Round Three Report from Abstracity

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Minidragon writes:

I've decided that i-Kore makes some pretty slick minis. The style is very clean, without a ton of extra garbage tacked on for no real reason. Even more, the folks at i-Kore have been very generous in their support of TMP for this Last Painter Standing feature. If you haven't already done so, send the folks over there a note expressing your appreciation for what they're doing.

Alright, with that out of the way I'll get down to talking about the Round Three figure. This month we've got Vidar Wolf-Helm, a Dwarf with a wolf pelt and a great big sword! Now this guy's pose is pretty good, you can envision him having just lopped someone in half at the hips...or in the process of doing so. My mini was fairly well cast - there were some annoying mold lines from where the mold was misaligned, but it wasn't too bad.

This time around I'm going to focus on how I painted the metals and his kilt. But, first, I'll talk about the base coat...mainly because the first picture is a bit misleading.

I actually basecoated this guy in white (Partha Paints White), not that you could tell from the first shot! After the basecoat I thought about what kind of colors the rest of the mini would have…and decided there'd be some gold, some browns, silver, and flesh. Brown seemed like a good base for all those colors, except silver, so I initially gave selected bits of the figure a wash of diluted brown ink (my own mix - made up of yellow, purple, blue, red, orange, black, and chestnut GW inks along with Future floor wax and water in proportions I could never begin to remember!). I had planned to leave some parts white, do some with the brown, and make the parts that would end up silver, black. That all fell apart as I got carried away with the brown ink!! Ink frenzy ensued and soon the whole fig was covered with it! I thought it might be interesting to see how everything worked with a brown base, so I didn't change anything. Next, I hit selected areas with very thin black ink to provide some black/dark lining. OK, that explains the first picture.

In the next picture you can see that I've painted what will end up as white metals with my own "gunmetal" mix (this is made up of Games Workshop chainmail and black mixed with a touch of salamander green — don't ask why I added the green, I just like how it makes things look).

Picture 3 was taken after I gave the metal areas a black wash (my black wash is made up of Games Workshop black ink, Partha Paints Black paint, Future floor wax, and water...again in mysterious proportion - I just mix and add ink/paint/water/wax until I get the consistency/darkening effect I want). You can see that this really defined the scales of his loin-armor-thing well.

In the next photo I've painted a highlight layer of my metal base paint onto selected parts of the metal areas. When I did this, I tried to paint this lighter color onto the parts that would be receiving more light...you can see a distinct difference between the two halves of the sword, and you can see a definite highlight on his face-mask. Finally, the tips of the scales got a highlight as well.