Hey,

So here’s my first in my Showcase series.  To begin with I’m going to showcase my own work.   This is my blog, so it only seems fair!  Once I’ve done with my stuff, I’m going to show you some other artists projects too so that you have the opportunity to enjoy their spectacular talents.  Anyway, enough of the introduction, let’s get on with showing you my recent Astropath project.  I hope you like him!

This mini was a bit of a strange one.  He’s a Games Workshop Imperial Guard Astropath, for those of you who don’t know, kind of like a post apocolyptic magician.  He manipulates the warp, and that was something I wanted to really bring over in the base.  I know it’s subtle, and probably too so, but it needed to be dark and cold to bring out the glowing pendant above.  I began by airbrushing him black through greys to white using Windsor & Newton black and white ink.  Then he got a coat of Games Workshop Purity Seal, a semi-gloss varnish to seal the ink to the mini (it rubs off pretty easily).  I then got a bit of dark green ink and sprayed that over the mini in a very light coat to give the zenithal lighting some colour.  It is very important to me that the robes look lit from above as if in moonlight as well as from the yellow of the pendant.  This got another coat of purity seal, and then I cracked out the white again.  I carefully sprayed, with as low a pressure as I could, white again around the pendant.  It’s hard to describe how lightly I had to do this, but it served two purposes, the first being to land a good surface for the warm glow of the pendant OSL (Object Source Lighting), and secondly to act as a guide for where it should go.  Then, a little less lightly, I sprayed yellow ink over the top.  This coloured the OSL, and with a little overlap onto the darker sections, helped mitigate the grainyness of the white, and ease the transition between the two.  Finally, a little dot of white airbrushed back on the pendant was the highlight that was designed to further accentuate the ‘glowiness’ of the pendant.

At that point, I was able to turn the airbrush to the base.  Hurrah!  I sprayed black, dark blue, various greens, and a little yellow in patches.  I sprayed it on in dappled patterns unevenly, and very thickly.  The inks acted as retarders for the Citadel and Vallejo acrylics, and I kept going until it was clearly thickly layered and overloaded.  This probably took me about 20 minutes in total from start to finish.  As ever, most of that time was spent cleaning the airbrush between coats.  Finally I got hold of a brush.  This was the risky part, it was the eve of Golden Demon (I painted the whole model start to finish on the saturday, ready for the competition on the sunday), and I didn’t have time to fix this if it went wrong.  I swirled the brush in the thickly layered paint in a spiral pattern.  It didn’t have the desired effect, so I ditched the brush and used my finger!  Fingerpainting rules!  I just gave it a swirly pattern, and then left it to dry under a heat lamp for about 20 seconds (not too long, or the plasticard would melt and warp – been there!).

Now I was ready to crack out the brushes in earnest.  First off, the face and hands got blacked out with Citadel Chaos Black.  Then I highlighted the face sort of upside down.  I left his eyes and brow very dark, and ran W&N black ink around the top.  The glossy finish makes the shadows appear deeper.  Then I used a variety of flesh tone paints that to be honest, I can’t remember, but it definately included tallarn flesh, mecrite red, and elf flesh, all GW branded.  Now he was looking like a human being!  time to re-do the glow on the face.  I ran yellow ink over the skin again to keep the glow, and highlighted with white oil paint for a clean sharp contrast.  While I was at it, I used grey and white oils to highlight the robes, and yellow/white oils to highlight the OSL sections.  On went another coat of purity seal, and the little fella was about ready to be finished.

To tie him off, I highlighted bits of the hands and other minor details, and then superglued him to the now dry base.  I used yellow and white oils as thin bolts of lightening among the swirl on the base around the Astropath.  It enabled me to ‘lead’ the swirl directly towards his gathered robes, and provide a false perspective of depth by changing the length and bredth of the lines.  Now it was 8pm, and I wanted to finish off some other projects, so I highlighted the rim of his base, attached a magnet to the underside of his slottabase, and to the top of the plinth, sprayed and highlighted the brass etch imperial eagle design on the plinth and called it a night.  Job done!

He actually did well, especially in a group that was so hard, I hadn’t expected anything from him tbh, but he picked up a finalist pin, and in the end I reckon he actually had a pretty good chance.  Not bad for a finger painted model finished in a day!

I hope you like him, I uploaded him to CMON thanks to Alextheartist making photoshoppy goodness on my photos.  As ever with CMON, I was disappointed by the score of 7.3, but hey!  I’m not minding too much – I’m sure if my lighting/background in the photos was better he’d achieve a better score.

Anyway, let me know what you think.  It’s been a pleasure as always

James