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for a 5E game. That's about all I can do for my WIP's theme after only one session. Mostly it will be monsters. Maybe I can convince the DM to tell me what's coming so I can paint it. These are just for tabletop, but my philosophy is you should still try something new on every piece, or at least work on getting better at something you can already do. Which is why I started a WIP I wasn't even originally going to bother with - for an experiment. I was looking at the marsh troll and thinking "this would be a good candidate for glaze painting." Now if you aren't familiar with glaze painting, it is where you prime white and then add washes/glazes of progressively darker colors. It creates your midtone and shadows, then you go back in and add back the highlights. You can do it for anything but it is ideal for textures. Now Bones are white, but you can't just go over them with diluted paints. Liner works well to prime, but then the mini is no longer white. But wait, I have a large bottle of white craft paint that I used for some terrain. What if I prime with liner, give it a heavy drybrush so the highlights are white again, and then glaze paint? Step 1: Brown liner + a heavy drybrush of white craft paint. Step 2: Green skin starts with yellow paint. Here is a potential issue - the liner shifts the shadows to green. As I want green skin this isn't an issue but it would be if I wanted my final color to be yellow. I am also trying not to be messy as I would need to make any messes white again later. Step 3: Sap green diluted to a wash. Now the skin is greenish. Step 4: A second wash of sap green in the shadows to add more depth. Step 5: His highlights are still pretty yellow in hand so I made a wash of anthraquinone blue. It will make the yellow more green and further darken the shadows. Oh, I hit his front too. It was really blue so I started the color shift with some phthalocyanine green ink. Interlude: Lem. Needed for a PC. Must be finished by Friday. The troll is optional. Step 6: All leather was hit with a couple of layers of burnt umber ink. Step 7: The wood was coated with a mix of burnt umber ink and titanium white. Some of the liner still shows through so the initial color is a little wonky in places. Maybe it'll add texture to the wood.... Step 7: Shade the wood. Initially I used a burnt umber ink wash, but it wasn't intense enough and would end up looking like the leather after a few more washes. So I used the obvious wood shadow color, dioxazine purple ink watered down to a wash. From the front. His belly got a wash of the burnt umber ink while it was out. A couple more and it would turn olive, but maybe I'll leave it bluish. While multiple washes have smoothed it out you can still see texture from the drybrush showing through. It's an interesting effect here but won't always be desirable. Step 8: Call it a night and go to bed. I have to work and make money after all. We can't paint all the time. Next update - unknown. I really do need to finish the halfling bard before I play around anymore.

Sometime last year I showed off a garage kit that I picked up. It has been gathering dust since, but recently I did a little more prep work on it and primed the head. Now I know a lot of times you'll see these kits given a sold coat of paint and not much else, but I've decided to approach it much like a smaller scale figure. First, some skin. I just blocked things in and then did a little smoothing on the upper right. I"m not too worried about the sides of her face because once she has the rest of her hair it won't really be visible. Still, while it's off I'll go ahead and give myself some practice working at this scale. Then tonight I spent more time fighting my wet pallet than actually painting. The consistency got off and now I need to go back a fix some blends. In the meantime I used my well pallet and blocked in her eyes. Next paint session I'll clean them up and decide what direction she's looking.

As some of you may have read elsewhere, I have been playing Village Attacks and painted the vampire. When I did I kept close to the concept art because I figured if I ever get someone else to play they'll be looking at the game cards, so the minis should look like what the player expects. When I looked closely at more of the cards though, it became apparent there was a bit of a problem. The monsters all have inhumanly pale skin and generally dark color schemes. The peasants look drab as well. While that is cool as concept art, having a couple 20 minis on the table that are all kind of muted colors is going to blend together more than I would like so a new plan is needed. That is to stick close to the concept art, but make everything a little more vibrant. I figure as slowly as I'll be painting these there will be plenty of time to stop for pics, so why not a thread. Next I'll be working on the banshee, but first a bit of background. You see there is another mini I would like to pull down off of the shelf of shame and work on but it has a problem. I want to paint part of it jade, but the jade paint I have kind of sucks. I like the color, but the paint itself is super shiny and too translucent. So I picked up Reaper's cool green triad to try out. The color swatch showed me Reaper's Jade wasn't quite what I wanted, but real jade comes in several variations of green. I'll find a use for it somewhere. Here's a sampling of some of the greens that I have. You can see the Reaper Jade 09015 is nothing like the VGC Jade 72026, but real Jade comes in both flavors so it's fine. I have a plan, but first I want to try the Triad out on its own just to see how it looks. Enter the banshee. Her concept art has her is a very desaturated garment with some green accents. The new cloth color will instead be the Reaper Triad and then put the green accents beside them. She will be very green. First 09013. I had originally painted the cloth but decided to texture the base before I went any further. It was messy and got some grit on her. I wasn't very thorough in removing it. Next is 09014. I just blocked it in to see what it looked like. It is noticeably warmer than the shadow color. At first it seems to stand out but... Once the jade is slapped on it really falls back into the shadows, as you can see below. My highlighting here isn't exactly accurate, but that's why we call it tabletop. There should be a step between 09014 & 09015 that I'll have to mix at some point. Under normal lighting the green just goes from dark to jade. Actually if you look at the colors there is another problem. This triad has no pop. Fortunately pop is easy. It's called VMC Ivory and solves (almost) all your contrast needs. Here it's actually mixed with the jade to create a highlight that will actually stand out. Just remember your painting lesson for today. VMC Ivory = POP and eliminates those pesky "more contrast" comments. Given that the real purpose here is to learn the triad, I'll be going back to refine things later and see how I can get it to look. Before that though I want to block in everything else so my green has something to work with. That though, is a project for tomorrow.

Best wishes for a happy birthday!

:bday: A happy belated birthday to you, and my sincere apologies for flaking out yesterday ! :bday:

May you have a happy birthday! :bday: