I am going to shift this blog from a mini-painting blog to something different. There will be no theme, just a random guy on the interwebs (or not so random for some of you) and his current fascination/opinion and journey through life.

Currently I have made the decision to stop playing video games. I wanted to replace that hobby with something more healthy/productive/rewarding. I am considering many things and will write my thoughts on here if I manage to find the time.

I am considering a few creative hobbies, a few active hobbies, and other hobbies I had no idea how to categorize. I guess this is my version of the midlife crisis lol.

~Just an Average Guy

Before I moved onto the highlight and shading, I wanted to add some details to the Erlking’s back. As mentioned in the previous post I wanted to add a tattoo. This will allow me to practice some free hand or as people who are not in the mini painting say: Painting.

I decided to go with the below symbol for inspiration mostly because it looked easily repeatable on a smaller scale.

I decided to use a dark blue (A mixture of Vallejo BLUE and a hint of Black Ink) for this it would help with making the skin appear darker and would pop relative to the skin tone. After a bit of back and forth work I was left with this result:

For a first attempt I was happy with the result. I’m going to make it more faded next try and make it look like this tattoo was done at some point in the past. But for the time being this is a good stopping point; next time I’ll work on making this look more natural and faded.

I hope you all had a good weekend. I only had one goal in mind this weekend: Determine if I liked the color I choose for the torso base color. I left off last time with a patchy covering which left a bad taste in my mouth. I wanted to fully cover the skin and make a decision after that before I made the decision to pivot or not.

After I finished coverage on the back, I moved on to the front of the model. What made this difficult was the head and the hair he had. I should have attached only the head or the left arm, not both. This made it difficult to paint under the arm and his left torso, as a result I got a lot of paint on other features of the model.

Which is fine because I haven’t painted them. However, I did learn from that mistake: I need to finish the torso before I can move on to the hair, spear, armor. This is fine because it gives me a marching order to follow, it is a bit restrictive so I’ll have to keep this in mind for future projects.

After the coverage was good I was very content with the color. It’s a nice pale color, I’ll have to darken it at some point somehow. To make it more interesting I want to try some free hand as well. Something Slavic in design as that is the believed origin of the Erlking. I really like the two designs below:

I’ll inspire my freehand off of these. More on that next time, for now I’m going to call it and begin work on that next time.

From this post on progress is going to be very slow going. Instead of explaining every little detail like the last couple of posts I'll just cover what I have been working on over the last few days. And anything noteworthy I feel I’ve learned from the process.

Today’s objective is to finish base coating the Erlking. I’ll leave the legs alone for now and move onto another part to keep my thoughts off the weird looking legs I got right now.

I decided to do the cape. I looked at my reference picture (which can be seen in the last post) and decided on a deep brown. Quick thin and coverage ended up with the following result:

Now in the story our man the Erlking is a Fae, so I need his skin to look eerily perfect. I’m thinking paler than normal to get the eerily part down, and I’ll give him some Celtic looking runic tattoo to sell the Fae part. I put the first layer of skin and got what can be seen below.

I am officially in the worst part of mini painting. Often times referred to as the “Ass phase” by some. This result doesn’t disappoint either, its very displeasing to look at at the moment…

I’ll keep with these colors for now, a few more coats on the back will make it not look patchy. Then I can decide if I want to pivot on the color choice there or not. Hope you all have a good weekend and stay tuned for this crazy journey.

I started off by adding a Zenithal highlight to Dresden. I wanted the source of light to come from the direction of his hand. I also wanted it to be a warm color kind of an off yellow. I used a mixture of 2:3 yellow to orange, with a hint of brown. I liked this it appeared as a warm light brown. I sprayed Dresden with the concoction to give the map for the highlights and shadow I ended up with this as a result:

This was defiantly greener than I wanted, once this dries, I’ll go over it again with a warmer color. For now, I’ll move on to base coating the Erlking.

