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New player, new painter - first results


Zirenius

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Dear folks, 

new Malifaux player from Germany here. I have recently purchased my first crew and thought I'd share my minis with the public as I go along.

Feedback and criticism are more than welcome, as I am new to miniature painting (this is my sixth miniature total).

There you go...

LPhbigo.png

Cheers!

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Looking good! You picked it up a lot faster than me if that is your 6th model! Really liking the face in particular.

Some cleanup of the "leaked" red as suggested would make a big difference. Not sure how noticeable the shoe is on the tabletop, I would consider that good enough.

 

If you want to have more vibrant black tones and differentiate different black objects I recommend highlighting black with some colour instead of flat grey. Vallejo's Dark Sea Blue is a great highlight colour for black and you can also use dark browns like scorched brown. If they get too obvious you can blend back with watered down black.

Is the sword done in metallics? It's hard to tell from the pic.

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1 hour ago, Ludvig said:

Looking good! You picked it up a lot faster than me if that is your 6th model! Really liking the face in particular.

Some cleanup of the "leaked" red as suggested would make a big difference. Not sure how noticeable the shoe is on the tabletop, I would consider that good enough.

 

If you want to have more vibrant black tones and differentiate different black objects I recommend highlighting black with some colour instead of flat grey. Vallejo's Dark Sea Blue is a great highlight colour for black and you can also use dark browns like scorched brown. If they get too obvious you can blend back with watered down black.

Is the sword done in metallics? It's hard to tell from the pic.

Thank you very much for your suggestions. I am currently working on some other miniatures just to gain experience and confidence. (Plus, I want to be able to field a crew for my first tournament in December... :)) The sword is actually just blacks and greys, no metallic colours used there.

 

1 hour ago, LastBellTower said:

Not bad for a new painter (new painter myself). I think the mini could do with a bit of a tidy up in places, the pool of wash on the boot,  red on top of knee cap & corset strings etc. Also a bit of colour on the blade handle might help break it up a bit.

I agree. The things you mention are obviously negligible at tabletop distance, but I was a bit untidy in the spots you mentioned. Thank you for the positive overall comment :). Much appreciated. I was actually hesitant to post here, as there are so many gifted people on this site . Hope to be making some good progress on the rest of the crew...!

 

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@Zirenius

Feedback is important when starting out. A good way to improve is try to paint together with someone you want to learn from. 

Painting metals without metallic colours is a pretty advanced and time consuming technique that requires wet paints and some careful planning to get the best result. That being said I think you did a lot better than me in my first tries and I had been painting for years when I tried that.

There are very good tutorials if you search for "non metallic metal". From the looks of this picture I would say you want to thin your paints more and finish it off with a few extreme highlights of pure white on a couple of the tips near the hilt and at the curve of the blade. 

If you want an quicker way forward for getting things on the table I recommend metallic paints on the whole area, a metallic highlight and then doing a wash with a dark normal colour over it all. 

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On 11/11/2017 at 12:52 PM, Ludvig said:

@Zirenius

Feedback is important when starting out. A good way to improve is try to paint together with someone you want to learn from. 

Painting metals without metallic colours is a pretty advanced and time consuming technique that requires wet paints and some careful planning to get the best result. That being said I think you did a lot better than me in my first tries and I had been painting for years when I tried that.

There are very good tutorials if you search for "non metallic metal". From the looks of this picture I would say you want to thin your paints more and finish it off with a few extreme highlights of pure white on a couple of the tips near the hilt and at the curve of the blade. 

If you want an quicker way forward for getting things on the table I recommend metallic paints on the whole area, a metallic highlight and then doing a wash with a dark normal colour over it all. 

Thank you. I found a local guy I can do some painting with. As to the metals, I think you are right - will be watching some videos on non-metallic-metals, as I really like the look of them if done right. However, regular metallics might be quicker to get the first crew together.

Somehow I picked up the - probably wrong - impression, that using metallic colours takes away from the paint shop in any way. That is likely nonsense, what do you think?

