Painting a Shiny Black – PRELUDE Black is one of the colours that many people find difficult to paint with. If you’re not careful highlighting it, the colour can quickly turn from a black into a grey, and as it’s already so dark, how does one shade it? While I hope to write a more thorough article on different ways to deal with black, for the moment I’m going to focus on a specific variety: painting a shiny black. Think of glossy black hair or shiny black leather. Sure, you could use a gloss finish over black, but that never
Read More
Painting of a 54mm Saxon Warrior – PRELUDE I’m always excited to paint kits from Raúl García Latorre, one of my favourite sculptors. This article will focus on one of his old kits, a 54mm Saxon Warrior, 5th Century. The kit was originally released some time ago from his old company, but looks like it will be re-released through MProyec so you can still get a copy if you want! While this step by step will focus on a specific figure, the information is applicable to a wide range of kits including many historical and fantasy barbarian figures. I’ll touch
Read More
Knight of the Holy Sepulchre – PRELUDE This article will be a walk-through on my painting of a medieval knight on horseback. At the time I was looking for a good competition figure. I settled on this beautiful 54mm kit from Pegaso, a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre. It’s a great dynamic sculpt and the large surfaces of the cape, shield, and banner provided plenty of opportunity for freehand embellishments. These features make the kit a great display or competition piece. Although I wanted to treat this as a historical kit, the sculpt could be just as easily used in a fantasy
Read More
“Before the Battle” – PRELUDE A couple of months ago I set out to make a big piece to bring to the Monte san Savino show. I worked with an idea that had been in my head for quite some time that had never been realised. This is not really a step by step but more of a look at my thought process and the transition from thought to realisation of the idea. With this piece, I wanted to achieve several things; being a painter and modeller of both fantasy and historical subjects, I wanted to bridge the gap between
Read More
Painting Tartan Patterns – PRELUDE If painting designs on your figures makes you nervous, taking on a tartan might seem like a nearly impossible task. Well, the truth is, if you can paint (mostly) straight lines then you can paint a tartan. In this tutorial I’ll breakdown the pattern and show you how to build it back up, one simple step at a time. The only other trick is trying to keep those lines uniformly spaced and of uniform thickness. The more uniform the lines are, the better the tartan will look, so I’ll be sharing some tips to help
Read More
Method for Painting Eyes on Busts – SIMPLE BEGINNINGS Eyes can be tricky, but I’ve got a multi-step process that can hopefully help you out. My focus here is on larger scale figures (busts and 90mm figures), however for smaller figures I use a simplified version of the same process. I’ll say a few words about that at the end, but first up is my more detailed version. Step 0: Before starting on the eyes, I like to add the main shadows to the skin around the eyes. Easier to do this first so I can be a bit sloppy
Read More
My Experience Painting OSL – PRELUDE Object-Source Lighting (OSL), is probably one of the most intimidating techniques in miniature painting. I’m intentionally not calling this article “How to Paint OSL” because I feel like I have a long way to go before I come close to mastering the technique. That being said, I think I’ve had success at applying it… so hopefully that is enough to justify me wanting to share my thoughts. GENERAL SKILLS TO HELP WITH OSL This is something I don’t often see discussed in other OSL articles, but I feel this technique really builds off of
Read More
Painting Orc skin – PRELUDE A few years back I painted an Orc standard bearer from Forgeworld who I christened Nagrus’z Strongarm. Hopefully this will complement the work David did in his article HERE! Anyways, I hope some of you will find this useful! OVERALL COLOUR SCHEME So initially I was thinking about how I wanted the piece to look, as I had decided to go with a cooler colour in purple for the dragon hide banner, I decided to go warm for the Orc’s skintone. The metal would also be cold in temperature value, framing the skintone and drawing
Read More
First Time Painting Historical Figures? Here’s Some Advice – INTRODUCTION This site is not focused on any one genre of figures. We hope to expose people to all sides of the modelling hobby. Speaking for myself, sometimes it feels like there is a disconnect in the figure painting community between the fantasy/Sci-Fi crowd and the historical crowd. Certain sites, shows, and clubs seem to cater to one or the other. In my experience, groups and shows are generally accepting of any genre of figure. But there’s not as much overlap as I would expect. While a lot of the top
Read More
Painting regular skin can be tough, but it is something that is covered in numerous other tutorials. So instead I’d like to go into a topic I find even tougher… painting unnatural skin. To start off I should clarify what I mean by unnatural skin. I’m not talking about orc or demonic skin. I’m referring to skin that should look human, but which is not quite right. Maybe it’s a vampire, perhaps an evil sorcerer or chaos warrior tainted by the powers of darkness. Or a look similar to the Borg from Star Trek or one of the dark elves
Read More