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.