SE-NMM marine

[Brother apocalyptic]

well, Im continuing on the SE-NMM area, this is my second attempt, but first on a whole model...

 

C&C are highly welcome...

 

http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b103/Apoc_swe/experiment/SE-NMM001.jpg

http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b103/Apoc_swe/experiment/SE-NMM002.jpg

[INKS]

It doesn't look right around his waste. wish I had the skill and knowledge to help you fix it. Sadly I do not. The brown looks too brown and the grey doesn't look like metal or mirroy (which ever effect your going for)

 

I think the problem might be the layers are too noticable? still not a bad try, just needs some more work I think.

[undertow]

it's not bad, you got the basics figured out. however, it doesnt register immediately what it is you're trying to pull off. you should maybe add blue to the gray.

[Dr_m4d_skillz]

u need to blend the layers into eachother better, then there some other things u need to work on, if u take a look at the chest eagle for example, u need to paint reflection on each and every feather, and not just the whole area... good luck!

[mario]

One can see that it's supposed to be SE-NMM but not because of the paintjob. You hit some of the basic pitfalls.

1. You need better blending. The sky (blue) are needs more blue, not that much Shadow Grey. The white border between the blue and brown needs to be better blended into the blue.

 

2. The brown parts need to be desaturated and better blendend.

But the basic blending for the blue and brown parts (chrome SE-NMM) are ok (but improvement doesn't hurt). Just a bit more blue, a bit less brown, blending that white, and not having any black lines (especiall near the white).

 

3. For the gold parts (chest eagle, details,...): Here you got it the other way. The sky needs less saturation and the earth part need some saturation. But not much for both, and a bit finer blending.

 

4. In general: You need a bit more brush control. Especially if the whole miniature is SE-NMM you need to hunt and eliminate any little bits of sloppy applied paint everywhere.

 

5. Dr_m4d_skillz said it. You need to see every surface as an individual piece and how it would reflect light. That's each 'feather', the rest of the eagle, each segment of the shoes and the sole of the shoes, the two pasrts of the shoulder pad, and so on.

 

6. Where are the horizons wrong:

- Upper and lower legs, they would go along the legs (vertical with the leg, and not horizontal)

- I am not sure but if the helmet is supposed to be NMM gold then that's wrong too. The basic form is a sphere so specular highlight and basic highlight on top and not at the brows

- The sword's blade (seond picture): The horizon is not at the edge. If it's chrome too then the gradient on the upper section would become lighter to the middle and not the sharp edge. And the lower section would have a horizon somewhere near the bottom sharp edge.

 

Sorry but the picture have a funny angle (no exact central front view) so I can't tell you where exactly there horizons are. My assumptions are based on how I think he's posed and how he's holding the sword.

 

So you need to improve the blending a bit and change your colours saturation to a more 'realistic' scale.

And you have to assume that every plane is individual andnot connected to any other one. Then you can reduce it to its primitve form (sphere, cylinder, rectangle, cube, pyramid, ...) and derive where the horizon is located.

 

-

[Brother apocalyptic]

why shouldnt the horizon go horiontal on the legs? Its not like it changes just because its legs, right? Ive read a few articles, and Ive learned (might be wrong) that the horizon doesnt change just because the marines pose does...

 

And bout the blending part, Im th biggest newbie on that part, Im working on that part atm, but it goes real slow.. (how I wished I had something to practise on.. Also, my brush is giving up, he has been with me for 7 months now (cost me 2 US dollars) so I think its time for him to hit the can...

 

the helm aint NMM, its a regular helmet, painted old school..

 

But thanks a bunch for all those tips... Ill practise on the things you said, and erhaps get back to you guys...

[Commissar_69]

Look i dont mean to sound like an idiot but what is SE-NMM? :lol:

[Brother apocalyptic]

Sky Earth Non Metal Metallics

[Xeres]

may i ask why the hell you are trying to do such a advanced painting style when you say your just a noob? Basically atm the model looks nothing like senmm, i recommend you give up on trying to do this untill you have mastered blending and ligting effects. Sorry if this is a bit harsh but it needed to be said.

[Artimis Vergadin]

Wow, someone is in an vengeful mood today.