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I would recommend to practice on easier miniatures and don't dive in "next level" stuff right away. Organic details such as skin and clothes are one of the hardest things to pull off as they are imprinted in our memories and we quickly see if it doesn't look "right". Learn to do simple base colour, neat shadows by using thinned dark (not black) paint or washes sparingly in recesses, and "edge" highlights first. If done correctly it produces quality table top results and all it requires is steady hands, appropriate paint consistency and some hours under the belt to become neater.

As for metal details - due to popular thought using metallics is put in easy category when compared to NMM, while in reality to look good both actually require pretty much the same technique. In metallics it is just a bit more forgiving on the blendings because of reflective nature of the paint. Plain base color + wash + quick highlight (usually drybrush) often isn't enough for a good result, especially on larger smooth surfaces such as swords or armour. 

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1 hour ago, Zirenius said:

Somehow I picked up the - probably wrong - impression, that using metallic colours takes away from the paint shop in any way. That is likely nonsense, what do you think?

Get that nonsense out of your head right now. TMM (=true metallic metal), drybrush, airbrush, whatever, none of that is 'cheating' or 'lesser' painting or anything like that. There's a time, place and taste for everything.

If you like how good NMM looks and are willing to put in the effort, absolutely do that. Just be aware that while TMM is a lot easier to do a decent low effort job on than NMM, both are techniques that allow for a lot of effort to be put in. There's no reason you couldn't put deliberate highlights and shadows when working your TMM.

Keep an open mind, try new things, perfect old things, have fun. You'll do good.

____

Bit of C&C, starting with the photo itself. In the future you might want to try and get a whole picture, ie. this one has sword and tiny bit of coat out of frame. With some figures, including this one I'd say, there's value in posting two or more photos. With Lilith front and back shots seem most pressing, as she has a big coat that's not really visible from the front but is a big part of the mini when on the table. Now if you do her three terror tots, we don't necessarily need full 360' view of each, it's pretty much a naked demon baby from every angle.

Good tip I've found is to take your picture a bit farther back and then crop the image down to just the figure. It helps my phone camera to focus on the mini better, but keeps excess clutter out of frame. I use my phone's built-in software to do the cropping.

As for Lilith herself. I like her. You tried to do a lot with the skin, face at least but I see some colour variety in her arm too. That's always nice to see. I'm a bit 50-50 on her lips. They're very bright, kiss kiss red lips. Not how I see the character, but on another model they'd work I'm sure. And if you're fine with lipstick on Lilith, well she's your girl. If you want to pick out the lips but not go for such bright effect, I'd suggest you mix some red or purple, probably a bit darker shade, in with your skin colour and paint that on. Could also try it without the skin colour and apply paint very thinly over a few layers. But that's down to taste and your idea of the model in question.

Looks like you highlighted her hair towards pink? Looks a bit off, better to use orange, or some flesh colour, or just off white to highlight if you want to keep it red. You already got told to try and be a bit neater, re: black on her boot. Sword also looks like it was black and you gave it a grey drybrush, looks ok towards the tip but root of the blade just looks a tad unfinished. Just in general try to work on how and where you place your highlights, shadows and all that stuff. There's plenty of tutorials that'll help you along as you keep painting more minis.

Overall it's a nice early paintjob. Should look good on the table.

 

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3 hours ago, Zirenius said:

Somehow I picked up the - probably wrong - impression, that using metallic colours takes away from the paint shop in any way. That is likely nonsense, what do you think?

There is no cheating in miniature painting or whatsoever!

Cheating would be if you took part in a contest and behave ageinst the rules.

Just do what you want. Its your hobby, your miniature, your hobbytime, your painting ability etc.

You have to decide what you want to achieve. I paint my Malifaux miniatures with about 8 hours each. My Project Z miniatures with about 1/2 hour. On the table with a distance of 1 or more meters you may recognize a difference, but maybe not a big. Right before your eyes? Definately!

The three most im portant thing in miature painting and gaming miniatures would be IMO contrast, contrast and contrast.

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8 minutes ago, Butch said:

There is no cheating in miniature painting or whatsoever!

