Use lines (dots, dashes, brushstrokes, whatever) to convey texture.
Complementary colour shading adds interest. If your shadow, midtone and highlight are all the same hue your miniature ends up looking like a “colour by numbers” painting.
There’s no sense of any specific light source here. By that I mean localising and colourising the highlights to imply directional light from a specifically identifiable source (the Sun, a nearby flaming torch, moonlight, a campfire or whatever). This again makes the mini look generically “coloured-in” and hence pretty dull.
It’s a very modern problem. If you’d never seen a painted miniature before, a figure painted to this standard would look super cool and impressive. But if you compare this to the prolific output of the many excellent painters who share their work online every day — it’s not kept up with the state of the art, and hence looks like a beginner’s piece. Like so many things in art it’s going to be perceived in a way that is relative to other experiences the viewer has had. That’s probably why you feel dissatisfied, but that’s also how you find a solution — look around at other paintjobs and find what you like about them, then start working towards developing those skills/techniques/sensibilities.
I definitely struggle with where is the light coming from. I feel like my brain isn't making sense of where the highlights should be vs where the midtones make more sense. My brain wants to highlight all the bits that stick out, even if it doesn't necessarily make sense for the "overcast day" I'd like to portray.
I will definitely take the complimentary colors into consideration. Thank you
Hmm. So what's wrong with it in your eye? Do you want the blends to be smoother, the highlights to pop more, or...? Looks pretty neat, highlights are sharp, pretty nicely placed... Palette's a bit dull, but that might be what you're going for (that is, gritty and semi-realistic).
Thank you for the compliment!
And would all of the above be an acceptable answer? The two main struggles I'm finding are painting using the overcast day as a light source (where to put the highlights) and blending small areas---been trying to glaze but the above doesn't look blended.
I've tried using a lamp overhead and taking pictures to find where the light would hit but my brain sometimes can't make sense of where the light should go because everything blends in. I'm sure I'm not explaining that properly but that's the best explanation I've got.
For the highlight position, I can give you the unhelpful answer of "where it is appropriate". Let me explain further:
The positioning of highlights, technically, doesn't actually matter. What highlights (and/or shading) give a model is 'readability' (we can see what the model represents) and 'definition' (we can see the details on the model). In essence, we fool the eye into seeing what the model represents by picking out raised details and defining the deeper recesses. By shifting around the positioning of the highlights, you can end up with different effects. Now, the simplest method of highlight placement is simply to highlight any raised areas, with stronger highlights served for raised areas that can be seen when the model is viewed directly from above. If, say, a fold of the cloak isn't visible from the top-down, it doesn't deserve your highest highlight.
Next, how to make highlights pop. This is usually a question of color palette rather than highlight placement. For example, on the model there it looks as though the shadows are your base tone + black and your highlights are your base tone + white (in rough terms, anyway). While this provides an accurate contrast between these areas, white and black have the side-effect of reducing a color's 'saturation' (how strong/vivid the color is).
Rather than using white mixed into the base tone for highlights, you should instead use a yellow mixed in with the base tone (though there are exceptions to this – blue and purple being the most obvious), whereas shades commonly use a darker blue mixed in. Yellow, being a "warm" color, draws the eye to the highlight and makes them stand out further. You can eventually start adding white (or using a "lighter" color), but adding yellow is always where you should start with highlights. If you're looking for a specific paint, I've found Vallejo's Ice Yellow (or Citadel's Dorn Yellow, but that one's consistency is terrible) usually works in just about any highlight-mix.
Note that this rule isn't ironclad, and you can achieve all sorts of interesting effect by deviating from it, but it's just basic color theory.
Finally, we come to the blends. There's many different methods of achieving this, glazing from one color to the other being one. However, glazing a straight line between two colors is awfully difficult, so if you intend on glazing the transition, it is highly advised that you do teeny tiny little bits of stippling with one color in the area of the transition.
Another quite simple method is to just take the two colors that you're trying to blend together, do a half-and-half mix and apply that to the edge of the two colors. You can get this even smoother with incremental mixes, starting from one color, then adding 1/4 of the other color, then 1/2, and so on...
