Gnollathon week 1 (2021 week 28)

I've been looking for new ways to speed paint and recently I ran into this video by Marco Frisoni using oils and gurdurnnit I haven't painted in oils in a long time. (This one's good too.) What would make that better? Gnolls! This week we kick off a new theme in a big 'ol batch for use in my every-other-Saturday game.

These are ten Frostgrave Gnolls, the first ten of whom were painted about a gajillionty years ago (ok, it was actually late 2018).  I love these figs and some day when I don't have a pile of potential in the four digit range, I will buy another box. These guys are supposed to be a speed paint. I feel like I type that a lot. Instead they were an experiment and I think it's turned out well.

We start, as usual, with a prime, shadows from below in Payne's Grey ink, and zenithal white from above. In a video I watched recently, someone noted that you want to zenithal that reads white from above.(Marco again? Can't remember). This matches pretty well with a thing that I noticed doing glaze speed painting--that my highlights aren't super bright. So for these guys I switched back to a white ink, Daler Rowney, like the Payne's Grey. This did seem to fix my zenithal problems but I pretty much painted over the whole thing anyway.

Next up I did a flat basecoat which is not normally a thing I do. I'm either starting with a Pro Acryl transparent base or a shaded basecoat which I like a lot better. Both of these add contrast cheaply and easily which is a better set up for the typical acrylic many layers method that I've been doing since, well, January, and it felt very, very wrong. I used an ancient pot of blue Reaper Pro Paints that I bought just after the turn of the millennium and a Vallejo Game Color terra cotta that I like a lot. The browns were played by my old (and terrible) Army Painter paints with backups in white from an off white Vallejo Game Color and metallics by Vallejo Game Air Chainmail Silver. In this case I was painting some 3d prints in the batch which fight with the normal Vallejo Metal Color Steel that I might otherwise prefer.

Now things got crazy. Re-activating my prepared oil paints, I cut up some makeup sponges, pulled out my q-tips, and found my eyeliner sponges (something like this and boy does my Amazon purchase history look weird). I slopped down an oil wash mostly in the right colors on the first fig and then wiped off most of it with the aforementioned wipey team. This mostly worked. The yellow and brown mix did not play nice with the blue mix as one might expect and the result was a mess but I soldiered through and even did some minor highlights. Every figure from there on out was washed in variations on the same color with a mustard-y wash for the base.

This was fun and they got better with each gnoll. There are three vectors to control here: the thickness of the paint, the length of time on the mini before wiping it off, and the color of the wash. I experimented with all three and by the tenth one I think I finally got it. Ten to fifteen minutes is what seemed to work the best for me in a relatively humid and slightly warm environment. This was just enough time to slop paint on three of them (the last three in this case) before going to wipe off most of the paint. You want to avoid pressing too hard on the fig even if you want to take off most of the wash, say, on their adorable gnoll-y faces, and if you don't let the wash set for a bit, capillary action will pull most of it off into the sponge. The consistency that worked well for me is around halfway between a well mixed Army Painter paint and a Vallejo Model Air. For the color, lighter colors were fine but the darker colors seemed to work the best, even on the blue base.

The last step was highlighting which I also did in oils after a day of paint drying on the figs. I'd considered waiting a couple days and finishing details with acrylics but wanted to do some sweet, sweet oil blends since I had them out. I also futzed around a bit with edge highlights but I don't think those turned out super well. Probably my paint was too thick.

This has been a fun return to oils and I suspect there will be more of these shenanigans in the near future. These guys were prepped in right around fifteen hours including assembly and painting was completed in around twelve of those hours. That seems good given the outcome and that I did a bunch of experimentation along the way. Next time should be faster! 

2021 finished mini counter: 158/100