After a long layoff the brushes are out the paints are mixed and hopefully some paint will be laid down – well sort of! Since the last time I made any contribution here, loads of things have changed, I’m way way behind on several things, modelling projects, house maintenance even some friendships will have to be rekindled. Anyway, while all those things can be restarted or rekindled or whatever, health is the most important and I’m delighted to say that I am back to my bench and thankfully firing on most cylinders (maybe not the full compliment) but enough to generate some forward momentum.
So back to the subject of laying down some paint, I retrieved some flat figures I had cleaned up and given a blast of black primer to, and I started to block in the values in monochrome. I’d forgotten how hard this process is and it’s all about being able to see slight variations of light and dark and then deciding where to put them so that the subject matter appears three dimensional. The three pieces I’ve picked are Napoleonic Hussar, a SciFi (posessed) female and lastly a fun piece depicting a little fairy or goblin bouncing his way along on a pumpkin – yes great fun!
So I have blocked in some light and dark and of the three, the Napoleonic figure seems to have finished up the best of the lot. I find when I get to the stage in the process where I can’t descipher the value levels accurately, the best thing is to walk away and return later. So this was todays exercise of getting out of bed and instead of passing by the work room, I had this little exercise set up ready to go. The second stage was to take some photos, and now I’m at the third stage of writing the words and posting the pictures – it all feels very strange, but I am enjoying it. I will leave these pieces now and I’ll get back to them and tackle the next stage in the monochrome process. Thank you for taking the time to look and It’s good to be back.