Fistfull of review – A Retrospective of the Hellboy Workshop through the Perspective of the Attendee
UMS Agram organized a Hellboy bust painting workshop in the second half of September. Like most of the workshops organized by Agram, it lasted two days and was held over the weekend, so I could not find an excuse for not participating, so I would like to share my experience as a participant in the Agram workshops.
The first thing I noticed, and I have to admit that it proved to be a significant improvement from previous workshops, is the organization and accommodation of participants. The venue that the association can use, each of the ten attendees has the opportunity to work at their own table with their own light source. Before we started working, I have to admit that it was a significant improvement for me, primarily as a comfort that sometimes life means. :)
The workshop was divided into two days, both in terms of time and topic. The first day we dealt superficially with most of the bust, clothing, while on the second day we shifted the focus to Hellboy’s skin, lighting, and smaller items on the bust.
At the beginning of the workshop, in addition to individual places, we were greeted by assembled and primed busts. Hellboy busts were painted by the Zenithal light method, when white spray from one direction on a miniature applied in black. The effect we get with this is to reward the volume, highlighting the highlighted elements with a lighter color, while the more hidden and withdrawn parts of the miniature remain darker. This makes it easier for us to determine the lights and shadows in the colors.
Although Zenithal itself is not something I have not encountered, working on clothing I have become acquainted with the application of Zenithal which can significantly help me in speeding up painting. Using thin layers of paint, glazes, we repainted the skin in several layers. Getting a uniform coverage is much slower than a thicker paint, more coats are needed, but the result shows the volume of the surfaces far better than applying a flat coat of paint.
What thrilled me about applying this technique is that, despite the required number of coats, it speeds up the painting process significantly, especially if I will be painting a larger number of thumbnails at the same time. While a few coats of glaze paint further darkened by some sort of washes won’t be enough to impress anyone, I believe it’s good enough for tabletop gaming purposes. In addition, with such a foundation, we can spend more time drawing and extracting details from the surface we are painting, such as damage and textures, freehand lines and patterns, or something else.
The next day we set off hard. We painted all the visible Hellboy skin, did the lightening and darkening of the details, and we dyed most of the bust. Of course, this does not mean that we have finished earlier, because our work so far has only been a preparation for the continuation.
The first extra step we did was coloring the cigar, and creating a micro-OSL effect. Although I have an effect around a large area cigar, I think it's a great exercise to master OSL with a light source on the miniature itself - a small light source means we have a chance to make only small mistakes, and therefore only small corrections are needed to correct them. We achieved this effect by applying additional highlights to simulate the glow lighting, and the procedure itself was relatively simple, as the light tones matched the color of Hellboy’s skin.
After drawing a warm light on your face, on the opposite side, we mastered how to overcome the cold, bluish glow. The experience was significantly different because we were working on a larger area than in the first part of OSL, and we didn’t have a light source on the miniature itself. From a technical point of view, it was also important to overcome the fact that the blue light significantly changed the character of the color it strikes, which is most visible on the nape of the neck. We achieved this by successively applying thin layers of plaque paint, glazes, and drawing blue highlights on the brightest parts.
This workshop will remain in my memory among my favorites, because during the lessons I noticed where I can use certain lessons without being out of the box equivalent to the topics from the workshop. They helped me to significantly simplify skin coloring, and I am very glad that I learned a new "messy" technique. I am sure I will apply the lessons learned in coloring my own miniatures.
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