grayscale – Bird with a Brush

Next up in the 12 Days of Reaper is a figure brand new this year – the Dragon and Stocking. He is the figure free with $40 purchase for December 10. I love Julie Guthrie’s sculpting on this, he has such a mischievous expression. In my mind he’s not filling up or handing out that stocking, he’s pilfering it for his tiny hoard of Christmas goodies!

As I have been doing with a lot of figures lately, I started by roughing in my shadows, highlights, and midtones with mixes of grayscale brush-on primers. This allows me to concentrate on where things should be darker and lighter based on my light source as a separate step. I was aiming to paint the light as coming from above and to the left when we’re looking at him in front view. (I discuss this and other approaches to painting with more contrast in this post – https://birdwithabrush.com/2018/10/16/how-to-paint-contrast-hands-on/)

My next step is to begin to apply colours over that value map. I work wet in wet drying to make rough blends. So I’ll place a shadow colour in the correct location, then a lighter shadow or midtone next to it trying to blend a little, and then the next lighter colour, etc. Sometimes with a little more back and forth than that. At this stage I am concentrating on the big picture only in considering where things should be lighter or darker over all. Look at the shoulder of the wing and arm on the left side of the front photo as an example, and compare with a a later step and the end result. At this point I’m just blocking in a light colour green for highlights over the entire shoulder and neck area since the light would be falling strongly on that section. I’m not worried about the shallow crevices or the small mounds of individual muscles. And similarly with the shadows that become darker under the shoulder and where the wing is slanted downwards. Since green is a somewhat translucent colour, I needed to do two or three passes of block in to build up the colour.

Only once I have those big picture shadows, highlights, and midtones in place do I start to worry about pulling out detail and refining the appearance of the blending on the figure. Compare the shoulder and neck in the following pictures to the ones above. I’ve added additional highlighting on the curves of the small muscles, and a little shading in between the muscles to add definition. And a similar process on the wing. In these photos I’ve just worked on that shoulder/neck/arm area, and the back of the wing. The detail is applied on top of and in a way that supports the big picture shadows and highlights.

This last set of photos is what the entire green area looked like after I had finished the refining and detailing stage.

Hopefully that gives a little insight into the process I’m using when I do a grayscale underpainting in primer.

Reaper Miniatures is running their 12 Days of Reaper promotion from December 5 through December 16. During the promo, one special holiday figure of the day is included free with every purchase of $40 or more from the online Reaper site. And for the first time ever, they are making the 12 Days figures available for purchase separately, for two weeks following December 16.

The 12 Days promotion stacks with the promotion to include a free Dungeon Dweller of the month with each $40+ worth of order. So for every $40+ you order at this time, you’ll receive two free metal figures. And if your order totals more than $65, you also receive a Christmas Sampler package that includes Bones miniatures, candy, a postcard with cool art by Talin, and a naughty or nice surprise. There are a fixed amount of Samplers, so those are while supplies last.

Here is the schedule of figures for each of the 12 Days of Reaper.

The Dungeon Dweller of the month is Caerindra Thistlemoor. I posted pictures and information about her last week, including some work-in-progress shots with lighting reference pictures and some information on how I rough in the lights and shadows. You can read that here: https://birdwithabrush.com/2018/12/03/caerindra-thistlemoor-roughing-in-lights-and-shadows/

You’ll find the Reaper website here: http://www.reapermini.com/

A couple of weeks ago I posted pictures of my completed paint job on ReaperCon 2018 Sophie. (https://birdwithabrush.com/2018/08/22/painting-figures-to-match-art-reapercon-2018-sophie/) She is now available for purchase online at this address. You can also purchase Barglemore and Camille (I’ll share more about painting those soon), the convention mouslings, and a few other figures. And even a swag bag from the convention! I haven’t unpacked mine yet, or I’d show a few pictures here. Maybe next post. Anyway, if you’d like to get your hands on any of that, run, don’t walk, to this link, they’ll only be available for a few days: http://www.reapermini.com/NewReleases

Now that lots of other people can get their hands on this fabulous Sophie sculpt, I thought it might be nice to share some insights into how I painted her. Lately I have really enjoyed using a process that I am calling value mapping. In art world terms, value refers to how light or dark a colour is. Every colour has versions in different values – a light sky blue, a medium value royal blue, and a dark navy blue, for example. Value is one of the major forms of contrast. It is critical to all of the visual arts, but is particularly useful for miniature painters. It is helpful to us to paint adjacent areas on a miniature to have different values. On Sophie, for example, the middle value blues and purples of her dress stand out against the paler colours of her skin and underskirt. So it’s easier for you the viewer to see which parts are which right away.

