Guindyloo and Buglips paint DHL 03100: Thanis the Bonecaller

[buglips*the*goblin]

Want more WIP threads like this one?  Check these out!

01614 Con Crud 

02818 Bugbear Warrior

02017 Scorpius Rex Dracus

 

07001 Rictus the Undying (Dungeon Dwellers)

07002 Baran Blacktree (Dungeon Dwellers)

 

 

 

Hello again, friends and neighbours! 

 

Several years ago, after the Bones I kickstarter, I made a thread to help people who had just signed up for a ridiculous amount of Bones minis get used to painting and encourage them to just jump right on in!  This thread was even more successful than I thought and, much to my astonishment, brings new people to our hobby even today.  I thought it was time for a fresh update that might be just as helpful, and maybe give us something to point new people to when they first decide to pick up a brush and become One of Us.

 

Often when new people come by and have no idea where to start, the first general question is: what are your aims and requirements?  This basically breaks down to: do you need pieces done for a game, or do you want to paint just to paint?  The idea behind this WIP is to give us something to show people the difference in practice.  So with the able assistance of Guindyloo, I will be painting Thanis in my usual fast-but-decent method and she will show us how nice things can be when you spend some time on them. 

 

There are, of course, many ways to paint a mini so this thread is just an example of our present working methods and by no means serve as the only way to do it, or the final word on the matter.  Those of you just joining our hobby may have your own ideas about how to do things, and by all means you should use your own best judgment!  All we do here is just give you some things to think about.

 

So on to the mini you came in here to see, and I hope this thread proves useful! 

 

Here's my Thanis, fresh from her blister pack:

 

 

Edited March 17, 2018 by buglips*the*goblin

[Guindyloo]

So I’m going to be doing the “painting for display” portion of this shared WIP. As Buglips noted, there are many ways to paint a mini and my way is not, by any means, the “right” way, there is no right way to do your hobby as long as you’re having fun. We're all on a painting journey and just like anyone else, I make a lot of mistakes, but I try my best to learn from my mistakes and move toward improving all the time. If someone else finds my mistakes or my approach or my thought processes helpful, then I’m more than happy to share.

 

I think it’s also worth noting that just because I'm calling my method “painting for display” doesn’t mean that you can’t take my approach to painting and apply it to figures that you intend to use on the table, especially if you happen to be much faster at applying these techniques than I am. I’m just sharing with you my approach as someone who’s in the hobby solely for painting, so I come at it from an artistic approach rather than for utility.

 

You’re going to notice that obviously my method is much slower than Buglips’ method. That’s multiple layers – On top of the differences in our methods, I’m also a pretty slow painter and he’s a very fast painter. As a result, he’s going to finish long before I am. That’s something that we have expected from the start of formulating this idea to do a WIP together. For transparency sake, I started a day and a half earlier than he did to combat that and as a result, my next couple of posts will be catching up to where I'm at currently. I did this so I hopefully won't fall quite as far behind. It’s obviously not a race or a competition of any sort, we’re just both very interested in helping and supporting people in getting the most out of painting miniatures, no matter what their desired end result is. We’re also both very passionate about promoting the fact that there is no wrong approach to painting. This is YOUR hobby and you should get out of it whatever you’re looking to get out of it, whether that’s to get figures painted up as quickly as possible to put on the table or painting for display or competition or somewhere in between. There are certainly techniques to learn and “right” ways to perform those techniques, but even in that, there’s multiple techniques to get you where you’re going and there’s no “right” technique to use, there are just personal preferences and techniques that you may be better at from the get go.

 

Please note that while I'm approaching this as an instructional WIP, I want everyone to feel absolutely free to not only ask questions if you should happen to have any, but give feedback and criticism on what I’m doing. If something doesn’t look right, let me know! If you think my highlights aren’t high enough, my shading isn’t dark enough, my blending could be better in areas, colours clash or whatever it might be, don’t be afraid to speak up.

