Vento Servitas: Painting the Windy City Wizard

Following on from last week's post on converting the Windy City Wizard, we are now ready to begin painting. This is a process (or, if you count the banner, several processes) that I've been meaning to document here for quite some time, as it's handy to be able to refer people here when they ask me about my paintjobs. I have to warn you, though, it's a little long.

At the end of the last section, we had the figure undercoated in mid gray, ready for the process of under shading. At this point, I give the whole model a generous wash of diluted Windsor and Newton black ink.

As ever with washes, you want to avoid pooling--but in this case the risk is not that great since there will be a lot of drybrush layers on top of it. Furthermore, the W&N inks are really good about sinking into the recesses. If you are using diluted black acrylic instead, I recommend adding a few generous dollops of matte medium to get a similar effect.

Once the wash is completely dry, go back with an overbrush of the mid gray basecoat (this, for reference, is 1:1 white to black. Some people like to add blue to this mix...I've never tried that, but intend to...someday.) You can see the result above.

At this point, I do something slightly...unorthodox (but only slightly). I've been developing a technique for painting surfaces decorated with starfields--a sort of mystical/magical look. In this case, I want the wizard's robe to be a kind of fay garment, a textile woven of the deepest regions of the cosmos. So I take an old toothbrush and dab it in some white paint, then flick it gently over my paper towel until all the larger gobs have flown  off. Then I go on to flick the brush over the empty areas of robe.

If you're doing just a normal undershaded figure, simply skip this step. 

The rest is all drybrushing. As I progress to lighter and lighter shades, I try and make the highlight more and more zenithal. Holding the miniature so that you are looking at it from the top down helps, as if your eye were the light source. The areas you can see should be the lightest. Also, be sure to avoid obliterating the starfields, if using.

The model is drybrushed with 2:1 white to black...

...followed by 4:1...

...then 8:1, and finally a dusting of pure white.

At this point, all of the edges and details are clearly defined, which makes the painting process even easier.

While I was waiting for the wash to dry (that part takes a while) I went back to the banner. I had let the waterproof ink (I use noodlers bulletproof black) dry overnight to avoid any streaking. Now I go over the whole banner very gently with an eraser to remove the pencil undersketch.

I went Windsor & Newton again for the colors here. I'ts hard to beat them for vibrancy (though I've heard that liquitex have similar properties, are available in single colors, and are less expensive, so I'll definitely be giving them a try at some point as well.)

I wanted to keep the color palat relatively simple, so for the hat, beard and face, I used the same mixture of Peat Brown and Deep Red inks (approximately 1:2) diluted to various opacities with water. The lettering and the wizard's eyes were done with Vermillion straight from the pot.

I went with Blue for the background of the flag and for the windy speach bubble, completing the hommage to the flag for the city of Chicago (and the colors of CSW) The motto ribbon and middle stripe were done in a dilute mixture of Canary Yellow and Peat Brown to give an aged look to the relatively white spaces.

Don't want things looking too clean though, so I took my trusty old toothbrush and flicked that same yellow brown mixture over the front of the banner...

...and then the rest of the yellow-brown and the red-brown mixtures generously all over the backs.

While that was drying, I went on to the painting stages for the figure. Prior to starting out, I had already treated the banner pole to some Rub n' Buff ersatz gold leaf. Next up is the skin (this needs to be done separately and in the traditional fashion because the drybrush highlights do not make for convinciing flesh.)

Now comes the fun part: glazing! For this step you use thinned out inks or paints to apply a color to an area while allowing the dry-brushed highlights to show through. W&N inks thinned with water are great for this, or can be used straight from the bottle for more intense colors. Acrylics thinned with matte medium also work very well and are a little easier to control, though are not quite as vibrant. Above, you can see I glazed the red areas, since they happened to be the same color as the wash I used for the skin.

Here you can see the exposed skin highlights are done and the eyes are a nice, menacing, spell-castery red.

From here, you move from color to color and spot to spot on the mini. The process is rather like applying a wash, except with less paint in the brush. I like to load my brush with glaze, then touch it to a paper towel a couple of times to make sure there's no excess. When you touch brush to surface, you want to deposit a thin even coat of translucent color, rather than a pool.

You may find some areas (like the skull or the book pages above) that don't quite glaze up nicely. This tends to be lighter colors. These are easy to tackle with traditional highlights. Sometimes it's as simple as mixing your glazing color with a bit of acryllic and using that to enhance the under-shaded highlights.

On this figure, I worked more or less on a whim, selecting the colors for the familiar, the feather, the stack of books on the fly. The base got a greeny-brown wash to suggest damp stone.

The one thing I had planned out was the robe. I wanted it to be a rich and vibrant blue, so I used Ultramarine straight from the jar all over the robe.

