Arydis

Finished Lysette tonight from the Small World set.

I've been learning and pushing my painting thanks to this forum too. I can see how much further I have to go when I see some of the detailed patterns some of you are able to put into your designs.

I used an irridescent medium with a gloss varnish to create a frost effect on a frost phoenix. I no longer have a picture of it though :(

I've found eyes to mostly be about good consistency control with your paint, confidence to fail, and practice.

Interested to see what your creativity will bring forth.

There are a lot of cool ideas you could do with this. 1940s female automata - Bronzed metallic faces/skintones for warmth with cloths in subdued cool black and a secondary warm border color (yellow/red/orange). - It seems part of the conflict with this is that the sisters models you are wanting to use though have more armor plating than cloth like the picture you reference. If you make the skintones metallic, with mechanical themed lines scoring the model, you can communicate automata while having cloth carry some of that femme fatale look. If you use silver/grays, you will have two cool colors, but if you use bronze/golds, you will create contrast. . . Dang, now I'm going to have to do this. Good luck finding models to suit your purpose as a base.

I wanted to try it out to see. This was my result. Thanks for the tip about the lines Doug!

The goal is to make a miniature's shield look almost like a cracked crystal portal (to a galaxy). My thought to achieve this is to create an illusion of depth with an underpainting, MANY layers of varnish, and even small touches of paint between layers. Being a mini, there won't be too much bulk, but I wondered if anyone had any experience with a project like this and could offer any pointers. Would this idea work?

This is my work so far on Goemon from the Ninja All Stars line of Sodapop miniatures. He is mostly done, but will need basing and to be sealed.

These days I'm entirely painting chibi figures, but I mostly use this technique adapted slightly to fit the chibi style. In step 3, instead of painting black, I will mostly use a darker shade of the final eye color with brighter shades to form the bottom and center of the eye. This is a slight adaptation of steps 3 and 4. I've also now begun only using black lining around the top and bottom of eyes, but again that's because of the chibi style.

One of my favorite chibi minis.

Remember that there comes a point when you will need to flip the 'craft paint to learn' principle on its head. Growing up on the cusp of the internet and in a rural area, I only ever had access to cheap art materials. I think if I had access to some higher quality materials (and today's easily accessible tutorials) somewhere along the way I probably would have pursued art more seriously earlier in my life as an intense hobby. It is harder to get good results from cheaper supplies and it can be discouraging to know what you are doing isn't good.

This guy is my most recent WIP, the poison dragon from the Arcadia Quest: Inferno Kickstarter. He has two slight mods. First, I removed the chest spikes from the original model. Secondly, I converted the spikes on the dragon's left wrist into a chain. I couldn't make sense of what the original part was supposed to be, but some sort of shackle made better sense to me. In the process of working the claws, spikes, and horns to a white-green to neon green range and highlighting the green specks again and hitting them with a touch of yellow. The wings are also getting some blue shading and then some purplish spots.

Ziva, As far as ground up sculpting goes, I got stuck at the phase where you are now. Pushing through and finishing something is valuable. You might want to comb through some of the other posts of advice given to beginner sculpters in these forums.