Following my obsession for miniatures
I had the chance to study,
improve my painting skills
and better understand this little form of art
under the guidance of incredibly talented
artists and awesome teachers
Hello Guys! Welcome to The Art of Caesura!
Today I have something a bit special to tell you about: the first miniature painting course I have attended!
Before Christmas, I saw that Marco Frisoni (one of the true talents in mini painting (almost 80 000 followers on Youtube) was doing a 2-day workshop in Dublin. It sold out almost immediately, so when I saw that he was doing another one in January, I immediately signed up.
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| The man himself! |
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| Underworld Gaming in Dublin - a brilliant venue |
I have never attended a miniature painting class before and mostly taught myself through Youtube tutorials. It was with a bit of excitement and a bit of trepidation that I thought about this class. Would everyone be better than me? Would it be a waste of time? Because it was a bit of a journey (driving almost 700km round trip) these concerns were magnified. Luckily they were quickly quashed. I will also say that two people independently flew over to Dublin from Germany just for the course so that put my journey in perspective!
I am genuinely not exaggerating when I say that it was a life-changing experience, and it has revolutionized the way that I think about miniature painting!
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| Some of Marco's award-winning pieces! |
Before I tell you about the course, I just want to say that Marco is a great guy and has clearly put a ton of work into this curriculum so I don't just want to repeat everything he said as that wouldn't be fair to him. Instead, today I'll give you a bit of an overview of my experience of my first painting course and go though the weekend's schedule (as much to aide my own memory banks!). In future posts I'll devote time to specific concepts that he discussed.
Two weeks prior to the course, Marco set up a discord server so that we could start to get to know each other before the course. This was a great way to break the ice and let us gush over each other's models. Judging from the photos that people posted, I would say that about two thirds of the 12 participants were more advanced painters than myself (some of whom, themselves have tens of thousands of social media followers!) but hey, we were all in it to learn!
Day one rolled around I got a chance to have a chat with Marco for 10 or 15 minutes while people were still arriving and milling about. He is just as lovely and enthusiastic as he comes across in his videos and I was amazed to learn that he and I have a lot more in common in our personal and professional lives then I ever would have guessed!
Day 1:
10-12:00 - Lecture: Light, contrast, inspiration and story-telling.
I was happy to start the day with a lecture. Having completed loads of schooling (post-graduate degrees etc) and as a lecturer myself, it was a very comfortable way to learn. He demonstrated the concepts that he was conveying at a paint station in front of us with an overhead camera displaying the image on a large screen beside.
This first lecture delved into the nuances and complexities around different types of contrast and how we can best take advantage of them in miniature painting. But it is not just contrast for contrast's sake; Marco is a great proponent of the idea of using miniature painting to tell a story. He suggested using various sources of inspiration (Spectrum Contemporary Fantastic Art books, Magic the Gathering artbooks - because pictures are divided into colours / themes), and to imagine cropping a character out of a larger image - now you have to convey the story and the surroundings using just that figure. When miniature painting we rarely have the luxury to actually paint the environment in which the character is situated, so we have to convey this through our painting of the miniature itself.
12:00-12:30 - Devise Our Stories
Following on from Marco's discussion about using miniature painting to tell a story, we were tasked with coming up with the story that we wanted to tell while painting GW's Lord of Blights (box art below) over the weekend.
This was a really interesting process; because we were all painting the same model it was amazing to see how pretty much everyone had a different idea of a story that they wanted to tell.
Marco was very specific, wanting to know the season, time of day etc that the scene would take place because these details would all influence our painting.
For myself, I opted for a take on a classically Nurgle scene: this guy is trudging through a toxic swamp by moonlight and has just stopped to plot. I wanted to try my hand at OSL - well, strong environmental lighting - from below, so quite the opposite way to how we normally paint and highlight minis, and something I'd never tried before.
12:30-14:00 - Lunch
14:00-15:00 - Demonstration of Value Sketching by Marco
Marco gave us a hands-on demonstration of an approach that, while quite foreign to most of us, he uses on most of his paint jobs. He first paints a "value sketch" on the model - using only white paint over the black primer, achieving grey by thinning the white in places. He usually does this with an airbrush, but encouraged us to do it by hand for better control as we approached this new skill.
I will discuss the merits of and rationale behind value sketching next week.
15:00-18:00 - Painting Our Value Sketch Based on Our Story.
Because my guy was going to be mostly lit from below by the glowing toxic swamp (and only faintly from above by the pale moon), my value sketch has all of the lightest white coming up from his feet. I actually just turned the model upside down and highlighted it in the "normal" (more zenithal) fashion for most of it. I left the metallic bits (hammer and shield) because the opaque metallic paints would completely obliterate the value sketch anyway. By the end of the first day I had completed my value sketch:
Marco and some of the cooler of the dudes (myself included - obvs!) went out to dinner together afterwards and had a great ol' time! I have often griped that living over 2 hours away from the nearest Friendly Local Gaming Store, I don't often get a chance to be surrounded by like-minded nerds and just "talk shop" and talk about our shared interests and just life in general. It was fun hearing about all the different walks of life that everyone came from, united in this common passion.
Day 2:
10-12:30 - Lecture: Colour Theory
Where our first day opened with an in-depth discussion of light and contrast (followed by painting light and contrast onto our models), on the second day we added colour!
Marco really broke down many elements of quite advanced colour theory, bringing everything back to the Real Colour Wheel and how it pertains to miniature painting. He discussed how pigments interact and how we can take advantage of these properties.
I learned A LOT!!!
Luckily I took loads of notes so I can continue to digest some of these concepts.
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| A book Marco references; it's so colour THEORY that the book is in black and white! |
12:30-14:00 - Lunch
14:00-16:30 - Paint Models and Individual Tutorial with Marco
While we worked on completing our models - painting translucent layers of colour over our value sketch, Marco circulated around spending 20-30 min. with EACH PERSON giving an individual tutorial on elements we were struggling with or wanted to learn. For me he discussed the OSL, environmental lighting, and controlling transparency level of paint. All of which I found hugely helpful and enlightening.
16:30-17:15 - Demonstration of True Metallic Metals (TMM) by Marco
As I mentioned above, because TMM will not allow the value sketch to be visible through it, Marco showed us how he controls light when using TMM.
17:15-18:00 - Finish up / Pack up
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| A great group of lads! |
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| Mine is front row, second from the left...but don't worry, you'll be seeing a lot more of him in the future |
What a weekend that was!! I learned so much and had fun doing it! I couldn't be more proud of the miniature that I painted (about whom I will speak much more in future posts) and feel so inspired to push my painting further!
I am currently reading Figopedia, which is nicely reinforcing some of the concepts Marco presented. I look forward to learning and sharing more insights on colour theory with you in future posts.
See you next week on The Art of Caesura!
Reading: Figopedia
Playing: Blackstone Fortress!!
Next Week:
The value in a sketch...
Nice weekend indeed. Figopedia is a great book. I actually bought directly from Jeremie while attending a 3 days workshop with him... 6 years ago! As you said it was a life changing experience for me too (at least in the painting area). And he refered too a lot to the Spectrum books, which made me smile while reading your review.
ReplyDeleteWow!! I hope you got your copy of Figopedia signed! I wonder if he still plans to release other books in that series (which he alluded to throughout the book). Anyway I so glad to hear that you got a lot out of the workshop that you attended; it's exciting to have these opportunities! How cool to hear that Jeremie recommends the Spectrum books too. I found that they were available through my library app "Libby" at one stage.
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