Head Shot

The figure is looking pretty good.

I was not looking forward to painting the head of this action figure.  The way I saw it, heads means details.  Details like eyes and eyebrows and irises and hairlines and all that good stuff that you need pretty good technique to handle.  And until a few hours ago, I didn't really think I had the skill to do any of that stuff.

The good news is, I should have had more faith.

But I didn't know that when I started out this evening, so I avoided work on the face by doing touch up work on all the other parts- used the tiny brushes to really get the lines down on the rest of the pieces to get my ready to work on the head.  When everything else looked pretty good (and there was really nothing else left to do... at all...) I decided it was time to attack that face. 

Hair is Folk Art 479 Pure Black by Plaid.
Skin in Elf Flesh by Citadel.

The first thing I did was give the face two good thin coats of Elf Flesh paint, from Citadel.  It was recommended to me by Mythic on Hisstank.com when I asked if anyone had any suggestions for skin tones to use for Japanese characters.  Mythic is an *amazing* customs artist and I think the advice turned out well.  The skin tone was great for what I was looking for.  Painting the skin and carefully edging between the hair and the skin wasn't too bad.  That mean it was time to work... on the eyes.

Time to man up and get to it.

Eyes over painted!

I had read a really good post on painting eyes somewhere that I can no longer remember* [update: I found the reference.  This is discussed on page 35 of the free MiniWarGaming ebook that I discussed here. - Dave] that recommended over-painting details on the face such as lips and eyes, and then covering the excess up with the skin tone again.  That seemed like an easier approach than just trying to get the eyes painted just right, so I completely over-painted the eye area with white paint using my two smallest brushes.  I used a second new technique here as well; instead of using short, smooth brush strokes over the eye area, I just tapped the area with the very tip of the brush almost like I was tapping in Morse Code.  I used just a dab of white on the brush in order to paint from landing anywhere I did not want it to go.  Using this 'tapping' technique was really nice, because it made hitting spots I wanted to hit easy, and made putting the paint where I wanted it much easier than it would have been if I just wiped the paint on with my normal brushing technique.

Eyes cleaned up.

 Next I went over the edges of the white that had spilled over the actual eyes themselves with the skin tone again.  And again, I used the 'tapping' technique to put the brush exactly where I wanted it. It worked great, and in very little time, I had two pretty well shaped eyes.  I liked how things were going; the eyes, which I thought were going to be a pain, were going well.  It had a lot to do with the techniques I had picked up from watching plenty of you tube 'how to' videos and advice I received from folks online, but I should give myself a little credit too.  Even with the advice, I didn't think I would be able to hold my brush steady enough to paint the face, but it was actually much easier to accomplish than I thought it would be.  Next would be the real challenge though- painting the irises.

The face is looking not too horrible.

I tried using the 'tap' technique to get the dark spots in the middle of the eyes a few times, but I just was not getting enough paint exactly where I wanted it to make much of a mark on the eyes using my paint brushes.  The dots were very, very light.  Over the white eye paint, they looked like faint grey spots that practically blended in with the rest of the eye I didn't want to tap the brush too hard, because I thought it would end up making a black spot on the face which would undo everything I had just accomplished.  But then I got an idea- how about putting paint on the end of an unbent paper clip?  I grabbed a paperclip out of my desk, pulled it straight, and popped it into the paint.

Guess what?

Paper clips make excellent iris painting tools.

Hobby tool of the day: the light up magnifier.

For the rest of the face, I ended up using a tool I picked up at a hobby shot a few months ago but had not used until today.  It was a folding 2x magnifier with built in LED lights, and made painting the eyebrows and soul patch a breeze.   Again, I used the tapping method, which took a lot longer to do on the eyebrows that I thought it would, but minimal touch up was required. And hey, whatever works.

