Speed Paint Challenge #2

Happy Miniature Monday! These are some exciting times, my friends. What recently started as an every-other-week challenge to a fellow miniature painter seems to have gained momentum. I started using a #speedpaintchallenge hashtag on Twitter and with the help of a few retweets, now more miniature painters are joining in. Hooray for social media! I can't wait to see what everyone comes up with. Last week, it was decided that the Speed Paint Challenge would be Reaper Miniature Bones #77131. 

The Rules: 4-hour Limit. 7 Colors + Black & White.

My Paint Color Choices · Left to Right:

  1. Leadbelcher [Citadel]
  2. Blue Liner [Reaper]
  3. Muddy Brown [Reaper]
  4. Deep Red [Reaper]
  5. Blood Red [Reaper]
  6. Golden Highlight [Reaper]
  7. Golden Shadow [Reaper]
  8. (Black) Brown Liner [Reaper] 
  9. (White) Linen White [Reaper]

The Results

 
 

Work In Progress Photos

My Approach

I decided to break down the time limit to eight 30-minute increments. I keep notes on paint color and overall strategy throughout the process.

  1. Base Coats: Boots, Hair, Gloves, Belt
  2. Cleaning up sections with Exact-O (since I didn't have access to one earlier)
  3. Leather & Skin Base Coats
  4. Boots (my favorite part of this mini) 
  5. Face
  6. Weapons & Shirt
  7. Details base coats (belt, pouches, torso section), Highlight Leathers
  8. Details highlights, Hair Highlights, Base

So there you have it-- another Speed Paint Challenge completed! Once again, I gained some great experience in both speed and skill. I stand firm in my belief that a little pre-planning goes a long way when painting within time limits. I'm really happy with how she turned out given only 4 hours. In fact, I have the sudden urge to go out and buy a matching pair of those awesome boots!

Color Inspiration

This week I'm traveling again. When I travel, I like to pull inspiration from what I see. Light & dark contrast, color proportions, texture, and my favorite-- the challenge of mixing paint to match colors I capture in the pictures. It may just look like a bunch of pictures of junk, but here are the creative challenges I see lying within each image:

I walked outside after a long day, looked up, and stopped short when I saw this sunset after a stormy summer's day. I need to recreate this color scheme and with the challenge of creating a soft, warm lighted contrast that seems to glow in comparison to the rest of the miniature.

I've started traveling with a small collection of mobile paint supplies. One thing I miss, my paint water cup I use each time I paint. Sometimes it shows me a nice pattern for a future freehand motif. Surprise!

1. Clouds: I love the rich blue transition paired with the soft texture of the clouds. Maybe inspiration for a fur-lined cloak!

2 & 3. Drinks: Studies of glass jars with liquid in them. One day I want to be paint the way different light shows through glass jars.

4. Coffee: I love the rich browns in my delicious, half-full Cappuccino. I mix brown colors so often for leathers, it gets monotonous so this would be a fun color-matching challenge. 

5. Apples: A challenge to blend equally vibrant red, yellow, and green transitions between themselves.

6. Twitter Image: An inspiration for an overall color proportion scheme for a mini someday. I was surfing Twitter while waiting for my flight to arrive and I just love that bright blue-- reminds me of Reaper's "Surf Aqua" paint color I used on the Maralise mini. 

7. Magnolia Tree: I love the waxy leaves and about-to-bloom flower bud. I like the white contrast and bits of brown yellow from the older leaves. A great challenge in color proportion and choosing where to include a pop of clean, stark white somewhere on a mini to create visual interest.

8. School Building: I love this older Catholic girls' school building. Despite the sea foam green and aqua, its overall look is quite haunting. It would be a great challenge for painting faded, textured surfaces weathered by years of rain and hot Louisiana summers.

Infinity Hacker WIP

Happy Miniature Monday! Yesterday was rainy-- the type of weather that makes it impossible to tell the time. A perfect day for painting! This weekend I realized that I've been unwittingly putting off painting my Infinity miniatures due to their small size and delicate assembly. So yesterday I decided to start my first Infinity miniature-- a Djanbazan Hacker.

First, I picked out a precast base for her and went with one of my desert wasteland options: 

After the preliminary dance of cleaning, assembling & priming, I made some significant progress. I wanted to paint her in more Earth-based/camouflage colors and give her clothing a sandblasted look to them. So far so good!

My biggest challenge here is to avoid obsessively blending my colors. I want her pants to look like well-worn twill-- a sturdy fabric that has faded over time. I'm not quite there yet, but I'm getting closer. Right now, they look too clean so I'll probably mute the highlights with some subtle glazes. I'll see how the rest of the miniature turns out before I go back & fuss over the pants. Here's a WIP picture after I painted the front of the pant fabric: