Painting time: 25hrs. approx, Sculpting time: 20hrs. approx

This is a mini I painted for some fun to celebrate the end of my university work - I did the sculpting in breaks while I was finishing off the writing of my thesis.

Weisern had sent me some lowly GW plastic skeletons, and I thought it would be a funny sort of a joke to turn one into something more interesting! So I used one of the plastic skeletons (without the head) as a sort of armature over which to practice some sculpting, to try to practice and learn before moving on to some more serious projects in the future. As you can see in the WIP pics, the majority of the sculpting was done with duro (greenstuff), although the beige parts are milliput yellow-grey, which I used to make the blade of his sword, the shield, and the core of the scabbard. This was done by sandwiching some milliput between two flat strips of plastic, to obtain a smooth, flat slab. The rough shapes or the blade, shield etc. were then cut out of the slab once dry, and then I used files to smooth and shape the surface into the desired shapes. Take a look at the milliput tutorial on Allan C's site - I copied his method (thanks Allan haha).

For the painting, I wanted to practice some more painting with metallics. I tried to make the metal darker than the way I have been painting it recently - darker, less vibrant rust for a darker feeling to the metal. To obtain this, I used glazes (juices!) over a base coat of boltgun metal, starting with bestial brown + black, followed by some dark purple tones and even dark blue + black in the darkest parts, to create a cooler aspect in the shadows. Then I re-highlighted with dilute boltgun metal, then mithril silver for the final bright parts, to try to achieve some strong contrast between the dark and light areas.

On his blue-green colorued clothing, I used combinations of VMC dark sea blue, VMC bronze green, VMC gunship green to shade, and highlights by adding different amounts of VMC dark sand, VMC medium grey and VMC light sand to the gunship green, with VMC silvergrey added for the lightest parts. I think this sort of dark blue-green colour suits undead minis well, as an interesting alternative to the usual colours that are seen on undead models.

Guild Artisan,
Sebastian.