Chaos Knight - feedback encouraged!

[aranelthemithra]

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Any advice, feedback would be appreciated. This was a commissioned piece, and the instructions were "tzeentch colours with a lot of aging"

While the customer was delighted with the outcome, I still feel this could have been done a lot better so any suggestions would be something I would really appreciate.

[Maru]

hello
thats 1 post so welcome

about painting i would not call that "Aging" as mini looks Dirty for first look - ther are beter way to wether minatures but all include painting mini clean at first step then usage of pigments, end battle demage to create dirty eaged look

adicionaly a separation could be incresed by dark linking - betwen blue parts end blue end lether parts

thats things that could improve this mini at fast

chers

[ScottRadom]

Most defo second what Maru has said about the seperation between sections with some dark lining.

The transitions seem pretty abrupt and look like they might have been drybrushed vs. going for a more seamless look through blending.

I'll maybe take a quick peek over at the heresy-online.net and see if you've got a gallery there as well.

[mahon]

that's not "aged" but "drybrushed" or messy.
or maybe "aged" but in the sense that the miniature spent ages under a carpet.

sorry about being so harsh, but for me it would look MUCH better if the miniature was painted in a simple but neat style instead of this messy and illegible paintjob.

if you want to get some tips, show us a SIMPLE but CLEAN paintjob to let us see if you mastered the basic techniques to the sufficient degree that allows to move on to more advanced techniques.

and maybe show us your best work, too. and tell a bit about your expectations - what do you want to achieve. is basic tabletop quality good enough for you, do you simply want to paint for fun, or maybe become a better painter, or prepare for a contest?

[aranelthemithra]

Thank you for the feedback so far. The client just adored the outcome but I looked at it and liked parts

What I liked: The finish on some of the gold (no gold paint was actually used) armour on the horse, the gradient blend of white to blue on the horse's hair (tail and hooves), the bone on the chaos knight, and the blending on the chaos knight's armour - which was sort of destroyed by the finish

What I didn't like: The chaos arrows on the horse, the highlighting, the shield, the horse's head armour, the finish on the knight (losing the blending really irritated me)

Among other things of course...

I started painting miniatures again for the first time in about 18 years - I used to be a lot better - indeed I used to paint for the local Games Workshop display case.

The Chaos Knight was the second miniature since I restarted.

Here is a WIP for the next miniature:

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This figure used a dark green "wetbrush" or glaze for the army followed by a glaze of teal and then highlighted with a light teal

The skin is glaze of brown and light flesh but a wash (which a GW painting instructor suggested) muddied it way too much.

The blades (Which are obscured on this photo) are a dark to light blue gradient

I am not happy with the hair yet. I want it to have a dark base with a vibrant red - but it wants to go pink.

The base, pole, some details just aren't done.

Goals:

You asked about goals. Getting better is the primary goal. Back to what I was able to do and then beyond. Sadly, no examples of what I painted back then, so that's a difficult goal to measure... so just assume, "get much better" as the goal.

[ScottRadom]

I would strongly urge you to check out some of the excellent tutorials available on this site and others.

CMON appears to be down now but there's ton's on there. Excellent stuff here on CofC as well. I would also do a search for some of the video's on YouTube. My personal bible is the "Painting Miniatures" by a guy named JBT as well as a Miniature mentor video by Larent Exposito Mas that takes a Wolfen from primer to finish.

A general goal of getting better is okay but not specific enough I think to really help out. I would pick one or two core things and start there. For me I think I would reccomend really working on the blending as a start. That is probably the hardest thing to learn as it takes a lot of brush control, patience, and practice.

[aranelthemithra]

Thank you for the tips of where to find tutorials.

Lileth certainly seems to be working out better. As I said, the wash (which was recommended to me) was incredibly detrimental to the skin making it just look dirty instead of getting in to crevices. I even watered down the wash and tried to apply it judiciously, but I think washes (some "mud" named wash) can be overbearing.

So I think to be completely happy, I will have to go and redo a lot of the skin area.

The glaze approach definitely left a smoother finish and to this point there is no drybrushing used at all with the exception of a little trying to figure out how to get the hair to be vibrant and multi-layered.

In terms of getting better, if you want very very specific areas where I would like recommended techniques and ideas...

1) Hair.

I am going to be painting a lot of hair with my dark eldar. I want it to look ... real. That means, I want the red hair to look like red hair, not painted red. I have tried this a few ways on lileth and I am unhappy with all of them.

I tried a dark red glaze with a brighter red glade over that and that all looked fine, but it was very dark. I can't figure out how to get it lighter, fuller colour without it having pink in it. I tried going more orange, but that looks firey - which in fact I preferred, but still isn't the look I want.

2) Facial details.