 

Pay no attention to what he just said.

 

You've almost got it. Just the blending is the area you need to work on. Master that, and your pretty good. Light affects will come after that.

 

Try a technique called feathering. I learned it from my art teacher when painting my last painting. It's very simple and affective. Simply paint one coat down. Clean your brush. Then creating tiny strokes at an angle. Keep doing this until that color is almost gone, i.e. faded into the other color. Works quite well and is easily mastered.

 

Artimis

[Boltman]

@Commissar_69;

SENMM is a technique used to mimic the effect of metallic surfaces reflecting light, without actually using metallic paint like shining gold; instead yellows and browns are painted to make it look like the surface is metallic. Sky-earth NMM is the variant of highly reflective, mirror-like surfaces.

 

@Brother apocalyptic;

First of all I commend you for giving this a go. It is not an easy technique, especially when you're still working on getting good blends. But you will learn a lot from this exercise. And learning is the important part, not the result. Mario knows his stuff, heed his advice. I will enlighten you a bit further about the leg issue though.

 

Why put the horizon vertical you ask, since the horizon itself is horizontal? You must understand that the marines' armor are not flat mirrors. Flat mirrors will reflect the horizon horizontally, yes, but when you look at a surface, you're not looking at the horizon directly, you're looking at how light bounces off the surface and reflects to your eyes. Have you ever had a look at a chrome sphere, or a car's round hubcap? Depending on how high your eyes are compared to the sphere, you can see a flat horizon line, but if you'Re higher than tehsphere you see the horizon line curve down and it's presence is lower, exposing more of the sky part. That's because the sphere's surface is mostly reflecting the sky back to your eyes when you look down on it. The opposite happens when you look under it, and you will notice that the horizon line will curve up, following the curvature of the surface.

 

Try this: Find a reflective tube. The metallic, cylindrical tip of a pencil perhaps, something chromed and cylindrical. Notice how whatever way you turn the pen, the dark lines on the chrome stay in the same direction? That is because the light bounces off the cylindrical surface in a certain way, not because of it's orientation, but because of it's geometry. It's very hard for me to explain with text, my best advice is to get a flexible piece of reflective paper, a foil paper perhaps, or a thin see-through sheet you can curve to your will and that will show reflections a bit. Curve it and notice how light reflections of your surroundings bounce off the surface. In the case of a cylinder, light bounces off in a series of lines, aligned with the length of the cylinder. All the light features bouncing off the cylinder are therefore lines running along the lenght of it.

 

Another important pointer is that not every surface should reflect the horizon line, as not every surface should show the sky part. Essentially, of you consider each part of the armor like a mirror, the surfaces pointing towards the ground will be reflecting the ground more, whereas surfaces pointing upwards would reflect the sky. It's not just a matter of applying those horizon lines everywhere you can. To fool the eye, it must look real, and unconsciously, though some don't know the science behind the thing, everyone can recognize when the reflections look right or when they don't so much. When a surface is curved, that's when the surface in question points at the ground as well as the sky, hence you expect to see a horizon line, but that line should be parallel to the main curving axis of your surface, not the absolute horizon. Because the surface reflects it's environments and alters it's reflection in the making.

 

Know how I discovered this? I stared at tons of great NMM paintjobs on the web. After a while, it gave me a sense of what's right and what's wrong. I'm not perfect at it, but carefully observing other people's work is what made me notice how horizon lines on a cylindrical shape looks right when placed along the cylinder, and not across it. Your marine's boot is essentially a cylindrical shape. Where to put the line then? Well consider that the innerpart of the boot is mainly pointing towards the ground (and the other boot!), whereas the outer part of the boot is aiming at the sky a little more. The horizon line should therefore appear in the front, where the curve of the surface goes from pointing towards the ground to pointing towards the sky. At the back of the boot, where the surface aims back down towards the ground as you make your way around the boot, another horizon line should appear.

 

I hope this made some sense to you, it's very hard to explain on a forum, living examples would be priceless.

 

To pull off a great effect, the color transitions need to be very smooth, so keep on practicing blending the colors together. SENMM is about smooth color transition and correct horizon light placement. Blending takes practice, horizon lines take observation.

