At the beginning of this year I reached out to Instar and said that I would like to work with them for a partnership to promote their paints. For disclosure I had used some of the Instar Alpha range before and Instar were incredibly generous and sent a set the whole alpha range out for me to work with. I was already in love with the paints and after using them for over 6months I have realised that I have been using some of the paints all wrong. This is not a review, although I would wholeheartedly advise having a try of this range. So around December 2019 the full Alpha range arrived on my doorstep and only know, having painted nearly 400 minis am I starting to need some refills. If you don’t know who Instar Paint is; they are a small family run Uk business who are making some extraordinary paints and a really unique par to the way they sell the paints is that you can select the bottle size you need. I am in the process of upgrading to the next size up for most of the range but the 10 ml bottles have lasted forever!
So I set myself a challenge 90mins 1 mini only using the 10 Pure colours from the Alpha Range. If you are interested in the mini to check out The Old School Miniatures Company who generously provided the miniature for me to paint up. Why these limits? I think its key to note that I wanted to see how I would act without time to question myself, to act based one what I have learnt so far this year...to just paint
I felt more confident with the paints when colouring the trousers and the beard. This was simply because I used the Pure Blue and Pure Red as mid tones and then glazed/ wet blended the shadows and textures in. Something I was very cvareful of was to create a distinction between the skin and the beard. Considering that the same colours were used between the two materials i was panicking when the beard started off very pink. To combat this i created a new gradient starting with purple i did a rough blend up to white and worked in the orange to create a better transition, then when that worked out i reapplied some brown to the bottom of the hawk and added some white and yellow to the tips before a final reglaze. This gave me the courage to try NMM (Non metallics) Then I tried NMM with the same palette. Its quite obvious here compared to previous work that; 1) I wasnt very confident with how i was going to achieve this. B) Skill fade from a lack of practise. Nonetheless playing with brown, red, black and yellow there is a semblance of gold. It requires some finesse as does the axe which was blue, black and white but the effect is sound enough for today. In fact the zombie style helps a little as it adds to the feel of rough, dirty undeath! Bear in mind I would normally spend 2 or 3 hours on 1 axe head for NMM so 90mins for a whole piece is a solid challenge. So here he is in all his glory a Slayer robbed of his single dream, cursed to follow the orders of its master. I really like the skin, it needs some refinement to the overall approach. Leather is going to be a tough challenge- the belt is really not very good as the colours were too close to the NMM gold. Overall I am particularly proud of this and want to conduct some more studies and experiments (I’m like a mad alchemist!) Would you like to see more of this? I think I might do a few guides for basic materials as I figure them out. Is this something you have tried before? Would you try it now? Let me know your thoughts on the final piece in the Facebook group Rate My Mini, if you are trying this yourself ping me a message on the group or from my Facebook page I’m always happy to chat it through. If you are interested in trying the paints or checking our some cool minis click and have a look see:
(Not affiliated just links to cool stuff ;) ) |
Archives
September 2020
Categories
All
Proudly Part Of
|