Assembling and painting The Raven Priest pt. 8

Here's the next part of assembling and painting the Raven Priest - after Ali completed two parts of the miniature last time, I thought it only fair to push on and finish it off. The last two areas to paint (apart from some small details) were the sword and the spell-effect birds - both of which are small, so quick to paint.

Sword - The first version I painted of this miniature had a bone sword, but with this one I decided on a straightforward steel effect. I gave it a base coat of GW Chainmail - being careful to avoid filling in the fine rune detail on the blade. I wanted to keep the shading nice and subtle, so I mixed black with just a spot of dark brown and watered it down to a glaze consistency before carefully applying it to the blade. I shaded down the bevelled edge of the blade, and close to the hilt - building up the colour in thin layers to get deeper shading. I kept the effect subtle as a lot of the shape would be picked out with the highlighting.

The first level of highlights was picked out with Chainmail - I concentrated this to the edges, with a wider patch of light added to the curved end of the blade and another half way down. The metallic paint was applied quite thin and the edges carefully blended out. The second and final highlight was GW Mithril Silver.

The final picture in the sequence shows a little faint blue added onto the shaded areas - this gives a colder, harder feel to the blade and suggests that there is some reflected light hitting it. This was applied as controlled glazes of very thin light blue paint.

Birds - These were painted with three colours - turquoise, light bone and black. The base colour was a mix of turquoise and bone - when this was dry I faded the colour (not very subtly) by adding more bone towards the base - and more black towards the end of the birds. The next two stages show how the effect is made to look more subtle - basically by filling in between the colours with intermediate shades. None of it was blended - I just worked quickly and kept going back and forth between the colours where the 'blend' needed some work. I like to mix plenty of paint on the palette when I am doing things like this - and work quickly before it dries out. That way I have every shade I need right there in front of me. It handy to have a hair drier to speed the drying time on the miniature.

I have just finished off all the small details (mouth, eyes, straps, etc), and am waiting for the base to dry before attaching the finished miniature. I'll post pictures of the completed piece tomorrow.

cheers

mike