Athena: FeR bust

[Corporea]

Ok Reaper Buddies!  Since I can't go outside on account of Monster Hurricane and I still (squee!) have power, I'm painting a bust. I thought it might be fun to try to do another "how to" hopefully to give some insight into busts and how I approach them.  I may ramble a bit like usual!

 

So, my standard bust approach to to pick something I want to work on and pick a photo to use as a guide.  This bust is Athena from FeR miniatures.  I can't seem to find a good unpainted example and since I'd already basecoated mine, here is the box art from Pepa:

 

Please note- Pepa is truly awesome and the painted example above is NOT mine!  

 

As you can see, it's the Greek Goddess Athena complete with her trusty owl.  I'm tired of light skin though, and I need to practice my darker skintones.  I'm using this bust to do that.  The bust comes in several pieces: main torso, owl, owl wing and front arm.  I drill all my holes for pins and deal with my mold lines, attach her to a cork and prime.  Then I find more mold lines and tackle those.  I wait on assembly until most of the painting is done to make it easier.

 

Next I pick colors I think I might use and try to remember them.  If I'm smart I write them down somewhere.  I highly recommend that!

 

Hmmn. This is one where the swatches don't really reflect reality.  Walnut brown is dark, and mahogany brown is a nice deep red-brown but much lighter than walnut.  At any rate, I'm also using Anne's fancy red shade yellow which is like a bright golden yellow for the cloth and some ochers.  I'll try to list those later when I get into the cloth.  But those are the skin tones I want to use.  Initially I mixed a fun shade for my basecoat thinking I wanted to go more greenish in my shadows, but I changed my mind.  For completeness sake, the basecoat below is a mix of:

 

 

Ends up fairly gray due to the red and green together, which is why I decided to just go warmer.  I think I'd fight too much working in the green.  I may just glaze it in later in certain areas, but I'll get to that.

 

Ok, next I want to pick a light direction.  This is super important on larger minis, because they add interest.  It allows me to go deeper with some shadows and higher with certain highlights.  This makes the viewer's eye bounce around.  This is a good thing.  We want to keep the viewer interested in the mini, so all out little tricks are designed to do just that!

 

 

Here I've held the mini up to a bright light source and taken the pictures.  I could choose to use this as a reference as I go, to make sure I make the light look natural as it flows over the form.  This brings up a good point.  See how certain parts of the mini are brighter?  Like the SCM muscle in the neck and the collarbones? 

 

 

They stick out when the neck is flexed in one direction and the collarbones have very thin skin over them.  They catch light.  Like the nose and the cheekbones, the area above the top lip and the chin... all of these either have thinner skin or stick out farther, catching most light sources.  Using the idea of "volumes" in the face helps paint it more naturally.  Knowing where things go and how they fit together helps paint the larger faces.

 

Here's an example courtesy of google:

 

See how they've broken the surface up into geometric shapes?  We can do that with painting just like drawing.

 

 

I decided to play with my olive skin and disliked it immediately.  At this point I was playing around, and didn't have a model to follow.  I wasn't sure what skintone I wanted.  But as long as I use thin layers, I can always paint over it.  I decided after this to go back to google like a good Erin and pick someone to copy.  

 

 

Isn't she gorgeous?  Naema Hossain from Bangladesh.  Yay!  Inspiration always helps me paint, and it's a lot easier to follow a map than to make it up as I go along.  The light source in this photo is more or less what I want, and it's a high resolution photo, which means I can zoom way in to get the eyes the way I want.

 

 

Now I've worked in a bunch of the mahogany brown in glazes over the basecoat and added in highlights where I see them on the photo. See how that starts to define the face more.  I've also decided on painting a yellow patterned sari and I'll go with black hair.  Note- I am NOT using a pure black here, just the walnut brown as my off black.

 

 

puttering along, pushing and pulling. The blends don't have to be smooth and I'm really only worried about making the anatomy make sense at this point.  All minis enter this weird ugly stage almost up until the point where they're finished. This is normal.  It doesn't mean you're doing something wrong.