Cheating would be if you took part in a contest and behave ageinst the rules.

Just do what you want. Its your hobby, your miniature, your hobbytime, your painting ability etc.

You have to decide what you want to achieve. I paint my Malifaux miniatures with about 8 hours each. My Project Z miniatures with about 1/2 hour. On the table with a distance of 1 or more meters you may recognize a difference, but maybe not a big. Right before your eyes? Definately!

The three most im portant thing in miature painting and gaming miniatures would be IMO contrast, contrast and contrast.

That is highly appreciated. I agree that I like Lilith way better if I don't zoom the camera in on her. She'll be fine on the tabletop. :)

48 minutes ago, Nikodemus said:

Get that nonsense out of your head right now. TMM (=true metallic metal), drybrush, airbrush, whatever, none of that is 'cheating' or 'lesser' painting or anything like that. There's a time, place and taste for everything.

If you like how good NMM looks and are willing to put in the effort, absolutely do that. Just be aware that while TMM is a lot easier to do a decent low effort job on than NMM, both are techniques that allow for a lot of effort to be put in. There's no reason you couldn't put deliberate highlights and shadows when working your TMM.

Keep an open mind, try new things, perfect old things, have fun. You'll do good.

____

Bit of C&C, starting with the photo itself. In the future you might want to try and get a whole picture, ie. this one has sword and tiny bit of coat out of frame. With some figures, including this one I'd say, there's value in posting two or more photos. With Lilith front and back shots seem most pressing, as she has a big coat that's not really visible from the front but is a big part of the mini when on the table. Now if you do her three terror tots, we don't necessarily need full 360' view of each, it's pretty much a naked demon baby from every angle.

Good tip I've found is to take your picture a bit farther back and then crop the image down to just the figure. It helps my phone camera to focus on the mini better, but keeps excess clutter out of frame. I use my phone's built-in software to do the cropping.

As for Lilith herself. I like her. You tried to do a lot with the skin, face at least but I see some colour variety in her arm too. That's always nice to see. I'm a bit 50-50 on her lips. They're very bright, kiss kiss red lips. Not how I see the character, but on another model they'd work I'm sure. And if you're fine with lipstick on Lilith, well she's your girl. If you want to pick out the lips but not go for such bright effect, I'd suggest you mix some red or purple, probably a bit darker shade, in with your skin colour and paint that on. Could also try it without the skin colour and apply paint very thinly over a few layers. But that's down to taste and your idea of the model in question.

Looks like you highlighted her hair towards pink? Looks a bit off, better to use orange, or some flesh colour, or just off white to highlight if you want to keep it red. You already got told to try and be a bit neater, re: black on her boot. Sword also looks like it was black and you gave it a grey drybrush, looks ok towards the tip but root of the blade just looks a tad unfinished. Just in general try to work on how and where you place your highlights, shadows and all that stuff. There's plenty of tutorials that'll help you along as you keep painting more minis.

Overall it's a nice early paintjob. Should look good on the table.

 

Thank you very much for your feedback and advice!

This was my first attempt at lipstick and putting on some makeup tones for the face. Honestly, I agree that it did turn out a little harsh maybe... You are spot on about the hair - the pink looks a little weird. Also: the blade - I did dry brush two levels of highlight onto the blade, which for the base of the sword does indeed not yet look optimal.

Thank you so very much everybody for being so detailed in your feedback. I will definitely try to keep your advice on taking pictures in mind for the next miniatures and I will post them again - I need to somehow get a crew done before December 9th, but I don't want them to look terrible. 

From your experience, is painting miniatures to a tabletop standard and doing the detail work later on viable? I would much rather take my time in the long run than rush things to be able to field a crew...

Have a nice evening!!

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18 minutes ago, Zirenius said:

From your experience, is painting miniatures to a tabletop standard and doing the detail work later on viable? I would much rather take my time in the long run than rush things to be able to field a crew...

Some people like to work like that, you certainly can. I don't. It might take me a day or a few weeks to paint a figure and during that time I'm quite invested in it. But once that's done, once I stop working on it it gets really difficult for me to get back to it. Each figure is its own little (more or less) uninterrupted journey and what's done is done. That's how I enjoy this hobby. Some people do it differently.

