Mini No. 7

A friend asked me to paint a mini for him to represent his character in a Vampire – The Dark Ages game. His character is a female vampire that wears a fashionable fancy black dress with red trim and the Reaper Ghost Bride mini fit perfectly. However, challenge number one was, how do you paint, shade and highlight black? The internet suggests several ways of doing this, but no universal fool-proof way.

I deliberately decided to prime this mini in white instead of black. This was to try as much as possible to allow for there to be layers of black, hoping that the white underneath would give more depth.

Now it was time to start blocking in some of the colour, mainly the black and red, just to see how the colours would look together and to see how “dark” the black would be.

Next was the difficult part. The internet suggested many ways to highlight and shade black, mostly it was suggested to use an off black or add another colour (like blue) to the black to give it some more dimension. I decided to throw caution to the wind and try a few things and use whatever worked best. I first covered the entire thing in a black wash and then used some super dark gray to dry brush on a tiny little bit. Just enough to give the fabric a little bit of movement and dimension.

You can see in the buttons on her top and the ruffles on the underskirt how it picked up the dark gray, but the dress still looks black which is awesome. The mini comes on the rocks at the bottom. I simply painted it gray, black washed and gave it a liberal dry brush with a light gray.

Since she is a vampire I was conflicted as how to paint her skin, but my friend told me that she takes measures to look as human as possible. So I just made her skin quite pale. I have her lips a light pink colour and her eyes blue as outlined in the description of the character. Initially her hair was supposed to be black, but with all the black already in the image I decided to do white instead. I think the stark contrast really works for her.

Before starting this mini my friend wanted her to stand on cobblestones. So I started working on her base before realizing that her base would cover most of whatever base I put underneath it. But at the very least it allowed me to practice basing.

I filled the base with greenstuff and let it sit a little to harden slightly. I came back to it with an exacto knife and pushed in the cobblestones edges, I found that sliding the blade along was pulling the greenstuff away. I ended up painting it over in gray and washing and dry brushing as usual.

This is the finished mini. I am pretty happy with how she turned out. I learned from this mini how to paint in black so yay!! I still struggle with my paint consistency the most. Its too thick and there are brush marks or it is too thin and doesnt apply at all. So I will work on that.