Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Fooling around with Composition

Reading the wonderful blog entry from Scratchbuilt 40k. It reminded me that many people in the hobby take horrid pictures. The ones on Scratchbuilt are actually pretty decent. The lighting is pretty good, the whitepoint is set close enough. Composition could be a bit better though. So I took his last photo of the Eldrad miniature that has a Spectacular Paintjob and worked on composition some. Now I am not an expert, but I think that it looks a bit better now. I also fixed the levels.

If you take photos and publish them on the web. Take a bit of money out of your minis budget and do yourself a favor. Go take a Digital Photography class at a local Adult School or Community college. They will talk about Apeture Settings, White Balance, Image Compsition etc. They should also give you some instruction on how to use Photoshop. Using even Photoshop Elements (The version for the non pros). will give you tons of necessary tools to do a great edit on your photos.

Original as posted
The composition is boring. Nothing on a third, light grey background does nothing for the miniature.

after a Bit of Photoshop


Added stock texture to background (Blurred like it would be if the picture was taken with the proper aperture). Foreground grass added (also stock texture) so the mini looks like it is part of something. Placed the head on the top left third (mostly) and left some space in front of the sword. It just makes the picture look more dynamic.

All done in a very quick and dirty fashion. Taking a picture of this while standing in front of a piece of nicely contrasting scenery could do the same good things.

Dwarf in Kilt that I took. Armorcast Techbridge as backdrop on grass sheet.
I took this one for my Photography class. He's centered Horizontally, but on a vertical third. This was cropped SLIGHTLY from the original.

So Composition, FOCUS, Having an interesting, but blurry foreground and background all contribute to a great looking picture of a figure.

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Painting Ethnic Skin Tones

I saw a blog post on BOLS about painting non-white skin tones. Here is a miniature that I painted for a Serenity RPG that I played in awhile ago.


I was going for a Native American skin tone. I think I got close. I used the Guide on Cool Mini or not to come up with the color palette. http://www.coolminiornot.com/articles/1310-ethnic-skintones

Tasha