So where I am now is this figure is pretty close to done.  I want to get some rest and take a look at it tomorrow to see what touching up may need to be done, and then I need to reassemble the figure.  But for my first try, I think this thing looks great.   Sure it could be better- I could have come up with some additional colors for the face and done some layering.  I may also do a dark wash to add some shadows, but I'm not sure.  I'm so happy with how things look at the moment I think I may decide to quit while I'm ahead and try those techniques on the next figure painting project.  You'll see what I decide soon.

Until next time,

David D.

Unplanned Christmas Update

I was not expecting to have an update today, but I found something I had to write up.  On my quest to become a better painter, I've been doing a lot of research on the internet.  I've done a lot of lurking and and a bit of posting, and this morning, I found miniwargaming.com.  Its an amazing store/forum/youtube video producer/community that all about crafting.  There are plenty of amazing things going on at this site, but the one I'm going to discuss in this short update is the FREE FREE FREE ebook they give you about painting minis (or anything, really) you get when you sign up for their forum.

Fifty nine pages of amazing painting related
descriptions, techniques and advice.
For FREE.

Free.  For signing up for their online forum.

But how good could a free PDF be?  Let me put it this way.  If you follow this site closely, you know that for the last two or three months I have been spending lots of time finding the best hobby painting sites, books and guides on the web and off.  And there are some really, really good guides, books, and forums out there.  There are plenty of helpful people on the net.  But in terms of a one stop manual for painting mini figures or action figures, this one

IS THE BEST I'VE SEEN.

Its even better than the Games Workshop guides for painting figures, and that thing was 25 bucks.  And unlike the games workshop book (which is very good) this guide does not push one paints and other products from one specific manufacturer.

That's how good.  Its 59 pages long.  Full color illustrations.  Fantastic writing.  It is written by hobby painters for hobby painters.  This guide could be, nay, should be, something people pay something for to pick up.  Its an amazing guide.  And all you need to do to get a copy is sign up for their forum.

I need to get back to the family, but I wanted to put this up there.  Happy holidays, folks.

Until next time,

David D.

Happy holidays

Hey folks-

I am in Chattahoochee National Forest in Georgia with my wife and her family for the holidays. I'll be back home late Monday, and I plan on having a real update on Tuesday.  Its been a wonderful year for myself and and family, and I have high hopes for the year to come.  I wish you all the best, and hope your next year is fantastic as well.

Happy Holidays.

David D.

Know your paints

Ok- I'm back from the conference in DC, which was very cool, and am at my painting desk.  I made a pretty big mistake last week in assuming what my paints would look like out of the bottle.  I had planned on painting the armor, gloves and boots of my figure a gray, and the rest of the figure black.  My black paint looked fine, but my highlight shade of gray paint looked like chalk; it was way, way lighter than I had expected.  Back to the drawing board.

You landed on boardwalk, sucker!

This was one of those times that educators call a "teachable moment".  I should have had an idea of what my gray paint was going to look like.  I figured I could make swatches of each of my colors, and made swatches today I did.  I painted a bit of each color on the backs of old business cards.  I also threw the name of the color, the manufacturer, and the product ID on the card to make I can easily buy more when I'm out.  They came out looking like deeds from a Monopoly game, but they serve their purpose.

Another thing that I had not thought of but should have is the finish of each paint- besides the colors themselves, a few of my paints have a very glossy finish, and the rest are pretty matte.  I figure knowing what is what on the finish front is also pretty useful. Figuring this out is an unintended benefit of the project.  Yay for unexpected results!

Now that I know what colors I have, there is a dilemma: I could paint medium gray over the old steel gray paint, not knowing how that is going to turn out, or I remove all of the paint and start again from scratch.  If I start again from scratch, I'm going to need a good way to remove the paint.  I know there are ways to do this, but the methods I know involve buying more supplies, and I'd rather accept that this is a first try and that it isn't going to be perfect.

So- time to get back to actually painting the figure.  More soon.

Until next time,

David D.

