Gnome Assassin

Struggles with painting a flesh tone

I’ve been working on a new project, the Gnome Assassin from Miniature Madness sculpted by Leonardo Escovar "Poisonauta". This characterful bust was an online ‘impulse’ buy but it’s been waiting my attention for years. I kept it in reserve as a ‘filler’ project but, even though I had it primed and ready, the moment never came, until now. After finishing Akito I was in the mood to experiment further with painting flesh tones and the Gnome Assassin’s small size meant that he shouldn’t be too much of a time commitment. He would probably take me months rather than years!

 

 

I’ve had plenty of time to consider this project and had some ideas for how I was going to treat him. My big idea was to present the Gnome as though he was peering out from between the branches of a tree, alongside an animal companion or two. Long story short, after many attempts I abandoned this idea as I just couldn’t nail the composition. Nothing I tried quite looked right and I think that’s because I was trying to turn the bust into something it was never suited to be. It’s another case of a big basing idea that would have overwhelmed the model. So I’m keeping things simple and concentrating on painting the bust.

However, while working on the woodland base idea my thoughts for the overall scheme came together. I decided to create a cold looking winter setting which seemed to go well with my thoughts on how to paint the Gnome. I’ve always pictured him as having a greyish skin tone and white hair. This comes from two early influences. My teenage experience of Dungeons and Dragons where I played as a Gnome and the afore-mentioned colour scheme stuck in my memory. But even earlier than that is the book The Little Grey Men written by Denys Watkins-Pitchford under the pen name ‘BB’. Memories of the book were reinforced by a 10-part animated series, adapted from the book in 1975, called Baldmoney, Sneezewort, Dodder and Cloudberry. A couple of years ago I re-read The Little Grey Men after discovering it in a charity shop and was charmed all over again!

 

 

I began to experiment with colours for a palette that would create a greyish skin tone in a cool light. Once again my trusty notebook came in handy. I first laid down a possible palette of colours and then experimented with how they behaved together. My first mixes were too purple and too saturated. I gradually shifted my mixes until I came to something that I felt would give me a good basis for the flesh tones. Dark Sea Blue and Black Leather mix together to make a very dark grey that is easy to shift from warm to cool by varying the mix. This would be my shadow colour. To this I gradually added Bearing Blue to create a lighter cool grey. Into that I then added Basic Flesh. This moved the colour into the midtowns and gradually warmed it up. To shift into the highlights I increased the Basic Flesh and introduced Ice Yellow and then Ivory White for the extreme highlights. On paper this gave me a very promising skin tone that shifted from cool shadows into warmer highlights.

 

 

Figuring out a colour palette in advance is very helpful, it builds familiarity with the colours and how they work together. However, it’s another thing entirely when you put these colours onto a model and my ‘greyish skin tone’ would prove to be very problematic! I quickly came to dislike the results I was getting as the skin tone looked dead, dull and desaturated! On consideration I’d made two mistakes that were causing the problems.

 

 

Because I wanted to create moody and dramatic lighting my base colour was a fairly dark blue grey. This shifted the overall colour range towards the cool shadows which was made worse by my being too timid with my colour mixes. I needed to go from the cool shadows into the warmer mid-tones with bolder steps because the cool dark base colour was desaturating the colour I put on top of it. I could have started over with a lighter and brighter base colour (Rakarth Flesh) but I prefer to try and resolve problems by working through them. I liked the blue/grey shadows so I focussed my efforts on the mid-tones and highlights. I set to making them lighter, warmer and more saturated.

 

The final selection of colours used in the colour palette.

 

I’d always planned to use glazes of warmer and more saturated hues over the flesh tones. Because of this I already had the colours I would need in my palette.  I’d now have to incorporate them in my mid-tone and highlight layers because glazes would not be bold enough.Those colours were very familiar as I’d recently used them for the flesh tones on my Akito bust. The application was to be very different though as my lighting scheme was far more dramatic than on Akito. Both Golden Skin and Pink Flesh would be vital in adding warmth but the most significant additions by far were Bugman’s Glow and Fiery Vermillion. The introduction of these colours into the mid-tones created a bolder shift into warmer hues.

