althai

Wow, she’s really looking good now with the yellow light. That lighting effect really pops, and you did a great job on the face. I only have a few final suggestions. First, if you want to neaten up things a bit, particularly around all the bits-and-bobs she has on her belt, dark lining is your friend. Second, the way the lantern is, it wouldn’t be shining too much light below it, so I would add more shadows to the bottom of the staff, the snake, and especially inside her sleeve. Finally, that blade on her belt could be reflecting some lantern light to make it look shinier. Try to keep those reflections thin, just small edge highlights, since it's fairly far from the light source. Here's an example I made. I used a purplish color for the dark lining so it would be easy to see the effect, but a bluish color would work equally well.

Hi Will- Really like how much energy you are putting into this model and WIP thread. You're clearly trying to do a really good job on this model, and it shows. You asked for a critique, but many of the things I would suggest you already have on your to-do list. In particular, my main suggestions would be: 1. 2. Since you have put so much time into the face already, I have a few more suggestions for it, in addition to smoothing the shadow on the cheek: 1. I think the white on both eyes extends a bit too far down. I would remove some from below by repainting the lower line with your dark eye socket color, and then repainting some of the skin of the lower eyelids. You should be able to do this without messing up your great work on the pupil/iris. 2. I think you should have a bit more shadow around the nose, both on the bottom and on the far side from the light source. 3. You could benefit from more shadows generally, especially on the neck, hair, around the face. Here's a rough example sketch from the "markup" feature on my phone. For making the OSL effect work better, I think you would benefit from a lot more shadows everywhere the light from the lantern wouldn't reach, such as her entire back, and the entire left side of her body. For example, I would do something like this with the back of her robe: In addition to making everything darker, shading the bottom of the sleeves would help provide better visual separation between the sleeves and skirt. I would also leave some light on the top of the far sleeve, but not as much as the sleeve under the lantern, to portray the environmental light. Other elements can be shaded and highlighted more like I'm showing with her robe, in order to sell the OSL effect more strongly. Looking forward to seeing how she turns out!

Since the piece does contain some nudity, I'm only showing back/side views here to respect the forum rules. More angles are available at my website, https://www.lightminiatures.com/come-back-to-me-my-love/. I also have a bit of a backstory and a LOT of work-in-progress photos of both the painting and some of the sculpting work I did for the resurrection effect and other parts of the diorama. It's definitely worth checking out. :) For anyone who was at ReaperCon and didn't get a chance to check out the booklet (I know how cons can be), the blog post is basically the same thing. The main figure is 03784: D’Vandra Lukesia by Bobby Jackson. The resurrection effect is constructed using 03639: Bella, Succubus by Patrick Keith, and Secret Weapon’s skeleton kit. Everything else is scratchbuilt out of putty, plastic card, parchment paper, cork tile, and wire, apart from two resin vases I got from somewhere I can't remember. If you have any comments, questions, or constructive criticism, that is always welcome!

Very nice work on the lighting, it looks great! The one thing I would suggest, other than the points you mentioned, is to bring up the highlights on the face a bit more. As Mathieu Fontaine always says in his classes, you must focus the face!

First of all, I think the effect of the strong blue light is great. Subtlety in miniature scale isn't always the best idea, as effects which are too subtle just don't read until you're examining the mini from 10 inches away. I'm curious how it will look once the lantern light is added as well. If you did want to make the light from the blue flames more subtle than it is now, I don't think it would be too hard to bring some flesh tones back into the face without repainting it. Just use a fine brush and thin paint, and highlight the areas you would normally highlight (nose, cheeks, chin, lower part of forehead) with thin glazes of your flesh color. Don't think of it as reducing the light from the flame, instead think about adding more ambient light back into the scene. I don't think this is needed at all, just pointing it out as an option if you're not happy with the mini now.

Lookin' good!

Glazing will not really give you a mottled appearance. For that, you should try "stippling": repeatedly jab at your mini with the end of your brush, using slightly thinned paint. Preferable, use an old brush which doesn't hold a good tip any more. Basically you want to make a bunch of small dots. This gives you a mottled appearance. You can highlight and shade by using a lighter color to stipple in the highlight areas and a darker color to stipple in the shadow areas.