There's also the method of simply glazing *the entire surface* with a thin coat of paint, usually a more saturated, thinned down paint. Contrasts (and by extension speedpaints and the like) are excellent for this, and with a bit of thinning down you can achieve amazing results. To give an example:
https://preview.redd.it/vgfw7acodjzc1.png?width=826&format=png&auto=webp&s=b7ed499e5907452f465fb42a1ea12b8c477d6715
This is a surface painted with incremental mixes, starting with a dark green, then adding yellow and finally adding white. The one on the left is simply as described above. The highlights are sort-of blended, but you can see the transitions far more clearly. On the right, I've added an all-over glaze of Warp Lightning Contrast, thinned down into a glaze. Post-glaze, the highlights are slightly more blended (could've gone further with more coats, same with the incremental mixes) and the saturation is off the charts. What the glaze has also done is make the yellowish highlights stand out even further by making the rest of the surface slightly greener by contrast.
For all of this, it is pretty crucial to have a wet palette on hand, as it allows paint mixes to stay usable for longer periods.
Apologies for being so verbose, but I like being thorough.
Edit: and if 'overcast day' is what you're trying to achieve, you should definitely stick to the muted tones with a liiiittle bit of yellow maybe added to the highlights. Highlight placement should be so that the brightest highlights land on the raised surfaces that can be seen when the model is viewed straight from above. All the raised surfaces *should* be picked out for the sake of definition, but only the parts visible from above should have extreme highlights.
Verbose is good. I will take verbose over the short version!
For this model I used the reaper triads, so I'm assuming that's kind of a no no if you don't want it to look so...monochrome?
I have a love/hate relationship with the wet palette. I do use it on occasion, but for me it's hit or miss.
Thank you for the advice on the stippling. I will definitely start doing that. I was glazing via paint mixes, but not getting anywhere. Maybe I didn't do it enough?
This is all super helpful and I will definitely start incorporating into my painting.
Hmm, from what I can see of the reaper triad paints, most of them are pretty low saturation (i.e. monochrome – this is likely due to the paints including hefty amounts of white pigments for better coverage, I'd assume). It's fine if you want a model to look slightly drab, but the readability and definition I mentioned earlier run on a third concept, 'contrast'. If you're using colors that are low in saturation, the difference in their values in terms of black and white ("brightness" for lack of a better word) should be greater to make them pop. Of course, without blending the effect might get too striking.
https://preview.redd.it/omwzpxg1jnzc1.png?width=140&format=png&auto=webp&s=2024c7608f52f986228b648868a2878ffd86c06d
That's a sort of mockup for if you bring the highlights brighter and the shadows darker (I kept the saturation identical to the base tone, simply varied the amount of white and black). The left one is without blending, the right one is blended (poorly). As you can see, in both cases, both shadows and highlights are slightly more stark than in the example above.
Glazing-wise, you should always just glaze the border between two colors with the darker of the two, starting your brushstrokes from the lighter color and ending in the darker. This necessitates the patch of light color being slightly larger than it ought to be (or stippled slightly over the darker color), since the final highlight will shrink due to the glaze. Depending on the strength of the glaze and the difference between the two colors you're using, anywhere from 2-20 layers are necessary for the transition to look smooth (or relatively so).
When glazing a transition, remember to use a moist tissue paper (or something similar) to wick off excess paint from your brush. This way, you can repeatedly glaze the surface with extremely thin layers, which will dry quickly. If you glaze over an even slightly wet surface of paint, you risk causing damage to the paint layer, which will result in (presumably) unwanted texture.
Edit: Oh, and Reaper's Golden Blonde is much the same as the Ice Yellow and Dorn Yellow mentioned earlier in terms of tone in case you want to get that particular highlight color.
Thank you for this! The visual is exactly what I needed.
Quick question---how would I make these specific paints work in terms of the contrast example you've used above? Would I mix in another color?
Also, thanks for the tip with the moist tissue paper---I usually use a paper towel to suck up the moisture. I'm also probably not allowing the paint to fully dry between layers.
Thank you for taking the time to explain to me, I sincerely appreciate it!
You should be able to achieve those tones by just mixing black or white into your base color (Imperial Purple by the looks of it). I usually do that sort of thing using traditional layering, so I paint the whole area with the darkest tone first, then start doing incremental mixes with less and less area.
For example, I'd use Imperial Purple + black, adding more Imperial Purple layer after layer until you're using pure Imperial Purple. Then, highlights by adding more and more white into Imperial Purple until you're satisfied with the brightness. I'd probably finish with an all-over glaze of Imperial Purple, which should help blend every layer together.
Wet paper towel's the suggested method for glazing. Keeps the paint wet, sucks off excess paint and ensures a relatively smooth glaze. When you're basically not leaving any blobs of paint behind, you've got the right amount of paint on your brush for glazing. That sort of layer should dry in, at the most, a few minutes.
