors, brushwork, all of it. Just...wow.

@Franchute I'm alive! Had an unexpectedly large dose of Real Life interfering with my hobby time this month. Disappointed that I haven't been able to participate in discussion but skimming through this thread I see some great work! I did manage to get the last bit of my Nothing Beast finished and smooth out some (but not all) of the blends I wasn't happy with. I will join others in the "finishing up club" and claim him for 10SS. Miss Terious will have to wait for March.

@Phinn just got the chance to look at your additional photos. Definitely worth the wait! I’ll echo Varuk and Burnin’ Coal here - you’ve done some lovely work, with the wings and boils as standouts. Great color too - brings out the detail and gives an otherworldly look without becoming garish. You’ve set yourself a high bar for the rest of the year ;-)

Thanks @Burnin' Coal - I have a couple of cardstock "interactive" color wheels that show complements/triads/tetrads and basic hue combinations. I rely on those pretty heavily for selecting paint schemes and doing rudimentary color mixing like "use purple to shade yellow". So far I haven't had much luck experimenting with more advanced color mixing the way you've done it on your Stitched. You've got reds, purples, greens all playing together in your shading. It's almost Impressionist in style. I'll have a look at the Itten book - I like Bauhaus architecture and design quite a bit. Then more experimentation! Always something new to learn...

Whoa, so many new models since yesterday morning! Just a couple of comments to add to my "likes": @tjgreenway A higher ratio, but not by much. It may seem counter-intuitive, but you actually want a pretty good sized brush (at least a 0, I use a 1) so it holds some paint. Then it's a combination of a light touch and a sharp tip to get the thin straight lines. If your brush is too small, you'll often run out of paint partway through your line. Here's a picture of the Specialist I painted for January with my primary brush (a size 1 Winsor & Newton kolinsky sable) next to it: Also I recommend using a dark almost-black rather than a pure black. A 2:1 mix of your darkest brown:black should do it. @Phinn Love your color choices. The whole model is lovely but the wings in particular stand out. I'm excited to see the final pictures. @PetitDalek Hahaha weeping angels! "Blink" is IMO the scariest episode in the entire rebooted series. Great concept, very well executed. I respect the time and effort you put into your bases! They look fantastic. A bit of unsolicited C&C :-) is on Teddy's tummy. The rest of the model (including the heart itself) looks like it's got the standard overhead lighting source but the highlighting on the checkers looks like it's lit from the upper left of the photo. I'd expect the dark areas on the left-hand checkers to be on the left-bottom side - essentially mirror images of the right-hand checkers. @Burnin' Coal The contrast color shading is just stunning. Reminds me a lot of the old Rackham Confrontation models, especially the Mid-Nor dwarves and Alchemists of Dirz. I'd like to practice this style with some Resser models waiting for me down the line but color is the biggest gap in my painting knowledge/ability. What resources (if any) can you recommend to learn about this kind of color theory?

I salute your modeling fortitude. I put the left track assembly together and then decided I'd just let my poisoned Freikorps burn. I'll finish the Nothing Beast this weekend in all likelihood but my real pledge is Miss Terious for 6SS. I can already tell she's going to be a pain to prep. Terrible casting offset.

@Treehouse That golem is really striking. I dig it. @Franchute Nothing wrong with that "cheap" OSL. The severity of the effect matches the perceived brightness/heat of the flames. If you'd made the effect more dramatic I don't think it'd look as realistic. @Caedrus Glad to see the finalized vomit worm. :-) Those day-glo colors are surprisingly effective! They don't look gimmicky or garish to me at all. The only critique I have is for the OSL. I like that you've gone bold and bright - it's a good experiment and I think it mostly works. I'd like to see brighter highlights on the flame itself so it looks hotter. That'd give you more room to play with brightness/contrast on the reflected light areas. Also the reflection on the middle tail segment (front of the third picture) should be more diffuse - a bit less bright in the center and more spread out with the darker tint. It doesn't quite hang together with the reflected light on the stones. Your Lynch model is super fun! I like the duality of color and the attention to detail: card face, peeling wallpaper, necktie, buttons, all very clean. I totally feel your pain with the varnish frosting. I had that happen to me on a competition model once, just a couple of days before the comp. 10 hours of work down the tubes and no time to repaint. Had to scrap the entire mini-diorama. FWIW you've done an excellent recovery job. I wouldn't have been able to tell if you hadn't said anything. @Stonewall78 Very tidy paint job. Nice work. @tjgreenway I don't see any poor brush skills here! Your paint is smooth and the colors are painted neatly. I like your color choices. As a next step (before you get into highlighting and shading), I suggest building on the clean brushwork you're already practicing. Try some darklining - painting very thin lines of dark paint between areas of the model where colors meet each other. Examples: between hand and coat on the nurse, between jacket and vest on the handler, between glove and arm on the handler. This technique helps to make the model "pop" from a distance and adds polish when viewed up close. Darklining's also very helpful as a brush control exercise for painting fine detail and correcting small errors. Make sure you've got a decently sized brush (no smaller than a 0, I'd say) that holds a sharp point. My go-to paint for this is Reaper Master Series brown liner (part #09064) because it's not as stark as pure black and I like the flow.

