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Warhammer WIP Wednesday

WIP Wednesday – More Griffon

This isn’t really a work in progress.  However, it’s something I’ve been meaning to do.  Never mind the fact that I have nothing that I’m working on currently to show off.  🙂

Now, quite a few months ago now I had gotten a new photo backdrop and done a review about the difference it made in my image quality.  Shortly after I had gone through and taken pictures of about half of the models in my High Elf army.  I never edited and posted them though!!  This first batch is now available in the Pictures section of the website under “Jon’s Stuff”.  I’m going to create some posts pointing out a few of them so I can speak more to a few particular models.

A while back I had painted a pair of High Elf Griffons for Templecon/Onslaught GT.  One was a Prince, the other was my Noble BSB.  I wanted to do these first because a) nobody uses Griffons and b) a fellow gamer had asked me to post some close up shots of them.  Sorry it took so long to get these out!!

These both come from the Island of Blood set.  For the Prince I cut the banner off of the lance, the BSB got to keep his strange lance-banner.  Other than that they are pretty much straight from the box.  I’m really not that into doing modeling/conversions, I just like to paint.

The paint scheme is relatively simple.  The body and the basecoat on the wings were done with an airbrush using various shades of browns.  The wings and feathers then got a wash, and a progression of about 4 drybrushes all the up to white.  I used a detail brush to pick out the very tips and some feather strokes in white as well.  The rider was painted by hand.

I did use pictures of birds for color reference.  I’m no bird expert so I can’t tell you exactly what I used as a reference but google images was great for finding some sample images.  For example, I used that to figure out how the eyes should look, and what a realistic wing color pattern would be.  One thing I always struggle with is contrast, something to make the model really pop.  That’s why I went all the way up to white on the highlights.  It seems a bit crazy, but that final highlight is relatively small and it really helps separate out the shades from the highlights.  If the shade color was darker that wouldn’t be necessary but the medium brown really needed to get serious highlighting to avoid looking muddy.

Well that’s my explanation.  On to some pictures!