Saturday, January 5, 2013

Wash the blues away: Finishing the Dragonforge bases



You know what time it is!  Yes, time for glazing!

Here is an image of the bases as they were set up for this stage.  As usual with the shaded basecoat, I have gone lighter than normal, so that I can do the rest by shading darker.


For the metal sections, I used a blue.black glaze.  My first layers were more watered down.  Subsequent layers were more pure glaze, and much darker.


Now it is time for the stones.  I have a few colors out on the palette: a black, a green, a sepia, and a brown.  The idea is to alter my glaze colors in the same way as I did the original colors.


Here's a close up of the palette.  I also have a few batches of watered down glaze.  This is very helpful for doing those initial layers of lighter glaze.  Again, it is very important to think of this as more of a watercolor technique.  Shade lighter at first, since you can always go darker!  All it will take is a few more layers.

It is much faster to apply these transparent colors, as opposed to the same number of opaque layers.


Here is another trick I like to use on rough surfaces such as this.  See the paper towel on the left?  Yes, dabbing away the extra glaze works very well for creating interesting textures.


Here is an image that shows the completed glazes.


Now it is time to get some rust action on the metal sections.  On the left part of the image, I set down a blob of Calthan brown.  The foundation paints have an interesting quality when you water them down.  It tends to break down the paint, instead of thinning it.  This is very useful when you want to create some random looking washes.


In this image, you can see that I have applied the first layer of "rust glaze".  I focused on the crevices, as that is where the rust would occur most frequently.


I did the same for all of the bases.


I added some lighter layers of this rust by adding some orange to the Calthan Brown.  It was watered down again, so that it would sink into the recesses.


Here is where I left it off.  There are some more details I will add on once the miniatures are added.

I hope this little 'how to' was useful!!




6 comments:

  1. I like that paper towel trick! If you like the chalky result of the thinned foundation paints I have found that Reotech Acrylics have the same properties when watered down. They seem to break up and dry in weird and interesting ways. I used Burnt umber and black at 1:1 and then watered down so much I could mist it on with a spray bottle to all my city fight terrain and it made everything gritty and in some places it dried with a very light sandy dusty texture/color and in others it remained very dark and muddy. Streaks everywhere too. Handy for big projects like tables/terrain and not as expensive as trying to get that much coverage with Citadel.

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    1. That sounds very cool!

      The paper towel thing is something I used to do when I was painting watercolors. It's all lots of fun :-)

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  2. I've got a quick question, what do you use to make your glazes? Are they actual products you can buy or just inks / washes / thinned down paint from companies?

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    1. My glazes can be just about anything. GW washes, vallejo or Reaper glazes, watered down reaper liner paints, watered down regular paints, etc.

      You can even take glaze medium and mix that with regular paint to create your own glazes. I hope that is helpful!!

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  3. hmm, I'm afraid to say I prefered them before the glazing. Before you had good gradients on the metal parts, after glazing you have hard transitions to the shade colours.

    The rust is good though.

    Just my personal thoughts!

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    1. Thanks for taking the time to check out the blog and reply!!

      One note... these are not quite finished yet. I am going to do a few more touches on them as I determine which figure goes on which base, etc.

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