 

When you’re painting for display and actively working toward improving your painting, criticism is an awesome tool to see things from someone else’s perspective so that we’re not just stuck in our own view. Sometimes we get so caught up in what we’re doing that we miss our mistakes or we get some kind of attachment to the work we’ve put in that we blind ourselves to the fact that things could be improved. I cannot recommend more highly that if you’re actively working toward improving your painting, you should set your feelings aside and ask for honest criticism. We all like to be told that we’re doing everything right and everything we paint looks great. It feels good to be complimented. But the brutal truth is that compliments won’t push you to better yourself as a painter and if you get too caught up in them, it can actually prevent you from improving your skills.

 

I love to encourage people and I think that encouragement is something that we should actively do in this hobby, but if you’ve seen me talk about this subject before, you know already that I think being too soft on criticism is detrimental to painters that are trying to improve…however, if improving your skills isn’t your goal, or even if it’s your general goal but just not for that particular figure (for whatever reason – you happened to paint this one just to relax or you were shooting for a “tabletop” paint job or the figure just has too much personal meaning for you or you’re just not feeling up to it that day) it’s ok to not ask for criticism. Know where you’re at mentally, know what your ultimate goals are and know where your skills are currently.  

 

Alright, enough rambling, here's my Thanis fresh from her blister pack:

 

Obviously her staff came a little bent, so I just used my fingers to apply gentle, even pressure to straighten it out, and voila:

 

[buglips*the*goblin]

I forgot to mention that my Thanis came with a bent staff, too, I just automatically bent it to shape when I took her out of the blister and didn't think about it.  So mine looked like Guindy's before I did that.  Bending my staff will prove important in a minute, and you'll see why.

 

But first, mold lines!  So if you're new and going to be working with metal figures, you will want to get some needle files (sometimes known as jeweler's files).  These can be had inexpensively in a set and should give you an assortment of shapes and sizes.  My Thanis was relatively free of mold lines, this being the worst of them on her staff and hair:

 

 

So I filed them off.  I was perhaps a bit too vigorous on the staff, because I noticed it seemed a touch wobbly.  This was confirmed when I went on to priming her and she fell of her plinth:  DISASTER!

 

 

So I broke the staff.  Unexpected things sometimes happen when you work on miniatures, so you have to deal with things as they crop up.  It wasn't my intent to include pinning in this WIP, but them's the breaks.  So two more useful tools are a good pair of side-cutting pliers, and a pin vise (this is a small hand drill).  I made two shallow pilot holes in the staff near her hand and on the part that broke off with the point end of a #11 x-acto knife, then drilled them out a little.  These didn't have to be deep holes, a small pin would do for the fix because it just needs something for the glue to hold onto.  I made the pins by cutting a small paperclip:

 

 

That's a bit long, so once the glue set I trimmed it:

 

 

And then I glued it back into place, being careful to line up the spine-looking bits on the bony staff up on the right side.  So here she is, good as new!  And I have learned to maybe be a bit more gentle!

 

 

 

 

Edited November 5, 2017 by buglips*the*goblin

[haldir]

Just to add to this & show the goblin isn't as clumsy as he appears, I had this figure at one time & the staff broke on mine as well. It's a weak point in other wise fantastic figure. Something to watch out for if you take on this figure yourselves! Onward!

[buglips*the*goblin]

My fix done and the superglue dry, time to finish priming!  I used Reaper MSP 09108 Brush-On primer for this, applied using a testors cheapo white handled medium brush.  The kind you see in hobby stores in a bucket.  It's robust and can take a beating, and priming is rough on brushes so you don't want to use one of your good ones!  Primer should flow smoothly without being too runny. If it's not going on easily, you might need to thin it a little with water.  This bottle went on like a dream, so no problems.  You don't need the figure stark white, you just want enough coverage that the paint going on later has something to latch onto.

 

 

 

This next step is something I started doing this year.  Once my primer was dry, I made a wash using Coat D'Arms black and some Frontline Games capillarity agent I picked up at ReaperCon.  It's good stuff, and makes it all flow nicely into crevices.  Reaper makes a wash medium that should o the job just as nicely. 

