kithcrafts

[kithcrafts]

A chicken I'm painting up for a gift! His colors are based on the Jungle Fowl from Sri Lanka.

#d&d miniatures #d&d minis #dnd miniatures #dnd minis #miniaturepainting #painting miniatures #painting minis #miniatures #wip #chicken #jungle fowl #🐔

[kithcrafts]

#wip #d&d miniatures #d&d minis #dnd miniatures #dnd minis #miniaturepainting #painting miniatures #painting minis #miniatures #merfolk #mermaid #smoke shading

[kithcrafts]

Trying out Smoke Shading as explained by Lyla Mev [YouTube]. I need some practice glazing to make best use of the technique, but I'm pretty happy with the result, and I'll explore with some more colors next time. I'm especially pleased with the eyes on this guy!

#d&d miniatures #d&d minis #dnd miniatures #dnd minis #miniaturepainting #painting miniatures #painting minis #miniatures #smoke shading #dragon #dragon mini

[kithcrafts]

The final figure from the Cats and Catacombs kit, Han is listed as a monk. I was feeling more colorful and ended up painting some kind of performer instead, but I still like how he came out!

#d&d miniatures #d&d minis #dnd miniatures #dnd minis #miniaturepainting #painting miniatures #painting minis #miniatures #cat #speed painting #underpainting #cats and catacombs

[kithcrafts]

This is Verdandi, the Druid from the Cats and Catacombs box. I think she's been getting into the magic berries again, but at least she gets the benefits!

#d&d miniatures #d&d minis #dnd miniatures #dnd minis #miniaturepainting #painting miniatures #painting minis #miniatures #cats and catacombs #cat #druid

[kithcrafts]

This friend was happy to pose for me at the edge of the lake in Memorial Lake State Park. I was able to get much closer than I expected.

Feel free to use this photo for anything you like, and if you do I'd love to see!

#art #photography #water #bird #heron #great heron #reflection #state parks #Memorial Lake State Park #Pennsylvania state parks

[kithcrafts]

This Very Good Doggo is from the Wildspire Miniatures Animals Set [at amazon], not the Cats and Catacombs collection, but I've painted him up for them because they needed a pet!

#d&d miniatures #d&d minis #dnd miniatures #dnd minis #miniaturepainting #painting miniatures #painting minis #miniatures #dog #corgi

[kithcrafts]

This is Solan from the Cats and Catacombs collection. They wield great power in the service of their Patron, and also wears such fluff!

#d&d miniatures #d&d minis #dnd miniatures #dnd minis #miniaturepainting #painting miniatures #painting minis #miniatures #cats and catacombs #cat #fluff #warlock

[kithcrafts]

This is Indy from the Cats and Catacombs collection. They'll all get more colorful bases eventually, but this one was just screaming for some dandelions.

#d&d miniatures #d&d minis #dnd miniatures #dnd minis #miniaturepainting #painting miniatures #painting minis #miniatures #speed painting #underpainting #cats and catacombs #cat #bard

[kithcrafts]

This is Sonya from the Cats and Catacombs collection. She was a pleasure to work with, and came out with a very different vibe from her colleague Barnabas!

#underpainting #d&d miniatures #d&d minis #dnd miniatures #dnd minis #miniaturepainting #painting miniatures #painting minis #miniatures #speed painting #cats and catacombs #cat #rogue

[kithcrafts]

Now for something completely different. Below the cut is a bit of ADHD poetry I mostly wrote a few years ago, found in my documents folder recently, still liked it, and gave an editing pass. There's a cut because of the format: it's a single sentence composed of more than two thousand (>2000) (2K+) words. Tumblr has compelled me to break it into several text blocks due to some character limit, but it's meant to be continuous.

If you like this sort of nonsense and want to see more, let me know!

Blueberry Muffins

Neither do I recall what compelled me to purchase an extra large blueberry bran muffin (now deceased) from that one little store on the southwest corner of the Center Square where, sitting in the slightly grimy window I would sometimes see a tiny and exceedingly creepy porcelain doll with bright, too-real eyes that seemed to follow you down the road long after you passed the place itself and that had you looking over your shoulder to see if the doll might somehow be back there with some sharp object stolen from the bakery in a fit of kleptomaniacal murderous intent, that object chosen for the particular way the light dripped in silvery darts from the steel blade and trickle glittering down the streets like liquid violence made solid and dangerous by the hellish forges beneath the land of Quilt where the flaming flamingo people carry strange luminous orbs that some rumors say hold their most precious memories but others claim are just another kind of weird folksy decoration with no real purpose except to establish the sort of communal identity that the Quiltish people so desperately needed after the last Textile War almost destroyed the entire country with those new Bass Drop weapons that came tumbling out of the bellies of the dreaded Duvetian planes,

plummeting thousands of feet through the smog-choked air before landing with a certain kind of thud that could vaporize any liquid water that happened to be close enough to get caught in the destructive radius determined by the size and volume of the device's "Drop Drivers", so called by the scientists who had the dubious privilege of naming the work that they never intended to be weaponized, of course, because no scientist ever wants to be responsible for a government gaining new destructive capabilities that they will invariably abuse by turning their shiny new weapons against some poor hapless group of people just because they have some philosophical disagreement or a piece of land they want or don't want or whatever motivates the enormous barely-conscious entities we carefully build out of the bones of ones that came before them and the ideals of the people whose descendants will eventually discover that the great machine created by their hallowed ancestors is now chewing them up wholesale and spitting out mindless corporate zombies with no creativity that operate not on rational thought or ingenuity or even instinct but only by playing back the pre-recorded programs that they have been carefully steeped in their entire lives like some perfect cup of tea (but horrible) but who will nevertheless eventually rise up to destroy that great machine, tearing its pieces cog from axle, mechanism from housing, and spring from escapement only to pack all those pieces up in neatly labeled little boxes and hide the boxes away in a cave somewhere on the west coast near the cliffs that catch the waves thrown by the uncaring ocean in the kind of weather where being out on the water is likely to result in the deaths of anybody unfortunate enough to have that sort of thing for a job since they couldn't get a safer job further inland like programming or data entry because all of those jobs were taken by the factory workers after the factories shut down when, after far too many generations had been exploited to exploit them, the mines finally dried up leaving only dust and cracked lives blowing in the wind like the leaves of the trees in the northern forest late in the fall after the colors have faded and the air has gone from pleasantly crisp to almost-painfully chill and dry enough that the moon and stars begin to stand out stark against the black sky like the bones left lying in the sun by the sanguine vultures that fly lazily though the sky day by day waiting for the sign of the flamboyant turquoise snail frog to appear writ in the sands of the place where the ruddy desert meets the golden beach to create an orange gradient like the one on the underside of the peach sitting in your grandmother's window because it wasn't ripe when she bought it and she thinks that putting it in the window well help even though so far it only seems to have attracted the fruit flies that plague every house from time to time regardless of whether or not there were any actually in the house before the fruit (that wasn't quite ripe anyway) came in on the backs of their riding sausages to conquer the sunbeams just so the cat is slightly less comfortable in the living room that is always just slightly cooler than she likes (owing to her tropical ancestry) so that she can never quite feel contented except when the sun spills onto the floor in splotches and shards stained to Technicolor brilliance by the glass of the window that was made to commemorate some long-forgotten event in the history of the old town where you grew up but can never go back to because of the entirely too personal way the people there treat you even though (and perhaps because) most of them haven't seen you since the day you graduated high school and left that place behind you - maybe forever - in the hopes of finding out who you are deep down inside where the squishy bits of your feelings (your hopes,

dreams, and fears) are keeping a constant vigil near that one closed door in the corner where the light has been burnt out for such a very long time and that now even the spiders have given up living in the borders between the light and the shadows, on those invisible lines where the dust motes wink in and out of visibility making you wonder briefly if it's really safe to breathe this obviously-polluted air if there's that much dust in it before you realize that you've been breathing it the whole time so it must be at least safe enough that you can live on it, unlike the sweet phosphorescent breezes that flow through the land of dreams whose effervescent vapors might draw you in with their spicy fragrances like fresh baked pineapple and piperine orange juice and trap you forever, not quite drowning you beneath the flowing waves of blue and yellow grasses on the hills behind the castle with those glistening banners whose threads come from the mysterious threadworm caverns beneath the lake on top of the mountain on the horizon to the west beyond the city of Baa'urg with the buildings whose roofs are tiled with a strange glittering stone that reflects the sun in three different colors depending on the angle of the light, and with the roads paved with a stone so black that light falls endlessly into it, warming it up so that even in the deepest part of the coldest winters the people never have to shovel the snow that instead simply melts away starting at any tiny bare spot of that wondrous road (which the people complain about so much in the summer) that happens to catch the light of the sun as it rises above the mountainous horizon bringing with it the strange music of the bird people whose fluting and trilling songs send cinnamon scented sounds along ancient and ancestral aerial avenues swirling and twisting the minds of some who hear them (or taste them with their ears, as it were) away from the subtle and carefully crafted dangers of their workaday working days and toward thoughts from wherein the mind swims swiftly among the stars and between the protons and becomes more vulnerable to other, even more insidious attacks from the many sources of psychic trauma that inhabit those worlds where such things prey on the innocent and unwary denizens who dare to wander out of their iridescent glass-domed cities and between the crystal spikes that in those places stand instead of the trees on other,

more verdant worlds, and that shine with their strange internal glows that seem so bright to look at but still somehow fail to illuminate even the nearest of the shadowed divots wherein dwell the mind eaters who lay in wait with their slime-covered tentacles so like those of the intelligent squishbeasts that inhabit the deeps of so many oceans on worlds lucky enough to have such life-giving expanses of water glistening on their surfaces instead of just barren rock or deep gas wells bubbling their own sort of life-giving poisons into the thick noxious atmospheres of those places, reminding many who see them of certain industrial processes that used to exist on their own worlds before their ancestors, recently or long ago, began to understand the interconnected nature of their environments and, often after much denial followed by eco-wars waged by the last of the great corporate governments those cultures would produce, finally took steps to correct only to find that much of the damage that had been done was irreversible (or would take many generations to repair) and that the only viable solution left was to scatter themselves to the stars (worlds like theirs being scarce enough that there were none close by) and take their chances in their smallish black-tipped ships where they would spend dozens of generations without contact from any other sentient lifeforms until they no longer resembled or even remembered their planet-bound progenitors or even those who had left on other ships, some of which had been destroyed and others captured when their particular shard of the unfortunate species-fracture encountered by chance a more hostile species among the endless voids of the universe, while a very lucky few found new worlds that would service their organic needs well enough to make a home with its own set of wonders and dangers, and yet others abandoned their organic bodies entirely choosing to become fully artificial so that over the years they could not only preserve and repair themselves better but improve on the technologies that now sustained and produced their minds in new and terrifying and amazing ways that eventually led to lifeforms entirely unlike any others the universe had ever produced before or ever would again despite its vast and undeterminable span, nor did the flowers in the grasses of that place produce any scent but instead bloomed in a most amazing array of colors and took advantage of the wind by changing their stems to vibrate with each passing breeze, producing sounds all up and down the frequency spectrum that sounded like a pleasant humming in a zephyr, but during a storm could sometimes take on a more banshee-like quality that the people told cautionary stories about to their children who, after many generations, learned to selectively breed new flowers that made specific notes that were more pleasing to listen to which gave rise to several new forms of music but caused the flies that the flowers had been depending on to pollinate to be much less effective leading to population crashes throughout that particular part of the food web until the flies (and two species of finch) were extinct and the flower came to rely exclusively on artificial pollination provided by the people who had changed the flowers in the first place because they could not bear to lose the "Music of the Buds" that had caused their culture to cohere into a post-technological utopia before ultimately dying out from uncorrectable genetic defects originally promoted by exposure to the pollen of those very same flowers and a dose of irony that could kill off an entire colony of elephants in just a bit more time than it takes for a leaf to fall to the ground from the lowest branch of the big tree on top of the hill next to the pond where those ducks played as the sun glinted off the water in diamond lancets toward the back wall of the shop next to the one that had that tiny doll that actually just wanted to be friends but was driven mad by being surrounded all day by those terrible blueberry muffins.

#poetry #adhd poetry #long post

[kithcrafts]

TLDR; Red is stupid and you've done well negotiating with it on its own terms. Yes, this still reads as red in the photo. Now that I have it on a bigger screen, I'm thinking it'll tend to look a little bit orange against a blue background, but you could probably mitigate that by adding some true orange (leaning towards the yellow end) as an accent color somewhere on the figure.

Long version (with color theory):

This is not a lonely struggle, so (if you'll indulge me) lets have a gripe about painting red for a minute.

