When we left off, we'd gotten this far: a kind of minimalist (hint: in art, instead of saying "low effort," always just say "minimalist") outline drawing. How do we take this and create a bright, colourful poster?
Step Five: Paint-by-Numbers
Well, now you use all of the tools, skills, and techniques you've already developed for painting your Warhammer minis and apply it to a flat page.
The lack of physical details rules out drybrushing and a few other techniques, but by and large, I've found the skills are surprisingly transferable. I start by painting the guardswoman on horseback using the exact same method and paints as I use on my miniatures.
As an experiment, I also stippled a little bit of Golden heavy body titanium white (which I use as an "eraser" when painting on white paper) to achieve an "edge highlight." Normally I edge highlight with Cool Grey, but I wasn't getting quite the contrast here as I do on plastic for some reason.
I start with the armour. I like a desaturated blue-grey, which I achieve by mixing Daler Rowney FW Payne's Grey (a misleadingly-named near-black deep blue) and Daler Rowney FW Cool Grey (basically the colour of sprues circa 1998). I work one armour plate at a time, starting by filling the full area in with a 50-50 mix, then, before it's dry, adding a bit of pure cool grey to the light bits, and a bit of pure Payne's grey to the dark bits. Then I wiggle the brush around a bit to blend it.
This is also how I paint my miniatures, but you obviously have your own technique--layers, shading, washes, stippling, etc. Just do that, in the same order. You might be surprised to hear that washes do work when drybrushing doesn't. You can't rely on the details of the model to run paint into the low areas of course, but a layer of thin, transparent shading over a base colour works just as well on paper as on plastic.
Just like when painting on plastic, the goal is to achieve as much definition as possible. I highlighted the edge of each armour panel, and then ran a fine line of pure Payne's Grey around that, to simulate shadows.
Keep working, section by section and colour-by-colour, using your usual method.
The horse was painted first with a layer of thinned Daler Rowney FW Red Earth (which is a great terracotta colour). An advantage to using artist inks is that straight out of the pot they're pretty much opaque (some less so, though the bottles have their opacity printed right on them), but can be thinned indefinitely with water to become transparent. In this case, I wanted a certain amount of transparency so that I could still see my ink lines underneath, but could pull back to full power to cover up errors. Shading was done with Burnt Umber from the same line, and a bit of white was mixed in at the high bits.
The horse's cloak or whatever that is was done with just Payne's Grey, with more in the dark areas and a lighter touch in the light areas.
For the red fabric, I cover the area fully in Daler Rowney Scarlet (which is very transparent), then stipple on some white in the high areas and some Payne's Grey in the low areas. Then I do another coat of Scarlet to tint everything back to red. The red-cloaked figure in the foreground currently only has a single coat of Scarlet on her.
The guardswoman's fatigues are a blend of Yellow Ochre and Burnt Umber.
I debated for awhile about how to do the sky, and decided in the end to paint it yellow. I did this for two reasons: the first is that I reasoned, being from a built-up Imperial planet, that neither the in-universe artist nor audience would be familiar with a blue sky. The second is that I already had Yellow Ochre on my brush and didn't feel like fishing out a new paint.
Don't worry about obliterating some of your black pen lines, you can always go over them again once the paint is dry. Do wait for the paint to be totally dry though--trying to draw on wet paint will pretty much instantly kill a pigma micron pen.
Sidebar: Every Detail is Worldbuilding
I debated for awhile about how to do the text along the bottom, and what I wanted it to actually say. Would the Imperium have a "League for Womans [sic] Service"? Well, maybe that's the wrong question--the Imperium is made up of a million-odd fairly disparate worlds with pretty distinct cultures and practices. Some planets might have explicitly gendered organizations, and others might not.
My army is from a planet I made up called Phaikia (name swiped from Homer's Odyssey), so I suppose the question is whether or my planet would. I hemmed and hawed about this for awhile. Pretty much my entire army is helmeted, faceless, and wearing really baggy clothes, so the gender of the miniature is pretty much impossible to determine and also not super important. I like to imagine that underneath their layers of ceramite and canvas, that there's a pretty even split of folks being sent into the Emperor's meat grinder. For minis that don't have helmets (commissars and certain officers, mainly), I try to keep a diverse mix as far as the mini range allows.
That's when I found the angle, the 'punchline' of the poster: what if the poster was explicitly trying to recruit women, (or "womans" as the dude in ~1914 who made the original poster would say, apparently) and so notionally all of the figures in the poster are intended to be read as female to the hive populace, but because of the dehumanizing nature of the 41st millennium, no 21st-century audience could tell how the heck they were supposed to tell. In addition, to maximize irony, the figures should seem as inhuman as possible to a modern viewer. The viewer should be struck not only by the thought "are those womans [sic]?" but, in fact, "are those humans?"
This is all the guidance I need to start tackling the figures in the background.
I wound up doing the text itself by drawing the outlines with a black pen, filling in the negative space with a black marker (a pigma black brush pen), and then cleaning up the writing with a white gel pen. I think the text still needs a few passes to be honest; writing in white on black is exactly as annoying as it sounds.
I keep plugging away at details here and there, in particular, the shading on the red-robed figure (I guess some kind of rake-specialized techpriest? A Magos Sarcula?), and re-establishing some details with a pen over the paint.
As I scan and upload these pictures, I'm starting to notice something a bit problematic. Some of my paints are slightly glossier than others. In particular, the lines of my micron pen over paint are particularly shiny. Looking at the painting in person you can only tell when it moves relative to light, but the scanner clearly registers shiny lines much more potently than the matte paint beneath. I'm not sure what to do about this yet.
At this point, I'm mainly filling in the crowd in the background (who I've re-imagined as a faceless crowd of hooded, glowing eyes, but I'm also laboriously adding more layers of white gel pen and/or white ink to the text along the bottom. After each layer of adding white, there's an inevitably layer of cleaning up the outline with a black pen, and then adding more white to make up for errors made with the pen...
At some point I'll be happy enough with the writing to call it, but I recommend against even attempting white writing on a black background. I'm sure as sure not doing it again after this (at least, not without a very different technique!)
Anyway, here's where I'm leaving it off for today! Next time I'll tackle the few remaining background characters, continue to torment myself by trying to write in white, and see what I can do about the glossiness problem.
Oh yeah--and the flag. I really haven't got a plan for that at all.
Follow along with part 3 here.
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