Hobby | A Rather Unfortunate Encounter...

The Ironwoods groaned, the wind whipping around massive trunks. Miserable folk squatted next to hovels, drawing their cloaks ever tighter around them. 

Joric had no such luck. A soldier of the Heldeni 1st Army, it was his task to oversee the expansion into this forlorn place. The deep black brambles threatened to overwhelm the village, if not for the constant hacking of axes by the support corp. 

A sound carried upon the wind reached him. Deer perhaps? Easy prey would be good for the troops. Morale was suffering. 

In he went. Rules be damned, hard tac was no proper meal. Immediately, the place was oppressive. All around shadows twisted in vile shapes. As a precaution, he drew his short sword, its steel glinting in the lantern light. A small comfort in this dismal forest. 

Up ahead, he could just make out the shape of antlers. He would remember this clearing, and return with some of the hunters assigned to his unit. Before he could turn, great wings unfurled. Frozen in fear, Joric barely had time to register that he was in the grasp of a foul beast...

With the last two post talking about Warhammer 40K, and what with me talking about getting the new FOMO box, you'd expect my next post to be about some painted Tyranids. Nope. How I'll paint and base those models needs to marinate for a bit. It's how I come up with paint schemes that I like and stick with on the first try. It's also been a long time since I last painted something, so I wanted to get back into the groove of things. I also happened to be digging through some of my Kickstarter minis from Archon Studio, and I found this Peryton model. It happens to be one of my favorite fantasy creatures, so I settled on painting this model, which is sort of a mini diorama in and of itself. 

Part of the painting process is admitting to myself I've entered into a bit of a plateau when it comes to my art. While I think I paint decently, I've more or less stuck to the basecoat-wash-highlight style of painting. With this model I wanted to push a little past that and introduce some textures and glazing. 

The most obvious texture is on the feathers. I referenced pheasants and their feathers when planning out this model's wings. They have a striped texture to them, and I achieved that with thin lines on the wings with darker colors. I even got a subtle lightening by letting the brush run out of paint as I progressed, which gave some natural variations to the coloring. I introduced a bit of texture to the flanks of the deer hide with some striping with a wash. 

Some of my favorite detailing is on the deer face. I used a red wash for the head to distinguish it a bit, then used a black wash on the nose, glazing in very light layers to get a natural transition. Deer have a black nose and that's what I was going for here. I did this process on the tips of the antlers as well to give some extra details. One of the issues I think I have with painting is just using one color tone. Things in real life often have lots of different colors and subtle tones to them, so I tried to work that in here. 

Metal is another area where I basecoat and wash, but I tried to do a but of true metallic metals here. Instead of just edge highlighting, I used a lighter metallic color to paint areas where the light would naturally hit. I think this helped to make the metal look much shinier, but also still dull in the darker areas. Which helps up the contrast and visual interest of the model. 

I even pushed myself to work on eyes, which are the bane of my existence. I mostly tried to evoke the hint of eyes instead of full realism, and I kinda pulled it off. The beard also had a mix of black and greys to again give some layered hues to what I was hoping would be a grey beard. I think it came out looking like a peppered beard, but a win's a win. 

And for my favoritist part of the model, the reflections from the broken lamp. I did some glazing with orange, and combined with the true metallic metal technique from earlier, I think it came out fantastic. 

Let me know what you think! I can always use and comments and criticism, it's a good way to grow in any hobby that you're interested in.

Thanks for any comments!

-The Space Dinosaur

PS. This also snagged another bingo square: Paint a model and incorporate a technique you haven't mastered. The true metallic metal was definitely a new technique for me. And now I'm approaching another bingo line....