I wasn’t ready for this step yet honestly, I wanted the Erlking to be dark greens and purple/black. But that was about as far as I made it with the color scheme. I started searching pictures of Herne the Hunter. Whom was the visual inspiration for the Erlking, below are two results that I liked:

The trousers are a dark green-blue so I’ll mixed up some paints and slapped on the initial coats to his legs. I wasn’t super excited with the result, but I was looking at wet paint I’ll stop here for now and reevaluate the next time.

A lot of doubts here, but I’ll power through them for now. The vision in my head is still clear it is just a matter of can I convince the brush to listen. We will have to wait and see, stay tuned for next time.

Hope everyone had a wonderful Halloween and a good weekend. In this crazy installment of paint slinging I’ll delve into Zenithal Highlighting.

For this project I want to try new things. I always enjoy learning and trying new things is the fastest way for myself to learn weather certain techniques work or not in the miniature hobby.

I usually do a typical Zenithal Highlight, base coat in black and spray white and/or gray from above. This is a great way to define where the highlights and shadows of a mini should go relative to your source of light.

I want to do the inverse of this for the Erlking. I’m going to spray a darker recess shade color from the bottom up. I could not determine if this technique had a name so I’ll refer to it as a Reverse Zenithal Highlight (RZH).

Before I could do that though, I had to assemble the Erlking temporarily. That way I can RZH while it is in model form instead of guessing. To accomplish this I decided to use sticky-tact. As it holds the part together against the air from the airbrush and it can be removed later when I’m finished.

I then loaded up the airbrush with a mixture of Daler and Rowney ink: One part black to five parts Violet. I then sprayed the mini from below. This technique in theory simulates the way light would act when falling on a model. Ideally everything dark purple would be the shadowy areas of the Earlking and help reinforce a dark imposing atmosphere.

Afterwards, I started priming Harry. I want him to be the complimentary of the Erlking. This ideally will help reinforce that there is conflict between the two with color theory (light vs dark, warm vs cold). I used Vallejo Grey 74.601 but, this felt too bright to me. I wanted a subtle difference not a blaring trumpet. I added a drop of black ink to the primer (Ratio was 1:4) and tried again.

I like this version much more. After the primer dries I’ll do a more traditional Zenithal Highlight on Dresden. I’m thinking an off-yellow color for the highlight, I’ll have to explore that more next time.

Whenever I prime mini’s I have a check list I work through:

• Inspect for rough area’s that need sanding or scraping
• Sand/Scrap if needed
• Wash with dish soap and water to remove any fine particulates
• Wipe excess water away and wait for mini to dry

This is just my mental check list I do. That gives me the confidence that I’ve done everything in my power to give the primer a chance to stick to the model.

I usually use black or white primer in a project. This time I want to challenge myself and do something different. I want to use Russian Green from Vallejo’s primer line (70.609), for the Erlking. This is a darker color so it will help sell the dark atmosphere feel that was described in the book. It will also help me when I paint as I always imagined the Erlking was wearing mostly hunting leathers. A nice green undercoat will help sell the leather being old and ancient.

I’m used to priming everything as a singular model. Whenever I was trying to spray the pieces with the airbrush the parts would fly across my table and I had to chase them down. I don’t know why I didn’t see that coming. To fix that I used some double-sided adhesive and stuck the main body on a base. It was held stationary by a painting handle.

For the shield I used the same approach and double-sided tapped it to a different base. With the arm and cape, I had to be a bit more creative as a lot of the surface needed to be primed. I ended up using sticky-tac and a stick.

With my parts not blowing across my entire hobby desk. I was able to get a nice even coat of the Russian Green.

The goal for next time is to add a Zenithal highlight. I’ll discuss more about specific plans and strategies then. For now, I am content with my process. I was hoping to get through all the airbrush work but that’s okay. I hope you all have a good weekend, and a safe Halloween!

I inspected my work after it had dried and noticed a few things: One, I left a fingerprint on his inner thigh. Two, the back gap was not fully filled; looks like I was too frugal with the amount I added. I’ll have to sand the fingerprint out and add some more material. I think the proper strategy is to add extra material and sand it down to size.

Finally, there is a forearm gap on his shield hand. I’ll have to add some material to that as well.

