Jason's Suck-In-Progress

[jfahy]

Hello, first post.

Biographical information: I painted my first thing in 1993, did it for a while, stopped for many years, and in 2012 while DMing for my Pathfinder group I dug my miniatures out and started painting characters for the campaign. Along the way we moved into our new house and I had room for some display cases for my minis...whereupon I noticed that I've kind of been painting at the same meh level for a lot of years. Since then I've been spending time on YouTube and this site, trying to grow my skills a little and not get too depressed.. A few of my recent things are in my gallery.

I thought I'd start a work-in-progress for some of the things I'm currently working on and see what suggestions people have. (Or if, perhaps, you all chip in some money to get a restraining order to make me stop hurting the poor defenseless miniatures. :tongue

The three things I'm leading with are for the Hoard of the Dragon Queen/Rise of Tiamat storyline - a vampire and two of her thralls, and a human wrecking machine named Severin. (They're just random miniatures that I had; none of them were sculpted to be these characters.) Not much to see yet but I'll try to keep updates coming. (The white miniatures on green really threw my camera's white-balance off; I'll try to solve that before the next batch goes up. For now, they're white, I've dark-greyed the vampires' eyes and then picked them out in really light grey, and put a layer on their exposed skin. No color on Severin yet.

 

[Demihuman]

Cool! Welcome to the rabbit hole! The lady with the sword and shield is a classic mini. Looks like you gallery posts are not up yet. It takes a little while for them to get approved. I have improved really a lot lurking here and posting to my WIP. It's a really incredible resource.

 

[Zab]

Welcome. Fantastic assortment of minis. A WIP thread is the way to go for improving. Also, it's fun to look back at page one to see how far you have come since starting

 

[jfahy]

Good news: I picked up a couple lamps today and made a crude lightbox.
Bad news: They're halogen lamps and their light is pretty yellow.
Good news: My camera's 'incandescent' white-balance setting seems to correct for it decently.
Bad news: The photos, on my computer screen, show me that while I thought I had passable brush control, I don't. The basecoats I see on this site look like they were done by robots in some laser-guided industrial process, and mine are distressingly fuzzy.

(Bad news: at home last night, it seemed like the pictures were getting corrected to reasonably-white;
on this monitor today the background looks pink. Looks like I might have to do some tweaking in
Photoshop to get things right, at least until I can acquire some full-spectrum bulbs.)

Anyway - I blacked over the armor. Then I went over the plates with Basalt Grey.

Along the way I identified several surfaces that I had painted black but now think should
actually be leather or fabric - gloves, backs of the legs - so those are staying black for
the moment. I think Basalt Grey is pretty deep, and normally I would say that about
1/4 of the metal would get shaded down from there while the other 3/4 got highlighted
up, but these are vampires so I don't want them to get ultra-shiny. I'll try to inch along
and see what happens.

 

[jfahy]

So...ahem. I screwed up on an unexpected level. The three ladies I posted above were
needed for a game, so I had to hustle through them. Apologies. Lesson learned.

I'm looking for some advice on this guy (skeezy workspace photo, because my lightbox
lamps are way too yellow and I have yet to find replacements - this at least shows
halfway-accurate colors):

I'm trying to make him look silver just using greys - getting to the point where I feel like
small near-white highlights on the edges should start going on (??). But what I'm actually
most worried about is colors for his armor, weapon and shield.

I've done other models like this, all chromatic dragons (red, blue, green and black - no
white so far) and for those I've made the armor look like bone. It wasn't spectacular but
at least it set off the dragon's scale color. Here, though, I'm not at all sure how bone-on-silver
would look. Seems like it might be weird and might not stand out against the silver/grey.

Ideas? The armor's got weirdly smooth, near-textureless surfaces which a really clever
painter would take advantage of but at the moment I'm not sure how.

 

[Zab]

Try painting it a really aged bone with a lot of dark and light contrast to go with the NMM silver. No white at all only bone and dark browns, greens, blacks and such.

 

[Demihuman]

I just started a very similar model, though no shield, and I am going to do green skin with grey and gold armor. I'll shade the green with red-brown, and the grey will have a touch of purple in the shadows, which I hope will set off my gold.

 

[jfahy]

Gold on green - that sounds gorgeous. I want to get another figure and do that now.

I've never tried darker bone (at least, not on purpose) - I'll look at some pictures and
consider it. Thank you both!