Jesilious

Painting time: about 45-50 hours, plus the base.

Here is a new mini that I have painted for Enigma, for the new 30mm range of miniatures called 'Massive Darkness'. The first minis are all sculpted by Raul Garcia Latorre - you can see the greens of the minis on the Enigma site here: Enigma

This one is a cleric named Jesilious, the last surviving member of his brotherhood. His brothers were slaughtered and his temple was destroyed by an evil, dark fire - the same fire that he now carries with him on his quest for vengeance against those dark hordes that destroyed his order.

The painting was such a pleasure, really....the sculpting is so nice, it was so easy to paint - thanks Raul :)

I used quite a strong colour scheme to try to reflect his religious nature: the blue and red details, and the dark vs. light areas, to try to give him quite a strong character. I was imagining him as a sort of crusader. I put quite a lot of thought into the specifics of the colour scheme before starting to paint, and used a pre-determined logic to choose the colours. The main colours used were: red going towards purple, blue going to green, and yellow going to orange. Theoretically, these colours should form a balanced colour scheme, because they are evenly spaced around the colour wheel: it's just the 3 primary colours, red, blue, yellow, each slightly turned around the wheel in the same direction. So, this is why I chose the red leather, which is slightly purplish rather than a 'true' red; the sqau coloured patterning on the robes, and the warm, orange- yellow tones of the robes and leather armour parts. These elements make up the bulk of the mini, and the most striking colours. For the rest of the details, I used a secondary layer of colours: yellow-green, blue-purple, and red-orange - also evenly spaced around the colour wheel and therefore theoretically balanced. These tones are much less obvious - they are usedmainly in glazes in certain parts of the mini, undertones in places, and so on, to provide a sort of counter scheme to the primary colour scheme used.

For the face colours, let's see...as a base colour, I used a sort of beige/bone colour with a hint of orange, and also some grey to reduce the 'saturation' (brightness) of the colour. The colour was something like GW bleached bone + fortress grey + a little bestial brown and scorched brown. The exact colour is not really important, because it just forms the base over which many successive glazes of various colours and painted to provide the different tones and shades - any fairly light, quite de-saturated skin-like colour will do.

I knew I wanted to use quite purplish/pink tones in the face, to fit with the rest of the colour scheme; also, it would be quite dark under the hood like that, so the purple-blue colours are also meant to provide quite a shadowy look, while also giving some depth to the face. So to shade, I started with glazes of an orange/red colour - say, the base colour + bestial brown + a little dark flesh. Then I moved to a more purple/mauve colour, adding liche purple and a little dark flesh to the base colour. Then added dark blues and black for the deepst shadows. I also applied glazes of VMC oxford blue - it's like GW shadow grey, but slightly more towards purple - say shadow grey + a little dark flesh or liche purple.

For the highlights, I used lighter beige/grey tones - mixtures of, say GW kommando khaki, bleached bone and fortress grey. Then added white to this for final highlights. You might want to check out this tutorial on faces, for some more colour ideas and methods - it's a great article: Spanish Team forum

The texture effect used on the leather parts (epecially the red leather) is sort of like tromp l'oeil, but not as stark as it is normally applied when painting scratches and dints in armour etc.. WHen I was painting, once I started to paint the brightest highlights in the red leather, I then moved the colour more towards grey, and painted some very fine lines in certain areas: perpindicular lines across straps, and some slight cross-hatching on larger areas such as the book. Then using a dark purple-blue colour, I added some more, darker lines to emphasise the deeper cracks, like with trompe l'oeil - but not on all the cracks, only some. And I added some dark lines just on their own as well, for variety. Then I used glazes of the red colour over the top, to bind the cracks more with the background and make the effect a bit more subtle.

The metals: the more I paint, the more I have been thinking that NMM and metallics are actually much more similar than many people realise. When using metallic paint, I think you should still follow the same principles you use when painting NMM. That is, you should think about the light reflections, and try to control the shine of the metallics to provide shiny 'light points' contrasting against much duller, darker areas. This is achirved by using the glazes of paints over the metal base coats: using paint glazes has the effect of deadening the shine, making it dull - so you can have this dull effect in the shadows, and then highlight with pure metallics to create the contrasting 'shiny' areas. The silver metal on this mini was painted using a base coat of GW boltgun metal. Then glazes of VMC middlestone + GW bestial brown + VMC burnt umber, burnt umber + bestial brown, pure burnt umber, burnt umber + dark blue and black, and pure dark blue and black were applied to shade. Highlights were then applied with very thin glazes of boltgun metal, then GW mithril silver, then VMC silver for the brightest parts. Some very subtle extra nuances were applied at the end with orange and purple colours.

Let me now tell you the story of the shoes: when I first painted them, all the leather was the same brown colour. But Raul made a good suggestion, that I make the bits on his toes a different, lighter colour (it's meant to be thicker toe-protection), to distinguish them from the rest of the shoes and also to break the mini a little more from the terrain on the base. The way they are sculpted though, it doesn't look like metal...there is no real clear line defining the two parts of the shoe - they kind of meld into each other in some parts, like the shoe and toe-protection part are stiched or wrapped together somehow. So I thought that maybe the toe protection was made from a different, thicker leather or some other material like that. While I was painting I realised that the grey colour I used looks a little like metal; I decided that it might be good to have something reminiscent of metal, because that might give an added impression of hardness to the material.

For the dirt, I just mixed up a few different brown colours - in this case I used snakebite leather mixed with VMC burnt umber, bestial brown mixed with VMC german cam. black brown, and some pure black brown. Then using diluted paint, I messily daubed it on areas, trying to be as random as possible. I did all the things you should never do when painting - used too much paint, applied it inconsistently, messed around with it when it was already starting to dry etc., hehe. Then I kept doing it again and again to build up the colour slowly. When doing this, areas of more concentrated colour, or shapes etc. start to appear because of the messy application, so then you can start to emphasise these random shapes with further painting to give a nice effect.

Guild Artisan,
Sebastian.