The Character Critique Class is a two-day course focused on pushing your character painting skills to the highest level. Across the weekend you will work on a 40mm base size miniature of your choice that you bring with you, either a new project or one already in progress, guided by expert tuition.
The course combines one-to-one teaching within a group setting, structured demonstrations, and optional breakaway sessions on specific topics requested by students. You will receive tailored feedback, advanced composition advice, and technique sessions designed to take your painting further.
The course was at Bad Moon Cafe and was led by James from Siege Studios. It was a small class so there was a lot more one-on-one time compared to other classes, which was important as we were each working on different miniatures and different materials.
We started of by focusing on brush control, which I think we all knew but as none of us were really focusing on it had slipped into bad habits so it was really useful as a reminder to help with the rest of the course and hopefully into the future.
I took in my Logan Grimnar with the armour more or less painted and a basic glow effect on it. For the first day James helped me with really pushing the glow effect further and making it a lot more realistic. It started off almost looking like a 50:50 scheme of blue and red armour, but by narrowing the glow and going up to much brighter highlights, as well as a lot of glazing to blend the glow and the armour neatly together, it ended up looking much more realistic.
At the end of the day James demoed how to paint faces and I did some practice on a spare head he gave me. I followed this up by painting the face on Logan Grimnar the day after the course and I think it's by far the most realistic face I've painted so far.
On the next day I painted a bit of the gold, then moved onto the base so I could get the color composition right and start to plan out how to paint the wolves, the tree and the rock so everything would work well together. James helped with this by discussing how painting a glow on a white wolf would look compared to a black wolf, and how a warmer colored tree would work well with a colder rock and base.
He showed how to add a lot of interest and realism to stone, and how you can use different colors as a shadow to create different effects. He also showed the same when painting leather, how starting with a light brown and mixing in blue creates a completely different effect to the more traditional warm reddish brown leathers. A light cold holster adds a lot more interest to a warmer darker model than a more traditional warm brown one would.
From this I decided to have the black wolf on the left as the glow effect would like much nicer on it than on the white one. With the white wolf on the right this meant the tree behind it would look better if it was warmer in color, so I went with a reddish brown with a colder bluish rock with a purplish glow.
Overall the course was really useful and James went over a number of other techniques for different materials like fur and armour. I learnt a lot about how to better use color and how to better handle my brush and to really push my painting to the next level. The only downside is how quick it seemed to go, as I have so much more I need to do to Logan to get him close to complete.
It was also really useful taking a completed miniature (my recent Necromunda diorama) and get some feedback on how to take it to the next level. Again, most of the feedback was on smoother blends, increasing contrast and better use of color. I think for future competition pieces I'll focus on smaller projects so that I can keep everything at the highest level, rather than focusing on the miniature, then getting burnt out and rushing the base and other details.
It's a course I would like to attend again in the future, with Logan finished to get feedback on and another project started that I can get feedback on as I work on it.