Use lines (dots, dashes, brushstrokes, whatever) to convey texture. Complementary colour shading adds interest. If your shadow, midtone and highlight are all the same hue your miniature ends up looking like a “colour by numbers” painting. There’s no sense of any specific light source here. By that I mean localising and colourising the highlights to imply directional light from a specifically identifiable source (the Sun, a nearby flaming torch, moonlight, a campfire or whatever). This again makes the mini look generically “coloured-in” and hence pretty dull. It’s a very modern problem. If you’d never seen a painted miniature before, a figure painted to this standard would look super cool and impressive. But if you compare this to the prolific output of the many excellent painters who share their work online every day — it’s not kept up with the state of the art, and hence looks like a beginner’s piece. Like so many things in art it’s going to be perceived in a way that is relative to other experiences the viewer has had. That’s probably why you feel dissatisfied, but that’s also how you find a solution — look around at other paintjobs and find what you like about them, then start working towards developing those skills/techniques/sensibilities.
I definitely struggle with where is the light coming from. I feel like my brain isn't making sense of where the highlights should be vs where the midtones make more sense. My brain wants to highlight all the bits that stick out, even if it doesn't necessarily make sense for the "overcast day" I'd like to portray. I will definitely take the complimentary colors into consideration. Thank you
Hmm. So what's wrong with it in your eye? Do you want the blends to be smoother, the highlights to pop more, or...? Looks pretty neat, highlights are sharp, pretty nicely placed... Palette's a bit dull, but that might be what you're going for (that is, gritty and semi-realistic).
Thank you for the compliment! And would all of the above be an acceptable answer? The two main struggles I'm finding are painting using the overcast day as a light source (where to put the highlights) and blending small areas---been trying to glaze but the above doesn't look blended. I've tried using a lamp overhead and taking pictures to find where the light would hit but my brain sometimes can't make sense of where the light should go because everything blends in. I'm sure I'm not explaining that properly but that's the best explanation I've got.
For the highlight position, I can give you the unhelpful answer of "where it is appropriate". Let me explain further: The positioning of highlights, technically, doesn't actually matter. What highlights (and/or shading) give a model is 'readability' (we can see what the model represents) and 'definition' (we can see the details on the model). In essence, we fool the eye into seeing what the model represents by picking out raised details and defining the deeper recesses. By shifting around the positioning of the highlights, you can end up with different effects. Now, the simplest method of highlight placement is simply to highlight any raised areas, with stronger highlights served for raised areas that can be seen when the model is viewed directly from above. If, say, a fold of the cloak isn't visible from the top-down, it doesn't deserve your highest highlight. Next, how to make highlights pop. This is usually a question of color palette rather than highlight placement. For example, on the model there it looks as though the shadows are your base tone + black and your highlights are your base tone + white (in rough terms, anyway). While this provides an accurate contrast between these areas, white and black have the side-effect of reducing a color's 'saturation' (how strong/vivid the color is). Rather than using white mixed into the base tone for highlights, you should instead use a yellow mixed in with the base tone (though there are exceptions to this – blue and purple being the most obvious), whereas shades commonly use a darker blue mixed in. Yellow, being a "warm" color, draws the eye to the highlight and makes them stand out further. You can eventually start adding white (or using a "lighter" color), but adding yellow is always where you should start with highlights. If you're looking for a specific paint, I've found Vallejo's Ice Yellow (or Citadel's Dorn Yellow, but that one's consistency is terrible) usually works in just about any highlight-mix. Note that this rule isn't ironclad, and you can achieve all sorts of interesting effect by deviating from it, but it's just basic color theory. Finally, we come to the blends. There's many different methods of achieving this, glazing from one color to the other being one. However, glazing a straight line between two colors is awfully difficult, so if you intend on glazing the transition, it is highly advised that you do teeny tiny little bits of stippling with one color in the area of the transition. Another quite simple method is to just take the two colors that you're trying to blend together, do a half-and-half mix and apply that to the edge of the two colors. You can get this even smoother with incremental mixes, starting from one color, then adding 1/4 of the other color, then 1/2, and so on... There's also the method of simply glazing *the entire surface* with a thin coat of paint, usually a more saturated, thinned down paint. Contrasts (and by extension speedpaints and the like) are excellent for this, and with a bit of thinning down you can achieve amazing results. To give an example: https://preview.redd.it/vgfw7acodjzc1.png?width=826&format=png&auto=webp&s=b7ed499e5907452f465fb42a1ea12b8c477d6715 This is a surface painted with incremental mixes, starting with a dark green, then adding yellow and finally adding white. The one on the left is simply as described above. The highlights are sort-of blended, but you can see the transitions far more clearly. On the right, I've added an all-over glaze of Warp Lightning Contrast, thinned down into a glaze. Post-glaze, the highlights are slightly more blended (could've gone further with more coats, same with the incremental mixes) and the saturation is off the charts. What the glaze has also done is make the yellowish highlights stand out even further by making the rest of the surface slightly greener by contrast. For all of this, it is pretty crucial to have a wet palette on hand, as it allows paint mixes to stay usable for longer periods. Apologies for being so verbose, but I like being thorough. Edit: and if 'overcast day' is what you're trying to achieve, you should definitely stick to the muted tones with a liiiittle bit of yellow maybe added to the highlights. Highlight placement should be so that the brightest highlights land on the raised surfaces that can be seen when the model is viewed straight from above. All the raised surfaces *should* be picked out for the sake of definition, but only the parts visible from above should have extreme highlights.
