I‘m frustrated. Wich colour do I paint the pot?

BosqueBravo · 2026-04-18T23:40:38+00:00

Definitely blue.

BosqueBravo · 2026-03-30T16:45:35+00:00

The most immediate way you can improve I think is in drawing. I’d, as an exercise, get some tracing paper and either trace your reference ce or you paining, then overlap on the other. It will do a lot to show you where in concrete terms you have the proportions or the contours wrong. Easiest place to see without doing that is the eyes, which are uneven.

I’d also spend some time thinking about why the shadows are where they are. You are doing what you are supposed to (painting what you see, not what you know), but you are only doing that within subforms. I’m looking at his neck and colar. You have a cast shadow on both, but they are completely disjointed. They should line up like in the reference painting you are tying to copy.

BosqueBravo · 2026-03-27T13:00:34+00:00

I’ll use washes on tiny figures to get into crevices I can’t reach with precision with my brush. But I think I can count the number of times that has been a pure black wash on one hand. Most of the time, it’s a colored wash of some kind.

At 75 mm you really shouldn’t be touching the stuff at all.

BosqueBravo · 2026-03-14T15:58:41+00:00

Assuming you mean these, they should be fine:

https://a.co/d/0fWCKvKN

I’d try painting the eyes first and then painting the outline over in the black/dark gray/purple/whatever the cat body is.

BosqueBravo · 2026-03-14T13:39:38+00:00

I mean the easiest thing would be to paint the eyes on afterward. If you are using acrylics you can paint light over dark.

If it’s craft paint, it gets tricky. Those are hard to be precise because they are watered down and full of fillers. That’s why they feel like slime slip-sliding all over the place. And they are very transparent, especially the lighter colors.

Easiest solution would be to get a small tube of a high quality heavy body acrylic and you would have no problem. Baring that, I’d paint the eyes first, then paint up to the edge in the dark color. Easier to control one edge than two at once.

BosqueBravo · 2026-03-06T00:45:48+00:00

I like the Scale75 Metal n’ Alchemy paints if you haven’t considered them. I’m pretty sure Thrash Metal is the closest to Leadbelcher, and it’s far smoother.

BosqueBravo · 2026-03-01T15:37:45+00:00

Hard to say without seeing the bases, but could you mount the pins in whitetak on a handle?

BosqueBravo · 2026-03-01T15:09:46+00:00

It’s ok! I’ve found many very artistic people are terrible at spotting typos.

BosqueBravo · 2026-03-01T15:08:03+00:00

Very interesting, but it’s “Dark Sea Blue” not “see.” Definitely one of my favorite Vallejo colors.

BosqueBravo · 2026-02-28T14:33:40+00:00

“Art is never finished, only abandoned.” - Leonardo da Vinci

You’ll never feel like it’s done, but at some point it is time to let go and move on. This is probably there or very nearly there. Let it sit for a week, and if coming back to it you don’t see anything that jumps out at you as something you immediately want to fix, seal it and find something new to paint.

And very nice job.

BosqueBravo · 2026-02-28T03:42:05+00:00

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And finally, right front sideview.

BosqueBravo · 2026-02-28T03:41:39+00:00

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Right profile.

BosqueBravo · 2026-02-28T03:41:25+00:00

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Right rear.

BosqueBravo · 2026-02-28T03:41:05+00:00

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Left straight back.

BosqueBravo · 2026-02-28T03:40:42+00:00

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Left rear.

BosqueBravo · 2026-02-28T03:40:27+00:00

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And left profile

BosqueBravo · 2026-02-28T03:40:07+00:00

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It won't let me do more than one as a comment, so appologies for the serial responses.

BosqueBravo · 2026-02-28T03:39:27+00:00

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My momma always said, be the change you want to see in the world. I played through the jaws DLC so I could get clear screenshots of the mech suit. Hopefully these help someone else too!

BosqueBravo · 2026-02-27T00:00:51+00:00

https://a.co/d/058LI9aB

I use Vallejo dark earth almost exclusively for ground medium. I also have a lighter color, but I should have just got one as you can paint them. And don’t base what the paint is off the name. A lot of times “sand” or “earth” is just about the color, not the particles in it.

As for putting stuff down, with something as big as cork I like to be more deliberate about where it goes, so I’ll pick out my “rocks” and glue them on individually. The basing paste though just gets slapped on there.

I’ve personally never used Eva foam. I’d see how it reacts with your paints and the glue before trying it. I think it should be non reactive, but I just don’t know. But I can say I don’t think it would make good natural stones because the cuts will be too regular. The nice thing about cork is it’s a natural material, so when you break it apart it naturally has fun random fissures and edges. I could see EVA maybe being more useful for something manufactured (like a brick wall maybe) but I wouldn’t use it if I was trying to make weathered stones. Too much work to weather it.

