Practice with Oils

 

Gemstones, oil on canvas.

And now for something different.

I've been looking for excuses to practice with oil paints a little more, but with free time at a premium I also wanted to tie it into miniature painting somehow as well. To that end I've started with trying to paint gemstones of various shapes to consider how the light might interact, framing, anything really to up my game on them.

Oil paints mix really well, but spread differently to acrylics and have a much longer drying (actually curing) time. Using a canvas allows larger representations to be played with, different shapes to more easily be explored, and no need to preparing entire models just to paint small little gemstones.

There was no particular plan here, I just started and went with it. The upper left red gemstone was painted similarly to how I paint those for Blood Angels, naturally, but I didn't take into consideration oils as a medium. I based coloured the area and tried to layer others on top. It didn't work very well, mostly because I didn't feel like waiting overnight to apply the next layer and wanted alla prima while I had the time. So the first lesson: mix on the palette, thinly apply basic tones, and then blend together. The brighter orange was overpowered by the red and so the effect doesn't work on another level: with that much light causing a powerful reflection point, then much of it will transmit through the object and give a brighter value on the other side. If that red was the brighter value, then it would only be a small sliver on the opposite edge instead of two thirds of the gemstone. This test is paying off already.

For the green gemstone I tried to improve upon my technique with oils as a medium, and the colours used. Yellow works wonders as a highlight and I think it mostly worked in this case. I could perhaps have gone slightly brighter, but it's much better than before. I also used a little red near the black shadows (more specifically where light isn't refracting and diffusing to the viewpoint as easily) which mixes to a slight brown with the green. It's quite subtle, but I think it helps identify that the surroundings aren't green, there's some other colour hues to the light, and also helps the black transition into brown and then green more easily. I'm not sure how this might look on very small gemstones on miniatures, but it's worth looking into. Finally I bordered the gemstone with a darker green for framing purposes. This provides an edge shadow impression and gives more depth. Additional light surrounding would also help here, but that's for later.

Onto the blue and I just wanted to play with a different shape. I'm not really sure how a more polygonal cut would look so I simply mixed in some white on the edges. I should've used a light cream tone to give more vibrancy to the blue, although I was trying to keep the palette to a minimum. If I start on Space Wolves then I'll need to explore this shape some more. The surrounding splash of blue frames the gemstone better - not required on a miniature, but helps when viewing on a 2D plane. Perhaps it might be something to try on a model one day: some very subtle light bounce through gemstones.

The purple spherical gemstone didn't go nearly bright enough, but that's again more down to the minimal colour palette than anything else. I tried to compensate by increasing the darker area, but it didn't really help. Regardless, a thin bright edge around the gemstone really helps define the shape - this works on spherical designs, but I'm not sure how to translate it to other shapes yet. The reflection line is different too, following the shape but giving the brightest (in theory) reflection point as a single dot. Also, while the highlighted areas are crescent shaped, the darker zone is more circular. It's almost like there are overlapping circles, each one with an offset centre, going from light to dark. Good to bear that one in mind.

I might play again with the red and apply a few lessons learned, and then move onto NMM style painting, and perhaps water reflections as well. Limited palette, single paintbrush, much more flexibility to study particular themes that are applicable how light and colour work in general. Highly recommended to anyone looking to improve their painting.

-- silly painter.

Commander Dante - Part II

 

I like to think he's just hopped off his flying Land Raider.

The focus of the last week has been to get Lord Dante's armour more or less finished. I might add spot highlights later, but I doubt it - I'm fairly happy with the result. There is a slight catch though: photographing this model is not an easy task, and the "golden angle" is slightly off the photographed axis; the highlights don't quite match up with the lights that I normally use. This is a model painted to be viewed in real life, not as a digital facsimile.

At any rate there wasn't a whole lot changed to the formula from before. I added some black to really darken a few outlines and increase general contrast. It's fairly subtle but really makes the model that much easier to read: despite the reflective conditions and angle of the photo, the sculpt is still easily discerned. In general the process is:

• Rhinox Hide / Balthasar Gold to provide coverage.
• Black mixed into that or just Rhinox Hide for the deepest recesses.
• Balthasar Gold mixed into the original mode, for initial volume highlighting.
• Gehenna's Gold / Balthasar Gold for further highlighting.
• Gehenna's Gold / Auric Armour Gold for edge highlights.
• Canoptek Alloy / Gehenna's Gold / Auric Armour Gold for extreme highlights (only done on the helmet so far, not pictured).

The amount to mix varies, and there's a lot of glazing, back & forth, remixing, adjusting highlights, etc, that's simply done on the fly. Knowing where to place highlights was simply a matter of angling the model against an overhead light and taking notes: the original airbrushing made this a trivial exercise. Bounce lights were likewise quite simply once metallics were glazed sufficiently in areas: the reflection could be seen immediately, and a higher value colour chosen to accentuate the effect. If I had to sum up the approach: make it slightly reflective, paint according to a light source, and exaggerate as much as possible because of scaling reasons. Also don't be afraid to layer, glaze, and mix metallic paints.

