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Interestingly, at this kind of size, at this distance from my painting lamp, the real light reflection reads much more scale-appropriate, so it looks like I’ve been highlighting here when I really haven’t.

#Micro

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A whole new child appears! Bearded and girthy! Its absurd size in comparison with gaming minis is subtly hinted at by both cramming it inside the largest Rathcore painting handle, tacked to a painting base probably intended for horses*, and standing it next to an industry-standard reference pot of Vallejo plastic putty. *🤷‍♂️
A mostly black-primed chonky dorf. If you squint, you can see his squint. The head, lack of neck, and trapezius have an initial brown basecoat applied. This could take a while. And that’s coming from _this_ guy.
Ivory paint is added to the brown in stages to distract the eye from ‘real’ (pfft) light and imply a starker contrast. Too stark? Yes. Will it get starker? It will. Will that make it better in some way? Almost certainly not, no.
A dark red base coat has been applied to a beard larger than the average human torso. A start has been made in layering up towards orange on the many, overlapping moustache mini-beards.
A little red-to-orange pass across the main beard strands, most orange on the upwards-facing portions. The whole beard will probably need to get a lot brighter before we’re done.
A topknot has been attached to the head of the mini, the same red-to-orange highlight pass has been applied.
Trying to add contrast and colour variation with some ivory now added in the brightest highlight and purple in the shadows/bounce-light reflections.
Angry-Face’s beefy right arm now has some paint on it. Thin layers of dark red and progressively lighter brown are being applied. The black primer still bleeds through the layers giving (hopefully? I think?) a sense of translucent skin-over-meat.
One (absurdly muscular) arm of the mini now has a range of tones from purple in deepest shadow through reddish browns to a small specular highlight of pure ivory on the side delt. Veins, as they say, are poppin’.
Well. This is certainly going to be something. Probably not a success, as such. But _what_ a failure. Just _extravagant_ potential failure. A dark-blue and purple sleeve has been basecoated (if you’ll pardon the noun-verbing) on the left arm and verrry tentative little curve sketches have been started towards a triquetra on the deltoid.
Tiny curly bits are being drawn around the central tattoo circle on the biggest left shoulder bump, white paint on dark blue. Approximately one one tenth of one percent compete. You can hear the tears falling gently, splish slash, just offscreen.
Look. We can all agree that the tattoo is a huge and life-altering mistake that I’ll be paying for forever. So why not compound it with a massive ‘steel’ axe that will take just as long? In this shot the upper blade has been sketched in, it’s a bit too blue and not quite bright enough at the brightest point. It also definitely reads a bit ‘fantasy comic illustration’ rather than ‘real’. Which isn’t bad necessarily, but doesn’t quite fit the rest of the mini.
The background has been cropped out of this frontal shot of the mini so that I can see the values a bit more clearly (without the insane mess of wet palette and discarded paints which normally add a good degree of visual noise). A lower set of highlights have been added to the axe blades, green used to imply the sky/ground reflected light distinction.
Barely visible on the mini for the time it took, we have some paint on his frilly linen undergarments and yellow crotch scarves (there are presumably more manly names for these things?) as well as stark lighting applied to boot and wraps, with some multicoloured highlights on the chest and belt armour panels. The background is a jumbled horror of paint pots, tubes, sanding sticks and masking tape.
One painting handle for the dwarf, one for the axe and top-knot, that’s always been my motto. They said I was _mad_, but who’s laughing now? The pile of background paints is accreting, fast becoming an entity with its opinions on the matter.