Croak Hunter, part 2

Done with Croak Hunter No. 1. It turned out pretty decently, but it was definitely a learning piece -- the zenithal highlighting worked much better. I'm not going to go whole hog on the technique -- at least, not yet -- but I'll be folding it into my repertoire.

Most of the muddiness has been cleaned up, but it's not a very strong piece, composition-wise. Among the lessons I learned on this mini: If you're going to use a dye technique, rather than a painting technique, you must know what you're about before you put ink to pewter. I'm normally fairly freewheeling when I paint something, adding color and replacing it as it suits me; that's just not an option with this highlighting technique. Luminosity turns to muddy very, very quickly as you add layers of color -- just look at the Croak Hunter's feet and hands if you don't believe me. They used to look like his throat pouch at one time! There's also only two colors in the model (brown and black don't count); Anthony suggested putting blue in the shadows, which I should have. I should have also folded more orange into the model; the eyes and lobster-claw necklace got orange, but nothing else did. It should have been a stronger sub-theme; I may go back and add it to one of the bags at his waist and some of his turtle shells.

The shells look better in this photo than they do in real life, which is funny -- the rest of the model looks better in real life than it does in the photos. There are a handful of examples of the miscues that come with inks on this side -- at the ankles and where the bracers meet the upper arms, for example. If you mis-lay paint, it's really really devastating and a real pain in the rear to clean up. The best solution would be to keep my inks close to their base colors, but that also means buying more paints. There's nothing worse than buying 3 bucks worth of paint for a highlight on one unit. ... That's a lie, there are several million things that are worse, but it'd still break my top, dunno, 500 of crappy things I put up with sometimes.

The spear didn't go so poorly, though. It could probably use another layer of brass color (I generally use whatever gold I can get my hands on -- in this case, Reaper's "Antique Gold" -- mixed with a medium brown.)

There's a lot of "what I may go back and do" on this model, but I just couldn't look at frogs anymore. I have a feeling that the longer I look at it, the more dissatisfied I'm going to be, so off to do another pair of Bog Trogs!

Croak Hunter, part 1

It seems every faction in WarmaHordes gets its own solo that terrifies the living poop out of the enemy. True to form, the Blindwater Congregation gets the Croak Hunter, a nasty little guy that has stealth, poison on a ranged weapon and punishes opponents that damage him without killing him.



Sharp-eyed viewers may notice the splotchy white base on this guy. It's the same base that showed up on my initial failures on the Bog Trogs; this guy is also an attempt at zenithal highlighting. The difference is that this pass actually worked. I'm not sure why -- probably because this guy is a lighter-colored model all around. Maybe it's just because I need to bang my head against brick walls to get anything done right.

While it looks muddy here, the red-to-green fade is actually quite nice and natural looking. Some additional coats really made the red pop while still having a believable fade into the green. But here, a picture does more than my words:

Yes, there's a lot of brown in his feet still. A little bit of creative mixing will fix that problem; it stems from not having a suitable dark color there yet. I'm quite stunned at how nicely this whole thing turned out, all things considered. I am living in fear of overworking the colors; I feel like there's precious little I could do to make most of the skin look much better.

Here's the backside. The spear and rope is almost done -- quick work, too -- it just needs a highlight coat to fix up some of the muddiness, and a few coats of bronze on the pointy bits, of course. The turtle shells are a bit of a flummox -- I really don't know how to approach them. There's way too much red as it stands in the model now, so that's out, but I'm loathe to introduce another color. Speaking of -- those red bags on his left hip will be toned into dark brown. There's just way too much red on the front right now, and it's throwing off the whole composition.

Finally, there's a significant craftsmanship issue on this model -- grains of sand somehow ended up on the legs and feet. I'm going to fix it in post, so to speak -- it'll get folded into the model as a sort of general muddiness at some point, but I'm annoyed with it. I'm not sure how the grains got onto the legs to begin with, and I'm doubly unsure of how I missed them until I had a layer of green down already.