Glazing

Just a quick post about one of my favourite techniques.

I have just finished painting the Infinity Cutter miniature - a fantastic sculpt by one of my favourite miniatures sculptors, Jose Roig. His contribution to the whole range is amazing, but the Cutter is an outstanding piece of work - fantastic animation and detail. I'll post pictures of the finished piece here soon, but I just wanted to talk a little about how I used glazing on this miniature first.

I wanted the cutter to have a really clean, anime feel to the colour scheme, so chose white and red for the principal colours. I have to admit that red is one of my favourite colours for miniatures (it just gives so much impact to a colour scheme), but I rarely use it as the main colour. It can also be a tricky one to get right in large areas like this - it's notoriously difficuly to get good smooth coverage as it has such poor opacity.

I tend to use quite a lot of white in the highlights for better coverage - building up the colours through almost peach tones and then adding some intensity back in with successive glazes. I glaze with inks rather than paint - I find that the intensity of the pigmentation really lends itself to the technique. I used at least 8-10 layers of glazes on this miniature, the first was a warm yellow and the final one was deep red. Each glaze is applied extremely diluted and in an even layer - the goal is to lay down a thin 'tint' of colour without any patchiness or pooling. It's important to make sure that the glazes dry completely between applications (I always have a hair-drier handy to speed this up). You also have to be careful where you apply the glaze - the early (yellow) ones are applied over the whole areas, but the deeper (red) tones are just applied to the shade areas.

It's a great technique and can be used to give colours a real intensity boost.

I'll post pictures of the finished miniature soon.

mike