Nothin' But Paintin' BTS #89 (Patreon)

Like a lot of people, I picked up Cursed City this past weekend and have been painting up the beautiful Wood Elf inside the box. 

There have been so many thoughts floating through my head while painting this model so allow me to vomit them all out onto this BTS post. 

1. I've definitely said this before about potentially any hue, but when we think of green as individuals, usually a color pops up in our head. For me, it's like standard grass green. Obviously, green is much more than that. I thought about constructing a color wheel where every standard hue was mixed with green in a 1:1 ratio, and then shifted up and down with saturation, and value. I then remembered that I bought a book a long time ago called the "Color Mixing Bible" and one of the main draws was that it maps out how various hues (green, blue, yellow, red, etc.) in various mediums (acrylic, oil, gouache, soft pastel, etc.) mix with a lot of other main tones. Here's the green acrylic example. Apologies for the rotation, it's a wider book.

Bonus points because it uses common green pigments. I'm not really seeing as much a disparity as I'd like, so part of me wants to do a few experiments on my own. Without going too deep down the rabbit hole, I've been experimenting with a lot of greens and balancing them across a model, tempering them with reds, cooling them off with blues, and all sorts of fun things and it's got my mind racing on green.

2. I was thinking about the GW painting style which has heavily influenced how I paint and what I think looks good in my older hobby life. One thing I talk about a lot is drawing a viewer's gaze up to the important part of the model, the face. You do that with several methods but what it allows you to do is maybe spend less time painting the less important parts of the model. While painting this wood elf, I found myself going to to town on the most unimportant details and I had to stop and ask myself why? I think the "super clean" approach to painting basically assumes you're looking at everything because it's first and foremost trying to show off every detail on the mini. I think this makes for a slightly confusing paint job to look at but also something of a tedious paint job. I thought about how other paint styles are less structured and focus their efforts more and it just made me think about the pros and cons of these various approaches. 

3. I discovered that while I paint, I create very small mixes on my wet palette. It sometimes isn't enough to paint all of what I need to paint. Because of that, I often mix water into this little mixture to extend the life of that mixture. I realized while doing this with a mixture that was brighter, that as I got to the end of painting with that mixture, I was getting less and less opacity - which makes sense! The more water I get, the more grey my white will appear, in this case. Knowing this, maybe I should paint details that I care to be brighter first, and then move to portions of the model that aren't as reliant on bright highlights. Just a little something interesting.

Normally when constructing a video, you know ahead of time what your topic is, or you discover it along the way. In this case, I've discovered a few topics that could make for an interesting video and I'm trying to figure out what I should talk about while painting this wood elf as the over-arching take-away. That's pretty much it. I was sick one day this week so I couldn't do much then, but I've been painting this wood elf (and assembling the rest of cursed city) in the meantime. What have you guys been up to?

Scott