I’d planned to paint the Shadespire models in regular metallics, so I could quickly get them ready for some games. Then I realised that it’s pretty rare to have a painting project capped at only three models, and that seemed like a good opportunity to practice some non-metallic metals.
Bright lights and close-up photos make any painter cringe a bit, but this is the result of last night’s painting on Angharad Brightshield, from the Liberators warband. I realised much later that I’ve painted the light source on the wrong side of her helmet, so I’ll need to go back and change that next time I pick up a brush…
More detail behind the cut…
The base colour for the gold is a mix of Vallejo Game Colour’s Plague Brown, a spot of P3’s Bloodtracker Brown and a bit of pure black – loosely following this excellent tutorial from Painting Buddha. I stopped following the video for a while and accidentally tried highlighting with pure Plague Brown, which turned out to be a terrible mistake (waaay to yellow), so I promptly went back and re-watched the tutorial and just added some white to the base colour mix.
I’m still not very comfortable with this style of painting, and tend to be far too conservative when adding the initial highlights: if the paint’s thick enough (super-thin paint dries too quickly), there’s plenty of time to wet-blend the edges and soften the transitions. After 3-4 too-subtle-to-actually-see attempts, I started adding much brighter highlights and darker shades. That’s still a bit rough, particularly on the blue of the shield, but there’s plenty of time to soften those with some thin glazes of colour next time.
