The Wamp Workshop - A Great Experience

Over the August Bank Holiday, I was able to go to the Wamp Workshop, hosted at 4TK Gaming in Colchester. The Workshop was a 2 day event organised as part of my Wamp Paint Brush Kickstarter pledge.

The first day was run by Scott Hockley, AKA Iacton or The Black Hand and was focused on his techniques for working on flesh and faces, while day two was run by John Keys, AKA Megazord Man and looked at his blending from light to dark across areas of a mini.

The weekend kicked off with a long drive down from Cumbria to Colchester, but thankfully I was able to get lifts from Normski and Darklord (or more technically Mrs Darklord, who was driving) so after setting off at 9:30AM, we arrived about 7:30PM and promptly went out to inspect the state of the local ale houses.

The mini that had been picked out for us by Scott to work on was Hasslefree's Steampunk Boudi.

As you can see from the concept art, lots of flesh to work on with plenty of different tones of lighting across it. 

Scott's way of painting was something I'd not tried before - one or two drops of paint in each dent of a dry palette before the addition of a drop each of glaze and matte medium along with a healthy dose of water to create a very loose paint. 

I was mainly working with the Scale 75 flesh set, along with some Vallejo Ivory and some P3 Midlund Flesh, as a little P3 in the mix apparently keeps things going on nice and smooth in the many layers that are going to be going on instead of going grainy which some paints can do. 

One of the main things I picked up was to not be scared of cross contamination of the paint - in fact, one of the first things we did was to mix the paints all the way up the palette and back down, giving a little of each into the next one along.

The next area we worked on was the face, and particularly the eyes. Boudi has teeny tiny eyes, so these took a few goes to get right so Scott's suggestion of finish the eyes before moving on to the rest of the face turned out to be a wise one.

The face is also almost always the focal point of the model, so it needs to be a degree brighter than the rest of the flesh on show. With this in mind, I added a lot more Ivory into the mix than I had on other parts.

I ran out of time on the first day to get any more than this done - The face is almost done, just requiring eyebrows, and about half of the flesh is "almost, but not quite" while the rest is more "half done".

Without blowing my own trumpet, I'm rather chuffed with how the face has turned out so far. It's a damn site better than any I've done before, and I think that's all down to the control that using the watery paint method gives you - if you don't like a layer, add another two and your mistake has changed completely. 

We also looked at using inks for leather effect and sheer clothing, though my attempt at that didn't go so well (mixed up the wrong colours to begin with so the effect didn't look right and will be repainted at some point.

We had surprise guests part way through the day, with the guys from Purgatory Miniatures turning up to give everyone a free copy of Death. Having had chats with them over Facebook for a while it was nice to meet in person. Speaking of free stuff, Scott also gave us each a second miniature to paint up after we had finished Boudi in our own time.

At the end of day one we went out into Colchester again and discovered that in the south they put orange in some of their ales. Thankfully it was a light, citrusy ale to begin with, and the orange didn't detract from the beer but it's not something I'd try up North.

Day two arrived, and with it a completely different style of painting, albeit one I've been accidentally wandering close to for the last couple of months. While I've just been mixing up shades on my wet palette, John's technique involves picking out three colours for each colour you want to use - a light, midtone and shade. Once you have these lined up on your palette and mixed through them, you start painting up the area you want to, working from light to dark or vice versa. You then add an even lighter tone and a much darker tone to the mixes, which allow for the creation of contrast against other areas as you paint them. 

The bit I found strange about this was that instead of using a base layer and working up or down, all three tones are added in the same layer, then built up over the next layers. This helps reduce the number of layers on the piece and thus reduce the chance of obscuring detail.

I went initially for blue, which I haven't used often. In fact, I can't really remember using it prior to my Masons for Guild Ball and the Gotham Police I've been working on recently.

Thanks to the angles of the model, the blue areas on the front start with the highlights at the top and work down to shadow. while the opposite is true at the back - with her back arched and her bum sticking out, that means the lightest area of the corset at the back is at the bottom. 

We then worked on the sash and the belt. As we had gone top to bottom on the corset and shirt, we went for the light to dark on the side on the sash. I threw some oranges together (what with orange being opposite to blue on most colour charts) and turned it into a fairly desaturated shade in comparison with the strong blues. 

The belt returned to the up to down lighting and is probably the smallest area I've tried to layer 4-5 different shades into from top to bottom. The front of the belt wasn't finished and neither was the blue of the skirt, which I added to help me with the contrast on the sash. The back of the belt however, I'm really happy with. By lining the edges in darker shades then adding a really fine line of Ivory along the top there are some really nice defined areas, all with their own directions of tone and shade.

The metals follow the same route as the non metals and I put the Scale Color Metal n Alchmey Gold series to work. Unfortunately again, I didn't get the gun finished, but I think there is enough there to show where the light and shadow should be once it's filled in.

At this point it was pretty much time to go and have another long drive back up North, but not before getting a Wamp Goody Bag. It was great to meet people who had previously only existed on the internet and some new folk as well.

I've come away from the event feeling like I've learnt more about painting in two days than I had in the past year. And it shows - I've taken a picture of the Gotham Cop I finished in the week before the Workshop and put her next to Boudi.

As you can probably see - the flesh is completely different and while there is shading on the Cop's shirt, it's nowhere near the same effect as on Boudi's.

One of the other hints John gave us was that just because a colour is darker than another, doesn't mean you should shade with it. With that in mind, I've ordered the Scale Color Shades of Doom set - full of lovely desaturated colours for adding to mixes in need of shade but not darkness.

The next step on from the workshop is to pick up my brushes again and get back to work on Boudi, tidying up the splats on the flesh from my messy painting as well as getting the areas that weren't touched at the workshop done. 

Overall I had a hell of a good time and would love to take part in another one, though maybe a little closer to the North next time!