Now, here's the thing about W&N inks: they bleed. Their website might say that they're water-resistant, and maybe they are...on paper, after some time. But when you've just put the ink to the figure, it will come loose again if you put more glaze on top or next to it.

You can use this to your advantage. I used it to blend purple ink into the blue at the edge of the robe, the ends of the sleeves, and the tip of the hat. Basically, it's like wet-blending except you don't need two brushes and you don't need to worry about drying time.

It's like magic.

Perfect technique to suggest illimitable nebulae in the depths of a wizard's robe.

Here are the finished pictures.

I have to say that if I were to do it again, I might lighten up on the Ultramarine a little bit. It's a very intense color and might obscure the stars a little too much. In all, the effect needs some further development.

Well, that was exhausting. Thanks for sticking with me through such a long post. Let me know what you think in the comments...

...I COMMAND YOU. 

Tar Eater!

My fellow CSW member, Karl, has a fun habit of just giving me stuff sometimes. (He's not the only one, either. I'm lucky enough to game with a group of guys who like giving me things. I'm certainly not going to complain.)

So when I was looking for a vehicle to use in Nuclear Renaissance and it turned out that Karl had a '57 Corvette he wasn't going to use...

I've long been a fan of Carmen's awesome custom post-apocalyptic death racers, and this was the perfect opportunity to try my hand at making one of my own.

I removed the undercarriage, which allowed me to attach the wheels directly to the body, lowering the ride sufficiently to make sure the car would scale at 28mm. Then I glued the windshield in place, fashioned blast shields from plasticard and a hood-mounted cannon from a ball point ink reservoir and the tip of a pencap. Then I started to get a little whimsical, and gave the sucker jet propulsion using the other end of the pencap glued to a superglue cap, with guitar string fuel lines.

In the above couple of pictures, you can see it primed and drybrushed in gray-scale. Here's an Amateur Tip if you decide to do one of these yourself: the wheels are made of a soft plastic that gets really sticky after spraying, so I recommend either masking or undercoating them before priming.

Painting was very basic, pretty much just covering the whole model in a diluted rust-colored glaze made from W&N inks. I then painted up the windshield, attempting to follow this excellent tutorial on SpacemanSpiff's blog, ending with a red glaze for both the windshield and the blazes on the sides—to reflect the red, glowering atmosphere of the slagscape through which this beast must hurtle.

The last step was the christening, above. Not just a name, an imperative. An expression of a need, the need for octane, the need to chew up road and spit it out in ribbons, to sear across the landscape and watch it bend and blur as though—maybe, possibly—it might not be real. In the ruined future, there's only one way to be...

...and that's fast.

Thinking of leaving a comment? Don't bother. Words are meaningless, velocity is everything. Put the pedal to the metal and fly.

Prodigious Gloat

As promised in my last post, here's a quick tutorial on how I did the skin tones on Prodigious Gloat, the ogre player for my human Blood Bowl team, the Synnetowne Abbey Manglers.

This is a simplified and customized (and less skillfully and less stunningly executed) version of the method found here. You want a trip? Scroll down to the comments to see how John Effin Blanche answered my question about Winsor & Newton inks!

I've altered the above procedure for a ruddier, more flushed result, but the same basic method can be applied to any variety of wacky color schemes with good results.

The first step is to mix up a base tone. For this I used a mix of about 1:1:1:8 (or so) Primary Red:Cadmium Yellow: Dark Chocolate Brown: White. The key to a good base coat is to make sure that it's pale enough. This can be really hard to judge...I almost always end up worrying that I've added to much white, but it's never the case.

You can see the base coat on the top half of Gloat in the picture above. The legs and feet are already on step two, which is a general wash of diluted W&N inks in a mixture of 1:1 Crimson Red:Peat Brown (this mixture is designed to represent the areas on the skin where the blood is visible, which is useful to keep in mind when designing less conventional schemes. The contrast of hue that it adds really makes the effect work.) If you do not use inks, you can make a passable wash by diluting your desired acrylic color with water and matte medium (Liquitex matte medium is a nice value brand available at craft stores), though you might have to apply a couple more coats to achieve the same vibrancy.

A final note on W&N inks: these suckers do not 'set.' If you go over them with wet paint, they will bleed and run. This can be a real pain if you aren't expecting it, but it is also something of a boon for blending if you know that it's going to happen. It basically allows for easy as pie wet blending, which makes for a really nice effect for all kinds of things.

Once the wash has dried, go back in and reapply the original base coat as the first highlight. You should notice the red/brown mixture seeping in a little from the recesses.

Now simply begin highlighting while increasing the proportion of white, and keeping the mix thin with water and matte medium. I tend to work on a wet-palette, which means I can keep a pool of my base color next to a pool of white and gradually form a gradient between them. That way if I need to go back and fix something, I can easily return to taking paint from a darker portion of the gradient.

