Brother in Arm

The brother in Arms Illustration- concept of the Myr If you can’t go to a duel because of your boss or because of a difficult wake up, the brother in Arm can replace you straight away. He rarely goes to bed before midnight: the Brother in arms looms in the streets looking for an easy job or for a girl to finish the night with. Always the gentlemen in his manners, he is a master of all blades and disguises, he’ll put your foes to the sword as soon as the sun rises for a couple of gold coins. class=MsoNormal>Ravage often rewards it’s faithful subscribers with a mini. This time it was Fenryll’s turn to provide it, in the form of this character based in Patrick Receveur´s universe, illustrated by the Myr: The brother in Arms. Positive points: This mini is easy to adapt to all medieval and fantasy game universe, and is pretty easy to paint. An iron Armature, some rolls of putty…. The sculpture is from your faithful reporter who apologizes for this first 30mm attempt who suffers from the “short leg” and “chicken thigh” syndrome. The painting will tend to hide these anatomic imperfections. And in the middle flows the resin The mini isn’t in plastic but in resin. Its weight might throw off people who are used to lead, but once on a support you get used to it very fast. The preparation is identical to metal or plastic minis. Resin being softer, a trimming error will dig in the mini easier than if it where made of metal, so favor sand paper (size 800 at least) to a scalpel that would be to dangerous for your mini. Minis made out resin however accurate they may be always have problems with blades because of their length and thinness. So I replaced the resin blade by a needle encased in the guard, the same than the one used on the original sculpt. Lets not struggle against a mini’s destiny: To be painted! I prefer not to go over the painting technique itself once more. For this you can have a look at the brilliant articles done by Team Toulouse. I’ll skip directly to the specifics of this mini. And rather than use long speeches; I’ll add many pictures to my explanations. Do not be surprised if you find some advice that might seem obvious, experience shows that it is always useful to remind the basics. I wanted this article to be accessible to the greatest number of readers. Don’t restrain yourself to the advices in this article if the mini is destined to beat your friends’ minis in a contest! Other possible flesh tones: AC2: Tanned flesh 90% Snakebite 10% AC6: Dark flesh 90% +Tanned flesh 10% AC3: bronzed flesh AC4: Elf flesh 90% +elf grey 10% The pants As you can see I start with a very transparent base of bestial brown GW with a touch of black. This base coat is applied in 3 or 4 very diluted layers, and this WITHOUT ANY ACCUMULATION OF PAINT IN THE FOLDS. To achieve this, I spread or absorb the excess paint with my brush to obtain a thickness that is the same on the whole surface. Same as with aquarelle paints, I apply many very diluted glazes to place the shadows. It’ll be the superposition of a multitude of glazes that will give depth to the shads and not a darkening of the shad color. Indeed, the more layers there are, the more the paint covers. These successive glazes allow us to retain the quality of the paint without loosing details on the painted surface. Be careful, the application of the shadows must not alter the semi- transparence still visible on the parts that will be highlighted. Since I’ve just done some dark glazes that cover the light parts a bit, I will do the same for the highlights on the shaded areas to achieve a greater opacity on the pants. To enrich the colors and to unify the steps explained above, I apply a couple of different reddish glazes. See the color chart to see exactly which colors where used. The shirt I wanted a shirt of linen rather then silk, to remind me of one of my shirts to which I’m quit attached. Just as with the pants, a couple of very diluted coats of bleached bone are necessary for this layer. I shaded by adding more and more black to the bleached bone as I did the successive shade layers. You can see I simulated a zenithal lighting (Light coming from directly above). Of course I was careful to shade UNDER the folds and not in the folds: under the arms, under the elbow… For the highlights I didn’t highlight straight away with white, which would have put off my color too much. Instead I kept some color by using a very light beige, clear sand by Prince August. Then I did the last highlights in white. There again I don’t stop at highlighting just the edges in the traditional white dwarf style, but rather the zone that catches the most light: shoulders, on top of the folds… the belt The painting the belt is quit easy. This one is very crumpled, and the well-defined folds guide the brush. You must not forget to really mark the horizontal folds to accentuate the tension that is due to the gun passed in the belt. The Face: To paint the skin of this Hidalgo, I favored warm and dark colors to give my guy some Hispanic origins or close to it. The paints used for the skin are from the Andrea skin paint set. I find this paint set to be of really good quality unlike the rest of the Andrea paints where the pigments’ size and the homogeneity of the paints aren’t great for the successive wash technique. Here again, a first coat of very diluted medium skin color is applied in several layers without any accumulation of paint in the recesses. This is best not to loose any detail on the fig. The inclination of the head means that there will be a difference in luminosity between the two cheeks; one cheek will get a maximum of light will the other will find itself in the shadow. So I took into account both this effect and the relief of the face to apply the different washes, more or less dark depending on where I was applying them. (See the color chart for exact colors). I already paint the eyes in black to help me read the face better, even at this early point. The lights are painted down will respecting the lateral effect explained above. The eyelid, the side of the nose and not the top of the nose, the side of the cheekbones, the upper part of the brow, the lateral point of the chin…get more or less light depending on the surface’s size. Here’s the most interesting moment, the one where the face comes to life. You add small colored dots on the cheekbones and the lips to warm them. I also like to add some very light blue glazes in the shadows. I voluntarily oriented his eyes so that the way he was looking went along with his eyebrow, which indicates a side-glance. For the hat, highlighting the edge isn’t enough. Indeed the fold of the hat catches the light. Make sure you shade around the hairs to make the highlighted part on top come out. Here’s a surface that calls for filigrees! The area is flat and quit small to attract attention. Don’t hesitate, take a 3/0 brush with a good point, and have a go with the drawing of your choice. I want a base under my feet !! Why limit yourself to the provided base when you can tell a small story with your mini? Apparently, our Hidalgo wanted to get a cheater sorted out in a bar of the old town. The floor tiles are made out of 3d plastic card, the barrel is from Fenryll and the table is made out of balsa for the top and toothpicks for the legs (pretty good for the relief) You can see on the finish piece that it’s only made out off different shades of brown. To differentiate them, I used a wide range of brown: Some with a big proportion of black (pants), many with warm tones (hat, pants), some completely red (belt), others with a good deal of yellow (skin) and to finish some beige (shirt). Gloss was applied to the wine on the floor, and some very fine straw glued on with white glue to show that the tavern in which our hero tried settling scores is a modest one. Painting/Sculpting/Article: Jérémie Bonamant Teboul Photos: Fenryll Intro and original Idea: Patrick Receveur Illustrations: Le Myr Translation: Arthur Muguet (Frenchkid)