After quite some time without bringing you any article, I being the year with my last collaboration with Hera Models, Nythgor the dwarf. Nothing better for a painting tutorial than a model sculpted by Raul Garcia Latorre!
As soon as I got my hands on the sculpture of Nythgor, I knew it would be an interesting job of volume interpretation. Generally I prefer to work metal surfaces with non metallic colours, playing with illustration effects, reflections and drawn textures. This miniature was a wonderful opportunity to undertake an exercise of this kind.
A job like this one normally requires a previous plan and a quite detailed sketch work. The complicated part is not fixing reflections in one view but rather making them work in all of them. In this case, since this will be a box art job, the painting will have a clear intention to fit the final photograph. Therefore, the work is thought to make the miniature stand out, making good use of its best views and making them pop out with painting.
In the first images of the process, I performed the sketch stains with a flat brush, wider than the usual brushes that I use normally. The idea is to create a series of general reflections and to suggest the highlights of the armour.
As a reference for the painting, I used some illustrations from Paul Bonner. His influence is also very obvious in the sculpture of Nythgor.
The work method is based on progressing in parallel in different elements of the piece to always maintain cohesion. There are many things that will have to be corrected afterwards, this lets us have a general idea.
The golden copper and metallic tones are a characteristical element in my paintjobs and somehow this miniature was a great opportunity to play with them.
As the painting progressed, the contrasts were softened, by overlapping intermediate layers of lights, tones and shadows. I defined other elements and intensified lights and shadows to be able to better see the details in the piece.
At this point I realized that the miniature was starting to become flat. There was too much white all over and I needed some intensity in the colours. I pushed some glazes with airbrush using Mahogany Red for the shadows in the beard and in other shadow areas in the miniature.
After this, and with the two arms glued to the piece, I finished defining the reflections of the armour together with the shield, fixing all views in the block. Especially interesting is the plane marked by the shield (see pictures) where many plane directions intersect as well as the different metallics.
In the final stages of the piece, some glazes with airbrush, applying a layer of black with some blue or green tones, helps finalizing the light spots and reinforces the dramatism of the effect.
The last step, to bring the work to an end, is to apply final light spots to the reflection, using denser paint than usual, with the tickness of paste. The titanium white from Golden Acrylics is perfect for this and will help bring together the shine areas.
Here are the final pictures of Nythgor. I hope you enjoyed it!
Awesome work.
Absolutely amazing!