Abyst
by Wolfgang Muskens
To make a long story short: almost anything went wrong with this mini. Paints absorbed the ink, something I had never noticed before with those brands. I tried oils- to find out that the needed months of drying time and my sealer dissolved the gold I had painted on the mini. I had to strip-paint four times.
First color scheme I tried was red brown - didn't look good. Then I tried gold / red in a square pattern on the scales - looked plain stupid (not funny, stupid! :-) ). Next attempt was red and gold again in a pattern like the black and white you can see on the picture. This turned out nice until I tried to coat it....
This Demon obviously didn't want to look frightening. After talking to some friends I decided to paint it somewhat like one of those jazz musicians and I added the hat (milliput). The sword didn't suit anymore and I would have liked to add a trumpet - but with my sculpting skills there was no way to add one in time. Ok, something else - my attitude to the mini was very bad at that time and if it had not been for ViC it would have ended in some box for a very long time. It was looking funny already so I though, what would a Demon look like if just summoned from the privy, where it just relaxed? Maybe it smoked a cigar enjoyed a magazine and had a had some toilet paper and a Brush with it. What magazines would demons read? - I scanned a Succubus from the Reaper catalog, enlarged it, painted it with acrylics (so much for my skills with painting software ;-) ) scanned it again (all in about 30 min) and then worked two hours to convince my printer to print it out in an acceptable quality.
Then I tried to create the impression that it had been summoned just a moment ago and and thus was still not fully materialized. For the effect I used Lukas acrylic medium (white) and Schmincke 'Akademie Acryl' black. That worked really well for a change.
The wings have different shades of green-black and blue-black. After the shading of the face totally disappeared on the first photos (only one of 12 pictures was usable at all - that had never happened to me before) I added some gray highlighting.
Like the miniature itself so were the pictures subject to murphy's curse. Out of two films with different lighting and several camera settings only two pictures were usable at all. Something that had not happened to me in the 10 years I've been taking pictures from minis.
Wolfgang Muskens
Previous Miniature
Visions in Color #2 Index
Next Miniature