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Okay, so my first post here, and I keep messing things up. Great start:p sorry about the double comments below, my browser was freaking out.
*ahem* So about this figure.
I'm really happy with his cloak, shirt, armour, and face.
The hilt of his sword, the brooch, and the filigree on his chest and armour trim is all NMM, my first attempt at it. I'm pretty pleased with it overall, though I know there is a long way I can go with that technique if I wish to. It was sort of a lark honestly. I had originally planned to do some basic colored highlighting of the hilt to get a good brown/yellow base coat, and then was going to finish it with an overpainted glaze of real metals- a deep bronze on the dark side up to a shining gold on the highlights. I've used this painted hightlights with metals technique before and I generally like it. I got a ways into the hilt and decided to just go for it, and try the NMM gold. From looking at most peoples work, I see a lot more brown dark-gold in most recipes than I ended up using, and I can see why. I don't think the yellower gold I ended up with is unrealistic as a metal, but certainly not as dramatic.
The blade is actually not as dark as the picture suggests, but after several experiments with lighting positions (and only 2 lights instead of 3) I decided it had to take a lower precedence as far as correct display in this form. it is a gentle NMM shading, over painted several times with very thin steel metallic, and then lightly highlighted with white over that. It has a nice gentle metallic sheen to it, and I quite like it. Although I have seen plenty of steel NMM that is par excellance in technique, I personally rarely find it convincing aesthetically. Crisp SE-NMM blows me away, but I don't like swords that look like they have been plated with chrome ;). Alternatively, a lot of the duller grey NMM blades I see look more like grey plastic than metal. I'm not trashing anyones choices or technique, I just am after something different in my own blades. This was an attempt to capture that a little. Still utilizing highlighting of the physical shape to convey its metallic and reflective properties, but not quite as. . .brand spankin' new perhaps. Anyway, I'd love to here others examples of how they might have accomplished or approached such a thing in the past.
Also I'm curious if people find the NMM gold trim on the armour plates discongruous to the metallic steel plates themselves. I think it works well myself, though perhaps could benefit from being toned down one notch.
Anyway, I'm curious to know what the opinions are of this figure are overall.
Aside from a diorama that was really to large to shoot to do it justice in limited image space, and a house that got cut for violation of the 2-views rule, this is probably my first 'real' entry, that I thought was worth putting up amongst the many wildly talented painters who exhibit in the GT. Hopefully it will be the beginning of a trend for me to get some better-than-my-average-gaming-squads work done.
Thanks for reading.
-nathan |
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