Malacassa's Oldhammer Blog: Painting Experiments

Sunday, October 2, 2022

Painting Experiments

Still Time to learn

Let me begin by saying that none of this new (except to me) or particularly difficult. I have been not particularly impressed with my last couple of miniatures. Nothing wrong with them but just not really any better than the ones before. So, I have been watching a few painting tutorial videos to refresh and improve my painting skills. Now I have to say I do like the ones by Ninjon as he clearly doesn't take himself too seriously and they seem quite straightforward.

Edge Highlighting & Wet Palette

I have tried using a wet palette before but didn't really get on with it. But gave it another go today and found it much more useful when setting out a range of colours. So, I could set out a range of light to dark colours for doing a section such as the tunic. And could then blend the colours together to get a colour gradient and because of the wet palette, the paint stayed wet long enough to complete a whole area in on go. So, I didn't have to stop and mix up and match another intermediate colour when trying to go from dark to light across an area.

Again, I have tried edge highlighting before and sometimes it worked and sometimes not! But the tip from Ninjon was to use a much brighter colour than I would normally use as the edge highlight. Now you still have to paint a nice, neat edge but the brighter colour looks much better than I expected. I think the paint looks brighter when wet so I tended to use a colour closer to the original colour and so got less of an effect. When I used this technique before.

I liked the effect of both of these techniques so will try to use them in the future.

With edge highlights and wet blended colours.

To be fair some areas worked better than others such as green tabard and the bottom of the cream tunic. Not so keen on the top of the tunic. But the point of this is to improve....

After washes and before edge highlights etc.

The guy on the left done in my previous normal style.

Zenithal Shading

This post seems to have a bit of a theme of I tried this before and it didn't work (See Zenithal Take 1). So, time to give Zenithal shading another go. For my next attempt at Zenithal shading, I picked a £2 minotaur I got at Salute last year. I figured a nice big miniature might be a better choice and at £2 I wouldn't be ruining an expensive figure.

Now, I am quite impressed with the final result. Now, it is quite a long way from my normal style, but I can see how you could paint army really quickly with this technique. I only had a couple of contrast paints, so my choice of colours is quite limited, but they fitted this figure. I did buy a white spray paint to do the final highlight and it was a expensive more brand as opposed the cheap (Poundshop) grey and black sprays I normally use. But the white looked a bit spotty but the grey was much better!

I don't see me painting all of my figures in this style, but I can see me using it when I want this particular look. I think I will have to try it with the Hexwraith flame paint.