With the elf prototype finished, I am now definitely sure about the colours I'll be using. Therefore, it's time to prime the rest of the elves. Here's a photo of some of them, where you can see the new method I'm using for handling the miniatures while painting: I use a little plastic rod attached with glue to one foot of the miniature. This comes in very handy, I can use some plasticin as a temporal base, like the one you see in the photo:
And now, the first part of the batch painting process I have carefully designed (to save time). I'll start by painting the gems. I'll use airbrush to make the painting faster and smoother. At first I thought I could paint the gems entirely with airbrush and just use the normal brush for the white reflection dots, however, as the gems are so little, I could only use the airbrush for base painting and then I had to work with the normal brush.
Remember that for each step, I will paint 9 elves at the same time. I put only a photo of one of them, but the rest have been treated the same way.
First, orange base airbrushed (Fiery Orange, Citadel) on the gems.
You can't really appreciate it in the photo, but in the second step I airbrushed some red (Napoleonic Red, Andrea Color) on the gems.
Then, airbrushed black (I think I used number 6 of Andrea Color's set of blacks, but any regular black does the trick):
As you can see, the last photo does not show a very important advancement in the painting, thats because of I what I said earlier about the gems being too small. So, a little bit of regular brush painting to finish up the gems:
Alright then, gems finished. Now I mask the gems to carry on painting another part.
I paint the clothes un Turquoise, right out of the pot, with the normal brush (I could airbrush, but in this particular case, it proved to be harder than just using a normal brush.
Now I mix some Space Wolves grey with the Turquoise, and airbrush the light parts of the clothes. It's quite difficult to see it in the photo, but look carefully.
Add some red, blue and Dark Green from Vallejo to the base Turquoise to make the shadow colour. Airbrush again.
With the basic light and shadows done, the work left on the clothes will be done with a normal brush. Therefore, I will mask the job already done and continue to another area to make good use of the airbrush.
Let's prime the shield back to white. Notice the gem in the middle was masked earlier, so when the airbrush job is finished, we'll retire the mask and find a perfectly finished gem!
WIP: High Elves Sea Guard part 4
