Monday Miniatures: Nienna
This week we paint Nienna. Want to see everyone do a better job than me? Well this is the week for you!
This week’s mini was definitively meh to me. It was good to be painting again, don’t get me wrong, but what I really learned is that even a break for a week or two will really you back. Tune in next week when I suck slightly less.
Magnus went with the classic green color scheme, with what looks to be a little bit of camo to break up the cloak. . The results are very clean, though the skin came out a bit yellow. Is that due to lighting?
Arjen noted in his email that this model is almost always painted green, as we see from this weeks other painters. Instead he went with a color palette that is much more autumnal. Outstanding blending.
Grognard’s mini is as always, vivid and colorful. Even in the dry brushing he somehow manages to avoid a washed out look. Excellent job.
Update:
Antonia’s mini is awesome, if a bit belated. As always, he nails the details. The cooking herb turned ground cover is very inventive, but the tree branch steals the show. The bark, the tip – everything turned out just great.
Damien – Please send pictures to Caffeineforge@gmail.com by 2100 MDT on 11/02/14
TBD – suggest a mini you want to see painted in the comments.
TBD
Caffeineforge 
The only thing drybrushed on my miniature was the tree log -laughs- I tried to give it a bit of a rough look on purpose as (in person) it looks more natural for a wooded character.
I am still getting used to where I need to place my lighting when taking the picture though and I think that is part of the issue.
The green part of the cloak was glazed with a couple of different greens (dark olive to a more evergreen type), the inside cloak was two brush blended from dark red to light red and the leather sections were dark red glazed with a reddy light brown.
Ugh I am hating the damien miniature, well more hating my colour choices, I ended up changing my original skin choice to something I have never done before… and didn’t account for how it would mess with the colour separation. Avoiding OSL like the plague, but I really should try my hand.
I love the Argen’s autum colourings too, I really want to do a wizard in autum colourings now.
I always check out the Reaper inspiration gallery (also the metal versions) before I start painting: it helps me in recognizing details that may not be very clear with the bones casts; in the case of this mini, it helped a lot.
I like that both Magnus and Jake put in a surprise color to break up the brown-green figure. I think that Jake’s yellow legs work a bit better than Magnus’ purple cloth, although the latter is the more daring choice.
David’s mini needs some work, but a lot of it is fine. I think small changes – like fixing the hair and painting the upper legs (the yellow part in jake’s mini) another color or just a darker shade of grey – would do wonders. And David was the only one with the guts to try to do those awfull recessed eyes.
Hello everyone, great work! I like the variation in themes and colors. Antonia had a quite mute color scheme this time, her email went out a bit late but I’m sure she’ll be added as soon as David finds the time 😀
Nice job on the gems btw, Grognard! You get a lot of detail out of the rather plain bones mini!
@ Mini suggestions:
– Ghost King
http://www.reapermini.com/OnlineStore/ghost%20king/latest/77161
– Finaela, Female Pirate
http://www.reapermini.com/OnlineStore/finaela/sku-down/77131
– Mariel Twinspar, Pirate Lady
http://www.reapermini.com/OnlineStore/mariel/sku-down/77135
I love your browns in the leg section, really nice separation and the Birch trunk is inspired. I think that is certainly an issue as I rush through these the base comes last and I miss key details like this.
I agree, the tree looks awesome! I’m bad at skipping over the base as well. Hopefully once I get some better basing materials I might spend more time on it!
Hey David,
thanks for the fast upload! As I said, we had some busy days and I only had half a day (and Monday morning, as it turned out) to paint Nienna. I didn’t even manage to find the flocking, but “herbes de provence”, as I told David, worked out quite good.
As I re-wrote last week’s email to quickly send off my picture (wanting to save the time typing in David’s email adress), I seemingly didn’t change the signature under it, so everyone is assuming Dirk (husband), and not me (Antonia/wife) painted this miniature 😀
I’m very sorry for the mix-up and not trying to steal Dirk’s achievements (he’s still the one doing the most minis, because he is better in pushing painting sessions into his schedule), but since we are the strange “bought a vampire package to participate in Miniature Monday”-couple I wanted to show that I’m still there 😀
And thanks for the kind words about the birch tree, that’s in fact the part of the mini I like most! The technique was quite easy: White base color, then light strokes of a black wash/ink (I used Army painter Acrylic “Dark Shade”) to get the pake grey “stripes” on the bark. Single black spots, partially overpainted with white again if too strong, tadaa!
@Miniature suggestions: I second the Pirate Ladies (are they part of the vampire package? I hope so!)
Greetings, Antonia
Attribution corrected. Sorry about that.
I think the coloration is off in my photo, perhaps due to her somewhat “hunched” pose creating extra shadows. To be fair, I finished this figure some time ago so it’s not a recent photo.
As far as the colors, I think I should have used a lighter purple for the sash to help it stand out. The purple was inspired by Jain Fairwood from the “Descent: Journeys In The Dark” boardgame, though the rich purple just blends in too much with the browns and other shadows in the area.
I’m just curious, was anyone able to paint Nienna’s eyes? I couldn’t even make them out, let alone get a brush inside the hood with any precision… 😛
I did but I didn’t like the overall look so I kept on shading it down with light glazes until I was happy.
Something I have experimented with in my Damien pic today was printing out a background image to photograph with… It actually helped immensely in getting the phone camera to pick out all the colours.
I was running out of ink and only had normal printer paper though so it wasn’t perfect, but it certainly created much better images than the white background did.
My support goes to the ghost king and female pirate, but I do not like the pirate lady.
I’d like 77161 Ghost King too, as well as 77031 Cassie, Female Gnome Wizard.
Great work this week. I found Nienna one of those Bones that didn’t have crisp lines and details (might be my copy though), so I didn’t enter my (poorly) painted one.
I like 77161 Ghost King, 77047 Goldar, Male Barbarian, and 77158 Arrius, Skeletal Warrior.