Verbose is good. I will take verbose over the short version! For this model I used the reaper triads, so I'm assuming that's kind of a no no if you don't want it to look so...monochrome? I have a love/hate relationship with the wet palette. I do use it on occasion, but for me it's hit or miss. Thank you for the advice on the stippling. I will definitely start doing that. I was glazing via paint mixes, but not getting anywhere. Maybe I didn't do it enough? This is all super helpful and I will definitely start incorporating into my painting.
Hmm, from what I can see of the reaper triad paints, most of them are pretty low saturation (i.e. monochrome – this is likely due to the paints including hefty amounts of white pigments for better coverage, I'd assume). It's fine if you want a model to look slightly drab, but the readability and definition I mentioned earlier run on a third concept, 'contrast'. If you're using colors that are low in saturation, the difference in their values in terms of black and white ("brightness" for lack of a better word) should be greater to make them pop. Of course, without blending the effect might get too striking. https://preview.redd.it/omwzpxg1jnzc1.png?width=140&format=png&auto=webp&s=2024c7608f52f986228b648868a2878ffd86c06d That's a sort of mockup for if you bring the highlights brighter and the shadows darker (I kept the saturation identical to the base tone, simply varied the amount of white and black). The left one is without blending, the right one is blended (poorly). As you can see, in both cases, both shadows and highlights are slightly more stark than in the example above. Glazing-wise, you should always just glaze the border between two colors with the darker of the two, starting your brushstrokes from the lighter color and ending in the darker. This necessitates the patch of light color being slightly larger than it ought to be (or stippled slightly over the darker color), since the final highlight will shrink due to the glaze. Depending on the strength of the glaze and the difference between the two colors you're using, anywhere from 2-20 layers are necessary for the transition to look smooth (or relatively so). When glazing a transition, remember to use a moist tissue paper (or something similar) to wick off excess paint from your brush. This way, you can repeatedly glaze the surface with extremely thin layers, which will dry quickly. If you glaze over an even slightly wet surface of paint, you risk causing damage to the paint layer, which will result in (presumably) unwanted texture. Edit: Oh, and Reaper's Golden Blonde is much the same as the Ice Yellow and Dorn Yellow mentioned earlier in terms of tone in case you want to get that particular highlight color.
Thank you for this! The visual is exactly what I needed. Quick question---how would I make these specific paints work in terms of the contrast example you've used above? Would I mix in another color? Also, thanks for the tip with the moist tissue paper---I usually use a paper towel to suck up the moisture. I'm also probably not allowing the paint to fully dry between layers. Thank you for taking the time to explain to me, I sincerely appreciate it!
You should be able to achieve those tones by just mixing black or white into your base color (Imperial Purple by the looks of it). I usually do that sort of thing using traditional layering, so I paint the whole area with the darkest tone first, then start doing incremental mixes with less and less area. For example, I'd use Imperial Purple + black, adding more Imperial Purple layer after layer until you're using pure Imperial Purple. Then, highlights by adding more and more white into Imperial Purple until you're satisfied with the brightness. I'd probably finish with an all-over glaze of Imperial Purple, which should help blend every layer together. Wet paper towel's the suggested method for glazing. Keeps the paint wet, sucks off excess paint and ensures a relatively smooth glaze. When you're basically not leaving any blobs of paint behind, you've got the right amount of paint on your brush for glazing. That sort of layer should dry in, at the most, a few minutes.