 

 

This didn’t come about easily. I constantly had to push myself to go with the warmer and more saturated hues. Throughout the process I tended to be too timid in my choices and made a lot of extra work for myself. However, I thoroughly enjoyed the process of figuring out my Gnome’s flesh tones. It’s the sort of problem solving I enjoy. The final result isn’t the ‘Little Grey Man’ I’d first imagined but it is my take on a Gnome and I’m happy with the result. 

What’s more the process helped to drive home a very useful lesson. It’s something I’ve always known but never really consiously experienced. When building up highlights it’s a good idea to focus on going brighter rather than simply going lighter. Even after forty six years of painting, there is still plenty to learn!

My Gnome is pretty much ‘out of the box’ with one exception. His original knife had a spiral Celtic style design on it and I didn’t really care for it. I felt it was too sophisticated for the rustic Gnome I was imagining. So I replaced the knife blade with one carved from greenstuff. The new knife was faceted to look like a knapped stone blade. I then painted it in green tones to contrast with the flesh.

This was an enjoyable little project and it feels very satisfying to finish a model that’s been on my to-do list for so long. I’m pleased with the final result but can’t help feeling that the dark blue/grey base colour was not the best choice.  Once finished I decided to  enter it into a couple of painting comps in the early half of the year. I didn’t expect stellar results so I was very pleased with a Silver at the Hammerhead Painting competition and a Finalist pin at Salute! 

 

 

Looking back on this project there are some lessons to be learned. I think it’s much better to go in bold and then have to tone things down as opposed to being too cautious and then having to add saturation and contrast later. If you start off bold something of that will always remain ‘baked in’ to your painting scheme and will show in the final result.

Specific to the Gnome, I don’t think this bust is especially suitable as a competition piece due to the limited range of materials represented on it. Adding a backdrop and an animal companion sat on his shoulder, a few tattoos or warpaint might have brought something extra. All of these options are still open to me but, for the moment, I’m happy to call the piece done and move on to the next project.

 

Aeldari Voidscarred Corsair, Part Four

Painting and repainting the Shade Runner

 

With forty six years of mini painting experience I should know better than to rush a paint job in order to meet a deadline! After all, my No.1 personal painting rule is ‘take as much time as I need to paint a model to my satisfaction’. But alas, my most recent Corsair fell foul of short cuts and I didn’t even realize it at the time!

The Corsair in question is the Shade Runner and I’ve been working on her since August last year. However, I‘d put her on aside in late October and didn’t get to work on her again until late January. The deadline in question was the Hammerhead Painting competition on February 28th and I had four weeks to get into gear and finish the model. I quite like the occasional tight deadline because it energizes my painting and keeps me on my toes. I do, however, have to be very careful as I never do my best work at speed. But I thought I had just enough time to finish the model properly.

This was, after all, the third of my Corsairs so I was familiar with my colour palette and scheme. Indeed part of the reason for the hiatus was a touch of boredom as I started to get that ‘been there, done that’ feeling about the paint scheme. One solution was to shake things up a bit. I’d always planned to vary the armour colour of my Corsairs within the overall scheme. Those with higher status would feature more gold armour and the rest would feature more red and black with less gold. 

I decided to figure out what the lower end of the range would look like and apply this to the Shade Runner. The black armour is not, in fact, a true black but rather an extremely dark grey green. I think of it as a soft black and Dark Sea Blue from Vallejo once again proved itself an invaluable part of my colour palette. I decided to restrict gold to the knees, vambraces, buckles and helmet. All the Corsairs will have gold helmets. The red was kept fairly minimal by restricting it to the belts, holster and one pauldron. In order to test this scheme out I made a quick sketch using the colours from my palette which was an incredibly useful step to help consolidate my plans.