The white chest detail is only three paints: Mechanicus Standard Grey, Ulthuan Grey, Corax White. Mixed and glazed in that order. The Mechanicus Standard Grey serves as a recess shadow colour to outline the details, with Ulthuan Grey added to raise the brightness very slightly, and to shift ever so slightly into a blue hue. Corax White just raises the brightness more, but doesn't go quite as bright as something like White Scar. Going too close to a purer white would dull the metallic shine by comparison, and I want the White Scar for the brightest reflection points of gemstones. I've not decided how much better I could do on the white, but I think it will do. I purposefully stayed clear of Contrast paints over concern of using too much an obscuring some of the detail like I nearly did once before. There are of course other white details to be filled in with this scheme, but I need to paint some other models first I think.

Much yet to do on this model, but I'm enjoying this one quite a lot. With still a long time until it will be completed, with the armour done I can at least get an overall feel of how it will turn out. One hopes the Sanguinary Guard will be equally well done, whenever they are given a refresh.

-- silly painter

Kontrast Festival 2024

 I had the good fortune to attend Kontrast Festival 2024, and so decided to write down some notes to compare it if I have the chance to attend again in following years. I was supposed to attend last year, but technical issues prevented me from going. So here's the good, the bad, and the ugly as I saw it.

The Good

The quality on display was top notch, and there was plenty of vendors, entry to the venue was free, and there was also plenty around for children to do. It happened to coincide with a Polish day for children, so the general area was really nice for families. Painters seemed friendly enough, though I didn't say hello to any in person (I figured some of the more well known would have too much of that already and I didn't want to intrude upon what little free time they might otherwise have).

The Bad

Too many people is actually one of the problems. The display areas just couldn't cope with that many people constantly hovering around. If I were organising, I'd probably setup a one-way route to walk through: gives everyone a chance to see everything, encourages people to not stop and hog space for too long, etc. I simply couldn't see as much as I wanted not because I had places to be, but because it was utterly boring just standing there waiting for a gap to move forward into. These are miniatures, you need to be close to appreciate them, and a glimpse between people from across a room just isn't going to do it.

I went to one presentation (I won't say which) and it was...well, it was a bit boring, ran over time, and didn't really match what was said. Perhaps the other presentations were better, or I was simply expecting more. Either way, that one presentation was kind of useless from an information perspective - better to just watch the youtube video of it later. I'm not sure how to make such things better in person unless you have a chance to talk and socialise, neither of which was on the cards for me. The presentations could play a large part of the festival, but perhaps need to be looked at differently.

The Ugly

This is going to be very controversial. It's just my opinion, and I can entirely understand it not being popular, but it's generally good to have opinions that aren't just in an echo chamber. This is nothing to do with the festival itself, but rather a comment on the state of the community I guess: everything was just uninspiring, unoriginal, repeated.

The models on display were all painted to a very high technical level. So much so, that perhaps people got a bit lost in the technical details and forgot the bigger picture. While there were of course some standouts, about 90% of the models had exactly the same super-matt finish (possibly for photography reasons, but these were on display in person), very similar colour palettes, very similar blending, very similar styles. Maybe I was missing a lot from having difficulty in seeing what was on display to begin with, but I didn't notice any cel-shading for example, no cartoon looks, didn't see gothic horror, bold black & white sketches, or the whole range of artistic ability that 2D art has enjoyed for hundreds of years (if not more). While yes a 3D model actually limits a lot compared to canvas, I didn't notice a whole lot of experimentation (there was some, just not a lot). Maybe presentations can focus on that.

The other part I noticed was related to what was on sale. The vast majority of larger scale models were scantily clad sexy females. Neko Galaxy is a little more unique, but almost entirely female sculpts. I was actively looking for something male, and heroic (or at least not monstrous). There was a barbarian from Mindwork Studios (next to a scantily clad sexy female), and the frost giant looked almost right but the style of that studio isn't quite what I was after. Radio Miniatures had the best - but that was historical gaming type stuff that isn't for me (though I was still very tempted, the scale was too small for what I was looking for). I would've liked to see druids, forest archers, barbarians, wizards, etc, for the fantasy stuff, and more on the sci-fi, cyberpunk, etc, side of things. I can understand that when painting a model for a while then it helps to be a pleasing subject, but at some point it all just becomes the same and I would've liked variation to be explored more. 3D printing helps artistically here, but 3D printing still doesn't match the quality of the resin casts that I saw.

That's a Wrap

And that wraps up my impressions. I know some of it sounds a bit unfair to say the least, especially as I'm not anywhere near the top levels and haven't entered competitions myself, but for what I look for and how I want to progress as a miniature painter, that's my thoughts. Actually realising how much of it just looked the same over & over is going to help me going forwards as I start to find my own style and how I can focus on experimenting with my own works. These reflections are after all mostly for myself to look back upon later rather than a soap box to shout from.

-- silly painter.