Wood Elves Redux - Updated: March 12, 2009

[danjones87]

Back when I painted him, I was afraid of free hand. I should go back and redo the whole banner. There's no blending. I hadn't learned how to handle big surfaces back then. The ogres have helped me with that, so yeah, I should just redo the whole thing.

Brilliant. What do you plan to do on it?

Dan

[DavidWC09]

Next are the Wardancers. Most of them need touchups here or there.

Scattered among them are four heroes. For the upcoming tournament, they'll serve as an alter highborn, alter noble, and two scroll caddies.

Today, I washed and dried them. I dunked them in a solution of warm water and "natural" dish detergent. I used my wife's dryer to get most of the water off and then left them to dry on a dessert cooling rack.

I've found tupperware cake platters to be really useful for keeping the dust off models while they are in progress.

I think I might buy new Wardancers over the next several months to replace these. I'd paint the new ones a bit nicer and sell off the olds ones. Anyhow, let's see what I can accomplish over the next two weekends.

[DavidWC09]

So I've got the chance to take a series of classes from John Bonnot at Reaper. I'm taking this limited edition noble I got back when it was offered. I actually got two because GW sent me an extra. Not sure why, but who cares, right? The extra one's going to a friend.

I spent today cleaning him up. I'll prime him soon, but there's too much moisture in the air right now (news flash: Hurricane Ike wreaks havoc on Texas miniature painters!). I'll do that tomorrow and then clean up more mold lines that I've overlooked.

So can anyone explain why the metal looks different on the mini lying on its back? The package says it's from the same batch, but it's a flat metal, not the shiny, pewtery look of the one I cleaned up.

[xbanditsx]

Some of my Wardancers and Waywatchers had that flat look too. I figured it was some sort of release agent that stained the metal.

I used to cast little metal figures when I was a kid and the graphite I used to prevent the metal from sticking to the mold would always made the figures dull.

[DavidWC09]

Primed him earlier today, which let me figure out what that was inside his cape. He's got a little spite there, with very little arms and tiny wings.

[Zarahemna]

Well its looking fabulous so far. Any ideas on the sort of theme you are going to be using here?

[DavidWC09]

I'll paint him to match the rest of the army, summer greens. I look forward to having a bit of guidance from Jon Bonnot. If I can learn some of his magic, this guy ought to look great.

[Zarahemna]

There are always two eh? The student and the master...

Learning new techniques is one of the best experiences in painting. I hope that some of the magic gets rubbed off. Enjoy!

[DavidWC09]

Here he is after lining and work on the leather. That last set of transitions from orange brown to burnt orange and burnt orange/golden blonde didn't blend, so I'll have to go back and try and smooth it out. I find those colors really stubborn. I'll try to glaze over the area with a midtone.

[DavidWC09]

I included the paints I used for the leather. It seems an inordinate number of paints for such small areas. Mixing these, I used a total of 7 or 8 colors.

Today, I went back and glazed with the harvest brown to correct some poor blending on the leather gauntlet and one of the boot flaps.