Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Lunchtime Painting - A Lesson In Insufficient Light

I have a few regularly scheduled painting times per week. Monday and Wednesday on my lunch hour and Wednesday night. The work lunch hour schedule is a new one set up for painting with a friend who is on-campus two days a week. He bought a Pandora "Legion of Sorrows" box (along with other Neverborn models) and plans on painting the box during his 15 week classes. I have been taking the opportunity to teach him what I can about technique. One lesson I was reminded of today is "don't skimp on lighting." Bill is actively seeking to become a better painter, and his Sorrow (middle) is coming along nicely. My Belles show the sorts of mistakes and ham-handed highlighting that is common with basic room lighting. I have a goose-neck lamp with a CF bulb in my office, which I let Bill use. I actually have a fluorescent strip light that I can use on the other part of my desk, but did not remember it until long after vandalizing the Belles as I did.

Tonight I will get the good lamp out and the magnifying headset and try to fix the highlights on the purple Belle's dress. I will also endeavor to make Blondie's eyes look less..... wrong. Sure, she's a zombie but those eyes just don't look intentional. It really is my #1 rule of painting... whatever you do must look intentional.

In other news, after the figs shown I have only 5 unpainted Malifaux models for my Rezzer army. Time to get out that credit card! I could probably use a couple more Macaw Vultures.....

Oh, and I have found that the purple background makes photography with the crappy phone camera (HTC Evo 4G) so much easier.  Here it is for your download and printing pleasure. Put the miniatures at the bottom and incline the rest no more than about 30 degrees to avoid light reflecting from overhead.

2 comments:

  1. Ooh. I like the purple backdrop. I use a printed blue-white gradient, but I think it's too light and bright for some evil models...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hey, thanks for that!

    I'm also using de blue-white classic combo all the way but I've been considering switching to darker backgrounds from some time on.

    Incidentally, the last pics I took was using a simple black (matte-a bit silky textured) and light itself do the trick of creating greyscale hues!

    I'll be trying to do that purple stuff in the near future but I'd rather use dark yellow/brown instead.

    By the way, the hooker looks better everyday, a tad cleaner may I say. Love the green djinn-spirit whatever, but maybe paler colors would fit him better since it looks like materialising out of nowhere.

    ReplyDelete

I had to add anti-spam measures because, let's face it, almost nobody comments on blogs anymore unless they are spamming. Sorry.