As a result the painting of the miniature was pretty straightforward and enjoyable. The dark armour gave me an opportunity to introduce colours into it from the overall palette and experiment with reflections from other areas of the mini and the wider environment. Black armour can be uninteresting but I think these reflections added a lot of nuance.

One other thing that I thought would add some variety was my choice of head for the Shade Runner. The ‘standard’ head for this model has a hood over the helmet giving it an assassin like vibe. I went with this option but modified it by adding the ‘tail’ from the hood of the Harlequin Solitaire model. This played into the ‘over the top’ aesthetic I wanted for my Corsairs.

By this time I’d been painting between four and six hours every day for over a month. This had been an incredibly productive period but a little bit of mental fatigue had started to set in!  I’d constructed a base at the start of the project and had it primed, base coated and ready to go. This was just as well because I only had a couple of weeks left to paint it. This was simply a matter of repeating my scheme so I forged ahead. I would normally spend almost as much time thinking about painting as doing it but that was a luxury I didn’t have time for. However, the model was finished with a couple of days spare and I was happy with the result … mostly.

Something bothered me about the overall scheme and it took a while for me to pin it down to the head. I’d spent a lot of time converting the hooded head and liked the result. In itself the miniature was fine but not as a part of a larger unit. I came to realize that the hood skewed the colour scheme of the Shade Runner away from that of the planned unit. It introduced a dominant bright blue element to the front of the model. In addition the helmet, showing only it’s faceplate, did not have the same bold impact as the other models with their tall gold helmets. I decided that for the sake of my long-term plan I would have to replace the helmet. That, however, would be after the competition.

It felt strange to enter a competition with a model that I knew I was going to change. But I was pleased with the Shade Runner as a stand alone model. I was even more pleased when it was given gold in the Sci-Fi Single Miniature category!

After the comp, I had the chance to chat with the Judge Matt Parks. Matt had some incredibly helpful feed back for me. In short my basing ‘was not up to my usual standard’. I really hadn’t seen this and even when pointed out it took a bit of time for it to sink in. After all the model had just won Gold but what I came to realise was that, although okay, the base was very basic! This was not as disappointing as it might have been because I already intended to rework the model. This time I would work at a more considered pace.

Removing the head was a nasty job with the potential to cause some damage but I thought through the process and worked cautiously. I realised that the safest way was to sacrifice the hooded head and remove it in pieces. This was a shame but I had a bigger picture to concentrate on. I had cut a small notch out of the blink pack when I fitted the hood so that also had to be repaired and repainted. Milliput was the filler of choice here as it could be sanded more easily than green stuff. The job was certainly fiddly but the area was easily accessible so I was able to make the repair with no slip ups.

For the new head I selected a helmet from the Drukhari Raider kit. It had a set of ‘fins’ running down either side that helped to give it some visual impact. I painted the helmet and then glued it onto the body. It made a huge difference to the appearance of the model! It had been a drastic step to remove a perfectly good head and replace it but the new version of the Shade Runner feels far more in keeping with the overall scheme I’m creating.

It was then time to scrutinize the base. It was indeed rather basic and that wouldn’t do at all. I decided to add some fallen statuary and rubble to create a bit more interest. This was done with minimal disruption to the existing work so then all I had to do was paint it. Or so I thought because once I started painting I realised just how right Matt was about the base not being up to standard!

Studying my earlier work, I discovered that I’d missed many stages of layers, glazes, washes and highlights. The Shade Runner’s base matched my earlier work on a superficial level but lacked depth and nuance in it’s painting. So I set about repainting the entire base. This time I would not be cutting any corners. 

Even when fully painted to my satisfaction I felt that the base and the figure needed something more to tie them together involving the colour scheme. So I added a green trophy/trinket to the models belt (as I had on the Felarch) and some blue ferns to the base. With that I’m now far more satisfied with my Shade Runner. The model and it’s base feel visually cohesive and painted to the same standard.   

Feedback can be difficult to accept but it’s always worth considering. Matt Parks’ advice saved me from failing to do my best and I’m very grateful for it!