Periodically, members of the Reaper forum get together and swap painted figures. This was my first...

Part 1:

I am working on a miniature from the Mercenary faction of Reaper’s Warlord game for a miniature swap. The deadline is early June so I have plenty of time to work on it, although I’d like to have it done before ReaperCon. I will post some in-progress shots here and discuss how well (or not) the work is going.

The book is a tough piece to carry off well. There are numerous small details that make the book interesting but none are easy to paint. I decided to use the light source as being above the top of the wizard’s head so shadows would fall directly beneath the wizard. This meant that the book pages would be lighter near the top and center and darken towards the bottom and outside. The underneath would be in shadow. The back of the robe would be have highlights near the bottom of the robe due to the way the light was falling.

If you look at the first picture you can see some yellow under the back of the book closest to the wizard. There are indentations there designed to look like fire. Above this are two skulls, one on each cover of the book. I filled the flame indentations with thinned yellow ink and will go back and add a bit of red ink as an additional highlight. Then I plan on painting the sections between the flames as best I can.

You can see (barely) how I shaded the pages with white and bleached bone. The outer edge is gold and I will outline the inner square with brown liner. I have tried to use a dark background on the page edges and then paint in the pages with gold to indicate gold edging. I used a liner brush to do this and I think the paint was too thick the first couple of strokes. The third picture shows the overall effect close up. I like the way the side parts of the pages turned out and am satisfied with the way the tops turned out.

Part 2:

I have done more work on the book - some tightening of the details, and painting more of the book. The picture to the left shows how I am handling the page border. I used brown liner to separate the gold from the parchment pages. What did *not* turn out well and shows graphically here are the pages. I used too thin a paint on them. The shading looks good when not viewed under a camera, but the paint “glopped” and is not smooth. I think it will not be noticeable once completed. I have yet to decide how or what I am going to put on for the text. The sides of the book are better now as I took the liner and redid the lines between the pages.

I also redid the tops of the pages. As you can see in the picture to the left, I took the liner brush and made the edges of the pages smoother by filling in with brown liner. I think they look much better and I am satisfied with them.

I also spent some time working on the back side of the book. I outlined the edges with new gold and then ran a dark line on the inside of the gold. The book was shaded from earth brown at the top to dark shadow at the bottom of the book cover. The skull was outlined with brown liner, painted with earth brown and then highlighted up to a light color of bleached bone. The left picture shows the transition from earth brown to dark shadow on the left cover. The right picture shows details of the fire and my approach to it. It also shows the outlining around the gold.

And as an aside, it is painful to look at these pictures after seeing the miniature. It looks good using the naked eye, but the macro lens brings out all of the flaws in the paint job!

Part 3: 

Today I spent time on the robe, the Tabard, and the book pages. I wanted to put some readable text on the book but the angle was too odd and the space I had to work in too small. I settled, therefore, for what you see here - two large stylized letters with smaller, black letter-look-alikes. Think of it as an ancient runic tongue!

The robe is now finished but I may go back and add brighter highlights. At ReaperCon last year, Sue Wachowski beat the mantra “Darker Darks, Brighter Highlights” into the heads of those who took her classes and I keep thinking of that when I look at the figure! The part of the robe on the top of the right arm as shown in this picture has the brightest highlights on it so far as it is directly under the light source

Part 4:

Huzzah! The figure is finished! I took today while I was editing and saving some videos to finish off what I had left. I think I psyched myself out with how difficult it was going to be to do the face and horns, but once I got started, all went smoothly. Quit a surprise, actually, as anyone who has ever done this understands. No paint spills, no sticky spots, no inks running, just easy painting. This picture is the best one I have of the face. I took some time to try and highlight the face with several different layers. The eyes were outlined in black, then had the whites put in using … uh… grey, and then I dotted the eye with black paint. I had to redo the left eye as it wasn’t looking the same way as the right!

The photos above show a better view of the serpent’s features.

The photos above were taken with different camera settings. I used a higher resolution and did not modify the pictures other than to crop them. If you have any comments on which set looks better, I’d like to hear them….

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.