Shiver Me Whatsits! It's An Ogre Pirate

Good morning/afternoon/evening everyone!

This week, I'd like to talk to you about this chap:

He is Gorlok Blackpowder and he is the leader of Blackpowder's Buccaneer's, a warband for the hugely successful Warhammer Underworlds game. I painted him for a recent competition held in my local GW store. The competition was held to launch the newly updated Citadel Contrast and Shade paint ranges and had to be something bought especially for the competition and had to make extensive use of the new paints. This would not be an issue for me as, since the launch of the Contrast range, I don't think I've painted a single miniature without using them in some way or another.* I've found them to be incredibly versatile, useful as glazes, shading washes, additions to base and layer paints for colour variations...I've even used them for their advertised purpose, on occasion!

As for painting this particular miniature, I was going to go through each stage, step-by step and describe each paint used and when, but I have decided against doing this, as I never originally planned to write an article about the painting of this miniature, didn't take step-by-step photos so I don't have anything with which to illustrate such an article. Without pictures there's not a lot of point. So what I've decided to do is instead focus on a particular technique that was used on the majority of this miniature. See, what I wanted to go for when I started painting was texture. I wanted his equipment to look old and weathered, without the smooth highlights that are my usual style. I still wanted it to be clean and bright, and based on the 'eavy Metal style, but I wanted there to be a certain amount of wear and tear and worn-in-ness to his clothing. As it was, I couldn't take it as far as I wanted to as I ran out of time to get him finished by the deadline for the competition but I was pretty happy with the way it turned out, particularly the leather of the coat, and this is what I'm going to talk about in this article.

So, for all the leather areas (the red of the coat, the black coat lining, the boots and the shoulder bag) I utilised a loose style, stippling and flicking the brush across the surface to give loose, random highlights, imitating a worn, battered effect. It's a really good idea to look at reference with things like this**, as it can show you things that you wouldn't necessarily have thought about. For instance, with old leather, where it wears away from use it naturally forms its own folds over time and, if not treated, those folds will crack and, being more exposed, will naturally get scratched and their colour will fade. when the colour fades and the surface cracks, the natural tan colour of the leather will show through and this is something that you should bear in mind when painting. The highlights of the colour will be the lighter tone of the base (eg. for black, it will be grey) but the areas of wear will be light brown. If you look at these pictures below, hopefully you will see what I mean. 

There's a clear difference between the grey highlights for the black, and the tan areas to show wear. I did the same on the boots but, obviously with the boots being brown, the difference is not as marked, although the effect is still there. As for how it was achieved well there's no great magic to it. I started each area with a very thin basecoat, using Contrast paints, sometimes mixed with Shades and then applied a deeper shade, wet-in-wet, to make it look patchy and uneven. I then used layers of opaque paints Bases and Layers, to build up the highlights. As I mentioned, these were not blended at all and were applied in a mixture of stippling (to build up the texture) and flicking across the surface (to simulate scratches and random wear.) Finally a highlight of light tan (I used Morghast Bone on all the leather areas) was applied more carefully to show the cracks and splits where the inner leather is showing through. I also added careful light drybrushing of this colour (used sparingly) to show where the top surface had been scuffed off. I then followed all this up with glazes close to the base colour, applied all over at first. These were very thin, applied carefully, the idea being to just smooth the transitions a little, but not too much. A stronger, more saturated glaze was then applied in the deepest recess (again, wet-in-wet, to allow a certain amount of bleeding into the thin all-over glaze). In the pictures below, you can see the difference between the red pre- and post-glaze (apologies for the discrepancies in the photos, they were taken while working on the miniature in less-than-ideal conditions for photography. Hopefully you'll get the idea.) 

As I said, I had then planned to go back and re-establish some of the cracks in the light tan, but I ran out of time. Maybe next time.

So, here's the end result.

In the competition he got second place, which I was chuffed with. In terms of the actual painting, I wanted to experiment with textures and work on my NMM and, in that regard, the project was a success. As I said, I'd love to have had the time to do more work on the wear and tear on the leather areas, and I'm still not 100% satisfied with the NMM, but I'm getting there. I had a lot of fun with this miniature. It's got bags of character, and one of those models that is a dream for the painter, with loads of areas of different texture to play with. At some point, I'm going to have to get round to doing the rest of his gang...

For those who are interested, here's the colours used:

BOOTS: Base: Garaghak's Sewer; Shade: Agrax Earhshade/Nuln Oil; Highlights: Doombull Brown, Tuskgor Fur, Jokaero Orange, Morghast Bone; Glaze: Agrax Earthshade/Athonian Camoshade; Recess Glaze: Garaghak's Sewer

JACKET: Base: Flesh Tearers Red; Shade: Nuln Oil; Highlights: Mephiston Red, Evil Sunz Scarlet, Morghast Bone; Glaze: Bloodletter***; Recess Glaze: Flesh Tearers Red

JACKET LINING: Base: Basilicanum Grey; Shade: Black Templar; Highlights: Eshin Grey, Mechanicus Standard Grey, Dawnstone, Morghast Bone; Glaze: Nuln Oil; Recess Glaze: Black Templar

SHOULDER BAG: Base: Snakebite Leather; Shade: Garaghak's Sewer; Highlights: Flayed One flesh, Morghast Bone; Glaze: Seraphim Sepia; Recess Glaze: Agrax Earthshade

That's all for now, see you next week, where I'll be talking about some teeny-tiny little cars... 

Thanks for reading!

Stuart

*plus, I hardly needed an excuse to buy more paints, or  new miniature specifically for the competition... 

**And don't restrict yourself to looking at, for example, old coats as reference for old coats. Think about other things that might have old leather on them. I found some great reference looking at old sofas and writing desks...

***it's a real shame that GW have discontinued the glazes. I know they're easy to replicate but having them ready-mixed in the perfect colours, density and opacity was really useful, and I'll miss them once I've used them up.