 

I do this wash for a couple of reasons.  The first is that it helps make the different bits more discrete and easy to pick out, which is useful on a busy figure like this.  Helps to see the details!  The second reason is that any mold lines I missed will show up here.  The third reason is that in some places, where I don't wind up painting over it, the black wash can serve as lining.  I could have made it a lot thinner than I did, but I'm still getting used to this Frontline stuff. 

 

 

 

So when I was chasing mold lines, she had one in her hair.  Mold lines in hair are a real pain, and like most of them this ones was hard to get to and remove.  Where I can't really file one down, I try to get the file in as best I can and at least break it up a little.  That way primer and paint can, hopefully, help disguise it.  That worked out as planned, shown here:

 

 

Of course, having just applied the wash now I have to wait for it to dry!  Since I have a large horde of minis to paint, I like to keep a few lurking in the background to fiddle with when I have to wait for my main project to dry.  You can pick away quite a lot of work in this downtime, and it helps make your overall production faster (less to do when you promote a lurker to the front to finish off).  If you're sitting at the bench anyway, might as well paint!

 

[Guindyloo]

I also removed my mold lines with diamond files that I got on Amazon for like $10. Handy little things and they work really well. While we were talking, I noted that my figure seemed to have more mold lines than Buglips' figure did. There were also some little metal burrs on the skeletons that I had to file off. Most notably, was the same mold line in the hair, which I'll tackle a little differently down the line from how Buglips saw to his. There are also seam lines on her thighs and there was a little divot on the front of her other thigh. I took note of all of these things, cleaned up what I could and then took the figure to the sink for a good scrub with an old toothbrush and some dish soap, then I rinsed her really well with some warm water and patted her dry with a paper towel.

 

Then I attached her to my holder. I don't have any kind of fancy holder, I just use a variety of things, old candles turned upside down, craft paint bottles that have a flat top, or other bottles with flat lids. I generally attach the model using this Scotch Mounting Tape.

 

 

It holds the models really well and frustrates me less than poster tack, as I had one too many times of trying to peel that stuff out of crevices. If the mounting tape won't hold a model because it's particularly heavy, I use hot glue to attach it to the holder instead.

 

Where I live, we have constant high humidity, so spray priming has never been an option for me. I've never even dared to try it. So I proceeded with my usual method of priming, which is Reaper's Brush-On Primer, in white. I thin it a little bit and brush it on with a crappy brush since as Buglips mentioned, primer is really rough on brushes and I also did a lot of poking with it to get into all of the little crevices on the skeletons. 

I didn't take a picture directly after priming, but I only do one coat and am only concerned with making sure that no shininess from the metal beneath it is showing through, I don't bother with trying to get a solid white coat as that can lead to obscuring details and building up unwanted texture.

 

I am newly converted to the method of painting figures section by section, rather than basecoating everything beforehand. I found that basecoating everything ended up with me getting bored with the figure and also led to me having to repaint sections over and over. Painting by section instead makes things more interesting and I feel like I have less of a need to go back and fix things. There will be spots that need to be touched up from time to time, but it's a different experience.

 

When you paint section by section, you want to start from the inside out, that is, start with the section that is at the innermost of the figure and gets overlapped by other things. For most figures, that's going to be the skin.

 

So I started out by mixing a base skintone. I start with a midtone on the skin. I used MSP Rosy Skin and Vallejo Nocturna Frozen Flesh for this.

 

I use a wet palette and highly recommend it. So I start out by putting a small amount of the 2 paints next to each other on the palette. Then I took the back end of my brush to pick up a very small amount of the Frozen Flesh colour to mix into the Rosy Skin. Dark paints are going to darken lighter paints very quickly, so you want to start with a small amount, as you can always add a little bit more if it's not as dark as you want it.

 

 

I mixed that up, again with the back end of my brush and that gave me a grayish lilac sort of colour. It's going to look far more pink on the model, but give a subtle difference when layering up from there.

 

Then I used the back end of my brush to pick up a drop of water from my rinse cup and mixed that in to thin the paint. As you can see, when dragged out, it pulls back in on itself a little, but still has body to it. That's the consistency that I want my paint to be for a basecoat.

 

It's not going to be completely opaque in one coat and that's ok - I want to do several coats to build the colour up slowly until it's solid, but without becoming too thick on the figure.