@CapnBloodbeard long post ahoy...tl;dr I think mini-painting is unlikely to become fast or enjoyable for you unless you grit your teeth and grind through the fundamentals first. In my experience, much of the effort for a new hobbyist is front loaded. Everything sucks until you’re comfortable with the tools - in this case, your brush and your paint. When I first started taking architecture classes in college (pre-CAD), the curriculum didn’t use t-squares or templates or any of that stuff. I drew circles and long straight lines, freehand, over and over and over and over. I drew dark-to-light shading boxes with pencil and with charcoal, over and over and over and over. I hated it. Once I’d had the practice, though, I could draw just about anything quickly and accurately because the techniques had become second nature. Similar experience playing guitar - practicing scales is almost as fun for me as eating glass but I can’t think about the music if I’m concentrating on where to put my fingers. All of which is a long winded way of saying: there are plenty of shading and highlighting techniques and materials out there, but I don’t think you’ll be satisfied with any of the results until you learn good brush control. Drybrushing often causes rough texture and uneven coverage. Washing often causes splotches and streaks. The end result looks messy, which is frustrating. These techniques are much easier to learn if you’re already comfortable with your tools and you can paint flat color neatly. Part of the reason that Treehouse’s pre-shaded model looks so awesome is that the colors are applied smoothly, with clean edges and uniform opacity. You can mitigate the pain of practicing something you don’t like by starting with good tools. I’m mostly thinking of brushes here. A high quality sable brush that holds a sharp point is essential. I use a Winsor & Newton size 1 kolinsky sable round brush for everything from cloaks to eyeballs, but there are a few other brands out there of similar quality. Consider using a wet palette as well. Wet palettes (which are simple to make with paper towels and baking parchment if you don’t want to buy one) help to maintain your paint consistency over a long period of time. Concentrating on your brush control is much easier if you don’t have to fiddle with your paint every 20 minutes. As far as your current models go, I think your blue and brown are just fine. White is a notoriously difficult color to paint well, though, so you might consider a different choice there. Slate grey or grey-green maybe. Pure greens (like kelly green), yellows, and reds tend to require several coats to get a smooth color so I’d stay away from those. My 2 scrip and YMMV.

Yep. A yellow-orange, I think. The effect won’t be as dramatic as it would if you were painting a full night time diorama or something. Ambient daylight makes the lantern light less intense by comparison. Here’s a stock photo that shows what I mean:

Thanks everyone for your feedback. @H4ml3t I think you’re right about the gloppy bits. I like the blends I’ve got finished but I’ll work more color into the front side. I might need to take those green highlights up another level or two as well - I’ll see how it looks when I get the other bits done. @Purple Mist Those metals are looking good! Dig the bases as well. @Joachim Those cyclops finished up nicely. Love the markings on the gorar’s hood - did you have photo reference for that? Thumbs up on Barbaros’ wings too. I’d maybe take the highlights on his loincloth up another step in the back if you’e not tired of working on him. It looks a little flat next to his skin. @Franchute nice smooth blends, on the trousers especially. Do you think you’ll OSL the lantern?

I’d like some work in progress C&C from my fellow painters. I’m back to the Nothing Beast now that the Specialist is done. I’m interested in texture on this model, as it’s not something I’ve spent much time experimenting with. I want to depict three different textures on: a soft, gloppy, not-quite-solid unformed mass that he rises out of, a chitinous carapace, and limbs somewhere in between. In theory this should be a matter of contrast and diffusion. Shiny carapace: higher contrast, sharper transitions. Gloppy bits: very diffuse highlights, less contrast between lightest and darkest. Limbs: “normal” paint like you’ve seen on my Specialist. So far I’m not sure it’s working. It’s got a pretty good “cool factor” going on the carapace, I think, but I don’t know if I’ve got the right highlight placement or high enough contrast. Also something about the stylistic mix on the model just doesn’t hang together for me and I can’t put my finger on it. Critiques? Suggestions?

I hear you. I have a rough time with OSL (and NMM for that matter) for exactly that reason. Easy to comment on, hard to execute. :-)

@RustAndTheCity Good work with the gold non-metallics. You’ve got the highlights and shadows in the right place, with the right amount of contrast to make them look super polished/reflective. The placement of the highlights on the right boot stands out to me as very realistic too. Nice consistent blends throughout. The two brush technique is clearly working for you! I’m not sold on the rocket pack exhaust. Rocket exhaust burns very hot so I’d expect more white and yellow near the tanks, with a more gradual transition overall from white to orange. The sharp white-to-red and red-to-black transitions you’ve got now make the effect look more like hardening lava to me. I feel like it’s a missed chance for some tasty OSL too, but that’s a time-consuming effect and may have been out of scope for this model. Your photography definitely does justice to your paint job. What’s your setup? My 2 scrip. Looking forward to seeing more of your work.

Claiming a Freikorps Specialist for 7SS. I confess that I rushed the finish on this guy. I wanted him for a tournament I played yesterday (where he totally earned his SS in Ours) but honestly I just really want to get back to my Nothing Beast. :-) Metals have some depth IRL even though they’re glare-y in the photo...anyone got a good tip for shooting metallics with a phone? Here he is with a couple of his buddies, for context: