Buglips and Guindyloo paint Dungeon Dwellers 07002: Baran Blacktree

[Guindyloo]

Hi, friends! In continuing with our plan to catch up with painting the Dungeon Dwellers as a joint WIP together as they come out, can I interest you in some Baran Blacktree?

 

Buglips and I will be painting him in our usual fashion, but if you haven't already, make sure that you check out Rhonda Bender's awesome PDF painting guide for him here: Dungeon Dwellers

 

Y'all probably know by now how these go, but if not, check out our Thanis the Bonecaller thread where it all began and that'll give you links to all of the other joint WIP threads we've done. 

 

[buglips*the*goblin]

 

And here's my Baran Blacktree, fresh from his pack.  The busted tab came that way, but it's okay because I'm not sure it would have fit in anyway, this guy has a wide stance!

 

I'm looking forward to this, he's a cool piece and has some challenging features to test my ingenuity. 

[WhiteWulfe]

Can't wait to see what kinds of neat twists and turns come about, and how the two of you approach such things, including colours!

[Sophie was taken]

Bonus points to whoever leaves his weapon curved like that and paints it up as a banana!

[Sylverthorne]

7 hours ago, buglips*the*goblin said:

 

And here's my Baran Blacktree, fresh from his pack.  The busted tab came that way, but it's okay because I'm not sure it would have fit in anyway, this guy has a wide stance!

 

I'm looking forward to this, he's a cool piece and has some challenging features to test my ingenuity. 

 

If he's anything like mine, I can assure you it won't. I had to clip the tab on mine, and shave it a lot to get it to fit, and even after that, it fit tight enough I'm not sure I will have to glue him ...

 

No, I don't have pics. I keep forgetting those. ;p

[Guindyloo]

Yeah, his tab definitely doesn't fit into the slot...

 

 

I didn't try to make him fit, I just cut off the tab and pinned him to my base. If you don't want to deal with pinning or going through a lot of trouble to shave down the tab to make him fit, I would suggest sizing up your base if that's an option.

 

The bendy banana sword aside, the mold lines on this guy were pretty standard but I do have a bit of extra metal in the arm hole here.

I shaved as much out as I could with my exacto and on dryfit, I think it's going to work out just fine.

 

Just like with Rictus, his arm is going to block enough that I want to leave it off until the end, but it shouldn't need any greenstuffing at the end.

So you're going to be seeing this base a lot and I want to explain first and foremost that it is not meant to look like that. First of all, just like with Rictus, I used a base stamp that I have with some greenstuff to make a base for him. Because of the size and position of his cloak, I wanted to get a basecoat going on the base beforehand.........and then I realized that I had completely forgotten to scrub Baran with dish soap to clean off any mold release that might've been left on the model. But I had already pinned him to the base.  So you're seeing toothbrush scrub damage and I'll deal with it later.

 

Alright, so to start out, I basecoated his face with MSP Golden Skin. Then I took Brown Liner to line around his face since the underside of the visor is in complete shadow. Then I blocked in the eyes with MSP Chestnut Brown.

He looks kinda like a motorcycle cop, doesn't he?

 

Then I took Warcolours One Coat Beige and blocked in the whites of the eyes and now he looks super creepy.

 

And I'm just going to pause for a minute here because in person, I didn't realize how low on his face I've painted his eyes. You've probably noticed this before - you paint the eyes on your mini and think they look pretty good...and then you see the pictures on your phone or computer and you're like "omg how did I not notice that?" and that's where I'm at with these eyes. Obviously with the visor where it is, these eyes are not easy to get to. So I'll think about giving them another go. Anyway, continuing on...

 

So then I took....I'm actually not sure if I used black or Brown Liner to put in the iris/pupil.

 

And then I made one attempt at putting a white dot and then immediately gave up and instead cleaned up the bottom of the eyes with my skin colour.

They look too low, right? Let me know what y'all think.

 

So next I used Chestnut Brown again to sketch in my darkest shadows.

 

Then I mixed Chestnut Brown with Golden Shadow to soften the harsh shadows.

 

Aaaaaaaand I gotta be honest with you here, I was doing a lot of back and forth and I can't really tell you exactly what changed from picture to picture for the next couple of pictures. So I'll just tell you that I pushed and pulled back and forth between Golden Skin and Golden Shadow.

 

 

 

Here I can tell you for sure that I brought in Golden Highlight for the top highlights.

 

Hmmmm.... I don't know, what do y'all think?

[LarsM]

His face looks really good, but the eyes does look a bit low.

[Chaoswolf]

Yeah, unfortunately his eyes do look a little low...

 

 

[Guindyloo]

Why do y'all have to ruin my day? 

Nah, you're right. I'll see if I can shift the eyes up a bit. The more I look at him, the more I see the sloth from Ice Age......or Sloth from The Goonies. Either way, it's not a good look. 

[Cyradis]

I like him Guindy, but I think the face needs more poking still. The visor is going to block a lot of light from his face, so even a Caucasian will appear a bit darker or perhaps even grayed - probably for the part of his face like upper lip and higher. If you get the top of his face darker, and the tip of his chin brighter, it would have a bigger impact.  

[Silvervane]

I agree the eyes look a bit low, I generally don't worry when I'm blocking in the eyes.  As they are usually one of my first steps.  Easier to fix the lining and shape of the eyes with the skin shadow. And lots of people have bags under their eyes.  He could be exhausted from a long adventure. 

[hosercanadian]

The other option for the visor is to try adding the angle of light shinig through the slots...something beyond my skills but maybe you might pull it off.

[buglips*the*goblin]

So, as Guindy noted he doesn't really fit into the slot even if his tab is intact.  Slotta bases are not an exact science.  Some years back I acquired an enormous box of Ral Partha Crucible figures mint in blister and only after I got them did I realize they were slotted bases.  After meddling with them some I eventually gave them away because I didn't like messing with slots.  Fit for tabs could range from perfect to abominable.  It should be noted that when I had those I hadn't yet discovered greenstuff.  In retrospect, I may have given away rather a lot of neat figures - it was like 60-100 packs, maybe more.

 

But now I'm learning to work with slotted figures, which is nice because it opens up lots of cool stuff from Reaper's Warlord line that previously I shied away from. 

 

Since my Baran Blacktree's tab was busted in any case, I decided to cut it all off and drill some holes in his feet for pins.  I used a pin vise for the holes, paper clips for the pins. 

 

 

 

I'd like to note here that I'd have likely done this in any case, even if his tab had fit perfectly.  With Rictus I could insert the tab and greenstuff around it, but with Baran that was impossible - he's got quite a lot of cape overhang that's very low to the base.  This means the easiest route is to the do the work on the base first, then attach him - and it's a lot easier to find space for two small pinholes than an entire tab.

 

 

So I mixed up some greenstuff and crammed it into the dip in the base.  I didn't worry about getting fingerprints all over it since I'd be turning it into broccoli base anyway, and that would cover them up.

 

 

Then I poked it with a T-pin a bazillion times and, while it was a bit stiff but not fully cured, found where the tab line under the base still was and jabbed Baran's pins into it to make some mounting holes:

 

 

The tab slot is not centered, so I chose to make the smaller side his "front" and the larger side his "back".  You can do it either way, I did it this way to give his ample cape a lot to overhang.  Once the greenstuff had dried I primered it and gave it a wash of thinned Reaper Brown Liner:

 

 

I also did the same with Baran himself:

 

 

And his shield arm, which I almost forgot about entirely:

 

 

Once that had dried, I decided to do the base first.  So I took some old reaper pro paint olive and darkened it about 1:1 with reaper brown liner:

 

 

Then I thinned the olive about 1:1 water to paint, thin enough to be manageable but not so thin it just ran all over the place:

 

 

Since his cape covers most of the back and thus creates a shadow, I decided to add some highlights to the front.  First by adding some yellow to the olive:

 

 

And then going all the way up to yellow:

 

 

At this point if I had any cork or similar mounting material I might have painted Baran all the way up before gluing him in.  But since I didn't, I decided to paint just his bottom parts in their shadow colours to get them done and out of the way.  I made my ratios as precise as possible, which was pretty easy:  1:1 paint + liner for the cape; 2:1 liner + paint for his boots.  The boots were coat d'arms rat brown, and the increased liner ratio is because coat d'arms tends to overpower the liner.  For his cape it was old pro pait dragon blue, a nice mid-blue colour, and the brown liner darkened it much more easily.  With these ratios I should be able to paint parts I left out at this stage with no noticeable colour change.

 

 

And once those dried, I glued him on:

 

 

Overall that went well, though it's at this stage I realized my greenstuff wasn't flat but was actually a low mound.  This means there's some gap underneath his toes.  I'll jab a little greenstuff in there and poke it into broccoli.  Hopefully it won't look like he's sinking into the ground. 

[Guindyloo]

On 3/20/2018 at 10:24 AM, Cyradis said:

I like him Guindy, but I think the face needs more poking still. The visor is going to block a lot of light from his face, so even a Caucasian will appear a bit darker or perhaps even grayed - probably for the part of his face like upper lip and higher. If you get the top of his face darker, and the tip of his chin brighter, it would have a bigger impact.  

My skin tones need more poking in general. It's such a small area though and honestly, I don't think it's worth the time. It's not often that I decide that something isn't worth the time, but if I sit here and obsess over getting his face perfect, when skin tones and faces are something that I very much need to work on, I will never get the rest of him done. For me, that's the #1 cause of things getting shoved onto my Shelf of Shame - I'm trying to get something on it perfect, when it's never going to be perfect because I'm not there yet, and I really just need to move on. There are some things where putting the time and effort into that single mini is going to pay off in experience, but futzing around with a single face is not one of them for me.