I tried something new when I was forming the Green-Stuff. I submerged the premixed putty into water before I mixed it. This made mixing the two easier, I have no idea why I’ll just have to keep this in mind for my next Green-Stuff project. As far as adding the Green-Stuff it was uneventful no new insights like above. I was pleasantly wrong though and the back addition didn’t need much sanding as I had thought.

Which is great because sanding small objects is very difficult to do in a controlled fashion.

Once it was dried, I checked it again to verify this is all how I wanted it to be.

Next time I’m going to start priming! I usually use a black primer; I’m thinking of trying to do a dark green primer this time. I think the Russian Green from Vallejo’s primer line (70.609) would be perfect. I will explore that in more detail next time.

Hope you all had a good weekend, I had the following tasks to complete during the weekend: First, I needed to attach the other leg. Second, I need to fill the tree gaps. Third, I wanted to make the skull he stands on not a skull. Seeing how the right leg is mounted on the skull I’ll start with the third task. After assembling and slapping a little bit of sprue goo onto the eye and nose socket I was working with the following:

It still looks a little too much like a skull. I’ll never understand Games Workshop’s obsession with skulls I swear GW puts skulls on EVERY model they have! This won’t fit with the scene, Harry summons the Erlking in someone’s backyard. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have an abnormally large skull in my backyard. After taking a branch I snipped from a different model I used some sprue goo to adhere to the front of the skull to cover up the eye and nose depressions.

This looked more convincing and less skull like. I also attaching the leg to the mini as this would give me a better way to hold the model while I filled in the leg gaps.

I then decided to mock assemble the mini to get an idea for what I was working with. One thing I noticed was a rather large gap on the back by the waist. I wanted that covered so I will need to fill that when I fill the legs as well.

With two of the objectives completed I moved onto leg filling. I decided to use Green-stuff, which is a room temperature curing two-part epoxy putty that comes in a tape. Mix it together and mold it in place against the mini, using a little water or Vaseline to help mold it. Either fluid would increase the cure time giving you more time to mold it how you want.

I will have to inspect my work once it cures to see if there is a need for more molding work. For now, this is a great place to stop until next time. I’m happy with my current progress the molding was a little worry sum though. I just pushed through it and it all worked out though!

Next, I’m going to give the model a once over for any remaining treefolk gaps and see if the mock build is good with no gaps. If it passes the final inspection, I’ll move on to the priming step.

To take something and reshape it, that is the goal for today. Post mold line removal and gluing the head together this is what I was working with:

This doesn’t really say stag horns to me. I started rummaging around my bit collection looking for a piece that I could replace the stag horns. I stumbled upon a lot of different candidates, however, the one I liked the most was from Sylvaneth Branchwych (See Below). This seemed like a perfect fit to me! All I had to do was remove the giant horns currently in place.

Now I liked the helmet look, my hopes are to remove the horns without ruining the two side wings of the helmet. As I could use those to help secure the horns in place. After removing the tall horns, I ended up with this:

I cut the new horns out of the sprue and lined them up, preparing them to attach to his head. I eventually realized that the gem in the middle of the current helmet would have to be removed. I sanded it smooth with the rest of the helmet and used some Sprue Goo cement it in place. Sprue Goo is a mixture of Tamiya Extra Thin Cement and cut up leftover sprue mixed in. Tamiya melts the sprue inside of it and hardens into essentially the plastic sprue when it dries.

For a first attempt I’m okay with this. I’ll have to do a bit of work to it, sanding down the protrusion and adding material to make it feel like a part of the helmet. That will have to wait until it dries. For now, I can attach the head to the mini, giving me a better hold when that moment comes.

After the head, I cut out the arms from the sprue and glued the left hand in place. Nothing exciting happened but I ended the hobby session with the Erlking in this state:

Seems like I am almost ready for the priming stage. Just a few more obstacles in the way. A couple of holes in the legs need to be filled to make the Erlking look less treefolk and more people-ey? I also need to figure out how to hold him together while I spray primer.