That's after one coat.

 

So I mentioned that there were seam lines on her thighs:

I want to do my best to smooth those out, as well as the divot on the front of her thigh (which I couldn't get a picture of, but trust me, it was there.)

 

So I took GW 'Ardcoat and very thinly smoothed it over the thighs, 'Ardcoat is a thick gloss sealer and what it does is fill in little tiny spots and helps to smooth things out. Once you've put it on, you want to let it dry completely - a good 10 minutes or so. Then, go back over the areas with your basecoat. It may take a couple of coats before you get everything smooth, but it works really well.

 

Unfortunately, I failed to take a picture of the same spots on her thighs after having done the 'Ardcoat a couple of times and a couple of basecoats. And at this point, remember I said I would be posting things that I already did until I'm caught up? Yeah, the skin's done already at the point that I'm typing this up. Sorry about that, I'll try to remember to revisit that area later on so you can see that, indeed, the 'Ardcoat smoothed out those spots.

 

I realized at some point that, as you can see, I had missed the backs of her arms. Those got basecoated.....unfortunately I didn't realize until just now that I completely missed her back. So you know how I said that the skin was done? Ok, well, it's like 90% done. 

 

Here's a picture of her front side only, because apparently I only felt like taking a picture of her front, after the skin was fully basecoated.......except for her back. 

[buglips*the*goblin]

Like Guindy, I am also a recent convert... to the opposite way.  I found I enjoyed painting a lot more when I did all of the basecoating first instead of my old way, which was section-by-section.  But, like her, my first bit of painting starts with the skin. 

 

You can see some of her wet palette in her post above, but I do it a little different.  For most work, I'm a ratio painter - so I do a lot of mixing.  I got frustrated with regular well palettes and, since I mostly used only the well, simply switched to a cheap, expedient alternative: pop bottle caps.  As I use a mix of brands that come in droppers as well as pots, I just throw it into these by eye and try to make my blobs about the right size.

 

So for the skin, I chose 3 parts old reaper pro paint caucasian to one part old pro paint chestnut brown for shade:

 

 

I added two drops of water and stirred it up to get this:

 

 

That's thin enough to play nice without running all over the place, but just to be sure I dragged my brush backwards against some paper towel to wick off any excess runniness:

 

 

So when I start in on an area I like to start on a broad bit of it and see how the brush and paint are behaving that day.  That way if they're doing anything weird because of temperature or humidity changes, I find out before I ruin something.  So here's the first pass:

 

 

 

Gross, right?  But as I work around the model I start working my way inwards towards the demarcation where skin meets cloth (or bone, or whatever).  I tend to lay down some paint and then rotate the model to another part, and just repeat until done.  This gives me a chance to get used to twisting the piece around, handling it (without dropping it, we hope), and checking out details so I can start to plan my attack on those after.  Eventually, all this twisting and turning results in a basecoat:

 

 

 

You'll notice I went over the lines a bit, but that was mostly in spots where I don't want a thick, dark line anyway.  I'll have an opportunity to touch up my lining (and any spots I missed) before I begin my layering.   

 

 

[Guindyloo]

So once I had a solid basecoat down on the skin, I moved on to her eyes. I like to do the eyes right after basecoating the skin so that I can easily touch things up when I make mistakes. 

I should note at this point that for all detail work, I use Rosemary & Co Kolinsky Sable series 33 brushes. I've tried a lot of good quality brushes and these have been my favourite. The hold a very nice, pointy tip and they're a very reasonable price. I'm not saying that these are the "right" brushes, they're just what I personally prefer. Use whatever good quality brushes work for you.

 

So first I started out by blocking in the entire eye area with Brown Liner.

That looks horrifying.

 

Then I took Warcolours One Coat Beige to paint in the eyes themselves. This is the paint that I always use for the "whites" of the eyes. You really don't want to use a pure white, as that is generally far too stark and contributes to the surprised look that mini eyes can sometimes have.

You can see here that I messed up a bit on her left eye. So I went back in with Brown Liner and cleaned that up.