That's not to say that your suggestion is not a good one, I think you're technically correct. But also, his face is in so much actual shadow that such detail isn't even going to show unless you're tilting his face back into the light like I am for pictures. Otherwise, all you're really seeing is the bottom half of his face anyway.

See? Lots of actual shadow, so I think it would be very easy to overdo the highlights on the bottom half of the face.

 

On 3/20/2018 at 10:38 AM, Silvervane said:

I agree the eyes look a bit low, I generally don't worry when I'm blocking in the eyes.  As they are usually one of my first steps.  Easier to fix the lining and shape of the eyes with the skin shadow. And lots of people have bags under their eyes.  He could be exhausted from a long adventure. 

Agreed, it's why I do the eyes directly after basecoating the face.... I just hadn't realized that having the eyes 1/16th of a millimeter too low was going to make such a drastic difference. Had I thought to check the pictures while painting, I wouldn't have moved on to shading and highlighting the skin. I just got overly frustrated with the visor being in the way and decided to call them good enough prematurely. Good thing it's just paint and better late than never! 

 

On 3/20/2018 at 1:19 PM, hosercanadian said:

The other option for the visor is to try adding the angle of light shinig through the slots...something beyond my skills but maybe you might pull it off.

You highly overestimate my skill level, sir.  It's a very cool idea though!

 

So I totally re-painted the eyes.

Those are terrible pictures, but hopefully y'all will agree that his eyes look better now. I painted over the bottom half of the eyes with MSP Golden Shadow and then painted them back in so they would be more eye shaped. They're now just that tiny bit higher and also about half the size that they were. If y'all have any other suggestions for them, I'd be glad to hear them but with how small they are and that visor in the way, we may have reached the best that I can do.

 

So I decided to move on to the cloak next. I'm going to throw a disclaimer on here because something we haven't reiterated for the past few WIP threads is the point that painting should be fun and if you're having fun then you're doing it right; getting something technically right is often just a bonus. So when I'm telling y'all how I did something in these WIPs, I'm not saying this is how things should be done, I'm just presenting to you how I tend to go about things. I am not a professional painter and I don't think for a second that I have all the answers. I'm just a rando that loves painting and has learned a few things or figured some things out here and there and in a lot of cases is still figuring things out. I may not always do things right and I may do things in a way that someone absolutely disagrees with. But if something I say or do helps someone else, even if it's just taking elements or by NOT doing something the way I do it, as long as it helps, that's awesome.

So why am I pointing that out right at this moment? Well, because what I'm about to show with this cloak is going to be so convoluted, that I would actually actively say not to try to follow what I did because it was probably a lot of unnecessary steps to get from A to Z (not even Z because it's not done) because I didn't entirely know what I was doing. I often don't know what I'm doing. I just try things out and slop paint on things and try to figure my way out. Sometimes it works out really well and sometimes it doesn't. So I don't want anyone to think that my showing the steps of this cloak is me giving a tutorial on cloak painting or endorsing going through these specific steps. Cool? Cool.

 

So I started out by basecoating it with MSP Jade Green. Generally I basecoat with my midtone and maybe this will end up being my midtone but even I didn't know at this point. I just saw this colour and said "yes, I want to put that on this cloak" because sometimes that's how I choose colours. So once that was solid, I took MSP Brilliant Blue and mixed a little of that in with the Jade Green.

I don't know why the lighting went so weird on these next couple of palette pictures. Brilliant Blue is showing more true to colour here, but Jade Green is way off.

I took that colour and I sketched in where I thought the shadows should fall.

I'm going to disagree with the placement on some of that later down the road, but this was just about sketching it in and not getting it right from the start.

 

Then I mixed in a little bit more of the Brilliant Blue.

 

And sketched in some deeper shadows.

It's weird how that stark contrast makes it look like I mocked that up in MS Paint.

 

Then I added a little bit more Brilliant Blue to the previous mix and the lighting changed back to normal on my palette.

"Normal" does not mean it's a good picture, it's just back to the usual quality for me.

Even deeper shadows.

 

Then I thinned down some of the original mix (just a little bit of the Brilliant Blue mixed into the Jade Green) and softened all of the edges.

 

Then I took this thrilling action shot....

 

Now here's where things get really fuzzy.... I put the shadows back in, mostly with straight Brilliant Blue, but then there was some glazing and some more mixing and a whole lot of back and forth to get the blending right.

 

And then this...

 

And then this...

 

And then this is where it wound up at the end of the night, but the cloak still needs plenty more work.

 

That was probably a solid 2 hours of back and forth blending. Probably needs another 4 hours or so. I might try to do it in another 2.

[Glitterwolf]

Amazing!