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Santana Ortega


odinsgrandson

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This mini is a very limited release from Wyrd- similar to their event minis, they also only sold this one to minions who work at promoting Malifaux officially.

I was very happy to have secured one (especially since I don't work for Wyrd). So I decided that it was a good idea to paint her up for this year's Gencon competition.

She took first single miniature for Wyrd.

Anyway, here are the pictures

santana-ortega.jpg

santana-ortega-2.jpg

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Loved this on the day, love it now.

A question - what colours did you use for the pink/red outfit? It's a rare thing to see that colour but not garish and neon!

The trick to that color is that I shaded it with it's compliment. If I remember right, the red started life as P3 Sanguine Highlight (or a mix of Sanguine Base+Highlight). I shaded it with a dark green and highlighted with an ivory color. The shading tones it down quite a bit.

Looks great, but is it just me or would you use this as a better Perdita...not Santiago?

I thought that when I was painting her. Of course, I'm looking forward to seeing the new Perdita box set, and we'll see what she ends up playing as.

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oh i didnt think about shading with the opposite. i tend to shade with a violet, black or brown. purple shades are great for tricking the eye into thinking there is more depth. like under eyes or just below cheekbones can really make a model look gaunt.

my painting mentor taught me that when doing layers, dont lighten your base color with white. it just ruins the color and you end up with an ugly tentacle pink that is not what you want from reds. instead add a light tan/ivory as long as its a warm based ivory to blend your reds with.

as a lazy painter who paints directly from pots and rarely works from a pallette blending my own shades, my solution is always "buy all the paints!" and i have to be careful to work with either all warm or all cool tones when blending thin layers.

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@Big Mike- are you ready?

...i have to be careful to work with either all warm or all cool tones when blending thin layers.

May I ask how you did the skin? It's perfect!!

Thanks, I think I want to talk about both of these together.

The skin is usually something that wants to be the main focus of attention (I actually had a rough time composing with this mini because her face isn't showing, but I decided that the skin was still going to be the focus).

Areas of higher contrast attract the attention of the eye. There are three kinds of contrast- value (light and dark) temperature (warm and cool) and color wheel (use of opposite colors near each other).

So, what I'm saying is that when you're working with a color, you can definitely go up alternating in warm and cool colors (I learned that trick from Zach Lanier). But doing so makes the area into a center of interest. Do it on the face, but not on the boots, you know?

I'll show you how it is done on this mini's skin:

My go-to method for painting skin is to shade it separately with green and red, both mixed with the base color. First I'll do a wash of red (P3 skorne red) then a wash of green (P3 battledress green or Traitor green) and last I'll mix the two together for any very deep shadows (I don't remember if I had any on this mini's skin).

Since I wanted to keep a kind of purple to the shading, on Santana here, I mixed in a tiny bit of purple to both layers as I went down (I don't remember perfectly, but I'm pretty sure it was Reaper Burgandy Wine that I used there).

After that, I highlighted up using flesh tones, and at the top made sure there was a little Ivory yellow in there (P3 Menoth white highlight).

So, I'm using green and red and purple and yellow without ever mixing them together. Since these are all opposites on the color wheel, I have some pretty strong contrast happening.

In addition, these colors are all different temperatures (I go down with the warm red, then the cold green, for example) which also creates contrast.

Mixing the complimentary colors together doesn't usually create as much contrast (although it can if you have really sharp lighting). So the green shading on the magenta clothing is toned down enough that the skin really pops out from it. The grey and black are similarly simpler colors, meant to draw the eye less (although I lie a little, the grey has purple shading and yellow highlighting).

So, there's the rant.

Edited by odinsgrandson
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I find that really interesting, it's a very different process from the spanish/french styles I've had shoved at me a lot back home. I think at my last count they have something like 6 different contrast types (though some are specularity and texture, so not really ones that matter to paint colour choice of course), and they swear that you should have them on every part of the model, and on the piece as a whole, maximising it on the focal areas like the face.

I prefer (and have been working on getting better at) your way, careful application of colour theory where it's useful. Less messy oversaturation and hypercontrast that way!

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Yeah, there's a whole lot of crazy ideas out there, and every time someone says "you should always" or "you should never" then they're lying. That includes me.

Every technique gives you an effect, so the best thing is what is going to give you the effect you want in the micro sense.

Even scorned techniques like drybrushing have uses (I like it for the texture of denim).

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