Hello everyone! I’m new here, and this is my first post. It’s great honor and pleasure to show some of my own stuff here, because I used to read this blogspot about 10 years ago, seeking for some of the precious tips and tricks for miniatures painting, as a teenager fascinated in this hobby.
Some time has passed, my skills have developed and my paths crossed with such great painters like Aลa, Mahon, Kacpero and Benathai in Mixed Dimensions Studio, where I had the best opportunity to learn even more. Now, as a part of this excellent Chest of Colors crew I’m going to do my bests to fit it’s standards.
Fjul-Grimnir for Chosen Axes
My first work to show here is not certainly what I’d call “my style”, but it’s the mini I’m really proud of. I usually like grim-dark, gloomy and some more realistic painting (for the glory of dark gods, of course!), I’m also huge True Metallic Metals fan, but I love to try new things and techniques as well.
As Warhammer: Underworlds player I own a lot of beautifully designed individuals from many different Age of Sigmar factions, so when I wanted to practice something new, I decided to choose something different to feel more free from my own routine. This dwarf slayer is really wonderful miniature and gave me great opportunity to play with tanned fleshtones, NMM gold and silver and some bright colours in general.
I’m really satisfied with the effect of this ~12 hours battle that has teached me a lot, and gave me a lot of fun! I also see a lot of things to do better next time ๐
I hope you like it too, you can also find some more of my paintings in my gallery.
Welcome to another instalment of my repainting Triss Merigold series. You can see the first part here, and today I want to quickly describe two things: her skin and her trousers.
Repainting the face
The first thing I did was the skin, for which I used airbrush and some paints:
Here on the corset you can see an example of how I used the colors to build up the highlights and shadows, because the this is basically the same approach:
I used some Vallejo 71.271 German Red Brown with a little Magenta Ink from Liquitex for shadows, and some white to underpaint the places for highlights.
I applied my skin tones with glaze of Vallejo 72.704 Elf Skintone and 72.703 Pale Flesh, which were later covered with a fine mist of thinner mixed with Cadmium Yellow Light Hue from Liquitex.
Her skin is freckled only on a narrow part of her face, so I had to change my tool to a paintbrush and thinned down Brown Ink from Vallejo. After this stage I moved to painting hair for a moment, as I was not sure how the paint on the model would react with my paints and if it wouldn’t peel off from the masking around the hair. Fortunately everything went smooth, the paint kept sticking to the model and I could return to the face.
I painted her eyebrows with Vallejo 71.293, and slightly modified the color with a bit of 72.704 Elf Skintone.
I applied the shadows around her eyes by airbrushing Vallejo 71.048 Engine Grey and I outlined the eye with a paintbrush. Whites of eyes look good if you add some skintone to off white and only use white as the color for painting light reflections on eyes. I also corrected off white and shadows on her eyelids with a fine glaze, and the blush on her cheeks with Citadel Contrast Flesh Tearers Red.
It’s only when I already had the base color for the whites applied, that I outlined her iris, and I colored the eyes in the very end.
I slowly moved down, creating lights and shadows around the nose and mouth. I also added color to her lips, using the same paints I’d used in the earlier stages.
I added some detail to her lips….
… and just cleaned up everything, while adding touch-ups and details. The face was basically done, so let’s move to the trousers.
Repainting the trousers
For painting the trousers I needed to protect the upper body, so Triss dressed up as a ghost and went “BOO!” ๐
The trousers were basically painted with two paints. The base was Vallejo 07.952 German Grey, and the highlight was 71.132 Aged White and 71.270 Off White applied in a zenithal way with my airbrush.
The next stage was a bit more annoying, as I had to pick the right thickness of my airbrush paints and try to get the feel of the trigger to achieve the same kind of grain of the base color to texture the trousers in my planned way.
This also gave me a chance to correct the placement of lights and shadows used to accentuate seams and construction of the trousers. Flexible masking tapes from Tamiya were perfect for this job.
Finally the most tedious part, the lockstitch, which is the decorative stitch on Triss’ trousers. But it was more of an exercise in patience than any secret techniques. Usual brushwork. ๐
Done (for now)
So yeah, here is what we have been discussing today and in the next part I’ll address the corset and the base. ๐
It’s been quite some time since I had anything interesting to write about, and even longer since I had anything new to show. And while this army from the Dark Imperium set is not really mine, I am proud to show this piece of team work and explain why.
Training that paid off
I can’t remember if it has been already mentioned or not, but we’ve been training hard to streamline our painting processes and optimize efficiency. Our cooperation with Mixed Dimensions allowed us to improve many things in this field and train a team of artists, who in addition to having their own styles and skills, also can work as one team, as a single well-oiled machine and produce large projects, which still remain coherent in style and quality.
Ultramarines from Dark Imperium boxed set
What we have here is an army that was a part of the Dark Imperium set. It is a perfect example of such cooperation. While models in this army have been painted by several team members, sometimes even a few of them working on one unit (or even one model!), I think we managed to keep a consistent look throughout the whole project.
As pictures say more than words, here is a picture of the army:
And here are some shots of individual units:
I am really happy with the result! And so are other team members, so here is another shot of the whole force. ๐
So what?
Hmm, what does it mean to you? It means we are fully capable of handling large projects, no matter how we assign the work and tasks. Months (if not years) of training allow us to officially admit we are also a team, not only a group of individual artists.
This can allow to handle your requests better, faster and potentially more affordably! Of course, if you insist that a particular artist takes care of your models, it’s totally doable. We just have more options than that!
We will be explaining it in more detail soon, but for now I just wanted to show these Ultramarines. And if you would like to try our team with your own project, you can always contact us about it. And in the meantime we’ll start working on building a gallery of similar team-work projects. ๐