Adding navy highlights over black to eldar guardians

So often, mini painting seems to be a game of exaggeration,

Where a full size red coat just has to be dyed red to look right, a miniature red coat made of painted plastic tends to look drab and fake unless you exaggerate the shadows and highlights.

This is a lot like stage makeup for actors in a play.

Believe it or not, almost every actor you see in a professionally run play wears makeup. Why? Because between the bright stage lights and how far away the actors are from the audience, without makeup their faces tend to look washed out. It takes makeup for the faces to look “normal” again from a distance.

So when you see someone who has a wrinkled face in a play, for instance, chances are somebody in the makeup department took the time to draw Oversized wrinkles on the actor using dark makeup, even if the actor already had real wrinkles to start with! Up close these drawn on wrinkles look like clown makeup, but on stage they read as genuine.

So it is in miniature painting. Things look right when you do some exaggeration.

To an untrained eye, these exaggerations might be undetectable if the painter has the skills. But once I know what to look for I find myself able to see past the curtain so to speak and make an educated guess on how the painter created the illusion.

So today’s illusion will be to try and make navy blue/black armor with depth on a guardian squad.

I started with a base coat of black primer and then used Vallejo Model Color’s Dark Prussian Blue on top.

To figure out where to put my blue, a positioned a lamp to shine down from directly above my guardians at a 90 degree angle. This simulates where the sun would hit their armor at high noon. Wherever the lamp lit up, I added blue. Wherever the lamp left a shadow, I left the model black.

And that’s how I achieved the look in the pictures! Not that the pictures quite do it justice. 😦 Maybe its time to upgrade from my camera phone and whatever crap lighting I have at my desk….

Pretty simple paint strategy though I think, subtle result, but I like the effect. I didn’t take care to do fancy blends between my navy and black, but rather slapped paint on (after thinning it on a wet palette) and hoped the transition lines wouldn’t look too ugly.

Bye now!

#hobbystreak