Buglips and Guindyloo paint Reaper 01614: Con Crud, Convention Zombie

[Guindyloo]

Hello fine people (and other assorted things) of the Reaper forum!

 

Continuing in our project of teaming up to show you two different methods to go about painting the same miniature, Buglips and I decided that we would do a WIP thread for Con Crud, Convention Zombie from the 2017 Reapercon swag bag! He's a great little figure, sculpted by Gene Van Horne, that we thought we could have some fun with.

 

This will be our second shared WIP thread in this series of ours, in case you missed it, check out our first one where we painted Thanis the Bonecaller:

 

As with that one, I will be covering my usual method of painting for display, and Buglips will be approaching the figure with his own usual "fast-but-decent method." As with the last one, Buglips' method will be much faster than mine will be and you'll get to see where our two styles diverge. We will be sharing our own issues, thoughts and methods with you in the hopes that someone will find such things useful.

 

So on to the mini!

Here's my Con Crud, fresh out of his blister:

 

I prepped him in my usual way, with some diamond files to grind off the mold lines and bit of flash that you can see on his outstretched foot and hand. He has some notable mold lines through his hair and back and down the left (his left) side of his face. I'll show you throughout the process how I'll tackle those.

 

So here he is after I primed him with Reaper's Brush-On Primer in white, thinned down with some water. As usual, I only did one thin coat so as not to obscure the details on him and I took a couple of additional shots from different angles so you can see some of the mold lines that I'll need to work on a little more down the road.

 

Edited November 16, 2017 by Guindyloo

[buglips*the*goblin]

DON'T GET BIT BY THE CON CRUD!

 

 

Con Crud, for those who may not know, is the nickname for cold/flu diseases convention-goers frequently pick up as a result of so many people being together and shaking hands, handling stuff, etc.  Con Crud is also the name of this fun little guy sculpted by my friend Gene Van Horne (who also drew my neato Buglips avatar picture).  Gene makes a lot of really cool stuff, and you should buy lots of it.

 

I've been looking forward to this mini because it's a fun little break from my usual adventurers and monsters.  Sometimes people don't like minis outside of their primary interest, and I know a few of Mr. Crud here wound up traded in at the melt table, but I like to let loose now and then and paint something weird, different, and fun!

 

So here's my Crud, fresh from his blister:

 

 

 

You might notice a bit of a powdery look to him, he has a bit of residue that I think is talc powder.  This is used to allow the mold halves to separate easily, and is one reason you should clean your mini with soap and water before painting.  Sometimes other agents can get on them, too, so it's a good habit to get into,

 

So after filing his mold lines and trimming the flash (those extra bits sticking off) I gave him a soap & water bath and once he dried, I gave him a coat of Reaper MSP 09108 brush-on primer:

 

 

 

After that dried, I made a wash out of coat d'arms black and some frontline games capillarity agent like I did on Thanis, only much thinner this time!  This brought out all the details nicely so I can see what I'm doing:

 

 

[buglips*the*goblin]

So the first thing I had to do was figure out a colour for his skin.  The green skin on the handout seemed neat, so I thought I would play around with some pro paint caucasian and assorted greens to see what I might get. 

 

So first I started with 3 caucasian to 1 pro paint troll flesh:

 

 

 

And I didn't like it.  So next I tried 3 caucasian to 1 coat d'arms Bogey Green:

 

 

 

... and I didn't like that.  So then I thought maybe their powers combined would work, so I did 1 part troll flesh, 1 part bogey green, 2 parts caucasian:

 

 

 

 

And that's not bad, but still not what I'm looking for.  It's at this point I realized maybe I was going about it the wrong way, so I tried reversing the ratio.  I used 3 parts pro paint olive to one part caucasian:

 

 

Ding!  Ding! Ding!  Now that's what I'm looking for.  So that sets my midtone, and I darkened it with some msp brown liner to make a shade:

 

 

And then, finally, I put some skin on my Crud (the things we say on this board outlanders will never understand):

 

 

[NecroMancer]

Yay!  I love these threads!  Its a terrific idea!

 

@buglips*the*goblin how many lids do you go through?  I think its a cool idea and haven't seen anyone use those before. 

[buglips*the*goblin]

11 minutes ago, NecroMancer said:

Yay!  I love these threads!  Its a terrific idea!

 

@buglips*the*goblin how many lids do you go through?  I think its a cool idea and haven't seen anyone use those before. 

 

Well they don't make the kind I like with the flat bottoms here anymore, they switched over to ones that don't use a rubber seal.  Those have a little bowl in the middle and don't work as well.  So I recycle the ones I do have and when they get too gunky I drop them in simple green.  I have 20 of them in service now (real 20, not goblin 20) and clean them all out before a night's painting.  Depending on how fast I'm going and how many mixes I need, I can go through all 20 in a night (as I use them I stack them on an old coffee lid so I don't have to clean them out right away) - and at least once I have gone through all 20 twice over in one sitting.  For every colour I use I need a shade, midtone, and highlight, and colours can add up fast depending on how much is going on with the mini.  Old cruddy here is pretty simple, but counting shades and highlights as individual colours, I expect he will total out to around 30 colours. 

