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Second try with oils. First try with the limited Zorn palette - just black, white, red and ochre. Plus metallics, because I don't have a clue about NMM.

A friend of mine gave me some canvases last month! I've decided to turn them into backdrops for my larger minis (or maybe just for minis in general depends on if I can get a floor piece to match. One of them (20"x16") I'm going to turn into a Bob Ross-esque painting but with like a dark and red sky so it seems the land is burning. The one I'm about to show (12"x16") is a dungeon that I've already had brother mock up a photo yesterday and I spent a chunk of yesterday and today drawing it out with heavy guidance from him. The third one I'm open to ideas. It is also a 12"x16". I don't care which way it's oriented. I just need ideas! I'm prefacing this by saying I literally do not draw. I've never felt good at it. It's just never been a thing I could wrap my head around. So back to the second one! I knew I definitely wanted a dungeon. But my brain, for a change, had a rough idea of what I wanted. I did some Googling and talked to my brother who does cute MSPaint cat portraits and other things to help me out. He drew up this rough sketch for me. And then with heavy guidance from him I was able to draw everything (except the chest) on my own! He helped with placing and proportions and whatnot. I still need to draw in the stone floor and cobblestones for the bridge/pillars though. So saying I am happy with it is an understatement. I will be painting this up. I have a /small/ set of water soluble oil paints and lots of acrylics. I will be using one or both of these in painting all of these.

Got him as a freebie and found him rather uninspiring, so I used him as a test piece for my first experiment with oil paints. Now that he's all painted up he's one of my favourite minis in my collection. Found out the I absolutely love painting with oils! You can read a bit more about my painting process here.

I have more armor on the workbench. At the end I will have used acrylics, enamel paints, oil paints and pigments. After I finished building all four vehicles, including some modifications to represent a specific unit, I primed them with gray Stynylrez primer with an airbrush. After that had cured I followed up with the primary color, dunkelgelb, using Ammo by Mig acrylic, again with the airbrush using, or trying to use, some color modulation. I followed that with the camo pattern, no masking was used because I wanted a soft or feathered edge. I sealed the pattern with a satin varnish. Decals are best applied on a glassy surface but a satin or semi-gloss gives the surface a bit more “tooth”. After the decals were applied I sealed the with another coat of satin finish. Now its time for the fun part, weathering! I start with oils to fade the colors which starts to introduce some more tones to the vehicles. It doesn’t take much to make it fade and this is just one of several techniques to do this. At the same time I darkened some the colors in some areas too. You need to let the fading dry for at least 24 hours before you move on. Fading was followed by a pin wash which can definitely be tedious to apply. Try and keep it neat so there is less to clean up. I used odor less enamel thinner to clean things up. Just use a damp brush not a wet brush for this. It’s easy to go overboard and effect the paint work. Now I just need to do this on three more and I can move on to the next step.

This miniature will be roughly my third or fourth venture into the realm of oil paints. Everything, with exception to the metallics, eyeballs, and some skin highlights were done in oils. This is also my first attempt in basing in the style of James Wappel (wappellious) using Green Stuff World texture rollers, sculpey, and Vallejo texture paste. No black paint was used in this exercise. I still can't take great photographs, but eventually I will get there! WIP Shots:

So I've been slacking on both updating here and on my blog. Here it feels odd because I don't really paint minis these days (though I want to!) and the blog kinda died when I switched hosting away from wordpress.com, my views basically dried up. I'm active on FB but I keep my friends list very tight (no offense to anyone intended), I should open up my image folders to the public, but I hesitate to do that on FB. Here's a link to my thread from last year: Anyway, I'll try to catch up a bit for year 3 (what!?!). Here's the YTD WIPs from oil portraiture class. Same model, same painting. Getting into some more advanced stuff with glazes, trying to add physical depth to the painting. At this point it's starting to get pretty luminous in some areas. The physical light on the painting can pass through some of the oil-heavy layers and pick up color from pigments along the way, hit the underlayers and shine or dull for the return journey. Cool stuff, I begin to understand the reason people say you can't appreciate an old master oil painting in a photo, you miss all the complex stuff the physical light does interacting with the layers. Each of these represents a 3 hour session, or about 2 hours of painting time. I've also narrowed my focus in drawing to portraiture, so I can bring up my skills for heads. Since I want to pursue figurative works, having solid portrait skills is going to be crucial, and it helps me stay focused in my studies and hopefully avoid lulls between studies. I'm taking Stan Prokopenko's portrait lessons as a premium member, but he makes most of these lessons free on his Proko youtube channel. I like to make study sheets while I watch the videos, and draw as many examples as I can. I picked up this amazing habit from Patrick Jones, it's really helpful for learning and later reference. Each sheet is 18x24 charcoal on newsprint. The final two lessons are charcoal portrait copies, where the reference photo is on one side of the screen and Stan draws on the other side, explaining his process as he draws. Here I've just about wrapped up the lay-in step. Charcoal on newsprint approx 11x14.

Since I can't for the life of me get the seam lines and fuzzies off my Bones Succubus, thought I would use it to practice eye painting since I've only painted one mini so far. Here is my attempt from last night. Deck tan for whites, black brown for liner. Nevermind the Skin painting, was just for cutting in the liner. I used red oil paint on a pin to make the iris. I think it turned out great, but seems to me there has to be a way to cheat at this. The anxiety and anguish of trying over and over and having ruined it at various steps is frustrating. This one took me 3 tries. Anyone tried using liquid watercolors for dotting the eye? seems like if you messed it up it would easily wipe off to try again. I assume I could seal it with airbrushed varnish when done. maybe use a tiny mask to cover the whites so both sides could match, etc? really fishing here....