Very nice work!

AFAIK Vallejo has always put cadmium in its paints, and they never used to label them. And "non-toxic" is a joke. I've literally seen cadmium red pigment labeled non-toxic, emailed the seller to protest, and been told to go shove it. I wouldn't trust any paint line not to contain heavy metals, unless you've seen a statement from someone who actually worked on the paint recipes that it does not.

Oh, sorry, forgot to include that. It's a conversion based on the old model for Fiona the Black, and the satyxis sea witch.

When you say the seatbelt is matte, do you mean you want to paint it so the seat belt appears matte, or you want to use matte paints? When painting black in miniature, I recommend trying to represent a glossy black, so that you can go quite strong with the highlights and really bring out the shape. In miniature, you really need strong contrasts to be able to see detail at that scale, and there's no good way to do this with black and have it appear matte. On the other hand, if you go for a shiny appearance, you can go quite strong with the contrast (even having fine line highlights that go all the way to pure white) and still have things appear black.

Looks really good to me. The only suggestion I can make from this picture is maybe some smoke at the ends of her hair, similar to how you did the smoke tendrils. However, the picture's a bit small, making it hard to pick out the details. If you post a bigger pic I can try to offer some better critiques.

I posted this figure in the WIP forum to ask for critiques, and the critiques I received help me improve her a lot. Before I was really unhappy with how the figure was looking, and now I'm really happy with how she came out. I may still tweak some things, as she's for a painting competition and I still have a month to make changes. If you have any other critiques, I'd love to hear them! In order to be friendly to people on phones or other slow internet connections, especially given the large number of pics, all pictures are small compressed jpgs that link to higher-resolution, higher quality versions of the same image. The figure represents Fiona the Black, and is a conversion based on the old Fiona model and the satyxis sea witch. As always, comments, questions, and constructive criticism are welcome and encouraged!

If you use a certain shade of red with a certain shade of green and those are the main colors, it's pretty much impossible to not be reminded of christmas, so if that's not what you want, you probably shouldn't do it. I've painted minis red and green and then had them bug me so much I had to change things. For Fiona, for example, I ended up adding a bunch of blue to the green to keep her from looking too christmasy. You can totally get away with red+green color schemes by tweaking the colors away from christmas colors. But bright red + forest green? Forget it.

Nice job. My 2c: whether you've attached them like the "official" version is irrelevant. People convert their minis or paint them differently all the time, and get great results. I assume you attached the antlers the way you did because you thought it looked right. If you like, you can think of this as a simple conversion. The only thing that matters is are you happy with it, or do you think it would look better if you changed the antlers. But you should make that decision without being biased by how one version did it.

Nice work as always Drew!

Wiley, knarthex doesn't have to paint the mini as if she's outside in sunlight. It's already starting to look more like an adventurer in a dimly lit space, and knarthex could push it further by darkening the non-torchlit areas a bit.

You've got the OSL basics right, and have pretty much mapped out where the light should be hitting. The flashlight method is a good one! The light on the hair and orange cloth looks good to me, but where it's hitting her face and the brown cloth doesn't look quite right. I have two suggestions: 1) for the face (elsewhere too, but it's most noticeable on the face), use a slightly orange color and not the yellow lemon you are using. Firelight is warmer than that (example pic). Maybe something like 29808 golden yellow or 29809 pale saffron. 2) Where the brown is lit up from the firelight, it is much yellower than surrounding areas, but not that much lighter. Rather than applying the glow color directly as a glaze, try mixing it with the base-coat color, and maybe adding some white too. Try to keep in ming that firelight is not a pure yellow orange light, but is a much whiter color than that. Technically, it contains all colors of the visible spectrum, just like other white light, but it's more tilted towards the warmer hues because of the temperature of the light. So it should be doing more to increase the lightness of the areas it hits, and not changing the color nearly so strongly. The best way to achieve this is by mixing, rather than doing a straight up glaze. Looking forward to seeing OSL step 2!