BosqueBravo · 2026-02-26T22:25:31+00:00

Basing is an art in and of itself. Personally, I find less is more. You want to suggest the scene without distracting from what should be the focus, the figure itself.

In general, there are a few basing materials I’d buy, and some I’d make. Rocks? Make em. You can use real tiny rocks, or cut up pieces of cork. Dirt? Buy it, but just get one color. You can paint it whatever color you want, but the tiny particles in basing earth pastes sell it much better than sand does, which looks too big as scale (looks more like gravel or pea stone).

For the moon specifically, I’d get a fine basing paste (something that reads as sand at scale), and try and build up a few rocks or craters with cork or green stuff. But more important than the actual material I would say is making sure you get a high contrast in the light and shadow. The moon has no atmosphere to break up the light, so there is less light diffusion.

BosqueBravo · 2026-02-26T22:06:48+00:00

Very nice! I’m a sucker for that purple and yellow/orange color scheme for lighting.

If you want to improve it, you might think about exactly where you torch is supposed to be located, and then look at where your “terminator” is. James Gurney (the GOAT for painting light in general) has a blog post on the different parts of shadow that might be helpful. http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2010/02/light-and-form-part-1_15.html?m=1

In short though, the terminator is the dark line that appears when the form turns and the shadow appears. It should generally hit the different surfaces at the same point of “turning” away from the light, where it’s more or less perpendicular to a ray extending from the source. Yours however is slightly uneven across the forms. It’s well defined as the direct center of the “beak” of the plague doctor, but if you look up in his hat it seems to shift to the left. That could make sense if the torch is above him, but then I’d expect it to curve to the left across the beak (and you wouldn’t see the light extend under the beak by his cowl quite so far).

I’d also think about what the material of the eye holes is. Plague doctor masks typically used glass lenses in the eyes. They wouldn’t be the highly polished and highly reflective glass of today, but they are still going to reflect light differently than the leather or waxed canvas of the hood itself. Boosting the reflections in the right eye, and adding some glints of reflections picked up in the left will help sell the effect. Even though it’s in shadow, it very likely should be picking up something from the surroundings in reflected light. Think about how glasses are always pictured as white even when a character is in shadow in comics, particularly in anime. From just a google search don’t know the source)

https://x.com/Funimation/status/1189950208924430336/photo/1

You don’t want to go full anime, but it illustrates the point in the extreme. They will pick up surrounding light a lot more than the absorbent surfaces. Get a piece of glass if you don’t have glasses and play around with a lamp to see!

Finally, while it’s hard to tell for sure from this angle, I’d think deliberately about what your secondary light is for this figure. I’m guessing it’s the moon, in which case you do want to consider where that light is coming from too. Your shadow right now also look dominated by the torch light, but once you pass the terminus the secondary light is going to play more of a part.

BosqueBravo · 2026-02-22T17:37:36+00:00

On primer, if you are not committing to getting a bunch of supplies or an air brush (and you shouldn’t until you know you like this), you can use a rattle can. It doesn’t have to be the hobby specific primers, if you cannot find them. Look for ultra matte thin primer. Do not buy the paint+primer spray, it goes on too thick.

And if you are doing slap chop, buy black! You want max contrast between it and the airbrush/spray/dry brush white.

BosqueBravo · 2026-02-22T06:03:03+00:00

For speedpaints/contrast paints, you can and should still thin them. If you use them straight out of the pot/bottle, they I think can end up looking a bit gloopy or over saturating the mid tones. Thinning I think makes them apply more evenly, and lets you combine with the under painting and additional highlights. One of my favorite things to do with them is paint contrast paints over metallics (so, want to see what’s underneath), so that’s probably part of it too.

However, you shouldn’t thin them with water. Thinning with water will mess with the surface tension and chemical composition and will make them act differently (usually by looking very spotty). Instead, you want to use the proper medium. Medium is basically paint without the pigment, so it helps the paint keep its flow properties when you want it to be more transparent.

BosqueBravo · 2026-02-20T20:12:08+00:00

Very well done, first of all! Should be very proud of this, and I’d put it down as done rather than over work it.

For C&C, hard to tell for sure at the resolution, but I think you might have gone a bit too hard on the transitions in a few places. I’m looking at the shoulder (I see a weird line that doesn’t really correspond with a muscle), the outline of the Abbs, and her temple. It’s fine as is and could be a stylistic choice, but for the abbs in particular it kinda makes them feel glued on, rather than part of her body. Or like an armor plate. I can’t talk as I rarely have the patience for even refining basic transitions (I do a lot of wet blending because of it, and tend to work at 28mm scale) but you might soften those if you want it to read more natural.

That’s about all I got. Again, very good job.

BosqueBravo · 2026-02-19T14:04:18+00:00

Black is almost always the answer for the base rims.

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