Black can be a difficult color to paint. Usually I paint it using a very dark grey, tinted brown for warm or blue for cold. I also almost always use an airbrush to paint black miniatures. Last night I tried painting a black miniature making heavy use of Latham Medium. Instead of wet blending, I used very thin layers. At the very end of base coating, I doused the mini in gloss varnish, and used oil washes selectively. I used a dark brown around the armor plates, and streaking grim on all of the gold areas. I then waited till the oil had become tacky (thanks to a hair dryer it only took a few minutes) and used a clean brush with a tiny dab of white spirit to clean off the portions of the wash I did not like.
I was not happy with the miniature last night, but this morning I can see some promise. Unfortunately this finecast model has terrible surface quality and loss of detail, so it is not worth repainting. The right shoulder pad was pitted so badly that after painting, I had to use a heavy dose of gloss varnish to fill in the the imperfections. I think that worked better than green stuff, so I'll use the method again.
The base just happened to be a reject I had nearby. I will use dusty desert bases so these guys could ally with my tallarn. Also it would allow me to put weathering powder on their feet, which will probably look pretty cool.
looking good so far. I would do one more layer of light highlighting and one more layer of dark shadowing using pure black.then washed black armor with a very watered down black. the wash will help blend and smooth out the transitions of the different layers without showing any hard visible layer marks.
ReplyDeleteI wish I had some spare models and bases to play around with and discard lol.keep up the great work.