 

Much better.

 

Then I decided that I wanted her eyes to be green, so I looked through my paints and chose a green that has good coverage and is bright enough to show from a distance without being too bright as to look unrealistic. If you're not familiar with the coverage of your paints, definitely test them out before trying to put them on the eyes. A lot of greens have a tendency to be a bit translucent and will cause you frustration in trying to get a solid coat in such a tiny little space. When you're painting eyes, you want to try to do everything you can in one pass if at all possible. I chose Vallejo Game Color Jade Green. It was a little bit brighter than I wanted though, so I added just a brush-full of Brown Liner into it.

 

The top portion is the paint right out of the bottle, the bottom portion had the Brown Liner added. Note that I did not thin this paint at all.

 

Then I placed that to the right side of both of her eyes. You don't want to leave too much of the "whites" showing, as again, that will lead to that surprised look.

And a shot from her left side:

Is it just me or does she look like Sandra Bullock in this picture?

 

I was a little bit messy, so, again, I cleaned up the outlines with Brown Liner.

Much better.

 

Then I decided to highlight the irises. So I added just a touch of the Warcolours One Coat Beige to the Jade Green just to lighten it a tad.

The lightened part is in the upper left corner. Sorry that picture's so blurry.

 

Then I did my best to get that in the bottom half of the irises. When highlighting irises, as opposed to most other things, you want the bottom half to be lighter, like painting a gemstone.

Close enough!

 

Then I took Warcolours One Coat Black to add the pupil. You can use any black, but I specifically used this one because it is very, very opaque so I knew I could get it done in one pass as long as my aim was good.

I covered up a lot of the lighter green colour, especially in the right eye, but I didn't feel like it was worth doing over.

 

Next, I added the glint in her eyes. I think this is a really important step when you're painting eyes, but it's not an easy one. The glint will not only denote that the eye is shiny, it also makes them look more alive and really helps to show the direction of the eye. So I used Warcolours One Coat White because, again, high opacity means I should hopefully only have to do it once.

And fail. Her right eye looks good to me but the left one went very much awry. Ok, not the end of the world, we just have to try again.

 

So I threw some green back in there and then black again and then tried again with the white.

Close enough!

 

Then I took my basecoat colour again and cleaned up around the eyes.

 

Those last pictures are extra terrible, but you'll see the finished eyes again soon.

[buglips*the*goblin]

 

 

 

More basecoating done.  The downside of doing it all before any highlighting is that it is a bit dull and takes a long time.  But once all this is done and the fun begins, it will pick up nearer the end.  This lets me get all the ugly bits out of the way up front, and it means I wind up with a lot fewer going to the shelf of shame.

 

So her cape I used old pro paint slate that I darkened up with MSP brown liner.  Her hair I did in straight old pro paint granite.  The crystal is coat d'arms blood red darkened with brown liner.  For the earth, I knew I wanted to use old pro paint shield brown but it seemed a bit plain on its own so I mixed it 3 parts shield brown to one part old pro paint troll flesh.  I figured the extra bit of green might make it look peaty or boggy or something.  I then darkened this with... brown liner. 

 

Many of you have noticed a theme.  In general I tend to pick a midtone and then darken it and lighten it to get my shade and highlight colours.  This lets me take a colour I like and do what I need to get my blended triad, even if no triad exists.  This is also part of my "I don't know what I'm doing so I will therefore do it anyway" method of painting.  When in doubt, try!  It works more often than it doesn't.  I use brown liner to shade most times instead of black because brown liner is dark enough to do the job most times but, unlike pure black, plays better with certain colours (yellow being one).  It's less likely to do something weird on me, which means I'm less likely to have something to fix. 

[Guindyloo]

Alright, so continuing on with the skin. First of all we should have a little chat. Normal human skintones scare me. I don't know why, they just always have, so at every opportunity, I choose to give my minis abnormal fantasy skintones. It's a bad habit. So when we decided on painting up this figure, I was very hesitant. She's obviously all skin. So I tried to come up with every excuse possible to give her a fantasy skintone. The problem was, well, it wasn't a problem because I needed to be forced into doing a regular skintone, but the thing was that I had already decided on the rest of the colour palette and a fantasy skintone wasn't going to work with that. So I resigned myself to making the attempt. When you're trying to improve your painting skill, it's often not only a good thing, but necessary for you to force yourself out of your comfort zones.

