Painting for Dummies -- Painting Theory

Posted by Ranillon on 2. April 2009 20:32

Take another and closer look at the picture (click it to embiggen).  See how flat and lifeless it looks?  Sure, given that on this website it’s a 2D picture doesn’t help, but even live the model will look rather uninspiring.  I guarantee that if you bring this to a tournament no one will give it a second look. 

But, of course, you wouldn’t reading this is you were interested in doing the absolute minimum.  So then, what does it take to do better?  That’s where painting theory comes in.

The basic idea is to recreate the look of “real life” in a small, inches tall model.  If you examine the world around you you’ll (obviously) see that it’s not just filled with solid, unvarying blocks of color.  Rather, there are a lot of different, subtle shades at work, even in something that might theoretically be a single color. 

Imagine for a moment a dark blue jacket.  When held up to the light the folds of the material will cause the parts of the garment at the bottom of the folds to look darker than those at the top of a fold – even though the actual color of the jacket is uniform.  These shades and highlights are what you aim to mimic in a model.  The more recessed portions of the figure you paint with darker shades of the same overall color while the raised portions are painted with lighter shades of the same color.  Doing this duplicates the lighting you’d see on a life-sized version of what the model represents.

However, when it comes to tiny figurines the rules for lighting aren’t quite the same as for, say, a full-scale reproduction.  Being small it’s important that the differences in color stand out – overly subtle variations of hue in an inches tall figure aren’t going to be noticed except at very close range.  Therefore, you’ll want to exaggerate the lighting effects in comparison to real life so as to make sure they “pop out”.  Of course, go too far and you get a model that looks more like a circus clown than bad-ass warrior.  Working out the balance can be a difficult process.  If nothing else I guarantee this – detail work takes far more time than a basic “by-the-numbers” job.

Yet, it’s not even that simple.  In general, you want to make the separate parts of the model distinct and easy to notice without being heavy-handed and clumsy about it.  That can mean more than mere layering of colors.  If you examine Golden Daemon quality work you’ll see that the painters manage to grab your attention and be distinct even while making everything still seem like a perfectly integrated whole.  Painters like you and me aren’t going to do that well, but we can still get good effects.  As I start the detailed work on my commander I’ll go through some of the basic techniques to (hopefully) accomplish this.

More to come...