I've been experimenting with airbrushing lately. One of my first experiments was to put down a green basecoat on this little gobber. And for a long time that's as far as I got. Finally I decided on a whim to finish him, at which point the first thing I did was to establish new basecoat colours by hand. The original green colour was completely covered in different shades that I ended up preferring, so nothing of the original airbrush layer survived. Oh well.
Early on I was struck by this model's resemblance to the Leprechaun of horror movie fame. To be clear I've never actually seen any of the Leprechaun movies, but that's OK, I'll get around to them someday. Probably...
Anyway, a little bit of sculpting and whole lot of circle-punched plasticard and I had myself a Leprechaun standing on his precious pile of gold.
A simple but effective little conversion. I actually enjoyed the process of painting this guy more than I have with any other model in recent memory. I'm not sure why; perhaps it was a balance of experimentation (I don't have much experience with shades of green) and familiar techniques that I have grown comfortable and confident with, so it was somewhat interesting but fairly easy. It didn't hurt that the model, while varied and detailed, was quite easy to paint. Also I have a new lighting setup that's making it easier to see the fine details, so that helps.
There's a couple of mistakes and questionable colour choices, but overall I'm happy with how he turned out. I think I managed to give him a dark look, without him actually being so dark as to be hard to read from a distance under normal lighting. He's not my best work, but he's a very acceptable tabletop-level mini in my opinion.
BTW I named him Warrick. After Warrick Davis of course. Obviously.
Colours:
It felt like I used more paints than usual for this guy; or at least more than I expected to use, seeing as I had planned to give him a limited colour palette. Well, in this case at least figuring out the right colours was part of the fun.
The skin was basecoated in Vallejo 72.730 Game Air Goblin Green, washed with Citadel Shade Athonian Camoshade, then highlighted with Citadel Layer Moot Green. The teeth were just Formula P3 Menoth White Highlight. The eyes were first painted Formula P3 Morrow White, then washed in Athonian Camoshade with the rest of the skin. After this I touched up the Morrow White then painted in the tiniest dot of Vallejo 72.106 Game Color Scarlett Blood that I could. I had intended to dot the centers, but I screwed up a bit and ended up with both eyes looking off to the viewer's left (probably something to do with the angle that I hold the brush?). Luckily I screwed up by about the same amount on both eyes so they do seem to be looking in the same direction, so that's fine.
For the coat I started with the lovely but very dark Citadel Dark Angels Green, then carefully shaded the recesses only with Citadel Shade Coelia Greenshade. Unfortunately my next brightest green of the right hue was Vallejo 72.729 Game Air Sick Green, which I felt was too bright, so I reluctantly mixed it with Dark Angels Green to get a colour somewhere in the middle for the highlights.
I wanted the four-leaf clover to stand out a bit. I experimented with mixing yellow into greens to try to get a plant green, but the results felt a bit too close to the skin colour, so I settled for the beautiful but not very organic Vallejo 72.026 Game Color Jade Green. Perhaps it's not an actual four-leaf clover, but rather a jade Lucky Charm? Or is that the wrong leprechaun? I highlighted with Citadel Edge Gauss Blaster Green, but it ended up looking almost like pure white so I gave it a couple of glazes with Citadel Glaze Waywatcher Green to try to up the saturation.
The leather bits were basecoated in Vallejo 70.862 Model Color Black Grey. I applied some heavily watered down Vallejo Model Color 70.950 Black directly into a the recesses for shading, then highlighted with Vallejo 70.992 Model Color Neutral Grey.
Figuring out what colours to use for the rest of the clothes was a bit difficult; in the end I settled on a dark brown for everything as a compromise between what I saw in screenshots from the films and what would be easy to paint and fit the dark earthy colour scheme. The basecoat was Citadel Layer Doombull Brown, which was washed with Citadel Shade Agrax Earthshade before being highlighted with Citadel Layer Skrag Brown.
I made a mistake with the brass and gold, accidentally shading with Agrax Earthshade instead of the much lighter and redder Ogryn Flesh. As a result both colours came out darker than I had intended, which is especially unfortunate for the pot of gold. Well, perhaps it's better this way: I did say I wanted a dark colour scheme after all. Anyway, the gold was Citadel Layer Auric Armor Gold, washed with Agrax Earthshade, then drybrushed with Scalecolor SC-74 Elven Gold (which I think is actually less nice than Auric Armor Gold), then lightly drybrushed with Vallejo 72.052 Game Color Silver before being given a glaze of Citadel Glaze Lamenters Yellow. The brass was Citadel Layer Gehenna's Gold, Agrax Earthshade, and an edge-highlight of the Auric Armor Gold.
I basecoated the steel/silver areas in Citadel Layer Ironbreaker, applied a couple of spots of Citadel Shade Nuln Oil for shading, and then tried to highlight with Vallejo 72.052 Game Color Silver. For some reason I thought the Ironbreaker was the newer name for the old Gun Metal, but it seems to be much brighter than that; there's really no visible difference between it and the silver, meaning that the buckles are a little brighter and flatter than I had intended. Which is not a big problem, they are very small and I think it's fine for them to be a shiny silver.
I settled for blue for the telescope lenses. On the larger lens I started with The Army Painter Warpaints Electric Blue and worked my way inwards with Vallejo 72.021 Game Color Magic Blue then Vallejo 79.925 Model Color Blue. On the smaller "lens" I found any bright colours looked terrible, so I just put a dot of the dark Vallejo Model Color Blue and called it a day.
A quick note: I experimented a bit with camera settings and lighting setups to try to get good photos of this somewhat dark model. I managed to get something that, on my screen at least, looks quite close to the model itself under normal lighting, but I'm finding it really hard to get consistent results. Ah well, what can you do.