So that's where we are with this skin. 

 

Since my basecoat and eyes were done, I continued on with layering the next level up, which was straight MSP Rosy Skin, thin just a little. I probably did a good 85% of the skin with this, leaving the original basecoat only in the lowest areas.

 

Then I decided to deepen up the darkest shadow areas. I added a bit more of the Frozen Flesh to the original basecoat mix. Which ended up looking like this:

It's the paint in the lower left corner, with the 2 original paints at the top and the basecoat mix  below them.

 

I was a little overzealous with this in some areas and it started to look a little bit too much like bruised skin, so I tried to tone it down some with a mix between the deepest shade and the original basecoat. I don't have any pictures of this on my palette because I mixed it directly on my brush. Whenever I'm layering, I tend to do a lot of this push and pull back and forth.

 

So then I went back to highlighting. I used half Rosy Skin and half Rosy Highlight.

 

Next I went to straight Rosy Highlight, making sure to tighten up the areas that I was highlighting to the highest areas.

 

Then I added a little bit of white to the Rosy Highlight, I believe it was about half and half. I did this only on the highest points and mainly stuck to highlighting the face with this.

 

So here's where I decided that things were looking too peachy. So I took MSP Clear Magenta and thinned it down to a glaze.

 

Now, unfortunately, I'm going to have to apologize again because I didn't take a picture after I applied this to the skin and that is because I immediately hated how it looked and freaked out a little bit and went straight into "Great, I ruined the skin" crisis mode and just wanted to fix it as quickly as possible. This led to me making a glaze of Rosy Skin and going over everything after the magenta glaze. That's when I remembered to take a picture again.

 

 

So that's where her skin is at, aside from some touch up that I did once I realized how bruisey the shadows were looking and after doing some other things. And also I finally painted her back. Again, I don't know why I failed to take a picture of her back.

[buglips*the*goblin]

 

 

 

This will be my last update for tonight.  Not a bad evening's work for such a piece with so much going on.  I could do a little more, but I'd have to bust out a new brush for the fiddly bits and don't really want to do that last thing.  Instead I opted to put some MSP bone shadow on wherever I could.  The bone triad is the only true triad I'll use on this piece, but it's very good at its job so it doesn't need my meddling.  Bone shadow is a tricky colour though, and time consuming, because it takes a while to get where it's going.  It goes on sort of... greasy, I guess I'd say.  But it's worth the effort because when it gets there it's goood.

 

I also decided to sort out the fabrics on the two skellies who need it.  I knew one would be old pro paint gnoll flesh, a sort of sickly yellow.  So I darkened it with brown liner and put it on the middle guy.  For the other one I thought a sort of ashy blue, but then I spotted my bottle of pro paint rust and thought "what a great colour that would be for this if it wasn't quite so vibrant".  Then I thought, hey, adding troll flesh to the shield brown worked, maybe it would work here.  So I did 3 parts rust to 1 part troll flesh and liked what I got, then darkened it with brown liner to basecoat the fabric on the rightmost guy.  

 

 

[Glitterwolf]

Thank you both, I love this!

 

On a sidenote, I accidently clicked on "Ignore Signature" from Buglips.

No idea what that means or how to restore it?

[knarthex]

Great job you two!

[Guindyloo]

2 hours ago, Glitterwolf said:

On a sidenote, I accidently clicked on "Ignore Signature" from Buglips.

No idea what that means or how to restore it?

Go to the very top of the forum where it says your name in the top right corner and click on it. From the dropdown, click on Account Settings. The Overview section should be the default view and to the right of that screen, it will say "Other Settings" click on "Ignored Users" below that. It will list Buglips under your Ignored Users section with a note that you're ignoring his signature. Next to his name, click on the little Gear and select to stop ignoring him. You will then be able to see his signature again.

[Chaoswolf]

Very cool, you guys!