Thursday 27 August 2009

Assembling and painting The Raven Priest pt. 7















Sorry it's been a while since the last part of this series - we got really busy with the release of Broga and have only just managed to get back to The Raven Priest. Here's two parts in one go though - the loin cloth and the hair, both painted by Ali.

Loin cloth - Quite a simple process this one. The base coat was a linen colour - which is basically a sandy buff colour, but with just a spot of green in it. I believe the one she actually used was a Wargames Foundry colour called Moss. This was shaded down by adding a tiny dot of blue to the base colour to give cooler shadows. As normal, the shade colour is applied to the insides of the creases - but on this miniature the bottom part of the loin cloth is over-hanging so gets quite a lot more of the shade colour - and even darker in the creases in that area.

The highlight tones are a mix of the base colour and off-white. You don't really want to use a straight white here - it's just a little too bright and harsh to mix well with the softer tones. The highlights are applied in gradual stages - getting lighter on the areas that would naturally catch light falling from above.

Hair - The base colour for this was a dark grey, with just a hint of blue added to give a cooler tone. The next step was to pick out whole areas of the hair by adding a highlight tone - it's pretty obvious which areas you should pick out - just look at the miniature and the way the hair has been sculpted. Breaking it down into smaller areas in this way gives a far more natural 'layered' effect than trying to highlight individual hairs... The base colour was highlighted with an off-white to get the highlight colour.

The white streak at the front was treated in exactly the same way - but the colour was taken quite a bit lighter.

That's it for this stage - just the sword and birds to go really (and some smaller detail areas to complete). I hope to get the whole miniature finished off as soon as I'm done with painting Broga... He's coming on really well, in fact I haven't had so much fun painting a miniature for a while - he's definitely suits my painting style more than The Raven Priest.

cheers!

mike

3 comments:

James said...

Looking great, thankyou for the sharing.

AJ said...

This is fantastic, Mike and Ali. I have been a fan of your work since Man O' War was a regular feature in White Dwarf. I am really excited to see you lay out a step-by-step. In particular, I enjoy reading about your color choosing process, so thanks for that.

I was also surprised to see how often you mix and match paints from different manufacturers. For whatever reason, I've always assumed mixing different formulas would result in a full-blown chemical explosion...

StudioMcVey said...

Hi AJ - you can mix and match acrylics from any manufacturer, they all have the same basic formula -artist's tube paints included. I also use inks when I paint - and they mix fine with acrylics too. It's probably possible to mix acrylics and watercolours, though I have never tried that...

mike