This is a small tutorial that came to life after some questions how I did some work on a Farseer that I was painting. Below is a fast produced tutorial and quality of the end result can be much better but it is good enough to understand the technique. Just below are some pictures of the figure that I was painting with this technique and that people asked me to tell them how I did this effect. I have publish this earlier on the coolminiornot site. A great place for inspiration and help for me.
First two different figures that I have used this technique and after that comes the tutorial.
I have made a small guide of the technique and also showing some of the mistakes that i did. I painted this example miniature in one hour so the result will not be the same as in the picture above, but the understanding of how I made it will be there.
First of picture of “test” figure. I made the cloak black/darkblue and also painted some surrounding areas just to show some things later on. No time spent on quality painting here thick layers of paint Normally I would take much more time here and thin layers of paint to build up the base colour.
Next step is to put some star´s on the cloak. I use an old children’s toothbrush for this. The most important thing here is that the paint can´t be too diluted.
Now we have stars on the cloak and almost all over the rest of the figure. I did this on purpose too show how important it is to mask the other areas of the whole figure not to get paint there.
I now proceed with the painting of the gas clouds and getting some colours in there.
Below are two pictures showing the paint consistence that I used to paint the gas clouds. the first pic is from the wet palette. The second picture have colour on a paper towel. The top line of paint is straight from the can and no dilution as a reference. I then load the brush with paint and then use the paper towel to remove paint in the brush until I reach the result of the last line and not much paint is left in the brush.
Below I have applied in the colour with a brushstroke that goes a little forward and back in a diagonal line; I have used around 12 layers of Turquoise colour to reach this stage.
I now speed things up a little to get to the end results. I have used thicker layers of colours then normally from now on where the gas clouds are painted. I have added purple colour to the cloak and some areas with purple I have used almost white colour. The white colour will be blended in multiple layers of a purple glaze until I am happy.
I also go forward and back at this stage with a lot of different colurs and add glazes in different areas, I could use red, green and yellow for example to add more interest and life to the painting. very thin layers. I also specifically add different glazed colours to the stars to have them shine in different colours which also should make them appear to look slightly different and also give depth to the painting.
I also with a very thin glaze of the original base colour go over the whole cloak or parts of it depending on where I feel it is needed, this smooth thing out a little and bring back some harmony to the overall effect. Below is picture of the glaze of base colour and on the paper towel also some purple glaze visible for reference on dilution.
It now looks ok and I would normally glaze more with some yellow and red and green to give more colour contrast into the blue/black background, but I will leave it as it is below for the finishing touches in this small tutorial part. Please experiment and find out what you like.
I then proceed with the next step and that is to use the Toothbrush again to bring back stars into the cloak, this since the first batch of stars now are not so “shiny” and covered with a lot of colour, they can still be visible but more “punch” is needed. I proceed with using the toothbrush again.
The result above became very many stars, too gain more controll you can do the star pattern one or even two times on a paper first and then over your figure and you will get less amount of stars since there are less colour left on the toothbrush and also smaller dots will be the effect.
Next step would be to go over the stars again to add colour to them, I would use red, blue, yellow and some green glazes on the stars only. I would not put all read stars beside each other but mix the colours around the whole cloak. I would also make some star spots smaller if needed. I haven´t proceeded with this step so no picture of this part.
For last I want to show a mistake that I did on the first figure and I really would advise you not to redo this mistake since it takes a lot of time to fix. When using the toothbrush I used a white colour that was too much diluted and the result was more like small raindrops with colour had fallen down on the cloak and it didn´t look like stars. Some of them even started to float around.
Below is a picture of the mistake recreated on the front of the test figure for you to see the result.
Great tutorial, John! Thank you for sharing. I’m looking forward to your tutorial on worn leather.