Red is just about impossible to highlight convincingly. Any other color, you can just add some white or add a little bit of a nearby primary pigment (cyan, yellow, magenta) and you get a brighter version of the color. But not red! Add white, you get pink. Yellow looks brighter than red, but adding yellow will turn your reds orange in a hurry. Add magenta and you just get cooler, richer pinks and no real brightening.

has feelings -> (never mind that I saw a red car on my way home today that literally LOOKED ORANGE where the sun hit it, if we paint like that it looks weird. it's shocking how yellow you can make green before it breaks, but not red)

So, to work with red we have two basic options. (1) We can add purple, blue, cyan, blue-green, or black to darken it for several levels of midtone and shade. What color you use here depends on what kind of shadows you want to see. Or (2) we can underpaint the values all the way to a pure white and tint it red with a very transparent paint applied like a filter. Some painters like to keep red acrylic inks on hand just for this purpose. (I have no idea if calligraphy ink would work here, btw.)

To actually answer your question: yes, this guy still reads as red. You've pushed the hue toward a dark wine red at the bottom and an orangey-red toward the top, and that's about the extent of how far you can make that work, but it does still read as red and it looks from the photo like you've achieved a good amount of contrast. 👍

If it's less contrasty in person, you could deepen the shadows with a black or very dark colored glaze, increasing the number of very thin layers as you work your way down each panel and down the mini. Personally, I'd work on the metal bits first and see how you feel after that.

Hey @kithcrafts does this still read as red or did I go overboard?

(I haven’t started shading the gray metal bits yet)

#color theory #minor infodump #painting red

[kithcrafts]

Allow me to introduce Barnabas, from the Cats and Catacombs collection He was painted up this week using an underpaint-and-highlight speed painting technique, and I quite like the result!

#miniatures #d&d miniatures #d&d minis #dnd miniatures #dnd minis #miniaturepainting #painting miniatures #painting minis #underpainting #speed painting #cat #paladin #cat cosplaying as a dragon #cats and catacombs

[kithcrafts]

Here's another take on the same figure by @willowwind78!

The lights come up, the music hits, and Mustache Nick begins to weave his magic!

Mustache Nick is painted with special paint!

There's a bit of work left to do, but this is the main statement. He wants a disco floor, and the light at the top of the staff is waiting for paint I have on order.

[kithcrafts]

I decided to use this skeleton warrior to try out a speed-painting technique. I first slathered the whole gray-primed mini with cyan, yellow, and magenta contrast paints in various combinations to produce some saturated shadow colors. Then I did two to three rounds of highlights, depending on what part of the figure I was working on. Finally, I sketched some NMM on the shield and called it done. The whole process probably took about an hour of actual painting.

I'm generally pleased with the results except for the face, which I've badly overworked. Everybody I've showed it to in person blamed the sculpt, which has the most intense overbite you've ever seen. I think it could probably be made to look like some kind of mask, but I've got what I wanted to out of this skelly for now. Maybe I'll revisit it some day.

#miniaturepainting #dnd miniatures #minipainting #painting miniatures #painting minis #dnd minis #underpainting #speed painting #nmm #non metallic metal #nonmetallic metal #skeleton warrior #d&d miniatures #d&d minis #kp2024minis

[kithcrafts]

First finished mini of the new year! This guy has never worn his leathers for anybody else before and he's super nervous about what you might think. Still, he's being very brave and wearing the whole kit into the living room because you asked to see.

#minis #miniatures #dnd miniatures #dnd #dnd art #dnd minis #d&d minis #d&d miniatures #d&d art #mini painting #miniaturepainting #miniature painting #painting miniatures #painting minis #kp2024minis

[kithcrafts]

LOL, I've been painting guys from that set for months now, but I had no idea where they came from!

For real with that eye, though: you got a good shine going on a tiny space. Well done!

Also from Monster, and available on Amazon. Once again, really cheap 98 miniatures for $23. They are on a bigger scale, but many are creatures like this dragon, which work incredibly well on a larger scale for tabletop gaming. I'm currently working on the same one in red and he looks really cool. They paint up nice.

I realize it has been awhile since I updated my blog, so check out those eyes! I've gotten so much better. It's like he's watching you...

Amazon.com: Monster Fantasy Creature Mini Action Figure Playset - 98pcs Toy Miniatures with 14 Unique Designs - Dragons,Wizards,Orcs, & More- XL 1/32 Scale Compatible with Dungeons and Dragons and other RPG Games : Toys & Games

#others art #dragon