When we left off, I was struggling with the white text along the bottom, and the shine of certain areas of the image (such as just under the horse's knee, and several of the black pen lines when drawn over paint). I was also pretty clueless about what to do with the flag, because...
The Night they Drove Ol' "Typical Cadian Regimental Standard" Down
Here's the problem. When I'm stuck painting, like most of us I think, I turn to the box art and source material. And here's the good news! There's actually a lot of reference images for guardsmen standards. And there's been quite a few minis released with banners, and they're all pretty consistent:
I'm a... middling painter. If I attempted a flag with a red background and two white-bordered diagonal navy-blue crossbars, it would look to both the untrained, and trained, eye like a confederate flag with a bunch of messy stuff on top. Now, the one on the right there is actually black-and-red, but like many painters, I usually accomplish black-with-shading by using very deep blues, so... the result would be pretty similar.
Now I know it's not quite the same, but in the framing of the specific painting I'm making, the middle portion of the flag (which is the most different from the Confederate flag) is obscured by the rider on horseback. This composition in the original painting was probably done to best show off the blue field and stars on the American flag, which is pretty distinct. The other big difference, of course, is that the white lines slop inwards, rather than being parallel to each other, but I'm not confident in my ability to convey that kind of accuracy on a waving banner.
I know most painters look at the box art, because when you google "Imperial guard standard bearer," pretty much every result is painted this exact way.
In the end, I did my best at making some placeholder red lines, and decided that the white banner with red lines looked "good enough." I'm honestly not thrilled with the flag, but by leaving it white, I can always pick up this painting and add different colours to it later.
(One problem with a white flag is that it's pretty much impossible to paint on an actual miniature, in case I want to get consistency between my plastic army and my painted propaganda posters. I otherwise aim for and usually achieve this goal, though literally nobody on the planet would notice but me if I didn't.).
Between the last scan and this one, I also went over the writing on the bottom with another layer of white (this time Daler Rowney White Ink with my tiniest brush, as the gel pen was making lines that were too scratchy). As with the flag, I'm not thrilled with the text, but continuing to attempt improvements is no longer fun, so I shrugged and moved on.
At this point, the painting is pretty much done, barring one final problem:
Why is it so Randomly Shiny???
For some reason, black lines drawn with a pigma micron 05 on paper are totally matte, but when drawn over dried paint, they're absurdly shiny. When sent through the scanner, they stick out like a sore thumb compared to the other lines around them (which look pretty much the same to the naked eye). The top two red boxes show the worst offenders of these lines.
Similarly, the dark-red section of cloak around the horse's knee, and the saddle in the middle box, are so shiny that they actually look light in the scanned image. They're both nearly black in person!
I wasn't expecting this at all, so wasn't really sure what to do about it.
After much hemming and hawing (and futzing around in the Gimp to no avail), I decided I had to cut back the glossiness on the original image, and re-scan it. Being a miniature painter, the only way I knew how to do that was with matte varnish, so I awkwardly propped up my artbook in my airbrush station and blasted it with AK Interactive Ultra Matte varnish.
The result is a huge success. There's still a bit of shine (maybe 20% as much as prior) in the paint under the horse's knee, but it no longer fully obscures the intended colour. The black lines are knocked right back in line with the rest of the black in the image.
At this point, I'm calling it done--the painting is good enough to print in miniature and glue to terrain (which, oh heck yes, that was obviously the goal the whole time), and I've learned enough from my blundering to do better next time.
UPDATE: It has been pointed out to me, after all this, that I misspelled "Imperial." I... don't have the heart to wade back into that white text. It's staying.
Comments