Making it Shine!
The next stages of the Mauler Squig are all about that Bling! From his silver chains to the gold in his teeth, and even the mauler’s drool. I go over everything that makes these elements shine and what we are looking into when painting these areas.
To start things off, with composition wise I think it’s important that making things shine should fit the model. Depending on what kinds of metal are present, we can create a whole variation of metals from dull Iron to chrome steel and everything in between. The idea here is that I like to save the very shiny elements for important elements that I want to catch attention and save the duller metal for elements that aren’t as important on the hierarchy ladder. If you make every single element with equal intensity and attention through all of our various tricks of contrast, colour, value etc. Then they all fight and we get a mess of lead actors trying to fight for the spotlight. Rarely this is good, but for the sake of argument and in this instance, let’s not go down that road. The shiny elements, these chains, teeth and spit are all elements that are forward facing and are on or surround the main subject of the Squig (ie the MOUTH!) Where if you see the ball and chain attached to the Squig leg, I’ve made it much duller with little shine so as to not compete with the forward elements. The large chains attaching the two Maulers will also be dull as they are more in the rear and actually get covered a lot by the 2 Maulers when they are in their final glued position. (And ok, I don’t have the time allocated for this model to paint all those chrome chains linking them. They would still get a lot less light due to their positioning, but I think you get my drift).
To make things shiny, you should observe how the highlights are treated, and more importantly, how small each max highlight actually is. Shiny elements have SMALL highlights, not large! This surface doesn’t absorb much light at all when hit, and the light doesn’t get much diffusion (splitting the light rays in multiple directions). The majority of the light gets reflected back at the angle it was shone. This results in small, but bright highlights. These also follow the root shape of the item which in the case of the chain is a bunch of cylinders attached together by a round 90’ angle. The spit is highlighted by picturing this as a lot of various stretched and warped spheres with highlights placed at the apex of each curve. Finally, to finish the illusion of shine (we are after all using paint to trick the eye), we need to make some rebounding reflections to show that the material is indeed affected by the environment. Or else it looks more like a matt or duller object lit by a very strong light up close and not something very reflective.
I hope these notes give you more understanding of what’s being painted and how you can start to reveal the secrets of making these effects happen. Part 3 of the Mauler Squig will of course reveal the painting methods used and a more deep dive into the effect. We are coming soon to the end with the Goblin riders and then it’s the base which will be covered in a materials list in a post here, followed by a video tutorial of it being painted. I’ll leave you here with some reference photos and happy painting!
Check out Parts 1 & 2 of the Mauler Squig in the Members area of the Pro Palette for full video tutorials covering all the Airbrush skin, texture details, and the teeth! NMM & Shiny Drool coming Feb 8th.