 

Keep up your promising work!

 

 

Boltman

[AkiraCho]

dont make the color transations so blatant, but its a good start, keep it up, use waters, and its ok to use differant color lines, such as GW Vellejo, all that goody, um what else.. grey its a good fading color, just blend lots of greys into other colors, again keep up the good work

[Brother Stickabee]

i recommend you give up on trying to do this untill you have mastered blending and ligting effects. Sorry if this is a bit harsh but it needed to be said.

'

 

That's not true and it's very inappropriate, as it falls far short of being constructive.

 

That being said, your original example of SENMM was fantastic, but I feel like that had a lot to do with it being on a smaller, much more rigidly confining surface structure. As has been noted several times, the area in which you need the most improvement is your blending. It's not something that comes easily, but it will happen for you. One thing that has been said in nearly every NMM tutorial out there is that, should you notice the gradations a bit more than you had hoped, you should use the "colored water" technique of making them less distinct.

 

This is a pretty simple technique in which you apply many extremely (emphasis here) thin layers of the darkest color paint over the whole surface (in this case, several layers over the whole 'sky' surface and several over the 'earth' surface). The paint should be thinned to the point of being almost entirely water and you should be able to see your pallet through the color. Load your brush with enough that, as you drag it over the surfaces, it leaves a wet trail, but does not have the color pooling anywhere. Ideally, by the time you're done doing the surface once, it should have dried where you started and be ready for another go. At any rate, this helps a lot and saves a lot of "guess" work in figuring out an intermediate color between two existing layers.

 

Hope that helps.

[Obliterator]

may i ask why the hell you are trying to do such a advanced painting style when you say your just a noob? Basically atm the model looks nothing like senmm, i recommend you give up on trying to do this untill you have mastered blending and ligting effects. Sorry if this is a bit harsh but it needed to be said.

What's wrong with aiming for the stars? If he wants to try SE-NMM, than more power to him. Sure he has room for improvement, but next time try to post more like mario for example. Instead of bashing him for trying something new, try to actually be helpful and tell him how he can improve his current standard.

This is a board where we actually try to help out painters and modellers from n00bs to Golden Daemon winners. We NEVER say that somebody should just give up.

[Nicorex]

Apocoliptic, I applaud your attemp at doing this. Only through struggle do we learn!

Boltman explained it quite well, but like he said text makes it hard to describe.

Here ia a Website on how light works on surfces. He isnt talking about miniture painting but it is still quite helpful.

 

http://www.itchy-animation.co.uk/tutorials/light01.htm

 

take a gander at it, apply that to what Bolt and Mario said and I think you will be well on your way.

 

 

You know sometimes this board amazise me. With the amount of talent floating around here you would think there would be some bigger egos. But they seem to be the nicest and most helpful guys.

I am so glad this board is back up and running agin. I can always find something to either inspire or entertain me here.

 

Boltman said-"Have you ever had a look at a chrome sphere, or a car's round hubcap? Depending on how high your eyes are compared to the sphere, you can see a flat horizon line, but if you'Re higher than tehsphere you see the horizon line curve down and it's presence is lower, exposing more of the sky part. That's because the sphere's surface is mostly reflecting the sky back to your eyes when you look down on it. The opposite happens when you look under it, and you will notice that the horizon line will curve up, following the curvature of the surface."

 

Since I dont know how to do this type of painting at all, it looks to me like Apocoliptic has his light sorce 360 degrees around his mini. Would it have been better to pick a single light sorce direction? If i did pick a single dource direction, wouldnt that leave some of my model totaly black as they would be reciving no light at all?

This is my biggist trouble with SE-NMM over all, I cant get a handle on where the light should be comming from.

[Brother apocalyptic]

WoW.. let me first of all just thank you guys a bunch for those tips.. Its really good.. And if my sweet Xeres had had the patience to read my whole second post, he would see that I said Im a noob in BLENDING, not painting...

 

I have in fact painted for 1,5 years now.. and I have sold whole armies to people, and people have sent minis to me for painting.. But next time Xeres, you could heed the old saying:

 

"if you cant say something nice, say nothing at all"!!!

