Dontfear

I can try. My phone is not always Cooperative though. I'll give it a shot tomorrow.

Pew pew pew! https://www.ima-usa.com/collections/martini-henry-rifles/products/original-nepalese-gahendra-martini-rifle-untouched-condition I'm ultra excited. I also got a bayonet to go with it. It's a weird experience to buy a gun and just get it shipped to my house when I'm used to all the BS with an FFL but this is the first legit antique rifle I've ever bought.

Fun quick paint up of the bones dracolisk

More or less done, just need to paint the base!

Loving the enthusiasm, excited to see what other people do

That's coming out nicely.

I forgot to take progress pics but here is where we stand with one wing done.

ugh, that is brutal. I've bought many of my best tools from widows who just wanted the tools to go to people who would use them. I hope at the very least they found their way into the hands of people who will Make beautiful things with them. It sucks to see a legacy just get scattered like that though.

You really should check out Paul Sellers' YouTube channel. I think you would really enjoy it. Careful though, I went from buying a Stanley no. 4 because if him to a 100% hand tool shop in just a couple months....... Sounds like a heck of a piece of hardware and probably fun to use. I enjoy what people come up with using such machines.

If it's good enough for Paul sellers to leave it sole down, it's good enough for me. In all seriousness, that is a bit of a controversy but some of the modern masters say sole down because it is less likely to knock your lateral adjustment off. Also here the iron is retracted because I don't want to damage my 200 year old piece of furniture it's sitting on :p Hand tools are far more precise than machines after all 0 rpm is way slower than 10,000 :p

Today I worked from home and it was stupendously slow so I'm going to take you on a long and boring journey. Scales! Scales....... Scales............ And scales. Still scales That last step is magic, just a very thin wash of clear green.

I use handtools because they are deeply pleasurable to work wood with. Nothing more than a well setup plane, The way the shaving rises from the throat of a plane and leaves a glassy smooth surface behind is beautiful, you feel the fibers of the wood being cut, feel the way the tree grew. Even the sound of the blade passing through the wood is beautiful, like a cross between the sound of a zipper and a shushing sound. you're lucky to have had that experience as a kid, I came to it much later in life. Thankfully I discovered that machines are entirely superfluous to producing good furniture, no need for dust masks or ear protection just the sound of sharp steel passing through lignum.

Not as bad as you might think for a no. 8. This one has a cracked tote which I'll need to make a new one and a previously repaired frog which murders the collector value but it'll cut wood like the day it was made which is what I need it for. I paid 125 which is a bit dear for just a user but the supply on these is getting thin around here and they go for at least that much on eBay. Consider too that a veritas or lie Nielsen goes for 4-500 dollars and I'm pretty happy with it. Someday I'll have a full set of veritas planes to work with but I need a kit for now. In a strange reverse the smallest planes no 1 and no 2 are the most valuable due to scarcity. They are also the most useless thus the scarcity :p

Now painting in the scales around the blue in a 50 50 mix. This looks ugly but I think it'll be ok when I blend it with glazes. Next I'll define the green scales And then I'll start glazing green and blue in the transition Lastly I'll rehighlight it because the glazes have dulled the contrast. Last a glaze of clear green I'm loving it. A good night painting :)

First a drop of the black stuff to relax a bit.... I had an idea due to how the wash pooled up under his chin that maybe this guy has a blue throat that fades into his green scales, so I am going to give that a try Get out my colors..... And lay down a base coat This ultramarine shade is a gorgeous color. I'm going to have to remember it when I paint blue in the future. Now to highlight...... And get ready to fade it to green, starting with a dark green mixed with the base blue.

Awww yeah..... 24 inches of board flattening power

For silver metals I use anything close to black in color (could be a deep purple, blue, green, whatever) and grade it up through grays to white and for golds I use a dark brown grading up to an orangey brown up to bright yellow, up to white. colors are much less important than technique though. in order to really sell the effect you need a lot of contrast and smooth blends.