Value is also a very useful tool to build contrast within an area. If I really want Sophie’s underskirt to look like it has peaks and valleys the way that Izzy “Talin” Collier drew it and Bob Ridolfi sculpted it, I need to make the peaks appear like they’re receiving more light, and the valleys appear as if they’re shadowed and receiving less light. It is always hard for we miniature painters to push our contrast like this, but we need to do this to make our figures look truly three dimensional!

Usually I paint in the value transitions of lights and shadows as I paint. Lately I’ve been starting by painting a ‘map’ of the major values and the transitions between them by using brush-on primer. (I live in a pretty humid climate, so I often use brush-on primer instead of spray cans anyway.) Reaper makes brush-on primer in black, gray, and white. I usually mix one or two additional values of grey. I didn’t take any pictures of my palette this time, but hopefully you can get the idea looking at these pictures of the miniature. I think I had 4-5 mixes of primer colours in total. I spent somewhere between one to two hours at this at most I think.

In these first sets of pictures above you can see the main body of the figure after priming on the left, and a work-in-progress shot on the right. You can plainly see on the left version that I am not worried about super smooth blends or picking out every little detail. I’m worried about the big picture of what value do I want on the major areas of the figure, and where are the primary transitions between light and shadow within those areas. Then once I have established the ‘map’, I begin to apply paint on top. I am applying a full coverage of opaque paint on top, I’m just using the value map as a guideline. You can see that pretty well in the area of her bracers/gloves, I think.

Hopefully you can also see spots where I refine the initial map. In this second stage I’m working on making smooth blends and adding a bit more detail. So in the value mapping stage I applied the broadest highlights and shadows to areas like the torso plates and the tiny ruffles of her sleeves. When applying colour, I worked a long time on the smooth transitions on the large panels of her dress, and added detail shadow and highlights to the torso plates and ruffles.

There are variations of this technique that involve layering transparent paint over the value mapping. In the traditional art world, this is known as grisaille if done using greyscale paints, and other terms with different colours. If I were using one of those variations, I would have to take more care in the value mapping stage to make smoother blends and bring out more details. In fact in this case, many of the colours I used were slightly transparent, so it was a bit of an effort to get down nice opaque coats to completely cover my value map over. So why did I take that effort?

I am finding more and more that if I can break up some of the stages of painting a miniature, I’m more likely to get more elements correct. We ask a lot of ourselves as miniature painters. We have to figure out where there would be more light and shadow on a figure based on our imaginary light source. And blend smoothly between those lights and shadows (or correctly apply texture strokes). That’s a lot to try to work on at one time, and it’s really common to have the location of shadows and highlights spread or drift, or to end up with insufficient contrast between them. If I use the value mapping method, I break the task of figuring out where things should be lighter and darker into a separate step. Then I can concentrate on applying the paint as smooth blends or textures to the best of my ability as another separate step.

In the case of Sophie, things were complicated a little bit by the fact that I could not attach her wings at the beginning, or I wouldn’t have been able to get the paint everywhere I wanted it. I did a little priming on them prior to assembly, then once I glued the wings on (I love that extra attachment point on the skirt, thank you Bob!), I went through the process of value mapping again with the wings, and also with the stone texture on the base.

Here on the wings the process may even be more obvious, at least from the front view. I did not bother at all picking out the bony spines of the wings at the value mapping stage. I’m a fairly messy painter, and likely any detailing like that would only have gotten covered over while trying to do the blends. So it saved me time to only worry about the big picture when value mapping. In the picture from the back, you can see that I also can course correct if I haven’t done a great job of all the areas on my map. As I was painting I decided that the top of the wing in the lowered position would be receiving more light than I originally thought, so I added more highlights.

One more picture to share. One of the things I love about Bones miniatures is how useful they are for doing practice and study. In the past I would have practiced freehand shapes on a flat surface like a base or primed piece of plastic. This can easily lead to sizing errors between the practice and the real figure, and doesn’t help you figure out how to apply the freehand to a three dimensional shape. Or I would have had to go through a lot of trouble to prep and prime a metal miniature. Now I just look out for a Bones miniature that has similar shapes to what I’m trying to test, bust out some paint, and get to testing immediately. Below you can see how I was working out how to break down some of the shapes from Izzy’s concept art into patterns I could replicate in freehand painting. If I had had the time time or was a little less practiced at this process, I would spent a lot more time practicing on my test figure.

So that is my little bit of insight into my painting process for ReaperCon Sophie 2018. As of the date of upload of this blog, she is available on the Reaper website for purchase along with some of the other convention figures, but they are limited release figures that will only be available for a brief time. So if you want to try your hand at painting this lovely figure (and it was fun to paint despite the deadline issues!), go grab one now!

Tag: grayscale

Dragon and Stocking – 12 Days of Reaper

ReaperCon 2018 Sophie: Painting Process