 

 

I worked in some shadows and cleaned up my lines and decided her eyes were just too blank.  I can only have dead eye on a mini for so long. I still have to straighten up her gaze and clean the eyes, but at least they're not staring at me anymore. I also love how gaze helps develop personality in miniatures.  It really changes then feel of the piece. 

 

 

 

Not sure what I changed, but I tried to make myself stop and take photos every now and then.  It's hard because I get in a groove and want to paint while I have energy and direction.  When I stop I lose focus.  Sigh.

 

 

Ok I played with the blending and the lips for sure.  Probably a bunch of layers I don't remember.  The key is layering and keep referencing the photo to make certain I'm following my map.

 

I decided to take a break from skin and work on the hair.  Hair is fun!

 

 

See where I've taken the walnut brown and mixed it with the olive skin?  I did a stark layer to show where I'd put the highlights. When anything bends in relation to light, you'll get a highlight on the bend- more or less. This is a good rule of thumb to tackle hair. Notice, I'm not painting individual strands, but blocking out my highlights?

 

 

Same on the crown of the head.

 

 

I like this photo- it shows how I've blocked in a lot of volumes, but haven't bothered with the blending yet.  This will keep me from getting lost later.

 

 

Then I worked in some linen white. Black hair is, well, dark, but it still has high highlights. Not all of them are the same. Again- I go back to my light source. Parts that sitck out further or are close to the light get higher highlights.  This is probably another one of those sneaky tricks I should mention.  Varying the intensity of both shadows and highlights add interest and make the mini more natural.  Sometimes when we harp on contrast, we don't mean taking everything up to white and down to black. We mean contrasting the depth of our shadows and highlights- making some pop more than others.  This is a gold-level trick I think.  

 

 

And I started to work on the highlights on the braid.  As long as most of the hair stays walnut brown, it will look black.  It just has some very narrow highlights.  That's all black is- being very careful with how much highlighting I do.

 

Ok, more when I'm done with my ice cream break!  Or maybe after I clean out my Diablo stash... maybe tomorrow... fingers crossed for power!

Let me know if you have questions or if I can explain something better or differently to make more sense. 

 

 

[vutpakdi]

Yay!  You have power and are relaxed enough to paint!  

 

I love the detailed description of your thought process and and the step by step pictures.

 

I picked up the The Atlas Beauty by Mihaela Noroc.  Lovely pictures for inspiration.  You can see some of the pictures online.

 

Ron

[SGHawkins09]

Fantastic job, I love the direction you are going with her.

[LittleBluberry]

I especially love how you have painted her gaze off to the side, like she's got her eye on someone.  A little more life and authority versus the box art's dreamy half-lidded look.  

[Cyradis]

She's looking great so far! Thank you for sharing all of your insights! 

[HolkDiggity]

I'm eagerly following, as I picked up a few FeR busts myself. They are fantastic, aren't they? Yours is looking excellent so far!

[Glitterwolf]

Super!

[buglips*the*goblin]

Niiice.

[Rigel]

Magnificent! Pin or bookmark this somewhere as a tutorial/masterclass.

[Corporea]

Thanks everyone!  Today was a good day.  I had french toast and bacon.  yum!  I also painted for a little while...

Ron- that book looks awesome!  I bookmarked the site.

 

So, I decided to run with the sideways gaze and started working on her expression.  An bunch of things go into expression, and sometimes it's hard with a mini to change the expression beyond the sculpted anatomy  But there are a few things that are flexible.  The easiest way to play with expression is to mess with the eyebrows.  Eyebrows do a lot to tell folks what we're thinking and feeling.  They can go up or down, and their position lends expression to our faces.

 

I've cleaned and even up her eyes a bit, added a frown line in between her brows and fiddled with her eyebrows.  She's definitely got her gaze on something now!  I still need to clean them and add some individual hairs, but their position helps give her some personality.

Here's a different angle:

 

Then I blended the skin some more.  When I paint skin, I want smooth transitions that accentuate the curve of each segment of the anatomy.  When I first start painting, I'm not too worried about the smoothness, and I tend to wet blend everything.  As I get further on, it's more important to have myself a little gradient of paint that doesn't require as much mixing.

 

I take my wet palette and mix a few shades in between each of my colors.  That way I can grab a given shade and start glazing it on in thin layers and there won't be as much of a transition between each layer.  Glazing is probably the most intuitive way for me to get smooth skin. I think of skin like what it is in real life- layers upon layers of thin cells.  If I layer on a bunch of thin glazes, I can mimic it's nature, and make it smoother.

 

 

Here I've done some glazing and then glazed over everything with lava orange.  I wanted her to be a bit warmer.  That's the other magic thing about glazing.  It can change the color if I'm not happy with it.  It's like a filter on a photo editing program.  Old school style before we had those new fangled digital filters!  Ok, more later!

 

 

[Cyradis]

Question - since she looks awesome and you're on a stage where this seems like a logical question!

 

I've just been playing with wet blending lately (I have humidity and it is magical), and been glazing for a while but it feels different now. Wet blending is delightfully sloppy, but seems like it can also potentially be smooth for transitions (if you want). I like glazing for layers, like you do, and giving new bits of detail and tints to things. A wee bit of Clear Yellow super thinly glazed onto foreheads might be a new favorite feature (thanks to your color map thing of Lincoln). 

 

What is your method for smoothing the edges of a glaze? Are they always so thin that they don't need blurring at the edge? On Elrond I was kinda wet-smushing the edges of them (swiftly rinse my brush, dab it, then fuzzle it at the sides of the glaze). Some I made more tinty, some a fat-glaze which had harder edges unless I actively blurred them. Any preferred blurring technique? 

[Corporea]

I do the same thing you do with my glazes.  I'll clean my brush on the sponge or in the water after putting down the paint, and tease out the edges. I can get the edges very thin that way. Each little bit of water thins the edges more.   If you don't have the humidity for that you can feather towards either your highlights or shadows to pull most of the color where you want it to be thickest.  Or do a layering technique where the difference between the layers is minuscule- instead of the 9 samples in the pic above, you'd have to do at least twice that.   I'll try to post a picture to explain tonight or tomorrow. The key with this is to not mess with the paint after it's reached a certain level of dryness, no matter what.

 

Have you ever noticed how sometimes you move the paint and it leaves little holes in the layer?  Or glumps up in one spot? Paint is made of a bunch of stuff, but the pigment is a very tiny particulate solid suspended in the binder, etc. It wants to stick to the surface, and if you mess with it after the binder has started to dry, you will be moving the actual pigment bits.  This is irritating because it will ruin a carefully blended area.  When that happens I just put a good opaque layer of paint over it and reblend around it.  It's fixable as long as we thin our paint.  If the area is getting bumpy from too thick segments, sand it and start again.  I had to do that on her cheek in between pics. Somehow I manage to get a stray fingerprint of sealer I was using to smooth something somewhere else on her cheek and it left a raised area.  I tried to smooth it out with sealer around it, but it was a wash and I just redid her cheek.  It's cool- mistakes happen.  They're not the end of the world as long as we don't panic. But know that they're normal and happen to everyone!

[Kuro Cleanbrush]

She is looking amazing!  Thanks so much for taking the time to do this step-by-step too; I am just busting in to the world of busts (pun intentional  ) myself, and I realize that my normal approach to faces will not be sufficient for a 1/10th bust, so this gives me some much-needed guidance!

[Corporea]

A great exercise with busts is to pick a high resolution photo and either have it up on the screen or print it out and copy it onto the bust. Look close at the eyes especially. On smaller minis the way I paint eye is completely different from on a bust.  The lids I tackle a bit differently, and they are very dependent on the light source. Also, spend the most time on the eyes. They capture the soul of the mini and we tend to notice them first when we look at a person.  

 

I worked some green into her sclera (white of eye,) though often I'll work a pale blue in.  If we look close at eyes...

...you can see the bluish shade. I use an off white for the sclera and only use pure white for the reflected light.  Notice how the reflected light is usually over the iris, not the pupil? The iris is a muscle which  contracts or relaxes to accommodate light, so in a larger mini, you can paint in the little striations or iris lines!  Its' fun!

[Morihalda]

Thank you for your step by steps, I'm loving that skin tone already. I'm glad you're staying safe!