Knight of Flowers - first WIP :)

[miturian]

Hi, so, I find the best way to learn is to constantly attempt somewhat more than I can do. As you can see in these pictures, that is quite easy Never the less, I still wanted to show my project and explain the ideas, in the hope that people here can give me some pointers about how to improve my painting.

So, the model is a GW Bretonnia knight of the realm standard bearer. I have chosen to make each of my knights different, and only have a common theme for my peasants. For this model I have chosen flowers.

The theme: blue flowers on light yellow background. The edge will be a dark green.
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(it seems that the auto-focus picked the table rather than the shield, but that should still give an idea about the colors. the light blue has a dark blue edge, and the centers are a mix of brown and gold).

The banner: At the moment, I am not planning to do any more highlighting here. The shield-part of the banner will be painted like a regular shield. around it, I plan for some sort of dark green leaves with gold edges.
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The horse. The brown leather needs another layer of basecoat. the grey ring is me preparing for the ring of flowers.
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any suggestions? I am aware that my painting looks really "grainy" or dirty, but not really sure about what to do about it. I use very watered down paints, and as large a brush as I can get away with (anything but the flowers was painted using a "standard" size). And I really try to "sweep" rather than "stab".

the highlighting technique I have used is painting everything in a basecoat, and applying shadows and highlights as very thin glazes. if the transition looked to be rough, I used a clean, wet brush to smoothen the edge before it dried (I haven't done it like that before, but I think it is going to be a new favourite).

edit:
damn, blowing it up like that really highlights the small smudges and imperfections...

 

[Tommie Soule]

your attachments don't seem to work sir/madam

T

 

[miturian]

yeah, I noticed. when I hit "edit" they show up fine, though. I've messaged an admin - anything else I can do?

edit: I have now tried uploading again from a different computer. I hope the images are not too big

 

[TrystanGST]

Ah - nice start. Had me going for a bit, thinking it was the Kingdom Death Knight. I would have to agree that that would be a rough choice for a first WIP. This seems eminently doable.

 

[miturian]

So, first shield done, and have made all the circles. Was hoping that the darkest of the greens would work well as a border, but it seems it has to be the light green, that is used as the "body" of the circles instead. Any thoughts on whether I should paint over the border entirely, or leave a thin dark line, as I did with the circles?
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(yeah, the lighting is different from the other photos, this one is taken later in the day)

edit: I see that the different green hues are not showing up very well on this photo. a shame. I guess on the picture, this color is perfect for the border I will have to come up with a better scheme for photographing, it seems.

 

[miturian]

Oh well, slowly but steadily. Have begun on the NMM. Was thinking that a blue set of armor would be rather pretty (inspired by some of the knights in the Game of Thrones books), and went the easy way and just tried to copy the NMM design from the gorgeous BSB at ironhalo (http://ironhalo.net/gdknight.htm). Not sure how convincing it is turning out, but it does look rather pretty Some of the base coat has been rubbed off (there as a lot of time spent painting flowers), but it's all in places that are easy to fix later.

Am thinking of adding more flowers around the place, the barding is looking somewhat empty next to the shields. I guess I will postpone that decision until the whole thing is done.

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(yeah, the pics are smaller this time, hopefully that makes viewing the thread less of a pain).

 

[miturian]

So, I think uploading the finished product is good manners. Here it is. Some of the paint on the horse got rubbed off at some point (and also in other places, I see now, funny how details turn up once you upload the pictures...), but since I'm doing it to learn and not win any prices, and was kind of fed up with painting that color anyway, I couldn't be bothered to correct it. Also didn't consider that all that "blue nmm" on the left side of the knight would be completely hidden by the shield... oh well, it looked neat before it covered up View attachment 18159

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Thanks for watching