I think you'll all agree she's much improved, and I'm much happier with her now. Please feel free to add any more critiques if you have them, even nitpicky stuff, as I'm planning to enter her in competition.

Thanks for the critiques all. You're definitely right about the red cape being too strong compared to the rest of the mini, which is too subdued by comparison. But the real "aha" moment for me was actually TGP saying, "I didn't spot the OSL on the phone screen", which, I decided, means it's way too subtle, and needed to be a lot stronger. I think this fixes a lot of her problems, actually, as it brings more focus on the important bits and balances out the cloak which was overpowering her before. She's looking a lot better now. I did some work on some of the other bits you guys talked about as well, including the black hipcape and the rock. I'm not too concerned with the black hipcape looking a bit flat and muted, as it's not supposed to be a focal point. I think the problem is that there are not enough other focal points from the back, so the eye keeps getting drawn to the hipcape which is big, and if I add more interest to the other parts the problems with the hipcape will naturally recede. There are some more things I want to work on, but I'll try to post updated pictures tonight.

Her chest seems much improved. The boots need some highlighting after their glaze. The hair looks good to me from the back, but from the front I'm not seeing the same shine.

Really nice work, especially on the sash and the face. The armguards are really nice too, I like how you've brought out the texture with your highlighting. You're clearly a very good painter. The breasts look a bit off to me though. I feel like where you've got an abrupt change from the highlight color to the midtone color a bit above where her top ends they would still be catching a lot more light and be more highlighted, so I would extend the highlighting lower down, and they seem nice and round, so I would smooth that transition more. Google some pictures of models and use that as a reference for the skin, maybe? Also, I think the boots would read better if they weren't exactly the same color as the pants. Maybe a thin orange glaze, to turn them from black into brown without ruining your nice highlighting work?

I wasn't sure whether to post this in WIP or Show Off as the paintjob is essentially done, but I'm not really happy with it and I wanted critiques so I'm posting it here. I can't really put my finger on why I'm not happy with the paintjob, but I'm not happy with it, and I'm hoping some critiques might help me figure out how to fix it. So please, don't hold back! Because of the 150k size limits on pictures, they all link to larger, higher quality pictures so you can see the detail better. Please take a look at let me know what you think could be improved.

Thanks, I took another look at the miniature you're definitely right about about whether the light could reach his shoes. When painting OSL (or any lighting effect actually), I like to actually look at the miniature from the direction of the light source, figure out what I can see, and use that as a guide for where to paint lights and shadows. Holding a miniature up under a light is also really useful for this. A good example is the study I did when I painted abalam [links to articles on my blog]. I didn't quite have time for that during a speedpaint. But the reminder is good because ideally I'd be better at getting things right without needing to find lights to create a reference photo. ;) No secrets. But here are some tips. 1) You can't get smooth blends or fine detail when speedpainting anyways, so just don't worry about it. Go for overall impact instead. This means thinking about large contrast and overall lighting situation. It's a lot like tabletop painting - your goal is to gave good impact from a couple feet away, not to stand up to close examination. 2) Highlight placement. If you put your highlights in the right places, they will look right even if the blending is not very smooth. A good example of this is the green color transitions on the arms, which are actually quite abrupt, but look "right" that way. The highlights on the red bits are like this as well. Not that my placement is perfect, as Nerd's critique shows! 3) Lining edges, both bright lines where they catch light and darklining between objects. This is where you fix mistakes you make while speedpainting and make everything look clean and neat, and have details that are visible from a distance. Since this is a speedpaint, I didn't worry about lining everything, just the most important areas, like the face, chest, and weapon. 4) I've been painting long enough to have developed good brush control and knowledge of how paint moves, so I make fewer mistakes that I need to go back and fix, which helps speed things up. I still make them though; that's what tip 3 is for!

Thanks for the kind words, all! Please share anyways, I'd like to know what it is. I'm not likely to adjust this particular mini (as it was a speedpaint), but it may be helpful for the next time I do OSL.