Hi everyone,
I guess it is superfluous to say, but I love bright colours. Nothing brings more joy to me than to paint with a lot of vibrancy. That’s why you will not often see a figure painted by my using only browns or dark colours. I like to enjoy what I paint, and that simply means bold, saturated colours 🙂
When first seeing this miniature from Kingdom Death, I immediately knew I wanted to go even beyond my own comfort and create even more vibrancy and colours then I would normally use, or even recommend. Then, I wanted to scale that up even more by creating many different freehands all over the fabrics. The idea here was to create something fun, but perhaps slightly uncomfortable and some would say “too much”. I don’t care! It fits this figure I think.
This is a plastic figure that comes in many pieces. In combination with the hard to reach areas, this means I had to paint a lot of parts separately and assemble them afterwards. I don’t take shortcuts, even if you don’t see something entirely, I think it still deserves attention to be completely painted.
Even though I intended to go for something bold and slightly uncomfortable in terms of colours, I still needed the colourscheme to work. It took a lot of testing and sketching. I think I made at least 8 different schemes before finally settling with one scheme. Even then, I made some adjustments later on.
Painting the skintone for this figure was also a great experience. I decided to go for a tanned skintone with a lot of warmth. The face was quite a challenge to paint, as the jewelry in the face makes it difficult to read. But it does add so much to the character.
As the figure itself was already so incredible complex and “out there”, I decided to go for a simple base. At the time I was painting this figure, I was listening to the audiobooks of the Wheel of Time series (still am by the way, takes forever!). The figure reminded me of the Tuatha’an, who are nomads living in brightly painted wagons and dressing in vibrant cloths. (Yes, readers of the books may tell me “a Tuatha’an with a sword?!?”…yes, I know, it’s fantasy right?). The Tuatha’an follow the “way of the leaf”, which is why the patterning on the base has leaf-type structures in it.