 

I think IMO, that I "master" highlightning, shading, blacklining, freehand notches, basics of free-hand, basics in sourcelightning...

 

I just think that its time to try out new things, and since this stuff needs blending, I figured that I could smash two flies in one hit. But to be honest, i must agree with you guys, I need to master blending, before going on to these harder techniques....

 

And may I just say that my life is now complete, the awesome Boltman has posted on one of my threads.. (I remember when I first saw magmatrax, and your khorne dread).. those are what I wante to achieve in my skill lvl.. But I find that its impossible to take a shortcut here, since there is a quite clear path on which techniques that leads to the other...

 

and Nicorex, I did my try, with the light coming from the Zenit, aka, right above the mini.. if that doesnt work for you, you can always claimn that the planet has 2 suns, so that there is no night on the rigid planet :P

[Nicorex]

Ahhh okay. Coolness thanks.

[mario]

Brother apocalyptic: No need to get defensive, I just wanted to help because for first try it was sort of ok, just missing some basic points: how the horizon forms, saturation, and a bit blending and brush control. If someone doesn't tell you what is wrong then it is harder to improve. And Boltman explain the horizon stuff a bit more. My tip would be to get to know the basic forms and how they reflect light (sphere, cylinder, cube,...). And get use to reducing any form to it's basic form or a composite of basic forms then you can manage to paint anything in SE-NMM or normal NMM or just normal paint because if you know how light is reflected from chrome then you know how all light is reflected. You just need to change how it reflects (dull, shiny, diffuse,..., waht colour) and you can paint any material. It's like building something out of legos, once you know how the basics work you can build nearly anything.

 

I think IMO, that I "master" highlightning, shading, blacklining, freehand notches, basics of free-hand, basics in sourcelightning...

Never assume that you master something, there is always something to improve or to try another technique. Now really hard: Your standard is above tabletop but not much. You have a passive sloppiness, you could inprove a lot with a bit more brush control and correcting things that need to be one (some of thesloppy highlights). Some people don't even realize where the sloppiness is but that are the little parts that need to be done no matter how annoying it is (and it canbe very annoying). but everyone can be a top painter and learn how to do it. You just need a bit more dedication that the other guys and you will be better (there is no other secret).

 

Since I dont know how to do this type of painting at all, it looks to me like Apocoliptic has his light sorce 360 degrees around his mini. Would it have been better to pick a single light sorce direction? If i did pick a single dource direction, wouldnt that leave some of my model totaly black as they would be reciving no light at all?

This is my biggist trouble with SE-NMM over all, I cant get a handle on where the light should be comming from.

There is only one Promary light source (the sun or something very bright). That thing is responsible for the basic key, hue, saturation and values that you see on a painting/miniature. But in the end everything is a light source because everything reflects light to some point. (that's why there is no pure black and no place that recieves no light). The guys on the moon had problems when they were looking away from earth/sun (to the dark side of the moon) because there is no athmosphere to reflect and bounce light around. So they got really deep shadow and no partial shadows.

[shuriken]

I figured that I could smash two flies in one hit.

 

You mean kill two birds with one stone :P I had to look at this model quite a few times before i realised what you were trying to achieve. I think it's a reasonable first attempt however there is a lot of room for improvement. As said before, choice of colours would offer the best scope for improvement, thereafter, focus on your blending.

[mario]

Some things that could help you with horizons and reflections:

 

http://coolminiornot.com/article/aid/59

The first real article on NMM for miniatures, very informative and a good starting point. With information from this article: http://elfwood.lysator.liu.se/farp/metal2/Reflective1.htm

 

http://coolminiornot.com/article/aid/54/

Here you should find some information about colour and even some bits about form and other things.

 

http://coolminiornot.com/article/aid/164

Very short but it describes good enough how convex and concave surfaces reflect light (helps with the realism).

 

http://coolminiornot.com/article/aid/191/

This has some more explanation and on page three you can see exactly what you did wrong on most of the parts of your Space Marine. You painted it as if each of the areas were just flat and didn't have a three dimensional form.

[Brother apocalyptic]

thanks a bunch for those links Mario.. Ill have to look at em some other day though, since Im going away over the day..