Help me improve?

copperchange

New member
Please give me some advice on how to make my elves better.
http://www.coolminiornot.com/220013

It\'s been a long time since I did flesh, any articles or tutorials on flesh or jewels would also be appreciated. :yes:
 

majestic0110

New member
Hi there copperchange, I hope you are well. YOur painting is actually quite neat and I like what you have done with the Elves\' eyes. With regards to painting gemstones and flesh, here are two great tutorials I used before:

Gems

Flesh

Now, these tutorials are not using Citadel paints (which you might be) but you just substitute the appropriate colours in the tutorial from the citadel range. I hope this helps you !
 

Joek

New member
Hi Copperchange.

The good news is that the figures are neat and tidy - colours are in the right place, and that\'s a good start. I think the best bit of advice I can say is read and devore as much painting information as you possibly can. There are loads of great articles on CMON, and elsewhere.

On a practical level, what you need to do is get some depth to your figures with some shading and highlighting. If you haven\'t got them already, I absolutely recommend the GW washes - they can make even the blandest of colours show nice depth and richness. It also gives you visual clues on where to lighten figures by simply automatically deepening the recesses.

Highlighting\'s a slightly more difficult beast, and all I can say is it comes with practise! Obviously, it\'s not just a case of bunging in more white into a base colour to get a lighter shade (although it does work for certain shades!) - that would be far too easy. For your greens, I\'d say experiment with mixing in yellows and fleshy tones to get a lighter colour and see where that gets you. For the flesh, it\'s slightly more difficult to explain - you can add blues, yellows, browns, purples and all manner of shades to get convincingly realistic flesh. I\'m still very much learning how to paint flesh well myself, so I\'m sure others could help further.

The final bit of advice is purely personal, but it was absolutely invaluable when I first started out - it\'s always worth learning about drybrushing. It is a bit of an antiquated technique these days, but it does train you to see where natural highlights should be on a figure, and it does give you instant highlights which look perfectly acceptable when you start to paint. However, there are loads of folk who hate the technique with a passion, so it\'s always worth getting the other side of the argument and see what you might prefer.

Just carry on with it - if you see improvements (even tiny ones) in each figure you do, then that\'s got to be a good thing! Good luck, and happy painting!
 
S

Shadzar

Guest
If galleries work, you can view mine and see if you think the minis are worth taking my advice...

I paint black to begin with, so I have to paint over everything. Leaving just the deepest shadows the basecoat.

For skin area, I paint them before the rest of the mini. This allows me to paint over the area the skin goes, and lets the paint go all over. This way when I come back to paint the clothes, etc the skin is touching, I just need to be real light with the brush to no go into the skin.

My skin painting is odd I am told. I paint a color onto the skin darker than I want it, and then with a real watered down lighter color after that has driver to lighter the tone of the skin up.

The faces are way better than anything I could do already, it just seems these may lack skin detail in the mold that isn\'t giving you much other than a flat solid color. There are tons of articles on this site for all these things.

Overall I don\'t see much wrong with these and gave them a 6, which can be blamed on GW because the sculpt just has an off look for me.
 

copperchange

New member
Thank you

You have all given me great bits of advice that should help me improve my realism. Thank you also for the articles- They were simple and to the point while giving me a very clear illustration of the technique.
 
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