Lady Olynder

Lady Olynder

The next painting competition at my local Warhammer store is to do with wizards and halloween, so I decided to finally paint up my Lady Olynder, whom I've had sat in my painting pile for the last 6 months!

She is fiddly as hell and so very delicate! After a test assembly, I decided to paint the corset first then build the lower part of the dress. I will paint the hair, veil and other bits and pieces separately. I have 4 weeks to get her done and everything else to make her look halloween'y. We will see...

Bit more progress. Decided to continue my tackling of red and making it brighter without turning it completely orange or pink. I'm happy with how it's going so far.

I started off with Celestra Grey base followed by Mephiston Red. I then put on top of this Blood Angels Red (c), this seems to give a richer red colour. For the shadows I mixed Blood Angels Red with Ork Flesh (c), to give a darker colour. This was a tip I got off YouTube. Green is the contrast colour to red on the colour wheel so gives a nice deep colour without losing the red too much. I blocked in the shadow where the light would not hit on the bodice, so under the bust, around the brocade detail and back and sides. (The veil is only tacked on for shadow reference).

For the highlights I started off with Blood Angels Red again and started adding Evil Sunz Red in glazes with contrast medium, building this up with Wild Rider Red and finally with Yriel Yellow, finishing off with a final glaze of Blood Angel Red just to tone it back down. The brocade was basecoted with Balthazar Gold, highlighted with Auric Armour, Liberator Gold and edge highlighted with Stormhost Silver.

I decided to give her green hair with a darker green ombre effect: 

I achieved this by base coating with Ionrach Skin, then with subsequent glazes of Skarsnik Green mixed with Ionrach Skin, building up the colour to just Skarsnik and then with a darker glaze mixed with Loren Forest. It still needs more shading and highlighting, but these are the basic colours for now. 

I made a start on her dress, which I'm attempting to paint on a satin effect. Over the Celestra Grey base I started painting in the shadows with Slaanesh Grey mixed with Russ Grey. These were both heavily watered down creating an almost watercolour effect. I need to build the colours up gradually in layers in order to get the required effect needed. I then began to darken these with Daemonette Hide and Dark Reaper. With darkening colours I'm finding that you need to keep similar colours together. There is no use in trying to mix a warm purple with a cold one, it won't work! If you look on YouTube there is a really good video by Hobby Cheating that explains about purple colours and how to mix/highlight them. 

14/10/19

Made a bit more progress on the dress, although it is slow going: 

I haven't used any shades or contrast paints just heavily watered down paints as I want control over where the paint is going. I probably could use shades but I wanted to use specific colours. For this stage though I tried a different technique on the front of the dress (2nd picture), I used wet blending here, by using Vallejo's retarder medium, but then on the back I just used layers and I think I prefer the layering technique. The medium isn't really giving me the result I want and ends up looking too thick. The layering does take longer but it's a better result (I think).

The colours used for this are: Mephiston Red, Daemonette Hide, Slaanesh Grey, Russ Grey, Dark Reaper, Celestra Grey and White Scar. All mixed in together and with Vallejo's Glaze Medium. I can see already from the pictures above where I'm going wrong and also bits that I'm pleased with. Unfortunately, I can't pinpoint my exact method, I'm just working with the light from my lamp to see where I want to put shadows and highlights. It is a bit haphazard, as I am still trying to figure it out!

19/10/19

I have been working away most of last week trying to refine the blending and glazing on her dress more. For the underneath I have painted a mix of Dark Reaper and Daemonette Hide and applied this on the underneath of the veil as well:

Smoothing out the dress is a lot of work but it's getting there. 

I have also made a start on the handmaidens, whose dresses I want to paint in a red cloth to match the bodice on Olynder's dress. So I have primed both with Celestra Grey and the dress only in Abbaddon Black as I want a darker red and fade out from the shadows with just the red rather than trying to darken them.

20/10/19

With the hair I ended up scrapping the ombre effect and went with lighter ends on the hair. It contrasted better I thought. 

25/10/19

Sorry for the lack of updates, I was stung by a wasp on Tuesday evening and had a bit of an allergic reaction. Never been stung in my life before, and to say the least, it bloody hurt!

Anyway...

I have started painting the veil after getting annoyed with it after I glued everything together. I had massive (ok, large) gaps where the hair and veil attached to the model, so I had to scrape off paint and fill with green stuff and then try and patch up with paint again. I did this twice as I didn't like it looking a mess. Everything was base coated in Celestra Grey, and I've started to apply the shading with the normal paints as listed above. You can't really see it that well in the picture below, but this is how it starts off. 

From here you just keep building up the glazes. It really doesn't look as though it's doing anything, but before you know it you have shadows in your recesses. I painted the crown with my normal recipe: Balthazar Gold>Auric Armour>Stormhost Silver and deepened the facial features that show through the veil. I did try a lace pattern but I didn't like it and it made the paint come up to thick and was a pain to blend away again! Once I was generally happy with her I moved onto the handmaids.

I wanted them to contrast against the lighter colours of Olynder to ensure the focus was solely on her face. The red was a bit of a messy strategy. I started off with Mephiston Red, Evil Sunz and then Wild Rider but there is also Blood Angels Red (c) in here too, as well as Shyish Purple (c) for the shadows. At this point I was starting to run out of time, leading up to the competition she was to be entered in.

Their hair was painted in a similar way to Olynder's but darkened down with Militarium Green (c), as I needed them to be darker and fall away into the shadows behind their gracious leader. Their arms were painted in the same colours as Olynder, base coat of Ionrach Green and darkened with a bit of Dryad Bark. Unfortunately, towards the end of the paint I was rushing so forgive me if I am unable to recall exactly  what I did! Sorry!

I was going to have graves and pumpkins for her base but didn't have time for all that and my other half suggested having her moving over a pile of bones, seeing as we had the GW skulls box. Sorry for not taking earlier pictures, this was the quickest part of the paint. I wasn't about to paint 30-odd skulls individually so after gluing Olynder to her base I covered it over with a layer of polyfiller, as I knew I needed it built up in order to stick the skulls in something and I wanted a small pond under her, which didn't turn out how I intended but looked good anyway!

So once I'd placed all the skulls in position I painted the whole base black (Abaddon) and stuck sand on in certain areas and painted this Mournfang Brown. The areas of polyfiller left un-based I painted in Mechanicus Grey. From here it was just dry brushing. Steel Legion Drab>Zandri Dust>Wraithbone>Tyrant Skull>Wrack White. I put a darker colour in the centre of the pond so it would add depth under the water (as I said earlier, this didn't quite work out!).

I also added tufts of grass, purple flowers, as I wanted these to match a bit of her lore to do with her brambles and roses.

N.B. As you can see below, the pond ended up looking an eyeball! I was going for a watery pond with blood drops in it, but didn't count on how viscous the water effects was! But it added to the effect of the overall painting, so worked out in the end :)

02/11/19

Despite still painting at 10.45am this morning I managed to get her finished and entered in my local Warhammer competition and I am pleased to say I won all three categories for the Masters level. So was a good result to a lot of work. I have no idea how many hours I spent painting her, this is something I should probably keep track of! For your viewing pleasure here she is below in her finished state. Now I can get on with some other stuff!

If you have any questions, please let me know!