Gnollathon week 2 (2021 week 29)

Today we have a single figure, purpose picked as a high quality one because I haven't done one in a while. In particular, I wanted to see how much I'd learned about contrast on a fairly straightforward fig without a lot of embellishments. Our subject today is a gnoll which I suppose was a giveway with the title. He's a 3d print of a model made by the great Manuel Boria and you can find him here at MyMiniFactory for free. This is a good fig and a fairly easy paint which isn't true of many 3d prints.

We start with printing I suppose, followed by priming, zenithaling and anti-zenithaling. From there we get a layer of Pro Acryl transparents, a psuedo basecoat of the blue like last week's gnolls because I thought this guy was going to be a speed paint, and after that, layer after laborious layer. This is my typical try-hard approach with acrylics only slightly spruced up by a slight wash on the mane and wood. The wood is just the wash over the normal shading which I thought looked pretty good so I left it that way. 

The metallics are Vallejo Chainmail Silver with a coat of Badger Ghost Tint Oil Discharge (and no, I don't get kickbacks for these links). After that we get a stippling of random earth and orange tones for rust and a nice midtone of the same Chainmail Silver and a highlight of Golden High Flow Acrylic Iridescent Silver. This silver is super transparent which makes it ideal for glazing tasks like this. The silver over the top of the Ghost Tint shading gives some good control of the lighting in a non-metallic way with actual metallics. As a not-very-good painter, I like this because mistakes are harder to spot but I still get to practice my NMM without things looking like crap. In this case, I'm not sure it worked out well mainly because I wasn't sure what to do with the highlighting on the axe blade.

I think this is a good result weighing in at around ten hours over three-ish real days and the first day of going down a very different path. Despite the time I spent, I don't think the highlights are as good as I can do partially because I kept forgetting which way was up. Note, it was not up from the cork he was pinned to and he kept spinning around on his pin which made everything harder. I was also stupidly tired from a historic heatwave and all the life disruption that came with that. And for those who are wondering, yes, I do push a bow wave of posts here. Life happens, OK. I'm happy with this result nonetheless, though not particularly satisfied.

This marks the beginning of year four of my serious painting efforts and in that time I've painted north of 600 figs. That feels like a lot, 2020 quarantine notwithstanding, and I'll sum it all up in a future update. Fair warning: there might be some nostalgia in there. Three years is an awfully long time, after all.

2021 finished mini counter: 159/100, high quality: 3/5