On The Desk - Launcelot Part 1 - Preparation

 Time to start a new project! (Technically I started this a few weeks ago before the orc but oh well) I've been a fan of the Twisted Miniatures for a long while now, and had a few in my collection waiting for painting. I also backed the kickstarter so more coming in the future! I decided to paint Launcelot. The thing that really stands out to me with Twisted's range is the incredible amount of detail on the sculpts and the superb quality of their casts, possibly the best I've ever seen. (If you want to see an unboxing of the miniatures I have then check this article http://noobsandtheirpaintbrush.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/unboxing-twisted-collectors-editions-by.html)

As usual I primed the mini and forgot to take a photo, my usual zenithal prime with a light dusting of white over the black prime from above. It really helps those details to jump out.

Wait...I'm jumping ahead of myself.

I did some preparation. Sometimes I like to play with colours and get a feeling for a scheme before I put it onto a model. I used Adobe Colour CC (Which you can find here https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel/) to come up with a palette I liked. I wanted vibrancy, parts like the feather and the cravat scream out fancy! I started with the bright green and picked a triad based around it, the desaturated blue and a deep reddy brown and finally a nice natural cream for the trousers. There's plenty of articles about colour theory and what works well with what (a book I highly recommend is Figopedia by Jeremie Bonamant Teboul, it's a wealth of useful information on colour theory, composition and lighting.

With my palette decided I used photoshop to try out the colours on a greyscale image of the model. This is as simple as creating a new layer, setting it to overlay and painting colours on that layer. You can even highlight and shade as I have on the shirt by playing with flow and opacity. I rarely stick to these schemes that strictly but it's nice to get a general idea before I start sometimes.

About time we picked up a brush right?

I started with the shirt, I used Moot Green from GW, mixed with Vallejo Dark Sea Blue for the shadow areas and working towards pure Moot in the highlights. I'm not very good at finishing areas. Rather than work all the way through I tend to do a bit of one area, then move onto another and come back to the first area later, just the way I work at the moment. The shirt needs more work but it's enough for now so I move onto the coat.

And here I already broke from my plan. I had the coat as dark green but decided to use the dark blue instead and use metals. I used S75 heavy metal to start then I used lots of glazes of dark blues and blacks to help create the contrast in the shadows (especially the lower back and towards the left side of the coat.

The side of the coat I used Cobalt alchemy by S75, it's kind of a coloured metallic. I've not really tried them before but I like the effect, again I used glazes of mostly dark blue to shade. (apologies for the badly focussed picture!)

Returning to the back I used more Dark sea blue glazes to increase the contrast, then some Speed metal from S75 on the upper portion of the back, the trim and raised sections below. TMM is quite hard to photograph but hopefully you get the idea.

That's a good point to stop. As always any questions or C&C please don't hesitate to leave a comment!