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Visions in Colour special miniature
I've bought two of these minis and as here can see one of my "visions". When I saw the concept sketch for the mini for the first time, I immediatelly thought of a female wizard from AD&D (or similar roleplaying system), looking quite naive, blond hair, red coat... The way a beginner in roleplaying imagines young female wizard. Then I decided to order two pieces and I thought I would do the second piece quite oposite - dark looking, possibly sorceress of a dark cult. I got the miniature and quickly noticed the problem of mini leaning back. I decided to cut it from the original metal base, quite straighten the feet and then I drilled a hole into the leg and pinned the mini to the base. Of course I did it with both pieces I got. As I wanted to have the minis quite different, I also decided to handle the problem of straps missing on the left sleeve different way on each of the pieces. On this piece I modelled the straps there using green stuff, while on the other mini I removed the straps from the right sleeve with needle file. When I paint a miniature, I always start with the largest area and continue the process to the smaller and small parts, finishing the mini with the smallest details. Well, not exactly, I always do the shoes as the last thing, but apart from shoes, I do it as described above (If you ask me why I do shoes as the last thing, it is because I usually touch them quite often during the painting - as I keep the mini by the base and shoes are end usually slightly outside the base or very close to the edges of the base - and touching breaks the paint). So it was clear to start with the coat. I first decided to do the red one. At the same time I also got my first few bottles of Vallejo paints. As I wanted to give these paints really hard check, the lot mainly consisted of reds and yellows, the most problematic shades. As I was going to do the red cloak, I decided to test Vallejo reds on it. I won't tell a long story - it finished bad, I wasn't pleased with it at all. It finished so bad that I gave the mini a bath (acetone bath, to be exact, to strip the paint and start it all over). The Vallejos are quite different in behaviour to Citadels and I wasn't able to get good result. I don't say they are bad, probably they are quite good, but I'm probably too used to Citadel paints. I'll give them another few tries and try to find how to work with them, as they have also the financial point (1 bottle of 12ml Citadel paints cost here 90 crowns, and one shop in Brno started to carry Vallejo's - the first one in our country to have them - and wants only 50 crowns (about $1.45 incl. tax) for 17ml bottle of Vallejo paint). Well after stripping the paint from the mini I started again. Now let's quickly look at the red mini, what's done how. Well, the cloak is shaded using layering technique, as it works very well with semi-transparent Citadel reds. I also gave it the stripes effect, which I "developed" painting a cloak of Mordheim Warlock Hired Sword in December last year. I like it quite a lot, the shame is that my camera is not able to catch red colours so well, so you probably won't see much on the pictures. Simply said, the cloak is not only shaded into folds and highlighted in raised places, but it's given an effect of many narrow stripes of very close shades of reds. The blond hair is painted this way: first I made a white undercoat. Then I used quite thinned Snakebite Leather - this gives a very nice blond hair color (well, natural "dirty" blond, not the peroxide blond). Then I gave it a wash of Bestial Brown for the shades, which after drying I repeated in the main folds of the hair. Finally I drybrushed it with Golden Yellow. I painted the legs as naked and when I was shading them, I noticed that wrinkled leg has receses on its right side the way it can't be a naked leg, it has to be some trousers. I decided to keep it painted as naked leg as it looks quite well from all other angles, just this one (visible on the picture showing right part of the mini) looks bad (I won't tell anyone there's a problem, unless he notices himself ;-) ) The NMM gold is painted from a base mix of Snakebite Leather, Bleached Bone and Sunburst Yellow mixed 1:1:1, shaded by mixing Dark Flesh into this mix and highlighted by mixing white into this mix. The head of the dragon on the staff is painted as gold - some kind of jewelry or so - to make it a contrast to the second miniature I did where I painted it as a skull. I don't like the way the face turned out. I usually have no problem with faces, but both VIC 7 pieces I did I don't like the result. I don't know what to do with it, if you can help me, please write me, I will patiently listen to your advice. I have a nice shelf on which I have the minis at home. It's excellent, but it's very narrow and so doesn't allow nice large scenic bases. For this reason I gave the mini standard 25mm round base, which I covered with sand (painted as ground), small stones and static grass.
Posted: 26 May 2002
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