This week (actually, a couple weeks ago; I've got a backlog) marks a significant shift in how I'm painting. Two weeks ago I mentioned discovering one James Wappel and being mesmerized by his style. I've now had time to digest at least some of his approach and it's made a pretty big difference. I still can't claim to be any good and might never be able to claim so, but this is going a lot more in a direction I like than stuff I've done so far.
All of these figs are speed paints. The first elf is a Drow Wizard from The Legend of Drizzt board game. The sculpts of these aren't bad but the molding is lousy. I had to guess at a lot of the details. The elf was done in a single sitting in about 2 hours after value sketch and was my first attempt at Wappel's shaded basecoat approach. It photographed very poorly. In particular, the eyes don't look quite so lousy in person.
The "bugbear" is an Orc Smasher from the Wrath of Ashardalon board game (oops) and was done in about 3 hours from the same state over a couple days and it photographed much better than it looks in person. I ended with some glazes that were far too heavy knocking out a lot of the highlights. I certainly could have fixed this but didn't feel it was necessary. Also, the metal medium really didn't work over the teal mail as expected.
The dude with the sword is Artemis Entreri also from The Legend of Drizzt board game. It's also a three hour paint job with way too much of it spent feebly attempting NMM. I gave up and blasted over it with metallics as should be obvious. To be fair, Vallejo Metal Colors are awesome. I'm also noticing in the shot that the Army Painter paints I used for the awful glazing on the cloak went glossy. I shoulda known that would happen.
The blonde gal is a Deepwood Sentinel from Mage Knight Lancers. When I started painting For Realz(TM) it was before I had the thousands of unpainted figs I do now. That summer I stripped a couple dozen figs that I intended to practice on. This fig and the next one sat badly stripped and badly primed in my "todo" pile for the last two years. I spent extra effort on the eyes which have distinct pupils, irises, and a reflection point. The photography, naturally, doesn't show this super well.
The gal with the shield is a Shield Maiden also from Mage Knight Lancers. Her original paint job featured a lot of metal and a bare midriff which makes no sense whatsoever. I thought the plate sculpt looked better as cloth so I painted it thusly. The green that keeps showing up is from an ancient pot of Reaper paints that I bought in like 2004 on the other side of the country. I like this fig despite the shield arm being bizarre and definitely not how one might carry a shield like that.
There's a lot to like with this approach--I'll break it down some other time in more detail. The painting in general is much easier and I can stop at relatively low time investments with something presentable. It encourages a focus on light and overall composition in ways that are way easier to visualize than the far more typical "many layers on a specific feature"--both things that I've struggled with.
I think if I'd found James' stuff in 2016 during my last failed attempt to learn rather than the more traditional stuff, I probably wouldn't have been scared off for two years. To be fair, I'm helped more than a little by a reasonable foundation from my studies of Vince's approach but they're both lining up in similar directions. Not ironically, it was one of Vince's Interview with the Artist videos that started me down that path. You should watch at least the first like fifteen minutes of that if you like mini painting at all.
2020 finished mini counter: 27/50
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