[Log] Alain and Oriana - Part 1

January 19, 2016 to January 31. 2016 - Oriana and Alain are Reaper Miniatures specifically made for Pathfinder. These are my gifts to my nephew and niece and not part of my collection. I let them pick a miniature from the online store and I am now going step-by-step with them the entire process.

Since they plan to use these miniatures for dungeon crawl games, I decided to make the base a stone floor, differing from my usual sand and rock with patches of static grass. To do this, I used the Castle Stone Texture Stamp made by Happy Seppuku Model Works with Milliput. They are easy to use and I really liked how they looked

Castle Stone texture made with Happy Seppuku stamp

I primed with gesso black and painted a base coat for the face and painted the eyes. This is the first time using a wet palette. This was extremely useful, keeping the working paint medium from drying up too quickly. I also retired my old brushes from detail work and am using more appropriately sized brushes (Royal & Langnickel ZEN) for painting. I can actually paint decent looking eyes a lot easier now! It makes me wonder how much better my painting can be if I use higher quality brushes...so I indulged and bought some Winsor & Newton Series 7 brushes for future painting. So far I am happy using the relatively cheap Royal & Langnickel ZEN brushes.

Alain

Alain is my nephew's choice. The only request he has is to have the hair be black. I will be trying freehand painting emblems on the banner and shield.

Alain's sword

One thing I noticed with Alain is that the sword/hand piece does not have a nice "fit" to the main body of the miniature. I am not sure if this was on purpose to allow different positioning of the sword or poor design of the piece.

Oriana

Oriana is my niece choice. As requested by my niece, I am going to paint the cloak and tassels of the helmet to be of a blue color

Oriana's sword

Like Alain. Oriana's sword/hand piece does not have a nice "fit" to the main body of the miniature. From Reaper's website, the two images of Oriana had the sword held in a different position. So the way it was made was, maybe it was on purpose fir the poor fit to allow different positioning. I need to figure if I need to pin or putty the pieces together.

Oriana's shield and bow

One thing I found very helpful to me is painting white highlights on top of the black undercoat. This acts like a black and white sketch to help me see where the highlights and shades should be painted when it is in color. I think from now on I will do that as a reference for most of my miniature painting. Maybe I should try the opposite with using a white undercoat and shading with black paint.

Next Log Entry - [Log] Alain and Oriana - Part 2