Vote
Misaki - Warmaiden
This was my entry to Wyrd Miniatures contest Something Wyrd, in which only minis manufactured by Wyrd could be entered. There are a lot of great creative entries there, it's well worth a look. My goal with this paint job was to try to push the level of contrast I work with a little higher - shading darker and highlighting brighter than I usually do. I think I managed to do that, there's a silky sheen to the cloth that I quite like. I have had some trouble with darker hair colours, and decided to try the blue highlight style for this. I also pushed myself to do some freehand. The frog is from Reaper familiar pack III, and is based on a real frog, the Chinese gliding frog. The lilypads on my original entry did not have veins. Numerous viewers commented on this, so I went back in and added some in, and did a little more highlighting on the leaves themselves. So hopefully this version will better match people's ideas of what a lilypad should look like. :-> The water is Future Floor Polish. I had used Woodland Scenics Realistic Water on a previous mini. The product required several reapplications at the time due to shrinkage, and has continued to shrink slowly over time. A year later the water is a slimy layer over the rocks at the bottom of the base. Future was recommended for small areas of water in an historical diorama book, and so far I'm much happier with it. I had a bit of a breakthrough in photography around this time also. The main change I made was simply to move from a white background to a neutral gray one. I'm really astonished at how much of a difference that one change makes, although the image still looks a little faded and diffuse straight out of the camera. I also had a clever friend explain a few simple photo editing steps I could use to help the image appear more as it does in the hand. I have been using PaintShopPro, and then tried PhotoShop Elements, but although all three programs have the same adjustment commands, I wasn't truly able to duplicate what my friend did until I downloaded a trial version of PhotoShop. The changes I made were to decrease the brightness and increase the contrast and saturation. Slight changes in all cases, with settings between +/- 8 to 12.
Posted: 25 Sep 2006
7 comments
More by Wren