Eyes, mouth, make up, scars, etc... these are also important elements of painting dark eldar wyches.

I think it's obvious why these types of details are troublesome. I used to use a 3 bristle trimmed brush back in England decades ago - perhaps my hand is just not steady enough any more, or the figures are just way more detailed than they used to be, but lipstick and eyeshadow I managed, eyes - just white.

3) making things look real.

One thing that bothers me about a lot of miniature painting is that everything is too "model"-ie.

what I mean by that is, when you look at a model, it has a style that looks like it's a cartoony snapshot of a scene. The skin is too flat, too perfect. Clothes blend with perfect evenness across a model. Space marines, as an example, often look like they have completely flat/matt armour.

So something I am looking for from my painting (and perhaps why I continuously and erroneously layer more on to my miniatures) is that from 12 inches away, I want the figures to look "real."

More muted colours, aggressive shading in areas that are clearly hidden from a light source, sharp highlights on metal edges.

By trade, I am an artist, its part of what I do every day. And that same realism element is part of my approach to my day-to-day work.

So I guess in short, if you want a single sentence that captures everything I am looking for, it's...

I want to become a good enough miniature painter that I can capture my art style of grittier, hyper-realism in my figure painting and learn the techniques necessary to do that.

For examples of what I mean, just consider that I picked Dark Eldar. Think cyberpunk grunge, or gotham city darkness.

Lilith is my "bright" period. I have no idea what I am going to do with my harlequins.

[LittleDave]

Realistic lighting is often a transition from shadow to highlight and as painters, we need to emulate realism for a piece to become believable. My recommendation would be to work on perfecting transitions, then move into experimentation with grime and dirt.

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Going to borrow an old Arctica piece (see above) to use as an example. This is a great demonstration of a transition from dark to nearly pure white. There's multiple ways to achieve this such as layering, glazes or wet mixing. It's up to you how you want to go about it, however something similar to this should be your end goal for the time being.

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Something along the lines of this car may be similar to what you're after. In this case, the artist started with a foundation of smooth transitions and added rusted effects on top of it. This is just one example of how to do a clean piece that still looks aged and worn.

-----
If there's any sort of recommendation I could make it's this; Don't take short cuts. Painting high quality figures is very time consuming. Don't rush things with dry brushing or throwing washes over the top. Sometimes these methods are good to use and other times they'll detract from your end goal. Other than that, read tutorials, look at what other people have done and practice, practice, practice. Cheers.

[aranelthemithra]

I do blending by starting at a darker base colour, and then using lighter colours and two brushes (one with paint obviously, and the second without) I blend the edge with the dry brush to create a smooth transition.

This does feel like a slightly "short cut" way to blend since all I am really do is stretching the paint and creating an additional transparency to give the appearance of blending. There actually isn't any blending happening.

After about 5 layers of progressively lightning colours, I have smoothly "blended" to a highlight.

The skin on Lileth (the WIP above) was done using that technique. Then I listened to a GW employee and added a wash... and I think your last paragraph sort of captures the essence of that mistake. It ended up being a bad idea.

I admit drybrushing has been an easy fall back for these models. It picks up detail quickly and easily and - I am sure - there are actually situations where drybrushing is actually ideal for that exact task. But It's pretty clear I over use it. I think for a table top army that you just want to field painted: Prime, base, wash, dry brush is probably a very efficient way of putting a lot of figures out that look pretty decent as a large group. But I really do want each figure in my army to be unique, and have a decent level of quality on them. I have no reasonable expectation that even my best "show piece" will ever reach the level of Ana or any of the other golden daemon award winners, but with $100s being spent to get me back in to this hobby, I want each figure to look like I put some real effort in to each and every one of them, and carry a solid "style" throughout.

Warriors = darker, grittier, more metal, more sharp edges, bigger guns
Wyches = light (both in colour and in weight...), I want the paint job to reaffirm the concept of lithe and agile so the materials should seem flexible and the weapons almost glowing with energy to invoke the idea of speed.
The vehicles = the show pieces of the army. Small figures will get their love, but I want the ravagers and raiders and venoms to explode off the tabletop with vibrant transitions from black to colour.

[Nameless]

one more thing about the realism... don't forget you're painting 30mm miniatures.
you need to deceive viewer's eyes to create different effects.
overdo the contrast to make your mini truly 3D.
don't paint white with white paint or black with black paint.
so on, so forth...

I think you need to go to the basis with your painting. miniature painting has changed drastically over the years. don't rush things. try painting smooth, clean layers first, then introduce more complicated techniques.
I'm a strong believer of the "learn to paint clean and then move to paint dirty" approach. otherwise you'll end up with messy, illegible, dry-brushed looking paintjobs like above.

good luck with exercises!