Landsknecht bust finished

Hi there,

not much to say really, just photos of a finished bust. As you know already it got commended at Euromilitaire.
I must say I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, and it was a pleasure to paint.

pnp

cmon

cheers

'eM

Hurry, hurry, only one week left!

With only one week left till EuroMilitaire, and tickets lying in the drawer, I'm doing my best to finish two busts I got on my workbench. It's not as easy as you could imagine, me being constantly tired to death, my hands acting up sometimes, going  numb without any reason, and my free time seriously limited. But I'm doing the best I can in these circumstances.

I managed to do some more work on the Landsknecht. The biggest change so far is the colour of the tiny bag hanging on his chest. I really liked the goldish colour I used previously, but it was drawing too much attetnion from the face, so it's dark brown now. I still need to add stronger highlight to the left side of the bag (right on the photo), but other than that I'm quite happy.
The other big change is the red feather. I couldn't get it right, so decided to change colour. I tried few options and finally decided to go for goldish like the other. I must confess, they're pretty hard to paint. And I have 5 more on two other busts. It's not making me happy to be honest.

Other than those two changes I finished the shirt and belt, and did a bit more work on the bere and beard. And as I'm really happy with the way the belt turned out, I'm not so happy about the beard. As you can see at the bottom photo, it looked  (at least for me it did) way more structurized, organized when only undercoated.

Right now it looks more chaotic, I can't really see the nice waves, as I could earlier. I'm not sure if I'll be able to fix it and make it look like I imagined. I guess we'll see.

 cheers

'eM

Wet on wet, for the first time

With Old Gnome waiting for the skin to be finished, I felt I need to 'warm up' a bit on another model. You know, it's always easier to start over again when only the face is painted, not the whole miniature. I decided to go with SK Miniatues piece.

Beautiful Landsknecht bust (scale 1:9), sculpted by Yury Serebryakov. Pretty big face, and the rest looking deceptively simple and fast to paint. And what's more important, I got it p repared already for few months now. At some point I decided to prepare and prime several miniatures and busts. If you're courious about my preping process, I described it in some more details few posts (and almost a year) ago.

And, as you probably can imagine, I got carried away.

With face basically finished (just few touch ups here and there, when whole thing is done) I just continiued painting. For the first time I managed to successfully use wet on wet technique. Till now I was struggling with big time. I've seen countless video tutorials on this technique (well maybe not countless but a lot for sure), but couldn't get it right. Luckily this time it just worked. I'm especially happy with the red of the tunic and black on the emblem on the front. Both red and black were really difficult for me to paint with high contrast, and this time I quite like the effect. I hope I'll be able to use this technique from now on without any problems. Below you can see a massive close up of the red and black elements. It looks kinda rough here and there, but please bare in mind that the photo is few times bigger than the whole bust, so of course all imperfections are well... bigger.

Right now it's almost finished, just like the Old  Gnome piece... And I can only hope I can finish both of them without further distraction.
The face is somehow desaturated on the photo. I seem to be unable to get the colours right on my new camera, but over all I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Like I said I'll be doing some more work here, but I'm almost there.
For the rest of the bust I need: repaint the pouch on his chest (draws way too much attention away from the face), fisnish the belt, shirt, beret, golden elements, and of course beard.

cheers
'eM

Back from the 'dead'. Hopefully for good this time.

After months without the brush I finally felt like I'm ready to go back and paint with pleasure and some consistency. Well almost without the brush, I tried to paint from time to time, but it wasn't very successful. So right now after a few days with painting I really hope the 'dry spell' is over and I'll be creative again.

Because I'm not really a fan of preping miniatures, you know cleaning them, assembling, priming... Especially priming. I use Mr. Surfacer 1200, which smells really nice, but still is not the healthiest thing to inhale, so I need to use a mask and all that stuff, and it takes time... you know.
Well anyway, I decided to prepare bunch of miniatures, prime them at one go and be over with it for a while. Below you can see the minis I chose to be painted next. As you can see, mostly busts and bigger scale. I'm not quite sure if I knew what to do with 28mm mini right now:D

At this point, the minis are all primed and 'preshaded'. Because I use light gray primer, I couldn't just use white paint from the top to mimic zenithal lighting, it wouldn't be wisible enough. So first I applied a fairly diluted, dark gray paint from the bottom (+/- 45 degree), and then again diluted white from the top (+/- 45 degree). Thanks to that I can see much better lights and shadows on my miniatures, which should help me to build the volumes. The darker and brighter areas will also look a bit different when covered with paint, wihich is an additional help to the contrast.

And here the last step of my work with airbrush. Of course if I had all colour schemes planned out already I could do much more, but I'm still hesitating, so I did only flesh parts. Here again I applied first lights and shadows, but rest of the job will be done with the brush.

cheers

'eM