Foundations First

When learning to paint I did things a bit out of order. I slapped down a basecoat and some grass and called my first models done. After a bit of that I hit YouTube for some tutorials and found Worthy Painting and their clean, hard line highlighting technique. I started mimicking that on a friend's Eldar commission because it seemed appropriate to their pristine looks and he had no qualms about letting me experiment. After that I started trying more techniques I'd find from professional painters, and it provided me with some good techniques that I never fully mastered.

The problem, of course, is that I missed a lot of the growing experience that other painters go through. I never really tried base-coating a model and then covering them in a brown wash, or dipped them, because I was told it was the "wrong way" to paint. As a result I learned to use (and love) washes, which is pretty foundational, much later than I should have.

Dry brushing is another technique I tried once then stopped because I like the look of hard line highlighting and, again, drybrushing highlights is wrong. Well yesterday I really had to go back to the basics before I threw a model against a wall.

As you may recall I've been working on a Cryx Bloat Thrall that has been grossing me out with how amazingly repulsive his sculpt is. That of course puts the demand on me to make his paint job equally horrendous. I followed the same technique I've used on Thrall models in the past, doing the skin and then some light washes of purple and green to really get the look of rot. However, after turning the model dark purple twice I put the model in time out for a few days so that it could learn a lesson.

While browsing through a painting forum I saw someone ask about drybrushing highlights. Reading through the thread I saw a lot of people saying not to drybrush highlights because it's too uncontrollable and doesn't look quite right outside of cloth. I don't know how, but that got the gears in my head running.

I had nothing to lose in experimenting on the model since I'd be stripping him anyway, so with his purple-green flesh mocking me I grabbed a very soft brush, my flesh color, and went to work seeing if I could just dust the skin so that the purple color stayed in the crevices and the color beneath the drybrushed area would give more dynamic color to the skin.

As it turns out, sometimes my ideas work!

This really showed me how important it is to understand the foundational parts of painting as well as the more advanced stuff. I've already been painting my Circle Orboros army predominantly in washes so that I can get a really good feel for when and how to use them. It looks like there are still other basic techniques that are worth going back and learning as though I'm a brand new painter.

And for those of you who remember me saying this in my previous post about this guy:

I was right. Assuming his base goes well, this will probably go in my top 5 favorite paint jobs.


See you tomorrow!

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