Edited November 16, 2017 by buglips*the*goblin

[Guindyloo]

Alright, so since I paint section by section, the first thing I want to tackle is the skin. So I mixed up my basecoat, which is generally my midtone, using a mix of Scale75 Sherwood Green and MSP Spectral Glow.

Straight Sherwood Green in the top left, contaminated Spectral Glow bottom left and my mix is the big blob.

 

It's a somewhat translucent mix and I did thin it a bit, so I think it took me about 3 coats to get a solid basecoat. He has a lot of tears in his clothing, so I wanted to make sure I got all of those areas with my basecoat as well. I wasn't particularly careful about the placement of that, I just wanted to make sure that I got it solidly in there. I'll realize a little later that I missed a spot on his upper right arm.

 

So once I had that done, the next thing that I like to tackle is the eyes. I do this so that when I mess up (and I do mess up the eyes quite a bit on any figure) the clean up is easy by just going back in with my basecoat. So I started out by blocking in the eyes with Blue Liner.

 

His left eye is very much blocked by his left hand and I'm going to struggle a lot with that both with the brush and with the camera. It's a difficult area to get to, but I'll show you how I decided to go about it. Complicating matters a little bit is that there was a mold line running down the middle of that eye. I wasn't worried about trying to fix it since he's a zombie, but my brush did catch on that area a good bit. Here are a couple more shots to show you what we're working around.

 

So I decided to tackle the eyes one at a time, starting with his right eye since that's the easiest one to get to. So I started by blocking in the middle with MSP NMM Gold Highlight for the "whites" of his eyes. Usually I use a light beige colour for the "whites" of my eyes, but since he's a zombie, I wanted him to look rather sickly, so jaundiced eyes seemed like a good idea.

Unfortunately, this is the wonderful picture that I got of that.

Sorry about that.

So I decided to embrace the fun of the sculpt and keep him kind of cartoony looking and to go with that, I decided to give him blue eyes. So I took MSP Ultramarine Blue and both darkened it up with Blue Liner and also lightened a little bit of it with a touch of Spectral Glow.

Blue Liner to the left, Ultramarine Blue/Blue Liner mix at the top, and straight Ultramarine Blue with the Spectral Glow mix off to the side.

 

I took the dark colour and painted in his iris. I generally like to have my minis facing off to one side as that saves me from having to paint in perfect circles and also helps to keep them from having a wide-eyed stare. I actually forgot to take a picture after I did that and started to do the next step before I remembered to take a picture.

 

So then I took the light mix of Ultramarine Blue/Spectral Blue and painted in a half circle on the bottom half of the iris to highlight.

I went outside the lines in the inner corner of the eye with this, but I'll clean that up later.

 

Then I took MSP Pure Black and painted in the pupil. Usually with eyes, I'd just do a little dot of this, but since his eyes are so big, I went larger with this and was careful to try to get a good circle in there.

 

Then I took MSP Pure White and painted in a reflection line. Again, since the eye is so big, I wanted to make this more of a line than a dot and I wanted to have it curve downward just a little to imply the roundness of his eye.

And now he looks so happy about infecting people. 

 

So next up I started to tackle his left eye. Oh boy, this was not easy.

So after this was how getting the yellow in there, I sat and stared at him for a little while. How on earth was I going to paint all of those nice circles in there? I wasn't going to. So I decided to go in another direction. Now a couple of times on dragons, I've painted in blind eyes, so I decided to go that route here as well. Normally when I've gone with that method, it's also been something that I've carefully done, but that wasn't realistic here, so this is going to be a much messier version.

So I started out with painting over all of the yellow with Warcolours Blue Grey 2.

 

Then I mixed up the Blue Grey 2 with MSP HD Ash Grey.

Straight Ash Grey in the 2 blobs at the top, contaminated Blue Grey 2 to the left, the mix between the 2 at the bottom right.

I used that to paint in a circle in the middle of the eye to give the impression of a clouded over iris.

 

Next I made a little bit of a lighter mix of that, although it's not going to look lighter.

It's at the top right

And used that to blob in a highlight at the bottom of the iris.

 

I decided that wasn't light, enough, so I made the mix a little bit lighter and then also mixed a little bit of the Blue Grey 2 with some white.

Lighter grey mix in the top right, white mix at the top middle.

 

I used the lighter grey to lighten up the bottom of the iris.

 

Then I used the Blue Grey 2/white mix to highlight the top portion as sort of a reflection point. Honestly, this went a good bit blobbier than I'd intended.

 

So here's where his eye was after re-outlining with Blue Liner since I'd covered up a good bit of that, and also after cleaning up the borders of his left eye with the skin basecoat. This was not easy to do behind the hand, so it's not perfect by any means, but certainly what I'm going to call good enough.

 

Then I cleaned up the right eye with the skin basecoat as well. I think he looks pretty adorable.

[pcktlnt]

No digs at you, but your blurred pictures from time to time make me chuckle.

[Glitterwolf]

Another great thread!

