Can't Argue With Contrast!

Have you ever heard "You could really use some more contrast on the  ____"? Yeah, me too. It's a horrible shouty-voice in my head that keeps pushing me to paint my shadows darker and my highlights lighter. I can't argue with the results, but it takes quite a while to blend smoothly. I'll get faster, but I need to focus on "seeing" how to incorporate more contrast in my figures. Previously, I'd see a model and think "Wow, that really 'pops'! How did they do that?" Now I understand that it's really about high contrast and using a wide range of dark & light values. While there's something to be said for being true to textures (for example, rugged leather won't contain nearly as many different values as a reflective silk), I want to experiment a little more. I decided to do a side-by-side comparison just to see how much I could push things visually. 

Here are the Reaper paints I used:

  • Brown Liner
  • Olive Skin Shadow
  • Linen White

I painted the entire section of upper leg wrap in Brown Liner and then painted the individual sections with "Olive Skin Shadow" as the base coat. I went back in with Brown Liner to clean up and differentiate the wrap strips. I mixed about three progressive shades in between Olive Skin Shadow and Linen White to achieve smoother blending, continuing to push all the way up to pure Linen White for the upper edges. In the back view below, you can see a big difference between the flat base coat and liner version I started with. You can't argue with contrast!

Binge Watch

Our place is still a construction zone. We're in the process of having our floors replaced after the flood (and still hearing about flash flooding warnings in this week's weather report). It's difficult to paint admit the loud floor fans that create wind tunnels and dehumidifiers drying out the concrete foundation (and my paint). When I sit down to paint, I'm just angry. So I decided to binge-watch some stuff on Netflix until I was ready to paint. I watched most of the 6th season of Star Wars: Clone Wars on Netflix and the entire first season of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. At first, the characters in that show irritated me beyond belief, but I soon found it ridiculously amusing thanks to the great writing of the show's creators Robert Carlock & Tina Fey. When I later broke out in hives thanks to the filthy floors and mold/mildew/dust tornado that's the floor-drying process, I did Kimmy's "I'm not really here!" dance. It's easy to fall into a pity trap, so I'm doing my best to keep smiling until it gets better.

After that I was ready to paint. I rebuilt my painting desk setup (again), put on my noise-canceling headphones and poured a big ol' glass of wine. I decided to work on my Kingdom Death miniature and despite painting for over an hour, I didn't make much progress. My heart wasn't in it but I think the most important thing was to get painting again. 

I can't quite seem to get her leg wraps right. I started to paint them a cream-colored linen but I wanted her to look more hard-core so I started painting it like leather. I'm still not sure if I like it, but it's a start! I slapped some paint in places where I think I want to do some interesting NMM and I painted part of her bodice. She's really not going to be a show-piece-- just an experiment as my first Kingdom Death miniature. I'll play around more with the leathers and finish her back before I attach her cape and head. 

At one point I just gave up and played with my hoard of miniatures (think Scrooge McDuck in his money vault). I opened one of my Infinity Miniatures: Zerat Special Missions Sniper. Love her! I toyed with the idea of cleaning and putting her together but by this time it was almost midnight and it had been quite a day. Wish us luck tomorrow-- the floor crew is doing a moisture evaluation in the morning. If it goes well, we're getting new floors sooner rather than later and can get back to our somewhat-normal lives :) 

Flood Damage

Our house flooded on Memorial Day weekend. We're in the middle of having the damaged floors removed and new flooring put in-- it's a long process. Currently cleaning up my desk and painting so I can post some late WIP photos