Emily Feilya

Terry Lyons 12:10 Miniatures , Painting No comments

Emily Feilya, another fabulous mini from Abyssoul. This piece came with 2 excellent options for the head, so I had to paint both and make a plinth to display the second one.

I found this a challenging piece to paint, I think mostly because I had some painting burnout after my last big project, and also because I didn’t have a clear idea of the colour scheme going into it. I knew I wanted black as the main colour, but I’ve always had problems making black interesting.

I first settled on using a texture pattern on the shawl to add some visual interest, and then worked on painting areas with different variations of black to differentiate them. From the feet up: the boots are highlighted with cool blue-greys; the chaps are highlighted with browns; the cuirass uses warm ochres; the puff sleeves use bone cream; the gloves, shawl and hat are highlighted with greys and white.

The challenge with the shawl is that the textile pattern uses the same greys that I was also using to highlight the black folds of the shawl, so I always had to keep the highlights 2 shades darker than the adjoining pattern section. This means that at the highest point, the pattern is highlighted to pure white while the black background is highlighted to the grey mid-tone of the pattern.

I’m really pleased with the glass and liquid effect I painted for the poison vials and syringe. I added a drip of poison coming out of the syringe using tinted UV resin. The one thing missing from the original sculpt was a bolt loaded into the crossbow, so I sculpted my own, and strung the bow with thread.