Mid-Summer Madness – Session 4

I continued work on the 12 figure “red skull” unit. Today, I painted red. In the past, I would have painted the area to be red with white and over the white I would paint the brightest red color I had. Fast, easy, done – but a little one dimensional.

Now days, I tend to use a technique from Angel Giraldez who did all of the Infinity tutorials using Vallejo paints. Basically, his approach is to work from the darkest shadow to the brightest highlight. This is different from the Games Workshop approach of painting the mid-tone first and then adding shadows and highlights.

What’s the difference? For me, and I may just be a weird exception, using Angel’s technique results in an easier more natural blending of color gradients resulting in a more realistic figure.

It does take longer to apply basecoats this way. Instead of white, red and done, I applied five different shades of red in seven or eight thin coats.

First things first, however, I painted the bases with Reaper’s Brown Earth. I don’t know about you, but bottled “earth” colors blow me away because the color doesn’t match the color of dirt where I grew up. It wasn’t until I did a fair amount of traveling that I discovered dirt comes in a variety of colors from nearly pure white to black with wonderous yellows, reds, and browns.

For painting red, I used four paints from Vallejo – Hull Red, Burnt Red, Flat Red, and Orange Fire. Now, this is just for the base coat, when I do highlights expect to see Orange, Pink and White.

Oh yeah, I’m left-handed, so I tend to do things from right to left – including putting paint on the palette.

Today’s Session was 2.5 hours long, bringing the total amount of time spent on the project to 15 hours.