Baudot's WIPs

baudot

baudot

Member
Hello all. I'm primarily a player, and sometimes even a game designer, and yet painted minis make games more fun for all. So I'm very much looking forward to improving my painting.

At this moment, I'm especially interested in improving my skills in delivering quality work at speed. When I paint faster, I paint more figs. The more figs I paint, the faster I get better. Or so it seems to me.

This is my current work in progress: A "Vassal Mechanik" from Warmachine's "Protectorate of Menoth" faction. I quite appreciate the strong colors of the recommended palette for Menoth. For my current goal of delivering quality faster, taking the hesitation of color selection out of painting is a big plus, and lets me focus on other skills like color blending.

View attachment 52347View attachment 52348

Your critique and suggestions are very welcome. Rest assured I'm not going to get my feelings hurt over any sincere critique. Please, let me know what you think for better and for ill.
 
B

bgcdazzler

New member
I'm not sure how 'fast' you want to do it, but three things I would suggest (how much importance you place on them will dictate how fast you go, I guess):

1. Get the base oats as neat as possible: you can probably do a bunch at a time, using your drying time on one to finish another. Neat basecoats will at least mean your whole army is consistent, and if you don't get to the next stage before a match at least they are all 'clean' and consistent (rather than one finished, one half-finished and the rest only primed).

2. Pick shadow washes and do these next. I have heard of dipping in special shades, something called nuln oil (sorry, I don't know the names of 'proper' paints). If you tackle all the shades at once again you get used to knowing which goes where, and how many coats to apply, speeding things up. Do the same with highlights, maybe only taking them to the edges at first.

3. pick one area of focus (usually the face) and give that bit the best paint job you can. I suspect a really good focal point will help the mini 'pop' and anyone looking at your army will be more forgiving of the unfinished bits if the face is really nicely rendered.

Hope that helps: I'm no army painter, but these seem to be the general rules for a quick tabletop paintjob.
 
Webmonkey

Webmonkey

New member
Also,.. decide the quality that you are shooting for. A "rank-and-file" army trooper is probably going to get a lot less attention then you were going for a "display piece". How much time/detail you put into piece is often times dictated by what your end result is going to be.
 
Zab

Zab

New member
It looks and sounds like you would really benefit from James Wappel's Shaded basecoat style. If you ever get a chance to take a class with him or get his dvds that would improve your speed for sure and your style seems to match how he paints too so you are half way there with some of your work already. For instance the leather on the weapon handle is nice and bright and you could glaze it and shade it down selectively in places until it pops in the brighter areas.
 
baudot

baudot

Member
Here's how the Mechanik is looking after a bit more attention today; mostly cleaning up borders and working on the paint blending.
View attachment 52396
Thanks to the recent time here, and the advice that's been shared by many (thanks!) I've been motivated to step up my game. I finally got one of those head-mounted magnifiers, and picked up fresh brushes.
View attachment 52397
And WOW it makes a difference. Before, I thought I was wrestling with not being able to see the fine details, and unstready hands. But no, it was just an inability to see. Now that I've got the magnifiers, I have no problem picking out much finer details. My hands, it turns out, are much steadier than I'd realized.

I've also been working to blend paints together on the model as well as in the palette, working with (slightly) more dilute paints, and going back over the same surfaces many time, in quick succession, to get better color blending while the paint is still wet.
 
KruleBear

KruleBear

Active member
Welcome to the wip section. It looks like you have worked on blending of the skintines on the head as it looks like smoother transitions than the first picture. Btw, not only do the magnifiers help but so does posting wip shots. I know I get to thinking, "this looks decent". Then I post to my wip and see it 20x bigger and see all the snafus to fix.

Also to the comments on darklining. A good example is look at the leather strap on your minis head. It kind of looks like it merges into his head and the transition is kind of choppy at the color change. To make it pop for table top you could run a fine line of black along the edge which looks "ok" at ten feet away. A better way is to use shadows...ether of the leather or of the skin. If going with the leather you could use a dark brown to shadow the edge of the leather...i find this difficult. I would use the darkest shadow of your skin right next to the strap. These will help the transition pop and give the impression that the leather strap is on top of the skin.

