Royal Guard

Painting time: ~25hrs.

This is a miniature I painted for a 'mini exchange' with Saul Remis, a.k.a. Deucalion S, an amazing painter from Spain - what an honour for me to exchange with him! The model itself is actually meant to be a statue - the feet come attached to the circular stone plinth - but I thought I would follow tortoise's lead and paint it as an actual Royal Guard of Alahan. I just added some sand and flock-type bits to the base to make a simple setting, and to make the plinth seem more like part of the ground rather than being attached to the figure.

There were a few experiments for me in painting this miniature. Most significant was using a white undercoat - I normally use black, which works very well with the darker colour schemes that I love to paint, but I am always trying to expand my painting knowledge, so I thought that trying white undercoat would be a useful exercise this time. The other experiment was the gold NMM - I have not painted a lot of gold before, so using it more extensively on this miniature was a good learning experience. I was aiming for a sort of green-gold; the base colour was VMC yellow green for the most part, with a little VMC goldbrown and tiny amount of VMC burnt umber added. To shade the armour, I added more burnt umber to the yellow green, and also progressively added VMC bronze green until I reached pure bronze green for the dark areas; the very darkest cracks and recesses were shaded with a mix of bronze green, GW dark angels green and a small touch of black. Highlighted was conducted using the yellow green and goldbrown mix again, then adding more goldbrown to the mix and also some VMC medium grey to tone down the colour slightly, and then progressively adding white until pure white for the final 'sparkle'.

The colour of the robes/tabard was based mainly on VMC medium grey, with some purplish-pink colours such as VMC beige red in the upper areas fading into more blue tones at the top. Most of the shading was done by adding VMC german cam. black brown to the medium grey, although it also involved some of the purple and dark blue for the upper areas. The highlights were painted by adding VMC sand light to the medium grey.

Guild Artisan,
Sebastian.