I love realism!

[redarmy27]

Fellow painters!

I\'m back in the painting loop and I\'ve made some progress on my new minis I\'ve been working on.

After reviewing many of the lovely submissions, I\'ve astounded by one thing: realism! I want to know, how do you do it??? Is there a tutorial out there for a such a thing?

Here\'s what I\'m talking about:
Huron Blackheart By Corvus
http://www.coolminiornot.com/174680

CHAPTER MASTER RELICTOR By Artur
http://www.coolminiornot.com/180143

and another one of my favorites:

space marine chapter master By Robacek
http://www.coolminiornot.com/179326

Now what I want to know is how do you achieve this effect?

I\'m starting with a white basecoat and then move from that point onto black lining. Would I simply add a solid layer of desired color, highlight then dirty it up? If anyone has a tutorial, that\'d be excellent. I\'m a little bit boggled on how to do this correctly without going nuts!

Lately I\'ve been having trouble with adding layers and having them look chalky, but that\'s a different story. Any tips on that either?

 

[Shawn R. L.]

One thing about realism is that colors in the \'real\' world tend to be a lot more subdued that one would think. The accepted \'mini style\' of painting tends to lean towards the cartoon (Definately not a bad thing) which is a lot more colorful.

 

[QuietiManes]

I don\'t think there\'s any shortcut to realism. No idea what exactly you\'re after here, dirty clothes and armour that looks like there has been a fight going on, translucent skin tones, proper highlight and shading making the miniature look lifesize when viewed up close? Might be easier to help you out if you specify what you want a tutorial on.

In general, realism is gained by fooling the eye into believing what it is seeing. So, for mini painting...smooth transitions, subtle changes of colour, intensity, hue, the illusion of translucency (is that a word?), highlight and shading, exaggerating certain key elements (sounds odd, to look real you have to distort, but it\'s true, certain things just can\'t scale down, for example sand, a grain of sand scaled down to 28mm would be microscopic, invisibly small grains, mirror smooth, yet, if you put your mini on a glass base and say \"hey it\'s sand!\" it wont look right, your eye needs to see the texture to believe it\'s sand, so you have to use HUGE sand, for the scale, for it to look right or to make any sense).

In short, lots of time and layers/blending.