It is worth noting that brown washes. (Or even dips) create a similar illusion as they would likely pool at the crevice of the transition and naturally dark line for you. But they are less controlled and can cause other problems if you start shooting for display level minis.
 
baudot

baudot

Member
KruleBear said:
Welcome to the wip section. It looks like you have worked on blending of the skintines on the head as it looks like smoother transitions than the first picture. Btw, not only do the magnifiers help but so does posting wip shots. I know I get to thinking, "this looks decent". Then I post to my wip and see it 20x bigger and see all the snafus to fix.

Also to the comments on darklining...
Click to expand...

Right you are. While I spent most of the time on the Mechanik cleaning up, there was a fair bit of time spent blending the skintones. I think they're too subtle, still. Webmonkey pointed out
that I hadn't used any wash on the skin areas, which is something I shouldn't have skipped, indeed.

Speaking of: I actually had the pleasure of meeting Webmonkey in the flesh last night. We painted together for a few hours, with him delivering lessons and me doing my best to pick them up with concentration. Specifically, he started me on blacklining, which as several people have pointed out here, is a technique I've been neglecting.

Here's a fresh Mennite Heirophant. It went into last night's training session with Webmonkey just prepped, pinned and primed, and came out with some blacklining and the start of a basecoat following the blacklines.
View attachment 52452
That's one coat of tan on the feet, three thin coats of P3 Sanguine Base on the skirt, and a custom blend of vallejo oranges on the front panel. I was aiming for a saffron shade on that front panel, like a buddhist monk's robes, but I seem to have landed on more of a "peach" shade. If anyone has advice on blending something in the "saffron" spectrum, I'm all ears. You'll also spot some other darkened patches that aren't blacklined: That's where Webmonkey demonstrated using a nuln oil wash to highlight edges as a quick & dirty alternative to blacklining.

Blacklining is definitely a technique I can stand to practice more. I appreciate the way it forces me to really solve which part of the models are separate, and which are going to blend together. For example, looking at the back of this model, there's a tassled shawl that you can't miss, It's a bit less obvious that the shawl is also the model's waist sash, so it's going to have to be the same color. Once you've blacklined, you can't miss it.

Many thanks to Webmonkey for hosting, and for the lesson!
 
baudot

baudot

Member
More work on the Hierophant. Bottom Robe: Shaded and Highlighted. More areas base-coated. You can see my playing around with finding places I might fit a cool color for accenting the usual Menoth warm palette. (Thanks for the recommendation, breff007.)

View attachment 52522
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The shadows on the robe are bolder than I've gone for in the past, and I'm happy with how that turned out. I took the advice of a few folks here and went very dilute on my washes during that shading and highlighting, brushing most of the wash off on a paper towel before applying it to the model to get thinner highlight layers that blended better.

I couldn't bring myself to leave the blackline visible, but ended up swallowing it with color. In many cases, I did go back and darkline over it with the shadow tones, 'tho'.
 
KruleBear

KruleBear

Active member
The blends on the robe are smoother than your previous work. Now get adventuresome and think about shading with complimentary colors. So, in the case get a dark green. Thin it and put a couple glazes in the darkest shadows of the red cape....trust me on this one. It will add another dimension to the contrast.

Covering the black line is not a bad idea. Just having under the color should darken the transition.
 
baudot

baudot

Member
KruleBear said:
\Now get adventuresome and think about shading with complimentary colors. So, in the case get a dark green. Thin it and put a couple glazes in the darkest shadows of the red cape....trust me on this one. It will add another dimension to the contrast.
Click to expand...
The existing shadows are blue! No credit to me for that, it's the standard Menoth palette.

Add green on top of that, or that covers the complementary colors there?

I could definitely put some more green into the cream colored robe shadows. That would bump up the contrast between the differing shadows.
 
Webmonkey

Webmonkey

New member
Looking good. Much cleaner lines. Keep going in this direction and you'll be an expert in no time. Once you get to the point where you feel that you have clean lines mastered, then we can start moving you on into shading and highlighting.
 
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