After that, it's basically just a matter of continuing to highlight until you think the overall tone is light enough. Above you can see I'm probably on my second or third highlight. (I work quick with more dramatic steps than most; blending is not my forte.)

Once I'm nearly satisfied with the highlights, but before the final layer, I go back with a very dilute red ink and glaze over the boils, lips, nose, and nipples. After that dries, I go ahead with the final highlight, bringing everything into balance.

I called it done at this point because the Gloat looked plenty flushed and sweaty; however for a more pale/sickly/eerie effect I will often go in and apply a very faint glaze of blue mixed with brown to the raised areas. The idea there is to have the fleshy or fatty areas contrast with the reddish bloody areas. In this scheme, that means contrasting warm and cool colors, though it could easily be the reverse when painting something a little more...imaginative.

Let me know what you think, or if you have any questions, by building up your query in delicate layers in the comments box, just down there.

Bale Grimly and the Comely Visage

Servant of old to Laird Bilebroke in exile is Bale Grimly, and champion of his banditry of hunchymen. Few villains are there upon the Wyrdwold or the Further Wilds who can match his dark reputation.

For upon his arm he bears the Comely Visage, an uncanny object of unknown heritage before which he has cowed his enemies, man, beast, and all. For by some art unknown to this world, the eye of the shield has power over the unwary to captivate, to paralyze, to make vapid or violently bilious. 

Some say it was the gift of a fay lord for whose favor Bale Grimly committed acts unspeakable; others, that it was cut from the face of an ancient Toad-o-the-Pit who challenged Bale to a reckoning one dark-moon'd night; still others whisper that it fell from the sky, and that Bale Grimly sought it in the weald, and emerged naked bearing the Comely Visage aloft. 

Those who speak thus know nothing, for none living saw Bale Grimly first bring forth the Comely Visage, and Bale Grimly will not speak of it. Bale Grimly seldom speaks of anything. Except late at night, when he sits across from the strange face of his strange shield, and holds deep conference.

He fixes the red gaze of the visage and begins, with a low, chanting rasp, to intone words of dangerous little sense. The Comely Visage does not respond, but its eldritch eyes glimmer in the firelight.

Thus, where others who behold the gaze of the Comely Visage fall, instant and entire, under its glamour, Bale Grimly communes instead. On what, none can tell. Bale Grimly does not speak of his communion with the Comely Visage. Bale Grimly seldom speaks of anything. 

Now, constant readers, I hope I have sufficiently thrilled and beguiled you with the tale of Bale Grimly to ask you a favor. Last night, I figured out how to make GIFs. You can see my first (rudimentary) attempt below.

I don't know how I feel about it. I can't decide if I like it, or if it's annoying. So I ask: is this the kind of thing you would like to see on this blog? Do you think I should replace standard photos with GIFs (which you cannot enlarge), or should I use the two in tandem as above? Do you like it? Do you hate it?

Does it make you violently bilious?

Let me know your thoughts by staring into the eldritch eyes of the comments box below and telepathically communicating your message.

Undershading

I've tried this technique once before, on my Blood Bowl Orcs, with the idea that it would speed up the process of painting a whole team of very similar figures.

It didn't work our very well back then, but I've learned a couple of things in the intervening year and a half (and Dee King has posted a more recent, more detailed tutorial).

First, and most importantly, this technique shouldn't be approached as a speed painting method - not really. It saves some time, yes, but if you rush through it, you end up with a crappy result and have to go over the pre-shading with traditional base coat and highlights. If this happens, then the time you spent preshading, no matter how little, was wasted. But if, on the other hand, you take your time getting the undershading right, glazing and washing on the colors will be a breeze.

Second, I discovered that it is very important to select the right figures to paint this way. Since the undershading is achieved entirely by overbrushing and drybrushing, it will only look passable on figures with a decent amount of detail and relatively few smooth, empty surfaces (like those on, say, a plastic GW blood bowl orc). Any smooth surfaces (like flesh, most notably) will probably have to be tackled in the traditional manner.

Third and finally, I have gotten much better at drybrushing. I am now a lot more careful and selective, which results in better contrast and a better shading result. And here's an amateur tip: zenithal highlighting is a whole lot easier if you hold the figure so that you are looking at it from the top down. (Almost as if your eye were the sun...) I don't know how I missed that for so long. Live and learn...

So I selected from among my Megaminis fantasy figures the best candidates for the undershading treatment. Figures with lots of detail and texture.

Bob Olley Hunchymen are, of course, perfect for this.

So are furry things.

I have a lot of confidence this time around. The greyscale figures look convincing enough. Now I just need to see if my glazing technique has improved enough to make it work.

Let me know what you think below. Greyscale responses only, please.