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The only cheating is entering a painting contewt with a model that someone else painted.

NMM is just harder to get right so naturally everyone had to do it. ;) I started trying NMM when I got into malifaux and now I'm kind off stuck because I have so many models painted NMM that I can't make the switch to true metals again. I'm still not very good at it.

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14 hours ago, Nikodemus said:

Some people like to work like that, you certainly can. I don't. It might take me a day or a few weeks to paint a figure and during that time I'm quite invested in it. But once that's done, once I stop working on it it gets really difficult for me to get back to it. Each figure is its own little (more or less) uninterrupted journey and what's done is done. That's how I enjoy this hobby. Some people do it differently.

I can fully relate to that philosophy, thank you. Still got almost a month to go + the tournament is only 40ss, so that should be doable. :)

13 hours ago, Ludvig said:

The only cheating is entering a painting contewt with a model that someone else painted.

NMM is just harder to get right so naturally everyone had to do it. ;) I started trying NMM when I got into malifaux and now I'm kind off stuck because I have so many models painted NMM that I can't make the switch to true metals again. I'm still not very good at it.

That's what I meant. Everybody in my local community + most of the guys on here and another game's forum I read seemed to be doing NMM. My pool of painted figures is limited, so I will try both. Also, now I will try to find pictures of your work on here, as your post sounded like understatement. ;)

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1 hour ago, Zirenius said:

That's what I meant. Everybody in my local community + most of the guys on here and another game's forum I read seemed to be doing NMM. My pool of painted figures is limited, so I will try both. Also, now I will try to find pictures of your work on here, as your post sounded like understatement. ;)

I used to have a few of them in my gallery here but space was limited so I started an imgur gallery. I will send you a link this evening when I'm on my home computer.

Here is my forum gallery. The guild guard and guard captain were made with true metallics because I was in a rush. The rest is NMM. I am unfortunately crap at taking pictures and haven't had the energy to get help from my mate who has a light box. 

 

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38 minutes ago, Ludvig said:

I used to have a few of them in my gallery here but space was limited so I started an imgur gallery. I will send you a link this evening when I'm on my home computer.

Here is my forum gallery. The guild guard and guard captain were made with true metallics because I was in a rush. The rest is NMM. I am unfortunately crap at taking pictures and haven't had the energy to get help from my mate who has a light box. 

Thank you for sharing, I'd love to see more of your work when you get around to sending me a link. :-) I'll be getting some more colours today anyhow, so I'll also try regular metal on the next mini down the line. We'll see. Have a nice day!

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This seems to be my only publicly accessible gallery. I'll have to take a look at my settings. This was made recently but I tried to get a dramatic look for a more tabletop-friendly finish with dramatic highlights. The NMM is of lower quality than my earlier stuff. Nice day to you too!

 https://imgur.com/gallery/Ue25L 

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@Zirenius

I have a few more here, hopefully they will give you an idea of how to do some NMM. I don't seem to have any pics of my finished McMourning or Sebastian but I'll share my shoddy WIPs because it looks like the metal was close to finished on them. Apoligies for the picture quality.

https://imgur.com/a/OqO74

WIPs of Seb and McMourning

https://imgur.com/a/VFn7V

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To add to all the tips you already got, if you want to mix a highlight for red, vallejo's model color 'sunny skintone' works very well.

Especially if you want a cooler overall tone. You can the use white to highlight it even further. If you use white exclusively, the red turns to pink quickly. 

 

In gerneral, you should try to balance the colors used, for example, you can highlight green with yellow or white or another light green. Either can work, but when combined with other colors on your mini ,one or the other can look a bit off. So if you have some old/cheap models lying around, you can experiment. 

Looking into colour theory can provide useful tips too. For example, that yellow can be shaded with purple. 

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Knowing a bit of colour theory helps when I get stuck on a paint scheme or am looking for ideas. Makes for good background material to listen/watch to when painting too. Plenty of written and video resources online.

