I kept to my bargain! I said Lenny would be next and here he is. This is the same model that I posted previously in my Painting Timeline post. He was the first model I ever painted when I was getting into minis as an adult, and I've had him stripped and waiting for a new coat of paint for quite a while. I figured I'm a bit bored of painting Stormcast gold armour so I'll take a quick break and try a new style.
The idea here was initially that I wanted to do something sort of cel-shaded, but I ended up moving more towards just a sort of illustration/comic type style instead. Total experiment, and starting out I had no idea whatsoever how well it would turn out.
Not many pictures here because taking lots of in-process pics kinda killed my enthusiasm for the Evocators when I was doing them, so just two sort of checkpoints before the finished product.
This is how I started off, simple highly saturated base coats for all the colours. There was just one trouble. I hated the green. Like, really hated it. It was mixed because I don't really have a neutral mid-tone green, just the jade colour I use on the Stormcasts. I think one issue was that I usually paint over a white or grey undercoat because building up from a light colour a) makes more sense, and b) gives a brighter overall finish which I prefer. I went for a black undercoat this time though because I wanted to leave a black line between the edges of colours for some definition (I think this was ultimately a mistake). What this meant was I am used to mixing colours to go onto white, so the colour I mixed that looked alright on my palette ended up really dark on the model itself. I genuinely lost sleep over how much I hated this green.
I decided to let the dark green be a shade, so I started to drybrush over it with this much lighter green. However, that looked crap also and I said screw it and recoated the whole thing with this much nicer green that I think suits Lenny a lot better.
This photo of the back shows you a different angle, but you may also be able to see that I didn't quite get a smooth coat on the back of the shirt. This is the other problem I have with undercoating black, I find it really annoying and difficult to get an even coat over a black base. Again, I tend to paint with lighter colours so it's almost certainly a style thing. About this point I was actually becoming quite frustrated because I was finding it really tricky to thin my paints just enough.
I then went into all the creases in the skin with a darker green to give it a cartoonish outlined style, and repeated with darker versions of all the different colours I'd used. I deliberately went for quite saturated shade colours here, except I think one thing I could definitely have done better is the shading on the trousers. I liked it close up, but I think in pictures and from a reasonable distance you can't see it as well. I think I probably should have just used pure black there since it's such a dark blue. Instead I mixed a very dark blue. I also went around and outlined anywhere that two colours met with pure black to add a bit more depth and contrast since I'm not really shading this model in a traditional sense.
The wood texture was a bit of a challenge as it's sculpted on and I didn't want to do a wash/drybrush method to bring it out since that would clash stylistically. Instead I just dragged a few darker lines down the trunk and it worked okay.
The face was also a bit rushed. It's a difficult to reach part of the model, and I wasn't entirely sure where to put shade. Thankfully as you can see in the below pictures it's not that big of a deal because from a tabletop sort of view, you can't really see his face because of his hat.
Overall I think for the first try at this sort of style it went quite well. Parts I'm particularly happy with are the black outlines, the armband, and the rings on the tree. I have plenty more Malifaux Gremlins, and I might end up stripping a few more to try and paint in a similar sort of style. I think it would be fun to have an army of some sort painted up like this because it's fairly simple but quite distinctive and looks good. Not bad for a first attempt.
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