Lion el jonson
Lion El Jonson, First son of The Emperor, and Primach of the Dark Angels Space Marines. So much of this model is WOW. From the armour sculpt, positioning his stride, that shield, and not to forget possibly the best human head sculpted on a plastic miniature to date. Games Workshop really pulled out the stops on this guy and I have the pleasure of painting him!
As you may have seen in the past few weeks with updates coming in waves of his green armour, gold details of the shoulder paldrons, and the latest in the shield. I’ve been a bit behind updating the writings of him on my notes. First off I’m sorry about that, as I’ve simply been exhausted during the month of June to sit down and empty my thoughts for you readers. But without further delay here they are and starting out with the overall concept.
With the Lion, I’ve wanted to take a step and think about the driving idea towards his painting, and what I want to emphasize on. Big character models that I want to punch out and stand among others as something unique to say needs a strong idea we can achore to. Essentially something such as a keyword, quote, emotion or action to give all of our creative decisions a place to point towards. An example would be my work on Exodus. The key ideas I had were, “Exodus is in position.” taken from the voiceline in the Horus Heresy Card game (yes its corny i know). As well as the snipers motif of “One shot, one kill.” With my creative choices of lighting position and emphasis focusing on the bullet. Making these choices I would measure up to my Key Ideas and made sure they are pointing and supporting this. I find with this approach you can be much more intentional and give your painting a stronger concept, rather than colouring parts just for the sake of colouring them. We can do so much with colour, values, direction, emphasis and contrast to convey a wide variety of emotions. So best practice refining those and come up with something more specific that lends itself towards this.
The idea of the Lion is that I want him to be stepping towards the light. Being in the dark literally under a rock for 10k years, it’s his time to step back into the light of the imperium when hope is fading. Also the idea of the Lion as a redemption story of sorts. His failures during the Horus Heresy tell a tale of lost honour and humiliation of not being by his fathers side during the final hour of the Siege of Terra, as well as loosing his home world from his most trusted son. Secrets and trust run deep within the lore of the Dark Angels, and for him to be severely wounded by the very docturnes his help create is just more salt in the wound. To further push this idea its also worth mentioning a new use of temperature I want to further illustrate. With a contrasting warm and cool sides to the model is both used to refine the idea of stepping into the light of the imperium, but also one of truth. Leaving the cold darkness of his past to write his wrongs. Warm light has been used in many ways to convey enlightenment, as well as saviour and blessing to the one that its focused on.
Moving from conceptual ideas into the more technical side of painting. This piece will be requiring a lot of Glazing both of unification, tinting, and in spot areas to help adjust areas and bring more colour as needed. A piece thats in the realm of character painting for sure, and I wouldn’t suggest painting a whole army like this! But that shouldn’t exclude you from taking techniques demonstrated in these next series of videos and learning where you can apply them. For instance, I glaze in more green inks to enrich the armour, unifying the area to bring more saturation into the space. Finding you lost that strong colour through highlighting and shading with washes? Try getting an ink with a bit of dilution and unify to pump the saturation up. Or wanting to make an area such as the primary light warmer. glaze over a nice warm ochre colour with a brush or even an airbrush glaze to give the entire model a nudge in the warm direction. I use more of these subtle changes to help steer the works into its final resting place because there is more to balance. You’re also observing this painting as I’m in its creation process. Every section I paint is myself learning how these are working together. I paint and observe whats working, and make choices in where it needs to go next. All keeping the overarching Key Idea in mind, so that my choices are steering in that general direction. Paintings like these are alive without a recipe known beforehand. It’s only now after the fact that it’s done, that you get to see the sequence and what it takes to repeat it over the entire model in parts that are applicable.
Well thats it for now on my words of the Lion. I leave you here with a library of shots you can look and study to help you understand for your own painting of the Lion, or just an understanding of the process as a whole. Till next time, happy painting!
