Tribal Warrior done and Viking bust started

After a bit more of a break I finished off the Tribal Warrior.  Or more correctly gave up and just finished it.  My heart just wasn’t in it to be honest and I never should have started it.  One of those “well I bought it, I should paint it..” times.

Tribal Warrior

For the metal's I kept them very cool and that seemed to work out.  For the highlights I used some Vallejo Metal Medium.  Basically the sparkle in metallic paints, not pigment at all.  Makes the Aluminum paint I have look dull :)

For the shield I couldn’t work out what to do so after doing a whole lot of brown shading I covered the shield in AK Worn Effect chipping fluid and painted it red.  Then I wore back the paint to uncover the wood.  The end result wasn’t too bad.

Top view

It needed some more work but by this stage I was done.  The figure got based and into the cupboard with it.

1/16 Viking Bust

Recently I purchased a 1/16 bust of a Viking.  He has very squinty eyes suggesting that he is looking into the sun.  So I decided to try for a very directional light in the shading (instead of the usual zenithal approach).  I didn’t want to go the whole OSL ‘lantern in the dark’ look, more of a sun bleached look.  I’ve just blocked in the shirt, cloak and hair so far.  I did a lot of work on the face and then the wife told me I had made it too yellow (trying of the sun look).  Yep, he had some serious health issues.  So I’m now repainting it with more red in the mix.

Attempts at directional lighting

Instead of the normal flesh colours from the pot I’m mixing my flesh again.  I’m using a base of

VGC Leather Brown
VMC Red
Jo Sonja’s white - really liking this white, seems warmer than the VGC Dead white.
VMC English Uniform
VGC Plague Brown
VMC Golden Brown

Shade down with
VMA Armour Brown
VMC Violet Red
VMC Dark Sea Blue

Highlights with
VMC Light Yellow
more white

The small amount of red is needed to stop the attack of the yellow skin condition.  However it is really a tiny amount in the mix.  Any more than a pin head and it’s pink city.  I’m wondering that as my flesh mix ends up close to the standard Vallejo flesh colours am I just make a rod for my own back?  Jury out on that one.

I’m trying to get the whole ‘shade with a complementary colour’ technique to give a wider range of colours to make the figure pop some more.  The idea of having the full colour spectrum in an area and using the natural grey of two direct complementary colours to enhance (read pop) the features.  I found at Cancon my figures looked really flat compared to the better figures.  I’m also trying to do the shades in cool colours and highlights in warm colours.  Most times I fail and over use yellow (see note about unhealthy skin above).

Hair too light, darker now

Since the picture I’ve redone the hair to be much darker.  It matches the skin a bit better as I was finding the beard highlights were getting very unnatural on the original hair colour.

New paint rack and work on Tribal Warrior (orc)

New paint racks

I’ve purchased some Jo Sonja paints recently for terrain painting and also for general painting.  However they have been sitting in a pile and always seem in the way.  So I decided it was time to make a paint rack for them.  My painting area is next to an Ikea Billy bookcase so under one of the bookshelves I attached some home made paint rails (like the ones the paints are sold on in a shop).  Just some pine strips with some 3mm ply glued on underneath and then the whole lot was painted and screwed into the shelf.  Gets the paints out of the way and under the paints I have room for some more bits and pieces.

Tribal Warrior

On the Tribal Warrior I spent a bit of time playing around with him.  I’m trying a new idea of around zenithal lighting where the areas in light should be highly detailed and the areas in shadow less so.  This was one of the ideas I picked up from the book “Colour and Light”  by James Gurney.  On the fur cloak I gave this a try.  As I progressed down the cloak the contrast between the base coat and the highlights and shadows was reduced.  At the top of the cloak I tried to maximise the colour variation.  All of this is to try and draw the eye to the top of the figure and the face.

I’ve still thinking about the flesh colours.  I tried for the light green/yellow orc skin and had some trouble.  In my first attempts he ended up going the full zombie so I had to add a lot of yellow to bring that back.  Also adding some red and purples to the mixes helped.  It still isn’t great.

Next up will be the armour that I’m trying with metallics first.  I’m not sure the cool temperature metals are really working.  However bone armour doesn’t work and I’m a bit stuck for what colour to try instead.

Heat induced time off

Well I planned to have a week off after Cancon but that kind of stretched to two weeks due to the heat wave going through Sydney currently.  Over 30 degrees C isn’t much fun and over 35 painting just isn’t possible.  Even in a wet palette the paint dries out too fast.  However today it cooled off a bit so I could get back and do a few things.

Battlefield accessories row boat

The small mdf rowboat I purchased from Battlefield Accessories I glued together and used some wood putty on the outer hull to smooth it out.  I simple paint job and it’s ready to be added to the box of 28mm terrain.  I am thinking that I need a person fishing…

I helped both kids with their mdf building from Knights of Dice.  The daughters farm house is put together and she has started painting it.  We did the tile roof in the old school “cardboard packing cut into tiles” method and put glue everywhere.  Just needs the ridge caps to finish off.  My son glued many rocks/etc onto his ruins and that is currently in the shed airing off after undercoating.

Little farm house

I got out the “Tribal Warrior (Orc)” from the Twelve Elements of War range that I purchased at Cancon two years ago.

Tribal warrior

I’ve pre-shaded him and now need to work out a colour scheme other than boring brown with red-brown fur.  Not even sure if I’ll paint him green.  Maybe go for more of an ogre look (he does have slightly pointed ears).  While thinking about that I made a small wooden base for him.  I used the top of a resin rock I had cast (yes, it’s lime green - the overrun from another job) to add a bit to the base.  I won’t do anything more as he is more an experiment in smaller scale while I think about what larger project I’ll do next.

Tribal warrior arms