Figure Painting, Part 1

I found myself with some extra time this evening (now yesterday evening) after getting home from a family holiday party, so I decided I would get to it and start painting.  I wasn't expecting to have time to do get started with the actual paint step until at least next week, so this was a pleasant surprise. I've been both looking forward to this and dreading it for a while; it is time to just get started.

black coat over black primer, white dry brushed, and
now a few layers of medium gray paint over everything else.

I began by putting a black base coat over the black primer I previous applied.  That step was no problem.  I then did some dry brushing of white paint onto different surfaces, because I understand that painting over lighter colors can impact the intensity of the paint that over over it.  It was my first time dry brushing, and I think it turned out alright. 

I wish I had taken more pictures of everything as I was doing it, but I was too engrossed in the act of painting to step back and stop to take pictures of each phase.  Next time.

After I got done with the dry brushing, I moved on to painting a darker gray onto the areas of the figure that I meant to end up gray- the body armor, gloves, boots, pockets, etc.  That went pretty well.  I am using Folk Art acrylic paints  from Plaid.  I use their paint because it comes in a ton of colors, its super inexpensive ($0.79 per 2 ounce bottle) and it seems to be good quality stuff.

One principle I saw in practice while painting the gray was color vs. coverage.  This idea is covered on page 50 of How To Paint Citadel Miniatures, and the idea is this: when it comes to paint, there is a trade off between the brightness of colors and their capacity to cover a surface in a single coat.  Some paint is made to cover objects in one or two coats.  In this case, the colors tend to be dull.  On the other hand, paints can be formulated to have bright colors, but in order to achieve these colors, several coats may need to be applied, as each individual coat is relatively translucent.  The former type of paint was the factor with the gray. After two coats, it didn't look very impressive, but after four, it looked amazing. 

on the left we have the medium gray, and on the right
we have steel gray on top of the medium gray.
Steel gray is kind of like barely dirty mob bucket water gray.

However, I do fine myself stuck at the moment.  I thought that I would use a darker color gray (medium gray) to be the first color layer of the armor, and then I would move to lighter colors of gray to give the sense of definition, shadow and high lighting to the figure.  Everything was great until I added the next layer of gray, which was steel gray.  On figure, the steel gray looks almost white.  The pictures here don't really do it justice; I need to learn how to white balance my photos before I upload them, but that's something for me to learn on another day.

The darker gray does give the illusion of shadows in the folds and recesses of the shape, but the really light color of the gray doesn't look good at all; it really isn't what I want. I'm not sure at this point what to try next. Maybe I should repaint the parts where I used the steel gray on with the medium gray, and try to find a gray paint that is closer to medium gray in darkness but still a little bit lighter than the medium gray.

I am looking at the Plaid colors online as I write this, and it looks like there several grays in the spectrum I could purchase, and the steel gray swatch on the website looks much whiter than the bottle I have here.  That makes sense.  I think my next step will be to run to the store when I can and grabbing battleship gray and dark gray, and doing some experimenting with dark gray, battleship gray and medium gray.  Based on how those look, I'll make a choice about what paints I want to use going forward.

Ok- so that's the plan.  Find those other colors at the store and report back to the workshop when I have time.  More news as it happens.

Until next time,

David D.

Custom Figure Color Schemes

<rant>Ok, I gotta say, the "free" wireless HP printer/scanner/potato peeler my wife received when she bought her Apple laptop a few months ago from the Apple Store is NOTHING but a pain in the ass.  You want to set it up to talk to your computers?  BOW DOWN AND BEG, MORTAL!  BOW DOWN AND BEG HP SAYS!  And what is that?  You want it to actually scan and send the images to your computer???  SILLY FOOL!  SACRIFICE UNTO ME YOUR PRECIOUS TIME!  SACRIFICE UNTO ME YOUR BELOVED FREE AFTERNOON! BWAAHAHAHAHAHA! 

