Bearing this in mind I decided to start a ‘fun’ project that would not require too much concentration and time. Horticulus Slimux and Mulch most certainly will and I’ll need to be fully back up-to-speed before I return to them. As it happens I already had a Sloppity Bilepiper assembled and base coated because I’d intended to paint him before the Isharan Tidecaster grabbed my attention. The Sloppity Bilepiper is the perfect mini for my current needs.
As well as being a fun miniature it hads the advantage of providing me with some familiar Nurgley subject matter. That meant that I could just dive right in and get painting. I’ve used the same techniques on the Bilepiper’s flesh tones as I used on all my other Plaguebearers. The only real difference is in the colour palette I’ve used. Instead of featuring green as the dominant colour I’ve experimented with a yellow flesh tone. Yellow can be used as a happy cheerful colour and it somehow seemed appropriate for a creature infected with the comedic fever of the Chortling Murrain!
In practice the colours used vary little from the combination of red/pink, blue and yellow over a Rakarth Flesh base that I’ve used before for my ‘human’ flesh tones (see below). The difference is in the proportions of those colours. I’ve built up a series of glazes going from yellow (Games Workshop Iyanden Darksun) through red (Scale Colour Antares Red) to a dark brown (Scale Colour Black Leather). This gave me my global shadows and colours. I then built up the highlights over the glazes using a combination of Iyanden Darksun and Flayed One Flesh (Games Workshop). In addition to the highlights this stage is where I build up the textures.
With the bulk of the highlights and shading done I then went back to fine tune everything with further glazes and highlighting. At this point I’ve use a little of the red from the Scale Colour Inktense range to increase the saturation in some of the shadows and mid-tones.
Fingers crossed this project will help ease me back into a more regular painting routine and serve as a stepping stone to my bigger projects.