Miniotaur

Today I shall talk about my first real commission piece, the Shadow Dragon from Reaper Miniatures. It is a weird coincidence that my first two dragons from Descent 2.0 were also named Shadow Dragons…

Shadow Dragon from Reaper Miniatures

Being a fantasy fiction fan herself, my dear wife kindly asked for a dragon. So we browsed the Reaper website and she decided that she wanted this model. Also, she liked one of the paint schemes so much that she literally asked me to paint exactly like that example (here).

My best piece as of yet

This was equally good and bad in a sense. It was good that I did not have to choose a complementary and satisfactory color scheme, it was already chosen for me. In my time as a fledgling painter one of the lessons I have learnt is that the quality of a “good” paint job is deeply related with the colors that are chosen. Complementary and aesthetically compatible colors leave the observer much more satisfied and pleased. Contrasting colors, dark and light colors, hue, saturation, and how the light itself is perceived in the brain.. all of these factors play a role in our appreciation of visual arts such as miniature painting. So I spent some time reading about the Color Theory and I strongly suggest you do the same if any of you out there is interested in painting regardless of the method and the medium. This website urged me to look deeper into the subject, so I suggest you take a look as well.

However it was “bad” in the sense that the expectation was quite high since this was a professional paint job that I had to match. Yet it gave me a chance to deploy my best and supersede my skill.

Before being affixed to a base...

I shall not go into much detail about the painting process itself but in this piece I believe I finally understood how layering actually works. Furthermore I started to appreciate why there is a type of paint called “inks” J When I bought my first paint bottles, due to the purely unfortunate fact that my local hobby store was out of normal black paint I had bought Vallejo Black Ink from Game Color range. When I had tried using it as a normal paint I was very much disappointed and frustrated by this ridiculously “dilute” paint J

With the stone base

However after watching hours upon hours of master painters like Doctor Faust or AGP Productions work I came to understand what inks actually do that washes cannot. Basically the difference is that washes settle in the crevices and provide a shade effect, whereas the inks cover everywhere they touch and therefore provide a more transparent layer of color on top of your base color. So, after this piece I went ahead and bought all the Game Color inks that my local hobby store had in store J

The base was my wife’s choice.. it actually came from my father-in-law’s garden.. and honestly it fit rather well.. I had something different in mind but I really liked the outcome. Furthermore my customer’s (wife’s) preference was more important and therefore I successfully concluded my first commission piece J.