I’ve reached the final stage with my SCE Underworlds warband. I want to try painting freehand flowers on some of the large flat areas across two of the models:
Painting freehand flowers bravely
Ok so one of those areas already has some freehand on it. I painted the freehand skull a few days ago (you can read about that here). I want to make the skull part of a larger freehand element. This will mean painting over some of it – a bit scary but as long as I know what I want and I stick to it then I’m sure it’ll be ok.
Why is painting freehand flowers a good idea?
Well…I have no artistic training. I have painted (and it’s something I want to get back into) but I’m no great draughtsman. The secret to why I like to paint freehand flowers is simple; because they’re actually easy.
Have a look online and you’ll find heaps of tutorials for easy flower painting in acrylics. To be frank the results of most of these are pretty crap on a 2ft x 2ft canvas but if you shrink them down to 28mm miniature scale they can look pretty good. Here are some of my earlier efforts:
So where to start painting freehand flowers?
Good question (thanks me). The key to a good finish is some detail and colour variation in the background. Now, I don’t try and get my flowers anatomically correct (they’re based on roses but I’m no rose scientist) but I do stick to some rules to make things pop.
I lay down three layers as a background. I start with a blue green layer, stippled on:
Next I add some yellow to the green to make it more vibrant and stipple this on top, focusing more on the top 2/3 of the blue green layer:
You’ll notice that this is the stage at which I start to cover the skull. I do this so it feels like the skull is sitting within the green leaf layer, not on top of it. It helps seat the freehand together and look like one element.
The final step here is to add even more yellow to the mix, so the green is very yellow and vibrant, and stipple this on the top 1/3 of the area:
The three layers increasing in vibrancy help give the freehand some depth. Don’t forget, colour has perspective too – the further away something is, the more desaturated and more blue it will look.
Here’s how it looks on the cloak:
Painting freehand flowers themselves
Ok so now it’s time to add the blooms themselves. This was really easy. It all started with these colours:
I laid down rough circles of the Deep Red where I wanted the centres of the flowers to be:
Then I desaturated the Antares Red with a little bit of my blue green first base layer colour and drew it in a rough spiral from the inside of the the deep red dot outwards. Finally, I then added some of the desaturated Antares Red to white to make a pink and repeated this step:
Finally for the shoulder pad I took pure white and added some highlights, very sparingly, to the outsider of the petal shapes created by the spirals:
Painting freehand flowers on the cape
As the cape flowers were quite a lot bigger I was able to add a further, final step to these. I took this colour:
And added some shadows to the spirals. I couldn’t do this on the shoulder pad because the flowers weren’t big enough and I was happy with them with just the highlight. The cape came up really well though:
Painting freehand flowers is easy!
So there you have it really. It’s very easy. Watch some acrylic flower painting tutorials and shrink them. Don’t be afraid to simplify them if you need to; they look much better at 28mm scale than at full size and people will think you’re a genius. I’ll take the final group shot with these guys tomorrow.
Comments always welcome!