Painting Adjectives

You'll have to indulge the English geek in me today.


I was painting a Cryx commission today and thought to myself "Man I'm having fun painting these guys." That's not a new thought for me, but today I must've had Socrates on the brain because I immediately countered with the thought "Why?" And as I paused and looked at what I was doing, I realized that it was because I was painting adjectives.

A few years ago I tutored various levels of writing. When it came to creative writing, by far the most common thing I'd do on a paper would be to circle a section and write "more..." My students knew what that meant - they'd said something that could be interesting or important, but completely lacked any detail. As a result, their story would suffer because everything was very bland and monotone.

Painting is the same way. When I first started painting, I blocked off areas with a solid basecoat and called it a day. I was happy with it because I was just starting, but it certainly wasn't interesting to look at. As I became more passionate about painting, I sought tutorials that would help me learn to do more than just a bland basecoat.

My first painting victim.

Finally I learned the importance of detail. Every bit of paint tells something about the model, much like every word contributes to a story. You can have something basic and it will still be better than nothing, but it's when you add those bits of detail that things really start coming to life. While shading and highlighting are key to making a model feel alive, I find that it's painting the tiny details sculpted in to a model that's the most rewarding. They are the adjectives that aren't necessary, but including them put the model on an entirely different level.

The models that inspired this idea are Stitch Thralls. Like the Brute Thralls I talked about previously, I basecoated them with Thrall Flesh, then washed their skin with purple and green to make the skin look more realistic. As a tabletop standard, that probably looked good enough. But when I'm looking at it up close, I see all the little details the sculptor added and those are what I love to paint. Like adjectives in a story, you don't realize how much a model is missing until you see the model with these tiny additions.



The details are pretty simple, but I think they add a lot to the model even though you may not realize you're paying attention to them. All I did was paint their seams red to emphasize where their body parts where stitched together, and then blackened the stitching to make them pop against the black skin. There are also some very small sores that I don't think the camera picked up. Like I said, it's a small thing but it gives a much stronger visual impression and makes the model look so much better without much extra work.

I think this is also why I love painting Privateer Press models more than anything else. I've always described their models as "characterful," and it's because almost every model has some kind of minor, almost inconsequential detail that can take a model from neat to amazing. I always appreciate when a model has that kind of detail built in to it because it lets me do much more with the model without having to do much more than highlighting and shading.

So when you hear me say a model is fun to paint, you can almost guarantee there's some cool details in it that were just waiting to be discovered and painted.

See you tomorrow! And if you're new around here, check out my Warmachine/Hordes faction dice giveaway coming up in less than a week! Be warned that you cannot enter from the Facebook mobile app.