We had to wander outside to let destructo pup run around the little field behind the pub and calm down. Imagine our surprise when some wooly cows wandered up! Imagine a tiny wooly mammoth. It was awesome! Father had his super camera with him and managed to get lots of excellent photos.
Unfortunately father is a child and only sent me photos of the tiny mammoths humping each other.
He sent me this photo of dog though so all is forgiven. She is so cute and stupid :3
Onto elves! After being transported everywhere during the holidays my little box of elves had taken a beating and was being held together by hope and sticky tape.
As I said in my previous post the elves are surprisingly nice sculpts, although they do have a couple of horrible flaws, and there was little prep to do. I decided to try doing zenithal priming this time. Zenithal lighting refers to lighting that comes from above - like the sun or an overhead light, and the general shadows and highlights things have. I use undershading to help me do it - where you apply primer or a monochromatic basecoat that decides where the highlights and shadows fall and then glaze over it so it shows through.
I did it by priming black using plasticote, then using a white primer lightly dusting from above to a maximum of a 45 degree angle over the models. This was the general results.
I went a bit too heavy with the white by mistake. It really only needs to be a fine dusting over the raised parts - the spotty ness really doesn't matter. He kindof looks like he's got snow on his shoulders!
I picked out three models to use as tests and got started on the coat with 1:1:2 paint:matte medium:10% flow mixtures. It took a fair number of layers but it had a good consistency and went on very smoothly. I anticipate actually covering up the priming by doing manual highlighting and shading but that's because a) I still love doing excessive amounts of painting and layering and b) covering the priming doesn't bother me, I'm mainly using it to see where shading falls. Normally people use pre shading for speed painting, but I'm not at the moment.
To start with I worked on their inner cloak, using P3 frostbite. I want to highlight it up to white but the frostbite with give me a nice subtle blue to work up from and help tie the model together. I was careful to make sure each layer was fully dry before applying the next otherwise you just end up pushing pigment around and end up with chalkiness that's hard to cover.
Then I worked on the first colour of the cloak using P3 arcane blue. Finally I went over the metals and armour with boltgun. I can't decide yet whether I went the armour to be gold or silver or a mix. I figured I could base with silver to get a feel for it and then try gold. These are test models so I'm trying to make myself be more bold with colour choices. Gonna slather gold everywhere tomorrow!
The hair was done with graveyard earth then a careful devlan mud wash. Originally I was going to use grypphonne sepia but I couldn't find it. I'm glad - the devlan mud looks much nicer. Skin was done with tallarn flesh and much cursing. I'm having trouble keeping my paints at a nice consistency and not having the paint just dribble everywhere.
It's not a problem on any other part of the models apart from the darn flesh bits!
The tiny gem at the centre of the breast plate and the cloth on the arms between armour sections was painted with scab red to compliment the turquoise and blue colours and draw the eyes upwards towards the centre of the model. I'm going to use browns with red base through the model as well such as on the shoes and wooden parts of the bows to further unify the paint scheme.
Overall these are really pleasant to paint and I'm looking forward to get some more done on them tomorrow.
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