77240 77240 Skeleton Guardians (quick and dirty)

[Sanael]

Six skellies, painted quickly during several lunch breaks, with little intent other than to be available for the table.

 

Given the state of their weapons, it is ironic that I used them to "knock the rust off" a few of my skills.

Color coded for ease of D&D mook-murder. I had a little fun with some traditional heraldic divisions on the shields.

Paints are all Reaper MSP. Blackened Brown played a large role, as did a lovely fleshy-toned sample paint.

 

... Pictures are quite bad, actually. I may reshoot at home.

[Loim]

Excellent.

[Painting Miniatures]

How did you manage the heraldric designs on the shields? They look great btw.

[Sanael]

17 minutes ago, Painting Miniatures said:

How did you manage the heraldric designs on the shields? They look great btw.

Thanks!

 

On something big and flat like the shields, it's super easy! 

 

Some terms:

 

1. Paint the face of the surface with your base color. (For these, I used Coal Black, as that was common to every shield. If I were only doing this for a single model, I would use the more transparent paint as the base. The yellow and orange were right pains to later over the black!)

 

2. Put in lines of your accent color to create the division you want. Just make single lines. For single divisions (per pale, per fess), just put the line at the border. For stripes (the single bend I did in yellow or the barry I did in blue), just lay down a single line where the center of the stripe should be. And for complex divisions (gyronny, checky*), just make a grid of lines in the right pattern (gyronny would look like an asterisk, checky looks like a tictactoe board).

-don't worry about being perfectly straight: you can clean up edges later. Just keep your brush moderately loaded with thin (but not washy) paint. For me, the paint for this is about halfway between basecoat and glaze in terms of thinness. It needs to flow without being runny, and the pigment should still be as opaque/dense as possible so you don't have to do 87 layers (see previous comment about yellow and orange).

 

3. Fill in the rest of the design. For stripes, just put down more lines on either side of your first until you build it out to the width you want.

 

4. Clean up your edges with the base color.

 

 

At this point, I also did some really basic highlighting just to give the divisions some depth. All told, all six shields took me about 50 minutes, divided over two lunch breaks.

 

I hope you try it! These kind of divisions are great for lending life to shields, cloaks and tabards, and they're pretty much the easiest freehand you can start on. I think they're fun!

 

 

 

 

 

*The purple shield is actually not a division shown on the picture. It's a combination of the "barry" and "bendy" divisions, called, appropriately enough, "barry bendy."

[Glitterwolf]

Good job and the shields stand out!

[Warlady]

Love their shields!

[Iridil]

Great shields - perfect skeles for the the table!