I finally had some time this weekend to test out a new painting technique. For my O&G army I have consistently used the Army Painter strong tone quick wash and got very good results. But for my trolls the result was not that good. I decided to use the dark tone variant but the miniatures came out too dark, even looking dirty. And I wanted to have really blue trolls to contrast with all the green stuff in the army.
I found this quick painting technique on the Miniature Mentor site. It did not use a dark wash so I decided to use it on my trolls. And since I'm very happy with the result I wanted to share it with you.
I had 3 units of trolls that still needed painting. Here are the steps I went through:
1. Primer and Zenithal highlightThe first step is priming the miniature in black. Then you use an airbrush to apply a gradual highlight called Zenithal highlight. The first colors are rather dark and you spray them over the upper half of the miniature. Then you gradually go to brighter colors but spray more and more from the top of the miniature. The final spray is done in a rather bright color spraying almost vertically over the miniature, focusing on the face. You basically want to have a black&white version of the miniature if it would be standing under a bright light.
As you can see in the image the lower areas are dark and the raised areas are really bright.
2. Painting rocks & woodIn the next step you apply only one or two coats of paint thinned down with washes and/or water. For the rocks I used a mix of 2/3rds grey wash and 1/3rd regular acrylic paints. This mixture is quite translucent so the airbrush shading really comes through. I created a basic mix, a darker variant (by adding more dark grey) and a third which was mostly thinned down white paint. I first applied the basic grey mix to three models, then blended in the slightly darker grey in the recesses and finally a dot of white here and there. Because the mixture is really liquid the blending is very easy, you just put on the second layer and blending goes automatically.
Below you can see the result, a pretty good blend for the amount of time spent.
The wood was painted with only a single layer of paint. I used a green-brownish color thinned down with a brown wash. A single layer was applied to the wooden areas. Here you really see the effect of the initial airbrushing - there is a very nice gradient from darker brown in the recesses to an almost white on the raised areas.
3. Painting the eyesThe eyes were the third step. It is important in this technique to paint from the inside out, so first the deeper areas and then building up to the raised areas. The red was about 1/3 of acrylic paints (equal parts of red & yellow) and 2/3 of red glaze. A small highlight using a mix of 1/3 yellow, 1/3 red and 1/3 wash was then applied to give the eyes some more relief.
4. Painting the skinBy this stage I was already painting for more than an hour on these 9 stands (not including the airbrushing) so it was not blazingly fast speed painting - me getting a bit disappointed at that stage. But I am not the fastest painter on the planet either so it could just have been me.
Then I moved on to the skin and here the technique really paid off. I created a base mix of 5 parts blue wash, 7 parts blue glaze and 3 parts vallejo model air clear grey. On my palette I created a second mix taking some drops of the base mix and some drops of the clear grey. I painted the entire skin area using the base mix and blended in some of the brighter mix on the fingers and face. This took only a few minutes per model and the results were quite spectacular. A very bright blue but lots of depth.
Here is the result:
5. Finishing touchesThe next phase were some finishing touches. Unfortunately here again I had to pick out all the details which took ages.
Basing is still a work in progress so only an intermediate (and not so sharp) photo here. But the result looks really good.
ConclusionI spent maybe half an hour on the airbrushing job and 4 hours on the miniatures themselves - so 1.5 hours per unit or half an hour per stand. That is not super-fast as such. But I am really satisfied with the result and more than happy to have tried out this technique. For most of my warmaster models I will stick to the army painter technique but for brighter models I will use this one in the future.
Hope somebody finds this useful,
Jo
