Culexus Assassin, requesting feedback

[Magos Takatus]

Hi. I've been painting this guy for a few days and I'm not really happy with the results. I've been practicing with Scale 75 paints on the bodysuit and I liked the matte effect in person but it looks really chalky in the photographs. I was using a wet palette to keep the paint thin but my highlights are pretty unflattering.

 

I'm also struggling a bit with my photographs. I've got a tripod for my phone, I've recently got a light box that has eliminated the lighting problem that I had but now I'm having problems getting the camera to focus properly on the face of the model.

 

 

I'm not particularly happy with the result so I'm appealing to people for advice with both the painting and the quality of the photographs. Thanks for anyone that can give me a few tips.

[Bryan Blaire]

What are you angling for on the highlights? Do you want to do more blended ones across the model, or looking for sharper edge highlights, etc.?

 

I can’t really help you with the camera, unfortunately - I use my phone without any controls.

 

I would be pretty pleased to game with an assassin painted to that quality though.

[Magos Takatus]

Hi. I was attempting to go for more blended highlights in this case. I was trying to go for a more muted version than the official paintjob. I'm quite puzzled by the last image. The ruin the model is standing on looks greenish to me which is odd because I was using rust paints and pigments.

[Arkhanist]

For the pictures, there's a few things you can do. Depending upon your phone, it should have a 'pro' mode when taking photos, if not, there are a plethora of alternative camera apps that will. The advantage here is that you can

a] set the white balance to your lights; 'daylight' bulbs or LEDs are around 5500k. You may be able to use RAW mode, which allows you to set the exact white balance later, but I've found that's usually more effort than it's worth with a light box.

b] set manual focus; my camera app (samsung) highlights what's in focus when doing this, which is really handy.

 

Phone cameras usually have a fixed aperture which gives you a fairly narrow depth of field - deciphering that, there's a limit to how much of the model can be in focus when taking photos close up. This is quite nice fort arty photos, but for our purposes we want the whole model/unit in focus. So if you're finding you can only get part of the model(s) in focus, the best bet is to move the phone further away. Use any optical zoom you have to get the model back full in the display. Old advice was not to use digital zoom as doing it on a computer with post-processing gave better results, but phones are pwerful enough these days that there's not really a lot of difference. I always tend to take bigger than I need and crop it later, but that's just habit.

 

I set my ISO to 100 - my light box is well lit - then let the camera pick the shutter speed to achieve that. Like you, I use a phone tripod to reduce any issue with camera shake; you can also use the timer to take a photo a couple of seconds after pressing the button if there's still any motion blur from pressing it!

 

I always post-process my photos to get them to look as close to the original mini as I can. All my photos auto-upload to google photos, so I use the editor built in to that as it's quick, keeps the original, and handily backs everything up for me. You can of course do it in a desktop app too, or on the phone - I just like working on the bigger screen. Usually they just need a crop, and maybe a bit of a tweak to reduce the shadows or the like. Since B&C doesn't like google photos, you can then upload the finished version to the gallery here, or use imgur or the like.

 

Not having the original mini, I've just chucked the last one mostly through the auto-fix and boosted the exposure a little; it may need some colour correction, which I think is mainly due to the white balance being a bit off. It's also a touch out of focus.

 

http://i.imgur.com/uMK8izg.jpg

 

Gotta go, so I'll try and give some tips on blending later. Main thing - thinner paint with more layers with less change per layer (usually around 7 is sufficient) is how you get smoother blends. Or an airbrush.

[Magos Takatus]

Thanks for the advice. I've set my ISO values as you have advised but my tinkering with manual focus is no more successful than the auto focus. The light box has been helpful. I modify with my images in Photoshop Elements and it has a handy tool to remove a colour cast from an image and I haven't had to do that since. I have an image before and after cropping in case that helps. I did have the timer set to 5 seconds but I've upped that to 10 so I can get out the way and stop shaking the camera with my clumsy fidgeting.

 

 

 

I guess I've not got much practice in photographing miniatures. I'll keep working on it but more advice is still welcome.

[Stoic Raptor]

If you're using a phone camera, you should also be able to set it to voice activation - you don't even need to touch it, just say "cheese" (or whatever the option is, I had a phone that used "whiskey").

That way your shots are as stable as possible.