Step by step: color test for LOTR Galadhrim Knights of the Blood Rose

Well, today was just a weird day.  I spent several hours filing and shaving down mould lines, washing off Mould release from countless resin pieces, gluing sand and gravel on bases, painting on liquid green stuff, priming minis and other mind numbing tasks.  The whole day left me in a strange mood.

The cure for that (at least for me) is to restore some measure of sanity to the day the only way I know how.  Paint color test minis! :-)

This now determines how I will approach the painting of my LOTR (Good) army for Bilbo's Bash in November.  These guys are the Knights of the Blood Rose.  These are elves who have no intention of leaving Middle Earth to the child races, nor to their bitter enemies... the Easterling/Khandish alliance.

I decided to make this a step by step, since lots of people have been asking about my golds.  This is the latest version of how I paint them, using the fluorescent paints, etc.

So, here was the first step. Obviously using the shaded basecoat technique:


How do you like my fancy palette?  You can still see the primer and the liquid green stuff!
Covering every surface was important, and you can see that I started out lighter.  I also included the brush that I always use for these earlier stages, so you can get a better idea of its size.



At this stage, I began to introduce the cooler and deeper reds.  These will set off all the lighter colors.  I am also trying to establish some reflected colors in the golds, such as the burnt orange.



This image shows the figure right before starting the glazes.



OK, first layers of glazing and tinting complete.  Once I have gotten all the values as dark as I need them, I begin to clean up lines (harder to do on these less detailed LOTR minis, that's for sure), and think about reflected lights.



These are the images of the completed piece.  You can see that the face was finished off, and some very bright highlights added.  The bright fluorescent yellow was included in many of the mixes, both in the lighter and darker shades.  It makes the metals more luminous.





So, the first one is down!!  Lots more to come...