Friday, 8 February 2013
Weekly News: 18 Austrians inked and nearly finished
During the last days I made some experiments with an old laptop and my digital SLR camera. It seems to work rather well to have it operated by remote control to check the pictures on the large laptop display. Some weeks ago we had a photo shooting session a while ago and some of the pictures were a bit disappointing because I got the background pin sharp while the miniatures in front were blurred. Definitely an aiming mistake with the autofocus but I didn't see it on the small display of the camera. Hopefully it works well when we have another painting session tomorrow afternoon.
But besides that I made some painting progress on my Austrians. First I painted the backpacks and glued them on the miniatures. Afterwards I mended some mistakes and painted the remaining details which had to be painted before quickshading them.
As a try I inked one of the miniatures with Armypainter "Soft Tone" and another one with my usual choice "Dark Tone". After some minutes of drying I decided that I prefer the stronger shades of the darker tone. Therefore I used it on all other miniatures afterwards. So 18 Austrians are painted and quickshaded and next week I'll paint the details (faces, moustaches etc.) and the highlights. Simultaneously I'll start with the base colours of the second batch.
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I totally agree, soft tone is nice for a light shading, but the dark tone does much better work as it does the blacklining as well.
ReplyDeleteYour miniatures look great and make me wonder if I want to start collecting 28mm Naps as well.
Cheers,
Thomas
28mm Napoleonics is absolutely fascinating. All the different colourful uniforms and the excellent miniatures of different manufacturers made me addicted. :-)
DeleteCheers
Monty
Interesting stuff on the photography, I'll have to pass that along to my friend Eric who has had some problems with his SLR camera.
ReplyDeleteLooking for ways to speed up my own painting process while maintaining quality, I'm very interested in how these turn out. Especially with all the white on the Austrians.
Are you using the AP inks out of the cans or the little paint bottles?? I wonder how AP "Strong Tone" would have worked. Its darker than "Soft," but maybe the brown "Strong" would have worked better on the white unis then the black "Dark Tone"?
The white Austrians were kind of an experiment. I just wanted to know whether I can paint them properly with this rather simple technique.
DeleteI use this turpentine based Armypainter from cans. Unfortunately I don't have a can of "Strong Tone" so I wasn't able to try this third alternative. However the blacklining turned out rather well with "Dark Tone" and I'll even it out on the higher parts with some more highlighting.
Cheers
Monty
I too agree, the dark tone looks better to me anyway, nice work Monty!
ReplyDeleteThanks Fran, I'll do my very best to finish them that well.
Delete:-)
I tend to stay away from blacks because they are too harsh. I use a blue black when I want to go dark.
ReplyDeleteYour photography idea sounds like a good one. One of my biggest weaknesses is photographing my mini's indoors.
I'm just unable to focus precisely through the small viewfinder. That brought me to the idea of an instant speed larger display and a prehistoric laptop from 2002 seems to be good enough.
Delete:-)
They look very nice both ways.
ReplyDeleteThanks Jay.
Delete:-)
I think you need the darker tone to get the effect and once they have been highlighted it wont matter. Looking forward to seeing the end result.
ReplyDeleteThanks Pat that's exactly the effect I'm hoping for.
ReplyDeleteHopefully the result will not disappoint you.
;-)
The darker tone definitely looks the better over white, the soft just isn't strong enough.
ReplyDeleteI like the little thing that your camera is resting on.
ReplyDelete