 

[Guindyloo]

7 hours ago, pcktlnt said:

No digs at you, but your blurred pictures from time to time make me chuckle.

No worries, I’m glad they amuse you. 

I think it happens because sometimes the phone camera delays a little between when it says it took the picture and when it actually takes the picture. Taking a picture after each step doubles the time it takes me to paint something so I’m not good about checking to make sure the picture came out ok like I would if I was just taking end of the night pictures or finished show off pictures. So it’s likely to continue happening and continue amusing you. 

[buglips*the*goblin]

Time to give this guy some pants.  I decided he was probably wearing jeans, so I chose an appropriate blue for the task:

 

 

Then I darkened that up with some reaper brown liner and put it on:

 

 

 

 

Now time for his shirt.  Nothing fancy here, just some old reaper pro paint woodland brown:

 

 

 

He has kind of an Eric Forman vibe happening now.  So next I decided t do the tissue box.  I don't know about you, but in my experience most tissue boxes seem to be a sort of rose colour.  So I found two ral partha paints, amerindian and sembia red, to see what combining them would make:

 

 

 

 

Looks right to me!  Now for the floor.  This has a little texture but not much, so you could pretty much make it whatever surface you wanted.  I decided it was carpet.  Really, really, REALLY ugly carpet.  For some reason when I think of flus I think of hideous carpet.  So I took some ral partha dunkelbrown and added Reaper MSP Mahogany Brown to it (check out that old MSP label, from the ancient sagas of our people):

 

 

 

 

 

Not bad, for ugly carpet.  Not bad at all. 

Edited November 16, 2017 by buglips*the*goblin

[buglips*the*goblin]

So next I had to give him some hair.  I decided he had brown hair, maybe kinda dirty-looking.  So I decided to use old pro paint shield brown, which I darkened using reaper msp brown liner.

 

 

 

Then I used some coat d'arms festering brown on the used tissues to make them suitably gross, and also added it to his teeth.

 

 

Then I used old pro paint dove gray on the fresh tissue still poking up from the tissue box, and on the pill bottle where it will serve as the shadow colour.

 

 

 

And with all that taken care of, I thinned some coat d'arms black and redid any of the lining I had obliterated.  Note that I only lined where different materials met, like between skin and cloth, and not in places like where the rolled-up part of the sleeve met the arm of his shirt.

 

 

[buglips*the*goblin]

Next step was to touch up all my sloppy lining and even out my basecoats. 

 

 

 

 

All that done, I can finally have some real fun!

[Guindyloo]

Alright, so with the eyes done, I went back to working on the skin. I took the basecoat from yesterday and added a little more MSP Spectral Glow to it.

 

And @pcktlnt jinxed me...

That didn't make a huge difference. So I added a little more Spectral Glow to the mix.

 

Then I took straight Scale75 Sherwood Green to start laying in my shadows.

 

Then I added a bit of MSP Stained Olive to the Sherwood Green.

 

Dangit. These motion blur pictures will now be known as pcktjnxes. 

Then I went back to highlighting by adding a little more Spectral Glow to the previous mix.

 

Now we're going to start seeing some nice contrast.

 

A little more Spectral Glow to the mix.

 

 

Then just straight Spectral Glow on the highest points of the face and hands.

 

Then I added a little but of MSP Maggot White to the Spectral Glow.

 

With that, I just highlighted the very highest points of his face.

[knarthex]

Am I the only one that thinks that this looks like Buglips chasing someone with a 12 pack of Taco Bell?????

 

Now I know how I will paint mine.....

[buglips*the*goblin]

So it turned out that the colour I mixed for the carpet was very close to old pro paint chestnut, which simplified the next bit.  I took 3 parts ral partha dunkelbraun and 1 part chestnut:

 

 

Mixed them together and got...

 

 

After my flashbacks to the ghastly 1970s-era carpet in the apartment I grew up in subsided, I stippled this onto the base.  Then I added a little msp polished bone to lighten it and stippled some more.  I just wanted it to look grungy more than anything else.  Then I made some of my 3 part olive to 1 part caucasian skin mix to do a highlight.  Then I reversed the ratio to 3 parts caucasian/1 part olive for the top highlight on the skin.  Somehow I forgot to take pics of all this, so here's the result of both:

 

 

 

Next on to the pants.  So I highlight a little backwards from the way I was taught.  I was instructed to begin in the shadow, drag the brush to the part I wanted bright, and then lift it off to deposit paint.  Repeat until it's light enough.  This is the correct way, but I kept going over the low parts too much.  So to compensate for my gross inability to do it properly, I instead adapted to start at the high points.  I pick out the areas I want brightest and brush over them once or twice to mark them out, like so:

 

 

Then as I highlight, I keep going over these areas instead and work my way to the low ones using a very light touch.  This way if I'm going over something more than once, at least all the paint is going where it should, like so:

 

 

So I'm not sure if that's useful information or not, but thought I should point out how I do it differently than the way it's usually done.  FWIW, my method may actually be bad here and I should maybe eventually learn to do it the right way.