I’ve painted a few Hasslefree Miniatures in my time, and one recurring theme with every one is how crisp and clean and beautifully detailed Kev White’s sculpting is. This makes them perfect for pushing your blending skills, or in my case continuing my journey into the realms of ‘The Loaded Brush’ wet on wet blending.
The technique is the same as I talked about in a previous post ‘Thorag the Savage and the Loaded Brush‘ but this time on a much smaller scale. Ákos is a 30mm figure, and is one of Hasslefree’s superb resin casts so was a joy from start to finish (even though I ended up painting his skin twice – thats what happens if you leave it too long before finishing what you have started… my technique had changed/improved so I felt I needed to repaint it!).
As well as practising the loaded brush, I wanted to work with the fact that this barbarian is mid-stride and thought it could be a cool challenge to try and put him in a scene where he is running through shallow water. I knew the sort of image I had in mind and started scouting through t’interweb for a reference pic. This is what I found.
Know you know what I hoped to achieve, so I started off by building a riverbed out of tiny balls of milliput. This took quite a while, but I did like the effect – especially once I got some paint onto it.
Click to view slideshow.Then I started to experiment with the splash. I cut up some clear plastic from a blister pack and made it into thin jagged shards. The first test was on the edge of my cocktail stick pot. I curved the plastic shards with my nail and superglued them one by one to the edge of the pot. When that was dried I took a cocktail stick and ‘blobbed’ Woodland Scenics Water Effects over the plastic strips to make them thicker and less regular. This starts as a white paste but dries clear.
I then applied the same concept to the figure, slowly building up the effect.
The final step was to add the rest of the water, and this is where it all went a little haywire, so I don’t have any photos of that work in progress, but needless to say, working with liquid resin is always tricky. But anyway, after a lot of faffing about sanding and gloss varnishing I managed to get it looking halfway decent.
Here is the big man in all his glory
As per usual, you can find the unadulterated images over on my Putty & Paint account, Ákos on Putty&Paint, and the montage for anyone who votes on Coll Mini or Not, Ákos on CMoN.
I’d love to know your thoughts.
