Miniature-Painting.net - Visions in Color

The only noteworthy thing about the preparation of the miniature is, that the short sword had to be separated from the wing. The remaining flash was easy to remove.

Then the figure was primed white because I wanted her to stand out and with a lot of vibrance in the colors

I almost always start a miniature by painting the flesh colors. To do so,I used the Citadel flesh colors and a brown ink. I started with the pallid flesh and applied several blending washes. Every wash used a color that was a little darker than the one before. The final wash consisted of a strongly diluted brown ink. After these washes the skin was by no means finished. Now I went through the colors in the reverse order, applying semi transparent layers of them. With every color applied, in washing and highlighting, I softened the transition of the hues with a damp brush. I also didn't do all flesh areas in one step. I went through this procedure for each arm, leg, behind, body and head. The breasts where some kind of a challenge to get right. In my first try I just used lighter tones as the area was rising. This was done absolutely symmetrically. But this looked just like the demoness was wearing a very ugly bra. The key was to imagine a virtual light source. I placed this non existent light source in the upper left over the figure. So the highlights on the breasts are stronger on the upper left too. The result looked much more realistic.

I wanted to do something special for the Visions in Color show. And the idea how to do this came to me while watching a Shania Twain music video. In this video every piece of clothing she was wearing had this leopard pattern. This was what I wanted to see on the cloth of the demoness too. The base of this pattern is a classical blending done with a base color of yellow. The shading was done by mixing brown ink into the base color. The technique was basically the same as with the flesh. For the highlights I mixed in some white. After this blending I added the leopard pattern. For this I painted the spots on with a dark brown. Every leopard spot consists of three spots of brown (building a triangle or a open rectangle) and a central spot of orange. Finally I added some small dots of brown to make the pattern more dense.

Since I wanted a vibrant color scheme, I chose blue for the boots to contrast with the yellow cloth. This was a simple blending with the exception that the top of the boots are painted in a deep blue and the bottom in a light sky blue.

The natural choice for the hair was red. So I used green for the wings. Again to get more vibrance into the color scheme. The wings are done in a blending technique, followed by a glazing with green ink to enhance the blending (smoothing transitions) and to richen the color of the highlights which where quite pale before the glaze.

All metallic parts where painted black, followed by a shining silver or gold. The gold was shaded with brown ink and the silver was shaded with a mixture of brown ink and a very dark blue. The shading was done by several thin washes.

The stone and the skulls where blended. I think that a drybrushing of the stone would have resulted in a more blurry look, and I wanted the model to look sharp.

Finally I added a wood base and some sand that was painted to look like some grass. I did this because the stone base looked unfinished and I wanted a better protection for the paint job.

Dominic Heutelbeck

Previous Miniature Visions in Color #1 Index