Squirt out some colors! I made a dark green and turned it into a wash to define the details. Then I washed in some of the ultramarine shadow which is my "black" on this piece. An easy way to get unified looking color schemes is to use common highlight and shadow colors across the whole piece. Then I worked in the greens and painted the eyes red. Then the final highlights on the greens It occurred to me early in the painting process that he had a fringe around his head that he could extend. I had not planned this but I had already selected an accent color and so I decided it would be an excellent use for it. Now I squirted out color for the teeth, finishing the eyes and highlighting his fringe. And got to work..... A nice afternoon painting while the baby napped. Thanks! I have a new baby and in a strange reverse I now have time to paint!

Before tackling another bust, I wanted a pallet cleanser of a miniature to paint. I find it much easier to go looser and not care as much with bones figures. So I dug through the bones yard to see what I could find. I pulled out the Dracolisk, which is a cool sculpt and a very crisp cast for bones. I cut off the worst of the mold lines and made a quick base out of a chunk of pine and milliput. I wrap it in blue painters tape to keep it from getting crud or paint on it as I plan on a natural finish for the wood. Then on to planning my colors. I decided I wanted to do two things, use a very saturated shadow and paint it green. First I pulled out my first colors (Vallejo flat green, reaper ghost white and reaper ultramarine shadow) and then made some decisions on the other colors. Red eyes, it's a cheap trick to use complements but a good one, throw in a purple scale here and there for a neat accent, something fleshy for the wings and something to paint teeth and spines with. I grabbed clear red and clear green out (clear red over green is a "cheat" to smooth rough blends) , my 'ard coat and matte medium. I'll stick to these colors for the piece but may bring in some others for the base. While writing this post I slapped some thinned white on the mini to give the surface some tooth. Next I diagramed out my colors just to check to see if there are any weird results or if it just doesn't look good. Now, on to the painting. Face first to set the tone....

you've hit on a REALLY deep topic and the only thing I can recommend if you want to get deep in it is to hit the books. James Gurney has the most digestable tome on the subject "color and light". However, for a short answer I have 2 points. You are only perceiving the deepest shadow color as black and it is in fact not black in 99% of cases. Second, a camera lens is not the human eye. It is taken for granted among the majority of people that working from a photographic reference is the same as working from life. It isn't. this doesn't matter so much in 2 dimensional paintings because you are forcing a single perspective just like the camera lens does. However, projecting that onto a 3 dimensional object is a whole different story and you need to be very careful how you use references. You definitely should but carefully.

I buy their scrap box which is like 10 pounds for 20 bucks, it's a good deal and since I just hand sand I don't need full belts. Their paper is most excellent. I've been experimenting with pre-sanding finishing methods and for curves I have found straight off a finely set spoke shave and then burnished with a hardwood scrap gets the best results but then again I'm not a turner. I know turners will use their chips to burnish but I feel like sand paper is faster there.

Klingspors is a dangerous store to go into and their sand paper is excellent. I prefer a planed and scraped surface myself though.

Some excellent advice from great painters above, definitely if you want to reach your goal, they have laid out the roadmap. However, there is another thing you should consider that may help you analyze what you're looking at and how to approach it. Look at the works of truly great artists that achieve what you are looking to achieve. They have already interpreted the real world and put out a representation that accurately portrays what you want to portray. I like Caravaggio because he captures a lot of what makes for a nice looking miniature. He captures drama, theatrical lighting and expressive faces which are all useful for creating great miniatures. If you really zoom in you can see the brush work, see how the texture is created and what colors make up the whole. Often the hard thing isn't the how, it's the why and what, by just copying better artists, you learn what achieves the look you want. In the cases below, you can see how the texture of the skin was stippled on in places, just like how Corporea mentioned above.

I want her to use the Disney visual language to clearly communicate that she is a Disney character so I won't do anything that modifies her look too drastically. I'll probably paint something else first and ruminate

That would be interesting, I was thinking something like a banshee or a dryad but that is a good option I had not considered