Side-Lit Orc

Directional lighting is very interesting to me, so I'm painting this Orc to show light from the side. One of my frustrations with directional lighting is that it doesn't seem to work very well unless you view the miniature in the same light as you're trying to portray. In this picture, as with my top-down-lighting Skink (below), it's hard to tell which shadows are due to the room lighting, and what's painted on.

One of the difficulties about trying new techniques is that it's hard to tell how good the miniature is going to look until you're done. Once I get the first few splashes of paint on, the miniature looks terrible: primer is still showing all over the place, the highlighting is incoherent, etc. When I'm doing something familiar, I hardly notice, but when I'm doing something new (like directional lighting) it can be very demoralizing. Only in the last couple of painting hours has this guy started to look respectable.

This is one miniature that looks better in the photograph than in real life. I think a blurry photo really helps NMM out, since it relies so heavily on blending, and fuzzy focus smooths blending even better than retarder. :-) The bag and buckles will be easy, but I'm a bit concerned about the cleavers, since that will require very smooth NMM otherwise it will really spoil the lighting.

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