Brambleten Paints... ArcWorlde's Father Griffmas - Part 1

Welcome to the first article in my "Brambleten Paints..." Series. The aim of this series, much like Shamikebab's "On The Desk" is to go through the entire process of painting a miniature, broken down into stages. I usually stick to just showing finished content on the blog, but I also want to offer up more paint related content to you guys instead of most of my articles being unboxings of one sort or another (my wallet is relieved to hear this).

So, what better place to start than with a miniature I picked out to paint for the 'Eavier Metal Christmas Painting Comp. The restriction put in place on choosing what to paint was that it must be somewhat related to Christmas, Winter or New Year.

My first thought was to choose The Perfect Present from Kabuki, but I'm also painting a mini for the Another World contest which finishes at the end of November, so didn't want to dive into a scale I hadn't painted before while trying to paint other things as well.

That left my only other Christmas related piece - ArcWorlde's Father Griffmas, from Warploque Miniatures.

Father Griffmas was released as last year's Warploque Christmas mini, along with his faithful Griffling, Coodolf. He's resin and 35mm scale. After giving him a wash and a minimal clean down, I created a base for him from a mix of Milliput and Greenstuff, using my Imperial Basius pad.

Once everything had set, he got a coat of grey primer, with a smattering of white primer from the top left. I've not tried this before so I'm not sure I'll use it to it's full advantage of showing where highlights should go from that angle, but it seemed a good idea at the time.

I decided to start out by painting his face and hands, as that was what I was painting on my AW entry along side him. First up is a layer of Deck Tan. Prior to the Wamp Workshop, I would never have done this, but since then I've found that flesh tones work so much better from a base of Deck Tan than they do from grey, so on it went.

This was swiftly followed by some mid tone flesh, some concoction derived from mixing various paints from the scale 75 flesh set and a couple of p3 flesh tones. Once he had some colour, I started on the eyes. First came a layer of ivory then, through trial and error and many redo's, some pupils and edging in what I think was roughly a 4:1 Black:Dark Brown mix - just enough brown to take the harshness of the black away. 

At this point I also added some red to his suit, as I always have Sanguine Base on my pallet when painting flesh.

Unfortunately, between the angle I was taking photos at and Griffmass's rather impressive eyebrows, getting a decent picture of his eyes was rather tricky.

Once his eyes were in and the basic flesh tone tidied up, I started adding some shadows. The great thing about ArcWorlde minis is that there are so many nooks and crannies to create shadow and depth with. I mainly used my basic mix with small additions of Sanguine Base and Coal Black, depending on where I was using it - I added more coal black to the mix along the hairline, but more Sanguine base to the depths of the hands.

After the shadows, some highlights were started, along with his hair. By starting his hair, it gives me an idea of how far along I want to take the highlights on his face. If I take his hair to white, I don't want to take his face that light for fear of washing it out but if the hair stays similar to how it is now, a mid tone grey, I can afford to add some highlights and create some contrast.

It was only at this point, at the end of my painting session, that I realised that the top of his head was smooth for a reason (not because Alex was lazy about sculpting the hair as I initially thought) - he's got a bald spot! No wonder he usually has a hat on. After realising this, I started to get some flesh tone on it but ran out of time.

Overall I'm happy with the progress I made in the first session. I hope that my next session will see the flesh tones and hair finished and the next area started.