Mini No. 10

So I decided to paint this mini since Derek is in a D&D game where he plays a Warforged, essentially a robot. I had no idea what I had gotten myself in for. I chose the below Warmachine mini for his character.

I had no idea how tough this guy would be to paint. Dereks Warforged prays to the silver flame so he wanted the colours to all be versions of silver. But he also wanted there so be glowing parts, like energy and circuitry. And that was the tough part. I watched a ton of tutorials on how to do OSL and glow effects and looked up countless images. I decided to prime in gray since the whole mini was going to be painted silver anyways.

The base was to be a graveyard scene. So I added some coarse sand and made some graves from matchsticks and coffee stirrers. I added some more coarse sand on a pile to make it look like a grave.

I used three different citadel silvers. A very bright one that I used on the most outter parts of the mini, a dark one (Leadbelcher) which I used in the most inner parts and a mid level shade. I then used nuln oil to add shading and the bright silver to highlight.

At this point I actually kind of like the result. I like the sleek steel look, but it was kind of a nightmare to paint. Some of the Warmachine minis I have seen that are robots have clear defined areas that are easy to paint, this mini is different, more …. organic? Some of the lines and layers done really make sense so there wasn’t a logical way to decide what should be what colour. But eventually I got to this point which I quite like. Next to the infuriating glow experiments.

Here you can see different things I tried and I did not like any of them. The colours are always too chalky, too bright, too dark. The more I dilute the less they show on the mini but if I dilute less its not thin enough. I have tried all the colours I can think of and even bought some acrylic medium to help with the dilution to no avail. I ended up sticking with the darker blue. It was the only option that felt clean enough.

I found out a lot of my short comings with this mini. My blending is not up to part yet and certainly not my judgement as how to dilute colours. This for sure has been the most difficult mini I have painted so far.