I guess what I've got out it the most is it gives language to how I think about painting minis. Last mini I painted had purple, gold (=yellow) and pale skin, with a bit of grey metallics and black in it. Purple was a main colour so I picked gold to do trim and other such parts because it contrasted nicely with purple. I shaded the skin with purple, as that harmonised it with the main colour of the mini. I painted a few miscellaneous parts black and grey metallic, because those look neutral and don't steal attention away from the important bits. You could do all of that intuitively, sure, but having the words helps me make more informed, conscious decisions about these sort of things.

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On 14.11.2017 at 7:26 PM, Treehouse said:

To add to all the tips you already got, if you want to mix a highlight for red, vallejo's model color 'sunny skintone' works very well.

Especially if you want a cooler overall tone. You can the use white to highlight it even further. If you use white exclusively, the red turns to pink quickly. 

 

In gerneral, you should try to balance the colors used, for example, you can highlight green with yellow or white or another light green. Either can work, but when combined with other colors on your mini ,one or the other can look a bit off. So if you have some old/cheap models lying around, you can experiment. 

Looking into colour theory can provide useful tips too. For example, that yellow can be shaded with purple. 

 

22 hours ago, Nikodemus said:

Knowing a bit of colour theory helps when I get stuck on a paint scheme or am looking for ideas. Makes for good background material to listen/watch to when painting too. Plenty of written and video resources online.

I guess what I've got out it the most is it gives language to how I think about painting minis. Last mini I painted had purple, gold (=yellow) and pale skin, with a bit of grey metallics and black in it. Purple was a main colour so I picked gold to do trim and other such parts because it contrasted nicely with purple. I shaded the skin with purple, as that harmonised it with the main colour of the mini. I painted a few miscellaneous parts black and grey metallic, because those look neutral and don't steal attention away from the important bits. You could do all of that intuitively, sure, but having the words helps me make more informed, conscious decisions about these sort of things.

Thank you both very much. What you are saying about color theory sounds very valid. Unfortunately. I dońt know anything about it and thus could never come up with your suggestions myself.

 

may I ask - is there any kind of book or internet resource that you would recommend on color theory? I don‘t mind taking some time to thoroughly read up on the matter...

 

On 14.11.2017 at 6:01 PM, Ludvig said:

 

@Zirenius

I have a few more here, hopefully they will give you an idea of how to do some NMM. I don't seem to have any pics of my finished McMourning or Sebastian but I'll share my shoddy WIPs because it looks like the metal was close to finished on them. Apoligies for the picture quality.

https://imgur.com/a/OqO74

WIPs of Seb and McMourning

https://imgur.com/a/VFn7V

Thanx for sharing! That does give a better idea on NMM - I alread saved some video links to watch tomorrow. This is such a nice and helpful place, I really appreciate it!

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3 minutes ago, Ludvig said:

I like this written tutorial on the basics:

https://imgur.com/pLabbQ5

 

I think I also used this video (I had it bookmarked, didn't rewatch it)

http://www.beastsofwar.com/3-colors-up/colour-theory-part-1/

 

Ok,  sorry that I can‘t hit the thank you button twice. So: thank you. That will take some time to sink in though. 🙂very nice resource!

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I just watched a bunch of videos, often on the background while I painted so it trickled in bit by bit. You know, sometimes you get absorbed into painting and whatever audio there is on the background just fades away :D

I really like Romain's videos (the one Ludvid linked to), his take on colour theory is a bit long, six parts total but worth a look if you don't mind his... well I know people who don't get along with his kind of people. It's an attitude thing. I myself can't get enough of him. He's also done non-theory painting videos for BoW, most I've seen are from quite a few years ago by now.

Vince Venturella has a half an hour episode on the subject, good channel for lots of painting related videos I might add:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVb4jiig0zo

There's been other videos, some text articles, I forget them. One Ludvig linked looked good. As always google is your friend if you want more.

You're right that it'll take a while to sink in. But if you're the type that likes to paint, likes to play around with paint, you'll probably get something out of it.

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