Painting with faith and confidence

 

 Well, for a novelty I thought I would paint up something that just arrived last month. No good reason for this item to jump the cue, just inspiration regarding what palette to use. I am amazed at how this turned out, again, no Golden Demon paint job, just to a basic table ready status. No, what I am amazed by is that I think the colour choices work, and that it pretty well matches the vision that I had when I started this project.

This figure is something of an in joke figure for me. A few decades ago a few of us started a Warhammer campaign using Mighty Empires as our map. One of the players selected Chaos for his army, and we decided to use the realms of Chaos book to generate his leaders and his army, pretty much all random rolls. Much to his chagrin when he came to generate his leader, he wound up with a highly mutated character that would transform into a chaos spawn if he gained one more mutation. Most notable about him was the fact that he was a shape changer, when he transformed it was into a mamoth that walked on two legs, when he was not transformed he was a 'human' who walked on fours! This then is his transformed general brought to 'life'!

Now that the introduction is done, I must address the title of this post, faith and confidence. When it comes to painting, I do not always exhibit either trait. This in fact is what often slows me down, or down right stops me from picking up a paint brush. This explains why I often like to 'emulate' the paint choices of other gamers, and the painted examples on the various web stores. Analysis paralysis often sets in as I dither over what colours to use, and I frequently doubt my ability to paint anything. I have numerous how to books that I refer to often just to keep on track with the task at hand. However I all to often feel that the words just bounce around my head and quickly dissipate into nothingness.  I mean how many times do I have to read up on how to paint faces before I feel I have it. Well at least one more time...

In the case of this current figure, I started with contrast paints to lay down a base.

This was the shinny ugly mess after the base coats. Nothing inspiring, in fact at other times I may have just quietly put the figure aside to be done 'later'. Shockingly, faith kicked in, darkest before the dawn and all that rot. In fact I just kind of kept a mantra going in my head , it will be alright, it will be alright, the wash will fix things...

So no wash yet, but some serious over brushing/dry brushing got me to this stage. This was certainly an improvement. However what to do next, how to improve the paint job without messing up what I had already done. Well, a few more layers of colour and some washes helped. What also helped was a new mantra, you can always strip the model and start over (you see I recently did strip something, so I had confidence that I could do it again if need be)

Well in the end I did not strip anything, but I did repaint the tusk something like 4 or 5 times, there are a lot of layers to those tusks. I also boldly experimented with the gourd at his side defying the odds and just going full speed ahead.

Anyways it is done. It turned out fine. I must confess I do not like these large figures, they show off my painting flaws all too well. I also am not happy with the base. It is a CD and too large by my reckoning, but I did not have anything of an 'appropriate' size. Perhaps I will re-base when I buy some more bases.

At any rate, here are some more pictures. Now that it is finished it has already joined the other unused figures in my cabinet awaiting a reason to be used.