I entered a competition for the very first time in September! Frontier Wargaming was running a competition for one of their beautiful painting cases, and this was fantastic motivation to clear something from my ever-growing grey pile. I didn't set my hopes very high from the beginning, but after browsing through the case and all its add-ons, I really started to want it! The premise of the competition was to paint a miniature using a palette based on a photo. Participants would then pick colours found only in the photo, and use those to paint the miniature. They had linked to a few stock photo websites, and I chose this photo below (Mahadevu Udaya Bhaskar). The photo reminded me of the Windows Media Player rainbow visualiser that pulsed and warped in sync with the music. I was also inspired by a project a friend was working on - he was painting up a figure divided up into three concentric circles, with each section being a different colour. I dug a wizard out of my grey pile, and submitted my entry. My initial idea was doing something like strobe lights, but I had difficulty finding any good reference pictures to get a reasonable idea of how to execute it. So I settled instead on the premise of the wizard shrouded in complete darkness, casting a prismatic spell. The process of identifying colours was a little bit trial and error, but I ended up going with Pro Acryl Bold Titanium White, Vallejo Nocturna Inferno Red, Pro Acryl Orange, Citadel Flash Gitz Yellow/P3 Cygnus Yellow, P3 Necrotite Green, P3 Iosan Green, Pro Acryl Transparent Blue, Pro Acryl Transparent Purple, P3 Thamar Black. A friend later suggested a very clever idea - to find the hexadecimal of the colours in the picture and cross-reference them on a database of paints - but unfortunately by the time I'd heard that, I was halfway through painting! I did an initial sketch of the areas where each colour would fall (and to check that my idea wasn't totally insane!). I had not planned this piece well - I was in the middle of moving house during this time, so I knew I was tight on time, and the deadline for submitting the finished piece was on 31 October. But after the first few hours of sketching out the areas of light, eyeballing the values, and refining the colours according to the stock photo, I was a lot less stressed. The biggest takeaway from this step was that I couldn't use the yellow as a section by itself. The value was too high (read: it's was too bright), so I decided to keep that as the highlight colour instead. This stage was also a great way to get used to working with the Pro Acryls, since this was my first big exposure to them. I have to say, I absolutely love their saturation. In fact, I went out the next day and bought myself a bunch from Game State. I'll be more to my collection over time.
It also dawned on me closer to the end, that the shadows closer to the spell effect would have to be much much harsher than I'd previously painted up. I ended up lining the shadows on the hand with Pro Acryl Transparent Purple (the darkest colour on the mini apart from black), and this was next to the P3 Cygnus Yellow, creating very dramatic, harsh shadows. After all of that came a little bit of waiting for the results of the competition to emerge. There was a tense round of community voting, followed by a private judging by the Frontier Wargaming panel. After a couple of weeks of trying not to get my hopes up, I received a happy message notifying me that this piece had won, and that my new painting case was on the way. I owe a huge round of thanks to my friend from Geekified for getting me through this little project. She's a fantastic friend and mentor, as well as a painter, printer, and retailer of geeky things. She's helped me to level up my painting so much, and I would not have been able to knock this wizard out so quickly without her 💛 she does painting streams and classes with Neo Tokyo Project every so often, so go hang out! If you enjoyed the article, please do consider donating your spare change on my Linktree https://linktr.ee/junebug.minis. It helps fund my art with supplies, new minis, and upskilling. Thanks for visiting, and enjoy the art!
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