Something I'm trying to branch out into is painting on, ya know, paper. I find a lot of the skills are transferable (I even use the same paints, mainly, Daler Rowney Inks), except for my pesky inability to draw. Proportion, perspective, straight lines... all pretty much out of reach for me. Painting miniatures doesn't need any of those skills--the model is already there for you.
So here's a guide for making your own Warhammer propaganda posters without having any of the skills that you'd associate with being an artist.
Step one: Steal from History
The internet is awash with old propaganda posters. I personally like plundering primarily WW1 American, British, and Canadian posters, but there are thousands of these things. Just google "WW1 Propaganda Poster" and you'll find inspiration.
I chose this one because it's a bit of a reach for my current skills given how many figures there are. I honestly don't know if I'll be able to pull it off, but there's only one way to find out!
Step Two: Print and Transfer
This little trick I learned from the excellent blog, FromTheWarp. All you do is print the image at whatever size you want to paint it at, flip it over, and use the side of your pencil to fill in the entire image area.
Here I'll note that I actually screwed up this step in a way that made it much harder for me later--learn from my error! The table I was working on had a really rough texture, which bled through on my pencil shading. The result of this is that my lines are sort of spotted in the next step, which is super annoying. Next time I'll do this over an old rulebook!
Anyway, once you've shaded this area in (make it as dark as you can), cut it out and tape it to a sheet of thick paper. If you're painting with really fluid paints like me (again: Daler Rowney FW inks are amazing) then you'll want watercolour or mixed-medium paper from an art store to prevent the paint from saturating the paper and making a mess.
I printed the image as a 4x6 postcard size so that I could do this in my little travel artbook, but it's probably more practical to do this as large as you can--the bigger you work, the easier it is to get detail in. I just like having it in a book so I can flip through it and look at my old paintings; it makes me happy. Remember--Losing is fun! It's not about winning a painting contest, it's about the self-satisfaction we make along the way.
Anyway, the final step in stealing this image is to use a sharp pencil or a ball-point pen, pressing firmly, to trace over all of the important lines. This will transfer the graphite on the back of the sheet onto the blank paper below.
See how awful and uneven this looks? That's because of the rough tabletop surface I shaded the paper in on. Don't do it like that. What you get here will look much better than mine.
Step Three: GrimDark it
Using a pencil and an eraser, modify the picture to add a few 40k elements. I decided that I wanted the woman on the horse to be in kasrkin-style carapace armour, like the models in my army, so I went about drawing that in. It helps to have the actual miniature you're drawing directly in front of you while you do this. I find that because I'm drawing over humanlike proportions already on the paper, that this part is a breeze compared to drawing something from scratch on blank paper.
In addition to pencilling in armour over the woman on horseback, I found that I'd captured pretty much zero of the face of the woman in the foreground, so I'm drawing a mechanicum-esque hood over her. At this point I'm not sure what I'll do with the rake she's holding.
Step Four: Commit!
Now, you trace over the final details that you want to keep with a black pen. I use a Micron 05. This is the opportunity to change or add anything as you work. Keep the original on hand to double-check what bits are supposed to be if you, like me, screwed up the pencil transfer.
As you fill stuff in with a pen, lightly rub an eraser over completed areas to remove the vestiges of pencil marks. You don't need to be perfect; we're going to paint over this, remember.
You also don't have to do all of this as one step--I left large parts of the crowd, and the text along the bottom (which didn't transfer well, and lettering isn't my strong suit anyway) for another day. You can absolutely start painting and finishing one area or character while another area or character is totally barebones.
What you should end up with is a fairly crappy-looking inked drawing. Go light on details and leave lots of open spaces, we want to leave room to paint (i.e., don't go crazy with shading using your pen!).
Anyway, I'll leave it here for now--the next post will cover transferring your miniature-painting skills to paint-by-numbers.
Comments