I have wasted more time at the HP website reading forums, downloading updated drivers, restarting computers and printers, etc. than I want to admit.  I think I could have redawn the images I wanted to post today in MS PAINT in less time than it has taken to get this stupid scanner to operate correctly.  "Cannot connect to the scanner check to make sure the scanner is on and the network is functioning correctly" my ass.  SCREW YOU, Hewlett-Packard!!</rant>

The colors the colors the colors!

Ok then!  We're back. Thanks for coming by. I've got some cool stuff to cover today.  I made some drawing of potential color schemes for the action figure to try to get an idea of what I like and what I don't before I actually start putting the paint on.  The idea is to have a plan I like before going to the trouble of painting the figure and working through my issues with brushes and ink, only to find out that an idea that I thought would look cool in my head actually would turn out looking like crap in reality.

I used a page of graph paper to come up with the images you see here.  If you are a real art person, (which is not me, as you can tell with the quality of my chick scratches!) you will notice that the characters are not dawn to proportion- a correctly sized adult human male should be 9 heads high, not 8, as seen here.  This is true.  But know what?  It turns out that 1/18th scale action figures don't seem to be correct in the human proportions department. I did a proportion drawing on another piece of paper using an art book image as a guide to where the proportions should be, and then traced an action figure and found out that the figure was only 8 heads high, not 9.  I traced a different figure to see if I got the same effect, and yup, that figure was only 8 heads high too.  Where was the missing head height?

Interesting- in both cases, it was in the shins.  It turns out our action figures seem to be missing some height in the shins, between where their feet should be and their knees.  Everything down to the knees is pretty proportional, both in GI Joe modern era action figures and in The Corps action figures.  Check it out.  You never know what you'll learn by surprise, huh?  Real adult males tend to be taller than the action figures made to represent them.  I'm sure there is a reason for this.  I don't really care to get into it here, because I've already off topic.

Images 1, 2 and 3.

Lets dig in.  The first image (I started on the top left, worked my way right, and then did the bottom row second, again, working left to right) is actually what the action figure looked like out of the package.  We had peach colored skin, black armor, black crotch, white legs, black boots, black gloves and the details (holster, armband) were black.  I think we can do better than that.

The second image doesn't fully represent what I was thinking of.  Basically, I waned to do black/clothing with red on the edges of the armor, to give it a kind of a black with red highlights look.  I decided in the end I didn't actually want to go that way, because I don't think my skills with a brush are there yet to make this work.

The third image starts the trend that I end up going with, which is basically flat colors on different sections of the figure.  When I actually paint, I plan on doing some layering, so the colors won't actually be the sold in each section, but I wanted to get an idea of what it would look like.  Here I have black top armor, red under armor, no sleeves, red legs, silver belt, red arm band, red gloves, black boots and red pockets/holster.  I thought this looked a little too much "Alucard the Ninja"-ish, so I didn't stop looking here.

Images 4 and 5

Images 4 and 5 were inspired by specific ideas.  Image 4 is clearly a batman rip off.  We have black over armor, gray under armor, gray limbs and black accents.  I even threw in the yellow utility belt and yellow for the medal on the guy's left pectoralis.  It isn't a bad look, and I could go with it.  But there is space left on the page, so I continued to experiment.

Image 5 is a rip off of some alternate art for this action figure found on the box art.  The box art was very cartoon-y, and I wanted to see what it would look like here.  We've got the medium blue on the focus areas, gray limbs, black accents.  Also not bad.  As this guy is a warrior in a Solid Snake-esq sneaking suit, I really like the idea of him in darker colors; I think he should look like he could blend in to the shadows, but I also want to do something that is interesting to look at. A full on black figure just seems boring to me.  I know that with enough skill, someone could make mostly black pop, but again, I don't think my skill level is there yet and I think there are more interesting things I could try.

Images 6-8

Images 6-8 is me messing around with gray, plus me seeing what this guy would look like in a Marvel Comic's Sentinel color scheme.  In image 6 we've got light blue focus areas with light/dark purple limbs, and black accents.  The medal looks out of place; maybe it would have looked better in purple.  This guy looks like he could sneak around, but he doesn't look as cool as I thought he might in this color scheme.  I'm really glad I tried it out on paper first.

Next, I tried something similar to image 5, but with the light blue marker instead of the medium blue marker. Its ok.  Not horrible.  It has possibilities. If I was making a few of this guy, I could definitely see trying one in this color scheme.

Trial 8 was a lot of fun.  How about different shades of gray?  THAT'S HARDCORE.  Well, it is in my head. It isn't horrible when I see it on paper, and yeah, what I have on paper isn't exactly what it will look like painted on the figure. I think this one has possibilities, but it isn't the kid in the classroom throwing his hand up in the air saying 'me me me! pick me! pick ME!!!'. 

Images 9 + extra image

Image 9 was the last one I did, and I think it is the one I am going to go with. Gray focus with black limbs. I think I can do this figure.  He looks like he would sneak around well, and I the gray makes him more interesting that plain black does.  I just realized as I was typing this that number 9 is actually just reversing the color scheme from image 4, and I think that shows the benefit of me going through this little exercise; things can be close to what you want, but sometimes they need to be tweaked a little before they speak out to you.

I really like this look. It says Solid Snake to me, it says not too crazy day-glo flashy, and it seems like something I would like in the real world.  When I look at this color scheme, I think "I can do this".  So I think I'm going to use this.  If everything goes to hell and it turns out like crap, I still have another one of these figures to mess around with.  I can try a different color scheme from the ones I made up here or can come up with different ones then.

Ok- I've got a plan.  I am actually going to be out of town for much of next week.  I'll be at a conference in DC, which means I'm not going to have much time for actual work on the project, but I do have a mini update unrelated to this project planned.  In two weeks, you will (hopefully) see some actual pictures of me applying paint.  Jeez I hope I don't screw that up.

Alright folks.  Thanks for checking in.  If you think I'm making a huge mistake on the color scheme, feel free to comment or email me or post in the thread over at hisstank.com.

Until next time,

David Draper

Primer Applied

 Ok- here is what everything looks like after I applied the black spray-on primer.  I used the ultra expensive Games Workshop Chaos Black, which sells for $15.00 a can at the game shop, as opposed to the stuff I can get at Walmart or the hardware store for about $3.00 a can.  I want to see if there is any difference.  (I'm guessing there isn't, but I want to know for sure.)*

I mentioned in my last post that the book I am using as a guide for this project, How to Paint Citadel Miniatures, suggests putting anything you are spray painting on a card and moving the card instead of handling the pieces when you use spray primer.  I used that suggestion, and it made spray painting the parts super easy.  Yes, some things moved around somewhat when the spray hit them, especially the joint pins, but it was much easier to rotate the card than it would have been to rotate each individual piece.  I still had to flip everything so I could get the back and front covered, but the card made painting much easier than it otherwise would have been.

I know the picture makes things look like there is white on the parts, but this is just the reflection of the light and the camera itself. These pieces are actually as black as charcoal.  Thanks to the layer of primer, their surface is about the same consistency to the touch as charcoal as well.  Next step: the first layer of paint.

However, before I paint I'm going to post a few color plan drawings I whipped up when I was trying to figure out a color scheme for my figure.  That will be my next blog entry.

Until next time,

David D.

* Update- I got more information about this.  It turns out that the solvents in the primer purchased in hardware stores is pretty intense on plastic, including styrene.  Styrene is used to make many kinds of action figures.  Depending on how much primer is used and the state of the plastic, the work piece can melt down after an application of regular hardware grade spray on primer.  I'll keep looking around for info on plastic safe primer for less than $15 a can and post again if I find anything.  On the other hand, metal products (such as the metal minutes made by Games Workshop) shouldn't be negatively impacted by regular primer.